G

GEFÜHL ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			feeling, sensation, sentiment, opinion
FRENCH			sentiment, sensation

  SENSE [FEELING], and AESTHETICS, BEGRIFF, COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, GOÛT, INTUITION, MORAL SENSE, PASSION [PATHOS], PERCEPTION

The German pair Gefühl/Empfindung is not parallel to the traditional distinction between sentiment and sensation. Today the use of Gefühl is mostly reserved for the sphere of feelings and emotions, more or less corresponding to the use of the English “feeling,” whereas its companion, Empfindung, refers to both physiological sensation and feeling. This instability is no longer the source of any major philosophical difficulty. By contrast, analyzing the way in which the two terms were placed front and center, contrasted and debated in the eighteenth century, gives us a sort of X-ray of the vocabulary of the subject and of consciousness, from Wolff and Kant and his heirs through the writings of Johann Nicolaus Tetens. The philosophical stakes were at that time far greater than those pertaining to their English and French equivalents. From the theory of perception to that of moral sentiment, by way of the doctrines of consciousness as a feeling of self, the terms Gefühl and Empfindung, placed at the junction of the various anthropological, aesthetic, and psychological discourses, affect the whole of philosophical study.

I. Gefühl/Empfindung, Sensation/Sentiment, “Opinion,” “Feeling”/“Sensation”/“Sentiment”: The Specificity of the German Pair

Certain terms in French, English, and German, both common and philosophical, that express the difference between feeling and sensation, have, based on the variety of their uses, been highly unstable since the beginning of the modern period. In the case of contemporary French, the terms sensation and sentiment no longer overlap in meaning, as was the case in the classical period, when sentiment meant sensation, feeling, and opinion. Alongside this threefold division in meaning, there was also a properly philosophical usage of the term, both in Malebranche ( in the sense of “internal sentiment” ) and in Pascal, in the sense of intuitive synthetic vision ( to prophesize is to speak of God, not by external proof, but by internal and immediate sentiment, cf. Pensées, Lafuma 328 ). This usage is clearly laid out in the eighteenth century in the Encyclopédie’s article “Sentiment”: it is the “intimate sentiment that each of us has of his own existence, and of what he feels in himself.” Sentiment is “the first source and first principle of truth available to us,” nor is it “in any way more immediate for us to say that the object of our thought exists with as much reality as our thought itself, since this object and this thought, and the intimate sentiment we have in ourselves, are really only ourselves thinking, existing, and having the feeling.”

As for English, we find the same threefold division with “sentiment.” Found in English since Chaucer, the word was also used as synonymous with “feeling,” “sensation,” and “opinion.” On the other hand, the term’s untranslatability in English comes mainly from the overdetermination of the word “sense,” which runs from perception to feeling, reason, reasonableness, and meaning, and from which the concepts, through Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and Hume through Bentham, of “inner sense,” “internal sense,” “inward sense,” “common sense,” and “moral sense” are derived. Coste, the translator into French of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, did not run into any particular trouble over the translation of the English terms “sensation” and “sentiment.” In the first case the term is identical in the two languages, and in the second we can go easily from the English “sentiment” in the sense of “mental feeling” to the French sentiment. Coste thus translates “due sentiments of Wisdom and Goodness” ( bk. I, chap. 7, § 6 ) by “justes sentiments de la sagesse et de la bonté,” and in bk. IV, chap. 1, § 4, “the first act of the Mind, when it has any sentiments of Ideas at all” by “le premier acte de l’esprit, lorsqu’il a quelque sentiment ou quelque idée.” Similarly, Coste finds a parallel usage in English to the specialized philosophical ( or metaphysical ) usage in French. When Locke writes, for example, “I do not say there is no Soul in a Man because he is not sensible of it in his sleep” ( bk. II, chap. 1, § 10 ), Coste translates this as “Je ne dis pas qu’il n’y ait point d’âme dans l’homme parce que durant le sommeil l’homme n’en a aucun sentiment.”

In philosophical German the essence of these issues was concentrated on the pair Gefühl/Empfindung, whose differentiation was the object of a long conceptual inquiry set against a background of ambivalence. The two terms cannot be translated except on a case-by-case basis and respecting what is untranslatable about them, that is, taking account of the redistribution of their relations, which itself depends on the way in which the different German philosophical discourses used them, strategically, to mark out differences with regard to the common uses of words.

Indeed, as shown by Adelung’s dictionary or Eberhard’s Versuch einer allgemeinen deutschen Synonymik ( Essay of general German synonymy ), 1795, in the eighteenth century Gefühl and Empfindung were commonly considered synonyms and used more to refer to the perceptual immediacy of a representation. The two words were defined as “intuitive ( anschauend ) representations that participate in our sensibility ( Sinnlichkeit ) to a certain degree” ( Eberhard, Synonymik, 1:119 ). And Johann Nicolaus Tetens notes in 1777 in his Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung that “the words Gefühl and fühlen henceforth have a range of meaning almost as wide as that of the words Empfindung and empfinden” ( 1:167ff. ). In doing so, he places emphasis simultaneously on the omnipresence of the two pairs of terms, on the difficulty of distinguishing them, and on the confusion reigning in their use.

Similarly, in his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste ( General theory of the fine arts ), J. A. Sulzer begins the article “Sinnlich” in these terms:

In fact, we call sensory ( sinnlich ) what we feel ( empfinden ) by the intervention of the senses external to the body; but we have extended the meaning of the term to what we feel ( empfinden ) in our bare interiority ( bloß innerlich ) without the action of the bodily senses, as for example in the case of desire, love, etc.

( Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, 408 )

This admission of instability continuously accompanied the philosophical division of the two notions. Even in the most decisive works we still find many inconsistencies. It seems, for example, that from the start the terms Gefühl and Empfindung originate, philosophically speaking, in the field of sensus, whereas the related term Rührung ( feeling, emotion ), which in the eighteenth century was used commonly in both everyday and philosophical language, comes from the field of tactus, since anrühren and berühen both mean “to touch.” Yet Baumgarten, for example, suggests translating tactus by Gefühl ( Metaphysica, § 536 ) and not by its literal ( and standard ) translation of Tastsinn—sense of touch—whereas he himself uses Tastsinn and Gefühl indifferently for tactus. In any case, it is clear that the internalization of Gefühl, or its derivation from the intimate sphere of subjectivity, only comes later, thanks to a need for terminological clarification.

II. Gefühl and Empfindung: The Near Side of the Division between Receptivity and Reflexivity

A. The twofold meaning of Empfindung in the Wolffian system

In Christian Wolff’s philosophical system the notions of experience and knowledge interact and complement each other against a Leibnizian background of preestablished harmony, insofar as Wolff does not distinguish between a logical system of knowledge based on the a priori metaphysics of scholastic origin and the principles of an empiricist reading of the world. In this framework Empfindung is the very source of experience and hence of knowledge; in order to have access to the true being of things, it is therefore enough simply to be attentive. The thesis of Deutsche Logik ( chap. 5, § 1 ), according to which “it is by paying attention to our Empfindungen that we have experience of everything that we know [Wir erfahren alles dasjenige, was wir erkennen, wenn wir auf unsere empfindungen acht haben],” is mirrored in the Deutsche Metaphysik ( § 325 ): “The knowledge we achieve when we pay attention to our Empfindungen and to the modifications of the soul, we customarily call experience.” If Empfindung is really untranslatable here, it is not because Wolff does not give equivalents; rather, it is because it refers to two philosophically sacred pairs: sentiment/sensation on one hand and sensation/perception on the other. Wolff thus writes in his Anmerkungen zu den vernünftigen Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt:

I have explained here [§ 220] what I mean by the word Empfindung, namely the kind of perceptionum [sic] that is called sensationes in Latin. And insofar as we consider these sensationes as modifications of the soul by which we are conscious of things that act on our organa sensoria [sic], we can call them in Latin ideas rerum materialium praesentium.

( Wolff, Anmerkungen, § 65 )

The equivalence between idea and sensation becomes explicit here by way of Latin. The sensation caused by things comes to be confused with the act of consciousness; sensation is simply a thought:

Thoughts that have their causes in the modifications of the organs of our body and that are excited by bodily things outside of us, we call Empfindungen.

( Wolff, Deutsche Metaphysik, § 220 )

Wolff does not hesitate to establish the following inferences: having a thought is the becoming aware of a modification of the soul. Thus, becoming conscious of an effect of things external to the soul is a thought; thus sensations are thoughts. And he adds: thoughts of objects insofar as they are present to our soul. There is thus no difference between feeling and knowing, between empfinden in the sense of feeling and erkennen in the sense of knowing, and it is on this basis that Baumgarten is able to develop his aesthetics, conceived as a science of knowledge ( cognitio sensitiva, see AESTHETICS ). Wolff insists especially on the coincidence between modifications of things and those of the soul, on which point he considers himself in agreement with Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz, defending himself again and again against the accusations of Spinozism leveled at him. The syncretism between a form of empiricism and an abstract system assured of the absolute pertinence of logically derived truths leads him to give the name Empfindung to the widest philosophical extension: the same term can thus mean the natural irreducibility of sensation ( our hearing cannot be affected by the noise of thunder, etc.: cf. Anmerkungen, § 69 ), a modification of the soul, and the fact that it is perceptible to us, thus conscious. Empfindung is thus the hinge between soul and world, and makes possible the distinction between innerliche Empfindung ( internal Empfindung ), when we consider Empfindung as it occurs in the soul, and aüßere Empfindung ( external Empfindung ), when we consider Empfindung as caused by external objects ( cf. Johann Friedrich Stiebritz, Erläuterungen der Wolffischen vernünftigen Gedancken von den Kräften des Menschenverstandes [Explanation of Wolff’s “Reasonable Thoughts” on the forces of human understanding], § 101 ).

B. The truth of feeling

For Sulzer, who aims to reconcile theoretical and aesthetic thought, the division is no longer, as it is for Wolff, between internal and external Empfindung, but between empfinden and erkennen. Baumgarten’s premise in favor of equal dignity for aesthetic or “sensible” knowledge and intellectual knowledge is radicalized in the form of a distinction between empfinden and erkennen, which is no longer a hierarchy but rather a division of labor. Whereas for Wolff Empfindung is a hinge between the I and the world, for Sulzer empfinden refers to the capacity to be affected by agreeable or disagreeable feelings and hence comes closer to emotion ( Rührung ). Empfinden thus falls unambiguously on the side of subjective knowledge and is contrasted with the objective pole of knowledge ( erkennen ). The article “Sinnlich ( Schöne Künste )” of the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste ( 1786 ) presents this topic well:

We say that we know ( erkennen ), that we grasp ( fassen ), or that we understand ( begreifen ) something when we have the clear perception ( Wahrnehmung ) of its nature ( Beschaffenheit ), and we have a clear knowledge of the things we are capable of explaining, or whose natures we can describe to others. In the state of knowledge, there is something that comes to place itself before our minds ( Beym Erkennen schwebt also unserem Geist etwas vor ), or we are conscious of something that we consider different from ourselves, that is, from our power of acting, and we call this thing an object of knowledge. Conversely, we say that we feel ( empfinden ) something when we are aware of a modification within our power itself.

( Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie )

The goal of the argument is in fact to show by and with the terminology of knowledge that there is thought in feeling. In order to affirm the dignity of aesthetic thought established by Baumgarten, then, Empfindung must be distinguished, as feeling of oneself by oneself, from the constitution of an object of knowledge, which can only take place if we are “spectators of what takes place” ( Zuschauer dessen, was vorgeht ), whereas “in feeling we are ourselves the object in which the change takes place [beym Empfinden sind wir selbst das Ding, mit dem etwas veränderliches vorgeht]” ( ibid. ). This feeling of oneself by oneself will enter not only into the vocabulary of perception but into that of consciousness as well: “Every time we feel something, we are conscious of a change in ourselves [bey jeder neuen Empfindung sind wir uns einer Veränderung in uns selbst bewußt]” ( ibid. ). The radical difference established by Sulzer between feeling ( empfinden ), as a resonance of oneself in oneself, and knowledge ( erkennen ), as separation of the observing consciousness from the objects of knowledge, leads then to the construction of two spheres of equal dignity. In feeling perception “thinks.” There is thus a “perceptual thought,” a “thought of the senses” ( sinnliches Denken, ibid. ), contrasting with “speculative thought” ( das spekulative Denken, ibid. ). From the point of view of the distinction between Gefühl and empfinden, the novelty introduced by the problem of perceptual consciousness is that “sensible” thought ( which Sulzer is careful to distinguish from that which, in feeling, is only the feeling of feeling ) becomes in his terminology the “full feeling” ( das volle Gefühl ) of feeling ( Empfindung ). There is, therefore, at the same time, on the basis of the newly constituted aesthetics, a promotion of feeling to the dignity of knowledge and the persistence of a “mirror” conception of reflection and perception. Thought is found in the folds of feeling.

We may go further and elevate the dignity of this thought-in-feeling, to the point of affirming that it is a cogito. This is indeed what G. E. Schulze does when he speaks in his Grundriss der philosophischen Wissenschaft of a Gefühl der Existenz, which he numbers among the “Gefühle des inneren Sinnes” ( feelings of an internal sense ), and which he conceives of as an equivalent to the cogito ( Grundriss, vol. 1 ).

This equivalence between feeling and knowledge is found again in Herder, who appeals to Wolff in his Kritische Wälder to define aesthetics as a “science of the feeling of beauty, that is, of sensible knowledge [eine Wissenschaft des Gefühls des Schönen, oder nach der Wolffischen Sprache, der sinnlichen Erkenntnis].” Radicalizing the Wolffian claim in a new way, Herder does not balk at the notion of a “feeling of mind” ( geistige Empfindung ) or at erasing any distinction between Empfindung and knowledge, as well as between Empfindung and Gefühl:

No knowledge is possible without Empfindung, that is without a feeling ( Gefühl ) of good and evil. . . . The knowledge of the soul is thus unthinkable without the feeling of well-being or doing badly, without the deeply intimate and intellectual sensation of the truth and of goodness.

( Herder, “Vom Erkennen,” 236ff. )

III. From Tetens to Kant: The Filtering of the Differences between Gefühl and Empfindung through the Theory of Faculties

In the philosophy of Johann Nikolaus Tetens and in Kantian critical philosophy, the link between empiricism and abstraction is called into question, making possible a reflection on the difference between Gefühl and Empfindung. Tetens, relying, it seems, on sensualist principles of Lockean origin, filters Gefühl and Empfindung by emphasizing that the impingement of the external world on sensation is only ever a starting point and that we must therefore draw a distinction between the primary matter of sensation and its becoming-representation. To say that our ideas come from sensations for him means only that “sensations ( Empfindungen ) are the primary matter ( Grundstoff ) that is available to reason for representation, thinking, and ideas, the matter from which the activity of thought makes them come forward” ( Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie, 49 ). Similarly, Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason that sensations are the “matter of our senses” ( B 286/A 233–34 ), the effect of the object on the representational capacity ( ibid., “Transcendental aesthetic” ), and as such, “the matter of the phenomenon” ( ibid., § 8; B 60/A 42–43 ). What distinguishes waking and dreaming despite their common source in sensations, Tetens argues, is that in the waking state “the capacity for thinking ( Denkkraft ) develops representations from sensations ( Empfindungen )” ( Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie ). He adds, however, that even in the state of receptivity, the soul is never truly passive and that attention is already itself an activity of the soul. The contradiction between subject and object is thus resolved, insofar as the modifications of the soul that define Empfindung for Wolff or Sulzer presuppose a faculty ( Vermögen ) of the soul to be modified. If Empfindung is an effect ( Wirkung ) on the soul, “the capacities [of the soul] to be modified are, insofar as they are seated in the soul, participative faculties ( mitwirkende Vermögen ), and they have their source in those which are active” ( Philosophische Versuche, vol. 1 ). It is the capacity of soul to animate itself that makes reality accessible. But insofar as knowledge develops or works upon the material of sensation, it “expels it from the soul” and “places it in front of it” ( ibid., vol. 1 ).

Against this background Tetens seeks to remedy the linguistic confusion he perceives in the usage of Empfindung and Gefühl, reserving the active meaning for the latter ( Gefühl is the act of feeling ) and the connotation of a signal for the former: perception has indicative value with regard to its source. Thus:

The words Gefühl and fühlen have a range of meaning almost as large as that of the words Empfindung and empfinden. And yet, it seems that we must admit a clear difference between them. Feeling ( Fühlen ) relates rather to the act of feeling ( Aktus des Empfindens ) than to the object itself; and insofar as we distinguish them from sensations ( Empfindungen ), there are feelings ( Gefühle ) when we feel a change in ourselves or exerted on us, without this impression permitting us to have knowledge of the object that caused it. To feel ( empfinden ) makes a sign toward an object ( zeiget auf einen Gegenstand hin ) that we feel ( fühlen ) in ourselves by the medium of the sensible impression and that we discover so to speak as a given.

( Ibid., 1:167ff. )

Like Tetens, Kant distinguishes Empfindung and Gefühl by submitting the relation between feeling and sensation to a rigorous analysis. In section 3 of part 1 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant, like Tetens, suggests bringing order to the vocabulary. The passage begins thus: “This at once affords a convenient opportunity for condemning and directing particular attention to a prevalent confusion of the double meaning of which the word ‘sensation’ is capable.” Of course, the context is no longer the same one as for Tetens, since here Kant wishes to contrast aesthetic pleasure that is free of all interest with the interested relation of hedonism toward the object of pleasure. However, the implications intersect:

When a modification of the feeling ( Gefühl ) of pleasure or displeasure is termed sensation ( Empfindung ), this expression is given quite a different meaning to that which it bears when I call the representation ( Vorstellung ) of a thing ( through sense as a receptivity pertaining to the faculty of knowledge ) sensation. For in the latter case the representation is referred to the Object, but in the former it is referred solely to the Subject and is not available for any cognition, not even for that by which the Subject cognizes itself. Now, in the above definition the word sensation ( Empfindung ) is used to denote an objective representation of sense ( eine objektive Vorstellung der Sinne ); and, to avoid continually running the risk of misinterpretation, we shall call that which must always remain purely subjective, and is absolutely incapable of forming a representation of an object, by the familiar name of feeling ( Gefühl ). The green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation ( gehört zur objektiven Empfindung ), as the perception of an object of sense ( Wahrnehmung eines Gegenstandes des Sinnes ); but its agreeableness to subjective sensation, by which no object is represented.

( Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 3 )

The contrast established here relies on the general notion of “representation” ( Vorstellung ), which acts as a middle term between Gefühl and Empfindung and presupposes among other things an equivalence between “objective sensation” ( Empfindung ) and what is usually translated as “perception,” Wahrnehmung ( see PERCEPTION ). Gefühl, understood as simply subjective feeling without a representation of the object ( Kant’s theme in this part of the Critique of Judgment ), corresponds nicely with the understanding of Gefühl as feeling a change in the soul without knowing its cause, as Tetens defines it in the passage from the Philosophische Versuche cited earlier, and which he sometimes calls Empfindnis precisely to distinguish it from Empfindung. But to say, as Kant does, that the color of a prairie is an “objective sensation” does not amount to saying that the materiality of a color is ignored, as objective reality, by any subjective determination, nor that sensation, insofar as it takes place in the subject, is only relative and arbitrary. The term “objective” here is the product of a break, that of the transcendental aesthetic, which Tetens had not made. For Kant, colors are not physical realities but modifications of our senses. They are “subjective” for this reason. But what affects the subject does not for all that belong to him, any more than space and time belong to him as a priori conditions of sensation—and in this respect they are, like Empfindung, “objective.” Thus, if it is permissible to split the term for sensation along the two axes of subject and object, it is just as necessary to distinguish clearly Empfindung, as what provides the hinge between the world and the individual, from Gefühl, as an internal subjective resonance and a signal from the subject to himself. If Tetens does not go so far in defining the principles of sensation ( Sinnlichkeit ) as Kant does in his Transcendental Aesthetic, where he designates them as formal a priori conditions of time and space, it is because for Tetens the philosophy of representation still falls under psychological analysis.

IV. The Avatars of Moral Sentiment: Gefühl, Empfindsamkeit

It is precisely this break that allows Kant to bring the term Gefühl into the moral domain, thus to transcend feeling, but without running the risk of erasing the difference between ethics and aesthetics: respect then becomes the unique “sentiment” ( Gefühl ) of practical reason. This usage of the term Gefühl is not in contradiction with the habit of the time. Almost all of the examples that Adelung’s dictionary provides for the use of the term Gefühl suggest ethical values ( love of country, creator, feeling of happiness felt in the presence of a good friend ), and they culminate in the following equivalence: “das moralische Gefühl, die Empfindung dessen, was gut und böse ist [moral sentiment ( Gefühl ), the feeling ( Empfindung ) of what is good and bad].”

We may contrast with this sense of empfindend as “capable of moral sentiment” the term empfindsam and the question of Empfindsamkeit, whose history comes entirely from the domain of literature and which was institutionalized in German starting from some of Lessing’s remarks about the translation of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey by J. J. Boder ( Empfindsame Reise, 1768 ). This sense of empfindsam in the eighteenth century meant “capable of emotion” ( Rührung ). Adelung defines it as “fähig, leicht gerührt zu werden” ( “ability to be easily moved” ), whereas Campe speaks of the ability to feel pleasure in emotive participation. For Kant and others Empfindsamkeit is denounced as whininess ( Empfindelei, Empfindsamelei ). But the term remains entirely bound to this period, and starting with the nineteenth century only Sentimentalität is spoken of.

By thus mixing moral sentiment and the effusion of participation, we get the conceptual hybrid of the Mit-Gefühl, that is, a moral feeling of participation in a community, whose uses may be pedagogical ( as in Herder, Ideen zur Philosophischen Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–95: the foundation of the community is familial Mit-Gefühl ), or political—especially with the concept of Freiheitsgefühl in Schubart ( Deutsche Chronik, 1775 ) or in Schiller’s Fiesko ( 1783 ). Friedrich von Schlegel gave the term an emphatic and conservative tone, attributing to the German character an innate feeling of freedom related to an intuitive feeling of legal justice ( Rechtlichkeit ), based on respect for morality and religion ( F. von Schlegel, Europa ), to which Heinrich Heine soon responded in the preface to the second edition of the Reisebilder ( 1831 ), contrasting a more French and Jacobin vision of politics with this communitarian conservatism of a “katholische Harmonie des Gefühls ( Catholic harmony of feeling ).”

As for the philosopher of feeling par excellence in the so-called dispute over pantheism, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, for him an objective and pure Gefühl is the basis of a philosophy conceived of as transcendental. This pure totality indissociable from Gefühl obliterates the boundaries between imagination and speech, literature and philosophy. Herder, Bouterwerk, Goethe, and Jacobi—all are in agreement as regards the absoluteness of feeling. For Goethe in particular, Gefühl is at the source of any discovery and any truth. It is similar, then, to the immediacy of Anschauung, of “intuition”—which is, even more, the dimension of genius. The absoluteness of Gefühl is similarly to be found in Schleiermacher, for whom the essence of religion is neither thought nor action, but “Anschauung und Gefühl” ( Über die Religion, 120ff. ). The literary absolute of the Romantics and of Hölderlin makes it the source of all poiêsis, all invention, and in the end all culture. Greek poetry, founded on the simplicity and purity of an originating Gefühl, becomes the mind’s holy site, against which the Hegelian dialectic eventually leads its antiparticularist crusade in the name of Vernünftigkeit—rationality.

Jean-Pierre Dubost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Metaphysica. 7th ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1963. First published in 1779.

Cohen, Ted, and Paul Guyer. Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Corr, Charles Anthony. “The Deutsche Metaphysik of Christian Wolff: Text and Transitions.” In History of Philosophy in the Making, edited by Linus J. Thro, 113–20. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982.

Guyer, Paul, ed. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Heine, Heinrich. Reisebilder I. 1824–28. Vol. 5, Säkularausgabe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag / CNRS, 1970. Translation by Peter Wortsman: Travel Pictures. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago, 2008.

Herder, Johann Friedrich. “Kritische Wälder oder Betrachtungen, die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen betreffend, nach Maasgaben neuerer Schriften.” 33 vols. Vols. 3 and 4 edited by Bernhard Suphan, 1877–1912. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1967–68. First published in 1769. Translation by Gregory Moore: “Critical Forests ( First & Fourth Groves ).” In Selected Writings on Aesthetics, edited by Gregory Moore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

   . “Vom Erkennen und Empfinden in der menschlichen Seele.” In Sämmtliche Werke, 33 vols. Vol. 8, edited by Bernhard Suphan, 1877–1913. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1967–68. First published in 1778. Translation by M. N. Forster: “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul.” In J.G. Herder: Philosophical Writings, edited by M. N. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 3 and 4. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

   . Kritik der Urteilskraft, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by James Creed Meredith: The Critique of Judgment, edited by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.

Kuehn, Manfred. Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.

Kukla, Rebecca, ed. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditsch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. First published in 1690.

Matthews, Patricia M. The Significance of Beauty: Kant on Feeling and the System of the Mind. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.

Schiller, Friedrich von. “Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua.” In Nationalausgabe, vol. 4. 50 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1967. First published in 1783. Translation by G. H. Noehden and J. Stoddart: Fiesco; or the Genoese conspiracy: a tragedy. London: Johnson, Edwards, Cadell and Davies, 1796.

   . “Über den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen.” In Nationalausgabe, vol. 20. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962. First published in 1780. Translation with an introduction by J. Weiss: “Connection between Animal and Spiritual Nature in Man.” In The Philosophical and Aesthetic Letters and Essays. London: Chapman, 1845.

   . “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen.” In Nationalausgabe, vol. 20. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962. First published in 1795. Translation by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby: On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, edited by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.

Schlegel, Friedrich von. Europa. 2 vols. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1963. First published in 1803–5.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. Stuttgart: Reklam, 1997. First published in 1799. Translation by Richard Crouter: On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, edited by Richard Crouter. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, ed. Deutsche Chronik: 1774–1777. 4 vols. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1975.

Schulze, Gottlob Ernst. Grundriss des philosophischen Wissenschaft. 2 vols. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1970. First published in 1788–90.

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and, Continuation of Bramine’s Journal: The Text and Notes. Edited by Melvyn New and W. G. Day. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2002.

Stiebritz, Johann Friedrich. Erläuterungen der Vernünftigen Gedancken von den Kräfften des Menschlichen Verstandes Wolffs. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1977. First published in 1741.

Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: in einzeln nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter aufeinanderfolgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt. 5 vols. 2nd ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1994. First published in 1792–99.

   . “General Theory of the Fine Arts ( 1771–1774 ): Selected Articles.” Edited and translated by Thomas Christensen. In Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Cristoph Koch, edited by Nancy Baker and Thomas Christensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Tetens, Johann Nikolaus. Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entiwicklung. 2 vols. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1979. First published in 1777.

   . Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie, edited by W. Uebele. In Neudrucke seltner philosophischer Werke, vol. 4. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1913. First published in 1775.

Wolff, Christian, Freiherr von. Deutsche Logik. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1977. Translated as: Logic, or Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding with Their Use and Application in the Knowledge and Search of Truth. London, 1770.

   . Deutsche Metaphysik: Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1983.

GEGENSTAND ( GERMAN )

  OBJECT, and EPOCHÊ, ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, GEFÜHL, INTENTION, PERCEPTION, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, RES, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SUBJECT, THING, TRUTH, WERT

Difficulties of translation with regard to objectivity arise most of all in so-called transcendental philosophies, which treat objective sense or objects as acts of the subject. They insist for the most part on the distinction of levels of objectification, that is, on the distinction of stages in the production of objective meaning, which leads to a veritable lexical proliferation, difficult to translate into any language. We may nonetheless note two distinctions within this approach: on one hand, Kant’s splitting of the object into “phenomenon” ( Erscheinung ) and “thing in itself” ( Ding an sich ) divides the vocabulary of objectivity in two, whereas Husserl’s rejection of the notion of a thing in itself makes this duality disappear. On the other hand, the levels of objectification are, for Kant, relative to the doctrine of faculties and of synthetic functions ( the table of categories ), hence to the structure of the subject, whereas Husserl, rejecting the Copernican revolution and the doctrine of faculties, makes them relative only to the stratification of objective sense revealed by the intuition of essence ( Wesenschau ).

I. Kant: Objekt and Gegenstand, between Phenomenon ( Erscheinung ) and Thing in Itself ( Ding an Sich )

The shift to Critical idealism, with regard to the theme of objectivity, was an etymological awakening. Gegenstand and Objekt were introduced to translate the Latin objectum, which comes from objicio, “to throw forward,” “to expose.” The German gegen adds to this idea of manifestation that of direction-toward and that of resistance ( entgegenstehen, the noun corresponding to which is Gegestand, which initially meant oppositum esse, and in Old High German gaganstentida had the sense of obstacula ), and Stand ( =stans ), “that which stands,” then “that which persists, lasts.” The philosophical term Gegenstand is thus the product of three registers: das Gegenüberstehende, “that which stands in front of me,” “that which is op-posed to me”; the terminus ad quem of a faculty ( “Gegenstand der Empfindung, der Wahrnehmung”: object of perception ); and subsistence or substantiality. In the pre-Critical period, Kant, in the wake of classical thought, covers the register of op-position ( phenomenality ) by that of subsistence ( reality in itself ). The turn to transcendental idealism consists in bringing the first two senses of the term Gegenstand on this side of the sense of “object subsisting in itself” and to think of them within the bounds of a unified system: the object is the “vis-à-vis” constituted by acts of objectification originating in the faculties ( perception, imagination, understanding ) and their functions, but the thing in itself remains its unknowable ontological foundation.

A. The split between phenomenon and thing in itself

In the Latin of Kant’s Dissertatio of 1770, we find two series of opposed ontological equations: objectivum=reale=intelligibile=subjecto irrelativum, subjectivum=ideale=sensibile=subjecto relativum. Objectivum is contrasted with subjectivum, what resides in or is relative to the subject, and is thus identified with the intelligible ( which by contrast with the perceptual does not vary depending on the subject ) and with realitas ( contrasted with idealitas, which describes ideas or subjective representations but not existing objects ). Thus Kant contrasts lex subjective, lex quaedam menti insita, or again the conditiones subjecto propriae ( “subjective law,” “situated in the mind,” “conditions proper to the subject”: space and time, § 29 ), to conditio objectiva, for example, the “forma objectiva sive substantiarum coordinatio [the objective condition or objective form as coordination of substances].” Similarly, he refuses to grant space and time the status of “objectivum aliquid et reale [something objective, i.e., real]” ( § 14–15 ) but rather treats them as “coordinatio idealis et subjecti [an ideal, i.e., subjective, coordination].” Whence there results the double meaning of objectum, corresponding to the two etymological registers: on one side res, “existens in se,” “objectum intellectus,” thing in itself and intelligible cause of perceptual affections; on the other side the phaenomenon, “objectum sensuum”:

Phaenomena ceu causata testantur de praesentia objecti, quod contra Idealismum.

( In so far as [Phenomena] are sensory concepts or apprehensions, they are, as things caused, witnesses to the presence of an object, and this is opposed to idealism. [NB: praesentia has, in this refutation of idealism, the meaning of existentia and not that of manifestation.] )

( Kant, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, § 11; Form and Principles, 389 )

Quaecunque ad sensus nostros referuntur ut objecta, sunt Phaenomena.

( Whatever, as object, relates to our senses is a phenomenon. )

( Kant, De mundi, § 12; Form and Principles, 390 )

Despite this amphibology the term objectum already tends to be reserved for the appearing object and to be separate from the register of existence in itself: thus section 4, which deals with the formal principle of the intelligible world ( with objects in themselves, in consequence ), substitutes the terms res, substantia, aliquid, omnia for objectum. This is why, in the last cited passage, it is best to avoid translating quaecunque by “everything which” ( “toutes les choses qui,” Fr. trans. P. Mouy, Vrin ), which implies a reification of the phenomenon, and to reserve “thing” ( chose ) for res intelligibilis.

This amphibology is reaffirmed in the Critical period, but with a decisive shift. The object of course retains its twofold meaning, that of thing in itself ( referred to as Ding an sich, Objekt an sich, Gegenstand an sich, Noumenon, das Erscheinende, that is, “thing in itself,” “object in itself,” “noumenon,” “the appearing thing” ) and of phenomenon ( referred to as Objekt, Gegestand, Erscheinung ). But the shift to transcendental idealism gives rise to a crucial displacement: things in themselves are unknowable for the finite subject, even for his understanding. The object in itself thus no longer indicates purely intellectual reality in contrast with sensible reality; rather, it refers now to what is relative neither to perception nor to understanding. In Critical idealism, the phenomenon confiscates the meaning of objectivity for any finite subject, and sensible intuition, by becoming the minimal condition of possibility of experience, becomes as well the minimal condition of possibility of all objective validity and all denotation:

Also beziehen sich alle Begriffe und mit ihnen alle Grundsätze . . . auf empirische Anschauungen, d. i. auf Data zur möglichen Erfahrung. Ohne dieses haben sie gar keine objektive Gültigkeit.

( Thus all concepts and with them all principles . . . are nevertheless related to empirical intuitions, i.e., to data for possible experience. Without this they have no objective validity at all. [Objective validity is here the equivalent to meaning, signification, or relation to the object; that is, in Fregean language, to denotation ( see SENSE )]. )

( Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 239, B 298 )

Objectivity thus recovers the etymological sense of “a manifestation to,” as the appearance to perception by way of the affections: Objectum=Gegen-stand=phaenomenon=ob-jectum=Dawider=vis-à-vis for the “intuitus derivatus.”

■ See Box 1.

1

Translating Gegenstand/Objekt in Kant

A famous difficulty encountered by Kant’s translators concerns his use of the terminological couple Gegenstand/Objekt. Existing translations fold the two terms onto each other by translating them both uniformly as “object.” Would it be preferable—even necessary—to underscore terminologically the distinction between the apparent object and the thing in itself? And does this distinction line up with the distinction between Gegenstand and Objekt in Kant’s text? Martineau brings the problem to the fore in his preface to the French translation of Heidegger’s course on the Critique of Pure Reason. Here Martineau suggests adopting ob-jet as a translation for the phenomenon ( the embedded dash rendering the hint of a separation from intuition by separating the prefix ob- ), and objet as a translation for the thing in itself. The difficulty, noted by the French translators of Eisler’s Kant-Lexikon ( under objet ), is that Kant frequently uses the two terms interchangeably, making both of them designate either the phenomenon or the thing in itself. One thus finds, manifestly employed synonymously, the expressions tranzendentaler Gegenstand and tranzendentales Objekt, Gegenstand in sich and Objekt in sich, and so on. And yet Kant also commonly employs the two terms simultaneously to produce a contrast—as when, in section 19 of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, he writes: “Das Objekt bleibt an sich selbst immer unbekannt [The object in itself remains forever unknown],” but when the relation of sensible representations is determined by the categories, “so wird der Gegenstand durch dieses Verhältnis bestimmt [then the ob-ject is determined by this relation].” The pair ob-ject/object would then have to be used without forcing it into a strict correspondence with the pair Gegenstand/Objekt, but rather according to the context. In general, the difficulty posed by the pair derives from the fact that Kant at times uses Gegenstand to designate the genus covering the two species “phenomenon” and “thing in itself,” as signally in the passage that Martineau uses to exemplify the distinction between Gegenstand and Objekt:

Die Transzendentalphilosophie betrachtet nur den Verstand, und Vernunft selbst in einem System aller Begriffe und Grundsätze, die sich auf Gegenstände überhaupt beziehen, ohne Objekte anzunehmen, die gegeben wären ( Ontologia ); die Physiologie der reinen Vernunft betrachtet die Natur, d. i. den Inbegriff gegebener Gegenstände ( sie mögen nun den Sinnen, oder, wenn man will, einer anderen Art von Anschauung gegeben sein ).

( Metaphysics in this narrower meaning of the term consists of transcendental philosophy and the physiology of pure reason. Transcendental philosophy ( ontologia ) contemplates only our understanding and reason themselves in a system of all concepts and principles referring to objects as such, without assuming objects that are given. The physiology of pure reason contemplates nature, i.e., the sum of given objects ( whether given to the senses or, for that matter, to some other kind of intuition ).

( Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 845, B 873 )

B. The different concepts of objectivity in itself

Is this to say that the phenomenon seizes all senses of objectivity for itself? No, since the concept of the thing in itself, even though it does not refer to any knowable object, retains several essential functions in transcendental idealism. The concept is in fact a deceptive one, since the “in itself” of “concept of the thing in itself” suggests the exclusion of all relation, whereas Kant, far from thinking of it only as ontological subsistence, defines “thing in itself” as a “terminus ad quem” of faculties ( infinite intuition, understanding, pure reason, practical reason ) whose eventual “correlation” is made possible by the Copernican revolution that Kant envisions for philosophy—and this definition as a result multiplies the concept’s meanings.

— The first concept of an object in itself corresponds to the positive sense of noumenon, understood as a pure object of understanding, given to an intellectual intuition or an intuitus originarius that creates its object:

Wenn ich aber Dinge annehme, die bloß Gegenstände des Verstandes sind, und gleichwohl, als solche, einer Anschauung, obgleich nicht der sinnlichen ( als coram intuitu intellectuali ), gegeben werden können; so würden dergleichen Dinge Noumena ( Intelligibilia ) heißen.

( If, however, I suppose there to be things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition ( as coram intuitu intellectuali ), then such things would be called noumena ( Intelligibilia ). )

( Ibid., A 249 )

Noumenon and phenomenon are thus defined according to each concept’s relation to intuition, inasmuch as this intuition is infinite ( noumenon ) rather than finite ( phenomenon ), creative ( again, noumenon ) rather than receptive ( phenomenon ), primitive rather than derived. Heidegger, playing on the opposition between the particles ent- and gegen-, characterizes the two terms as Entstand ( existent-arising-from-originary-intuition ) and Gegen-stand or Dawider ( existent opposed to derived intuition ) ( cf. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, § 16 ). As we have only sensible intuition and cannot show the possibility of an intellectual intuition, such a concept has no objective reality, that is, neither denotation nor content.

— The second is the negative conception of the noumenon, to which the terms “transcendental object ( tranzendentales Objekt ), “object in general” ( Gegenstand überhaupt ), and “something in general” ( Etwas überhaupt ) correspond. We cannot know the noumenon in any way; but if we wish to avoid Berkleyan idealism, we must attribute to phenomena, as simple representations, the relation to something that is not representation but an ontological cause of intuitions. This “object” has the twofold function of limiting the claims of perception to give us objects in themselves ( thus to ensure the transcendental ideality of phenomena ) and to guarantee the denotation or empirical reality of the latter:

Da Erscheinungen nichts als Vorstellungen sind, so bezieht sie der Verstand auf ein Etwas, als den Gegenstand der sinnlichen Anschauung: aber dieses Etwas ist insofern nur das transzendentale Objekt. Dieses bedeutet aber ein Etwas = x, wovon wir gar nichts wissen.

( Since appearances are nothing but representations, the understanding relates them to a something, as the object of sensible intuition; but this something is to that extent only the transcendental object. This signifies, however, a something = X, of which we know nothing at all. )

( Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 250 )

This object is defined elsewhere as “die bloß intelligible Ursache der Erscheinungen überhaupt [the merely intelligible cause of appearances in general]” ( ibid., A 494, B 522 ), and “das, was in allen unseren empirischen Begriffen überhaupt Beziehung auf einen Gegenstand, d. i. objektive Realität verschaffen kann [that which in all our empirical concepts in general can provide relations to an object, i.e., objective reality].”

Insofar as no category can be applied to it in order to determine it, this transcendental object is precisely not a defined “object.” It is a pure X, “the concept of an object in general [der Begriff eines Gegenstandes überhaupt]” ( ibid., A 251 ), “the completely undetermined thought of something in general [der gänzlich unbestimmte Gedanke von Etwas überhaupt]” ( ibid., A 253 ). It is the ob- in the object that guarantees the unitary denotation of our representations, which is correlative to transcendental apperception as the formal unity of self-consciousness.

— The third concept is that of the idea of reason: the “purely intelligible object” or “object of pure thought” ( “bloß intelligibler Gegenstand,” “Gegenstand des reinen Denkens,” ibid., A 286–87f., B 342–43 ), that is, the suprasensible object of “metaphysica specialis” ( the soul, the world, God ) as reason claims to determine it using the categories alone, in the absence of any sensible data. As sensibility is the condition of the relation to an object, the categories as pure forms of thought therefore define only “entia rationis,” “leere Begriffe ohne Gegenstand” ( “empty concepts without objects,” ibid., A 292, B 348 ), “hyperbolische Objekte,” “reine Verstandeswesen ( besser: Gedankenwesen ) )” ( “hyperbolic objects,” “pure beings of understanding ( or better, thought ),” Prolegomena § 45 ), that is, suprasensible objects without objective reality, without denotation.

— The last concept of the object in itself is correlative to practical reason. Suprasensible ideas have no denotation for speculative reason but do for practical reason, as necessary conditions for following the moral law. The immortality of the soul, freedom, and the existence of God are thus an “objective reality”; they are “objects” in the sense of necessary correlates of rational faith, even though no intuition ensures this objective reality:

Nun bekommen sie durch ein apodiktisches praktisches Gesetz als notwendige Bedingungen der Möglichkeit dessen, was dieses sich zum Objekte zu machen gebietet, objektive Realität, d. i. wir werden durch jenes angewiesen, daß sie Objekte haben, ohne doch, wie sich ihr Begriff auf ein Objekt bezieht, anzeigen zu können.

( Now, through an apodeictic practical law, as necessary conditions of the possibility of what this law commands one to make one’s object, they acquire objective reality; i.e., we are instructed by this law that they have objects, yet without being able to indicate how their concept refers to an object. )

( Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 135; Critique of Practical Reason, 171 )

“Objectivity” and “objective reality” signify, of course, the independent subsistence of our knowledge but as necessary correlates of practical reason, which postulates them.

C. The degrees of phenomenal objectivity

The object as phenomenon is thought of as a correlate of the objectivizing functions of thought. In a general way the central problem of critical philosophy is that of the objective validity of our knowledge, that is, the movement from simple subjective representations, valid only for me ( bloß subjektive ), to a representation having both a relation to an object ( Gegeständlichkeit, Beziehung auf ein Objekt ) and objective validity for everyone ( Objektivität ). The uniform translation of all three stages by “objectivity” masks this distinction, as well as the Kantian solution, which is to assimilate Gegenständlichkeit ( which we might translate as “objectuality” ) with Objektivität ( for which we would reserve “objectivity” ), understood as necessary ( notwendige Gültigkeit ) and universal validity ( Allgemeingültigkeit ):

Es sind daher objektive Gültigkeit und notwendige Allgemeingültigkeit ( für jedermann ) Wechselbegriffe, und ob wir gleich das Objekt an sich nicht kennen, so ist doch, wenn wir ein Urteil als gemeingültig und mithin notwendig ansehen, eben darunter die objektive Gültigkeit verstanden.

( Objective validity and necessary universal validity ( for everyone ) are therefore interchangeable concepts, and although we do not know the object in itself, nonetheless, if we regard a judgment as universally valid and hence necessary, objective validity is understood to be included. )

( Kant, Prolegomena, § 19 )

Objectivity thus no longer contrasts with subjectivity but only with the “simple subjectivity” ( bloße Subjektivität ), the “purely subjective validity” ( bloß subjektive Gültigkeit ) of sensible modifications of the subject. It is identified with that which is a priori in the subject, namely pure intuitions and categories, which provide the relationship to the ob-ject:

Daß es a priori erkannt werden kann, bedeutet: daß es ein Objekt habe und nicht bloß subjektive Modifikation sei.

( That it can be cognized a priori means: that it has an objectand is not merely a subjective modification. )

( Kant, Reflexionen, 5216, trans. Guyer, 111 )

However, the concept of object is a generic one whose meaning multiplies as a function of the levels of objectivization that ensure the denotation, universality, and necessity of the phenomenon. It follows that the concept of “objective reality” ( objektive Realität ) is multivocal, and may be divided into levels related to the transcendental conditions ( formal, material, general ) defining the modalities ( possible, actual, necessary ) and corresponding to the different scholastic-Cartesian concepts of “reality” ( quidditas or realitas objectiva, quodditas or realitas actualis, necessitas or ens causatum ). Each level achieves a successive elimination of that which is simply subjective ( bloß subjektiv ): the quality of pertaining to the senses; ens imaginarium; and contingency.

— Realitas objectiva ( essentia, possibilitas ) at the mathematical level is not, however, the possible object, that is, the object simply present in front of us ( da-seiendes ), stripped of its secondary qualities and constituted by primary qualities alone ( magnitudes ), the conditions of construction in space and time. Rather, realitas objectiva is the sense of the object ( gegeständlicher Sinn ), which is contrasted with the nihil negativum, the empty object without a concept ( leerer Gegestand ohne Begriff ) ( Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 292, B 348 ):

[Die] Bedingungen des Raumes und der Bestimmung desselben . . . haben ihre objektive Realität, d. i. sie gehen auf mögliche Dinge, weil sie die Form der Erfahrung überhaupt a priori enthalten.

( [The] conditions of space and of its determinations . . . have their objective reality, i.e., they pertain to possible things, because they contain in themselves a priori the form of experience in general. )

( Ibid., A 221, B 268 )

Realitas actualis existentia, at the dynamic level, is actuality ( Wirklichkeit ), the perceptually given object with a perceptible matter that guarantees its empirical reality or denotation ( Gegenständlichkeit, Beziehung auf einen Gegenstand ), which is contrasted with ens rationis and ens imaginarium, intuitions or concepts empty without objects ( ibid., A 292 ):

[Wir müssen] immer eine Anschauung bei der Hand haben, um . . . die objektive Realität des reinen Verstandesbegriff darzulegen.

( [We must] always have available an intuition for it to display the objective reality of the pure concept of the understanding. )

( Ibid., B 288 )

Finally the ens creatum sive causatum, purged of all theological content, corresponds to the “material necessity in existence” ( materiale Notwendigkeit im Dasein ), that is, submission to the principle of causality and to the rule of understanding necessary in the apprehension of phenomena:

Dasjenige an der Erscheinung, was die Bedingung dieser notwendigen Regel der Apprehension enthält, ist das Objekt.

( That in the appearance which contains the condition of this necessary rule of apprehension is the object. )

( Ibid., A 191, B 236 )

The idea of a causal order of time prescribes a rule to the subjective succession of apprehension and makes it possible to move from the subjective succession of representations to the representation of an objective succession, from Erscheinung to Objekt. The object in this sense does not simply denote the existing object but that which has universal and necessary validity. Objectivity as objective validity is thus not completely identical with denotation but adds a further requirement to it, that of the principle of reason or causality, which inserts every object in the necessary order of causation of phenomena and makes it possible for the natural sciences to construct reality, nature being identical for every subject ( allgemeingültig ). We should not confuse this intersubjective validity with the simple claim to subjective universality that characterizes the judgment of taste ( Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 8, 5:213–16 ), since that is only the idea of a universal assent lacking a concept, and hence also lacking objectivity.

— A final concept of objectivity appears on the practical level, where the critical question concerning the objectivity of our principles of action is posed. There are indeed phenomenal objects of practice, namely objects of desire constituted as realizations of the will. But if the principle of determination of an action is an empirical object, namely the feeling of pleasure or pain or the distinction between good and bad, then the action is deprived of its objective validity since its object is an a posteriori matter ( Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 5:21, Object=Materie ), and thus simply subjective. For it to have objective validity, the practical object must be a necessary object of the faculty of desire, whose intersubjective validity is ensured by its formal, a priori character, namely the form of the law, the principle of distinction between good and evil ( Gut and Böse ). As in the case of pure reason, we must therefore distinguish between Gegenständlichkeit and Objektivität, objectuality and objectivity, the latter being guaranteed by its a prioricity, that is, its necessity and universality:

Unter einem Begriffe eines Gegenstandes der praktischen Vernunft verstehe ich die Vorstellung eines Objekts als einer möglichen Wirkung durch Freiheit.

( By a concept of an object of practical reason, I mean the presentation of an object as an effect possible through freedom. )

( Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 77 )

Die alleinigen Objekte einer praktischen Vernunft sind also die vom Guten und Bösen. Denn durch das erstere versteht man einen notwendigen Gegenstand des Begehrungs, durch das zweite des Verabscheuungsvermögens, beides aber nach einem Prinzip der Vernunft.

( The sole objects of a practical reason are, therefore, those of the good and the evil. For by the first one means a necessary object of our power of desire, by the second, of our power of loathing, but both according to a principle of reason. )

( Ibid., 78 )

II. Husserl: From the Object to Gegeständlichkeit

The terminology of objectivity in Husserl presents the same kind of difficulties that we find in Kant, insofar as it is technically extended and complicated by the distinction of types of object and objectification. However, Husserl’s deployment of the concept of epochê [ἐποχή] also serves to simplify the treatment of objectivity ( in comparison to Kant’s treatment ), for epochê serves to remove the dissociation of the object into phenomenon and thing in itself, and brings the object back to the phenomenon alone.

A. Multiplying the kinds of object

The key phrase for Husserl is the “Rückgang auf die Sache selbst,” translated as “return to things themselves.” However, “Sachen sind nicht ohne weiteres Natursachen” [things are not simply mere things belonging to Nature] ( Ideen I, § 19, Hua III/1, p. 42; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 36 ); they are, rather, everything that may be ascribed to intuitive self-givenness ( Selbstgegebenheit ) in contrast with what is simply indicated ( bloß vermeint ). There is, as a consequence, a proliferation of types of thematic objects. These Husserl designates by the term Gegenständlichkeit, which is better translated into French as “objectity” ( S. Bachelard, Élie-Kelkek-Schérer ) than as “objectivity” ( Ricoeur ), to avoid confusion with the character of what has objective validity ( Objektivität, see below ):

Ich wähle öfters den unbestimmteren Ausdruck Gegenständlichkeit, weil es sich hier überall nicht bloß um Gegenstände im engeren Sinn, sondern auch um Sachverhalte, Merkmale, um unselbständige reale oder kategoriale Formen u. dgl. handelt.

( I often make use of the vaguer expression “objective correlate” [Gegenständlichkeit] since we are here never limited to objects in the narrower sense but have also to do with states of affairs, properties, and nonindependent forms, etc., whether real or categorial. )

( Husserl, Logical Investigations, First Investigation, § 9, 1:281 )

Thus, a number, a value, a nation are “objectities” in the same way a tree is. Let us analyze these complexities in the vocabulary of objects.

1. Things of nature and grounded “objectities”

Objectities may be forms of object that are grounded on the infrastructure of material nature and possess layers of superstructural meaning. They are “new types of objectity of a higher order [neuartige Gegenständlichkeiten höherer Ordnung]” ( Ideen, I, § 152, Hua III/1, p. 354 ), which Husserl refers to by the terms Gegenstand, Objekt, Gegeständlichkeit, Objektität ( ibid., § 95, Hua III/1, p. 221 ): animate beings ( Animalien ), objects of value ( Wertobjekte or Wertobjektitäten, see WERT ), objects of use ( praktische Objekte or Gebrauchsobjekte ), cultural formations ( konkrete Kulturgebilde: state, law, morality, etc. ). The difficulty derives from the distinction between natural infrastructure ( that which has value, werter Gegenstand ), the abstract layer grounded in it ( das Wert, value as the correlate of an evaluation, objectified value ), and the concrete objectity resulting from their fusion ( Wertgegenstand, where the Naturobjekt and Wert are combined, the object with value ):

Wir sprechen von der bloßen “Sache,” die werte ist, die Wertcharakter, Wertheit hat; demgegenüber vom konkreten Werte selbst oder der Wertobjektität.

( We shall speak of the mere “thing” that is valuable, that has a value-characteristic, that has value-quality; in contradistinction, we speak of concrete value itself or the value-Objectiveness. )

( Husserl, Ideen, Volume I, § 95, Hua III/1, 221; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 232 )

Let us take an example. In a museum, I perceive a primitive object first as simply a thing; then, understanding its practical value ( Gebrauchssinn ), I incorporate that to it and perceive the object as an object of use ( Gebrauchsobjekt ). French does not have the ease of German, with its compound words, of rendering the nature of this fusion: “objet-valeur” risks introducing a confusion with objectified ( that is, abstract ) value, “object having value” ( Ricoeur ), and thus of suggesting a split between object and value; the expression “chose-évaluée” better suggests the sort of fusion Husserl describes. Generally speaking, the different levels of objectification and the distinction between abstract and concrete objectities create problems for French.

2. Singular objects and essence

Husserl also widens the domain of objectities by admitting, alongside singular objects, essences as objects of specific intuition:

Das Wesen ( Eidos ) ist ein neuartiger Gegenstand. . . . Auch Wesenerschauung ist eben Anschauung, wie eidetischer Gegenstand eben Gegenstand ist.

( The essence [Eidos] is a new sort of object. . . . Seeing an essence is also precisely intuition, just as an eidetic object is precisely an object. )

( Ibid., § 3, Hua III/1, 14; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 9 )

The difficulty here is not one of translation but of understanding the term Gegenstand. If we render it by “object,” we must keep in mind “the generalization of the concepts of intuition and of object” ( “Verallgemeinerung der Begriffe ‘Anschauung’ und ‘Gegenstand’ ” ). In Husserl this “generalization” is not an analogy taking essences on the model of perceptual objects but the understanding of singular objects and essences as species of the genus “any object whatever,” of the “universal concept of object, of object as any something whatever [des allgemeinen Gegenstandsbegriffs, des Gegenstands als irgend etwas]” ( Ideen . . . I, § 22, Hua III/1, p. 47 ). Husserl generalizes the fact of being an object ( Objektheit ) to fields other than singularities, even while denouncing any confusion between real and ideal objectities:

Besagt Gegenstand und Reales, Wirklichkeit und reale Wirklichkeit ein und dasselbe, dann ist die Auffassung von Ideen als Gegenständen und Wirklichkeiten allerdings verkehrte “platonische Hypostasierung.”

( If object and something real, actuality and real actuality, have one and the same sense, then the conception of ideas as objects and actualities is indeed a perverse “Platonic hypostatization.” )

( Ibid., § 22, Hua III/1, 47; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 41 )

The term Wirklichkeiten, corresponding to the generalized concept of object, does not refer to “realities” ( as Ricoeur argues ) in the sense of “natural realities” but to anything that has the characteristic of actuality ( Wirklichsein ) and contains different types of ideality ( vielerlei Ideales: the spectrum of sounds, the number 2, the circle, a proposition, etc. ).

3. Syntactic objectities

In the domain of essences, the idea of formal ontology extends the notion of objectivity to the syntactic domain. Material ontologies consider the genera of concrete objects ( thing, animal, man, etc. ); formal ontology considers the “formal region” ( formale Region ) of any object whatever, “the empty form of region in general” ( “die leere Form von Region überhaupt,” ibid., I, § 10, Hua III/1, 26 ). Taken in the logical sense, as designating any possible subject of predication, “objects” are not restricted to concrete individuals like proto-objecticities ( Urgegenständlichkeiten ) or ultimate substrates ( “letzte Substrate” ), but contain “syntactic or categorial objectities [syntaktische oder kategoriale Gegenständlichkeiten]” ( ibid., I, § 11, Hua III/1, 28–29 ) derived from these by syntaxtic construction:

“Gegenstand” ist ein Titel für mancherlei, aber zusammengehörige Gestaltungen, z. B. “Ding,” “Eigenschaft,” “Relation,” “Sachverhalt,” “Menge,” “Ordnung” usw., die . . . auf eine Art Gegenständlichkeit, die sozusagen den Vorzug der Urgegenständlichkeit hat, zurückweisen.

( “Object” is a name for various formations which nonetheless belong together—for example, “physical thing,” “property,” “relationship,” “predicatively formed affair-complex,” “aggregate,” “ordered set.” Obviously they are not on a par with one another but rather in every case point back to one kind of objectivity that, so to speak, takes precedence as the primal objectivity. )

( Ibid., I, § 10, Hua III/1, 25; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 20 )

“Objects” of this sort are purely logical, fundamental concepts; the formal determination of the object as a “something in general”( “ein irgend Etwas” ) taken as the substrate of a statement; objects of a higher order inasmuch as they are derived from the ultimate substrates, the perceptual objects. Thus the state-of-affairs or state-of-things, the Sachverhalt “the snow is white,” is an object just as much as the snow is, but of a higher order, since it implies the consciousness of the substrate, of the property, and of their combination all at once: it is a compound object of polythetic consciousness ( “Gesamt-Gegenstand polythetischer Bewußtseins” ). The French translation of Sachverhalt ( see SACHVERHALT ) by état-des-choses is inaccurate, since the thing is not a thing of nature ( Naturding ) but rather any logical subject of any level; the English “predicatively formed affair-complex,” even better than the more common “state of affairs,” renders its predicative origin and its much broader reach and common character.

B. Elimination of the object in itself and layers of meaning of the intentional object

The Kantian amphibology of the object ( Erscheinung and “Ding an sich” ) is eliminated by epochê, since placing the natural thesis on the sidelines ( ausschalten ) means bracketing ( einklammern ) any object posited by it, hence any existent in itself, and making the object appear as “intentional object” or Noema, terms that refer to the objectival sense sought and constituted by consciousness:

Ähnlich wie die Wahrnehmung hat jedes intentionale Erlebnis . . . sein “intentionales Objekt,” d. i. seinen gegenständlichen Sinn.

( Like perception, every intentive mental process . . . has its “intentional Object,” i.e., its objective sense. )

( Ibid., I, § 90, Hua III/1, 206; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 217 )

The intentional object is an object not in the sense of being self-subsistent but in the sense in which one speaks of an object of attention, that is, as a correlate or “terminus ad quem” ( Worauf, toward-which, Heidegger will say ) of an activity. Not the existing thing ( “das wirkliche Ding” ), but the being-sense ( Seinsinn ) constituted by the giving of meaning by consciousness—noematic trees do not burn! The term gegenständlich refers to the relationship to an object and is translated by “objectival” or “objectual” to distinguish it from the term objektiv, which refers to what has intersubjective validity. In this way any object being reducible to a being-sense correlative to a target of consciousness, a noema correlative to a noesis, we can—in the same way that a noema may be decomposed into a series of partial goals or intentions—distinguish in the noema different layers of objectival sense corresponding to different degrees of objectification. Thus we come, as in Kant, to a stratification of meanings of the object and objectivity that return us to the constitutive operations of the transcendental subject.

1. The twofold sense of the concept of reality: “reell” and “real”

This reduction of objectivity to the intentional object should not hide the division of the concept of “reality” into two senses: the “reality” of being is referred to by the adjectives reelle and real, or immanent and transzendent. What is reell refers to what has the mode of being of consciousness and is absolutely given, while what is real is what has a material nature ( Naturding ) given by its outlines. The perceived tree is real, but my perception of the tree is reell, not included in material nature but included in consciousness and in this way ir-real. Indifferently translating real and reell by “real” would gloss over this essential distinction of the modes of being and consciousness of the object, of experience ( Erlebnis ) and the thing ( Ding ), “des reellen Bestands der Wahrnehmung” ( “the concrete, really inherent composition of perception itself” ) and “des transzendenten Objekts” ( “utterly transcendent object” ) ( ibid., I, § 41, Hua III/1, p. 83; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. Kersten, 86 ). The translation of irreal by “unreal” would be inaccurate as well, suggesting that experiences are fictions when in fact they are the absolute given; irreal refers to whatever does not have the mode of being of a worldly thing. Husserl thus takes up terminology inherited from German idealism, in which Realphilosophie referred to the philosophy of work, nature, and family ( cf. Hegel, Realphilosophie of Jena ), and in which real contrasts with whatever is metaphysical and deals with the philosophy of mind. He extends the concept of real to whatever belongs to the world, contrasting it only with ideal and syntactic objectities ( see TRUTH ).

2. Immanent objectities

While terminology for objects becomes complicated at the top end by the admission of objects of a higher order, it is also complicated at the bottom, when we examine the abstract component of concrete objects. These are “immanent objectities,” that is, units identified by consciousness and not objects situated in the world. The time of consciousness is not, therefore, unformed or Heraclitean, but already shaped by permanent units:

Das Erlebnis, die wir jetzt erleben, wird uns in der unmittelbaren Reflexion gegenständlich, und es stellt sich in ihm immerfort dasselbe Gegenständliche dar: derselbe Ton.

( The mental process which we are now undergoing becomes objective to us in immediate reflection, and thenceforth it displays in reflection the same objectivity: the self-same tone which has just existed as an actual “now” remains henceforth the same tone. )

( Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua II, 67; Idea of Phenomenology, Eng. trans. Alston and Nakhnikian, 52 )

This sound is, of course, an “object” in the sense of a unit apprehended by consciousness, but not an object of nature ( Reales, Naturgegenstand ). Whence the difficulty we encounter in translating the expressions for these immanent “objects,” like Zeitobjekt:

In der Wahrnehmung mit ihrer Retention konstituiert sich das ursprüngliche Zeitobjekt.

( The primary temporal object is constituted in perception, along with the retention of consciousness of what is perceived. )

( Ibid., Hua II, 71; Idea of Phenomenology, Lecture 5, Eng. trans. Alston and Nakhnikian, 56 )

In French Zeitobjekt must therefore be translated by “tempo-object” ( Granel ) or objet de temps, “object of time,” and not objet temporel or “temporal object” ( as Dussort and Lowit do ) since, although any object of nature is “temporal” insofar as it is situated in objective time, a melody as an immanent given of consciousness is a “tempo-object,” a pure thing-of-duration without spatial or causal character. The same holds for the abstract layer of spatiality, which defines “objects” that are concrete relative to itself but abstract relative to the natural thing: res extensae. Here again, we must translate res extensa by spatio-object or spatial-thing ( with a hyphen ) rather than by “extended thing” or “spatial thing,” since while every Naturding is extended, res extensa is only extension, its materiality having been abstracted away, as well as its placement in the causal order of nature: a ghost, a rainbow as pure apparitions. These layers separate out again into new, more abstract layers, such as the res extensa in “things” relative to each sense modality ( Sinnendinge: Sehdinge, Tastdinge, etc. ), which are not choses sensibles or choses sensorielles ( Ricoeur ), “sensory things” or “things of sense” ( Boyce Gibson, Eng. tr. of Ideen I )—since every Naturding is sensible—but “things pertaining to the senses” ( Cairns ), things-of-the-senses or things relating to each sense ( choses-des-sens in French ), which we might translate by the Latin sensualia ( Escoubas, Fr. tr. of Ideen II ). Thus Sehding could be rendered with the help of Latin as visuale ( Escoubas ), or again “visual-thing” or “thing-of-sight,” but not by “visual thing” or “visible thing” ( Ricoeur ), since every Naturding is visible ( but also tangible, audible, and so on ), whereas a Sehding is a pure thing-of-sight having only visual properties ( e.g., a patch of red color that I see when closing my eyes ).

3. Object “pure and simple” and complete object

The analysis of intentional objects and the ways in which they are given allows us to distinguish between a narrow and a wide sense of noema: the central core or pure objectival sense, or the central noematic moment ( “zentraler Kern,” “purer gegeständlicher Sinn,” “zentrales noematisches Moment” ) is contrasted with the complete intentional object in the manner of its modes of being given ( “volles intentionales Objekt,” “Gegenstand im Wie seiner Gegebenheitsweisen” ). The same tree may be perceived from different angles, at different seasons, and change predicates ( color, shape ) while remaining identical; it may be perceived, remembered, imagined, named: this “same” is the minimal objectival sense ( “gegenständlicher Sinn” ). From this “same” of the tree have been eliminated, by abstraction, the acts of apprehension ( perception, memory, etc. ) that give the tree its Aktcharaktere ( characters of act ) of “perceived,” “remembered,” etc.; this minimal objectival sense is contrasted with the “Objekt im Wie,” which is the perceived-tree, the remembered-tree, and so on:

Daß verschiedene Begriffe von unmodifizierten Objektivitäten unterscheidbar sein müssen, von denen der “Gegenstand schlechthin,” nämlich das Identische, das einmal wahrgenommen, das andere Mal direkt vergegenwärtigt, das dritte Mal in einem Gemälde bildlich dargestellt ist u. dgl., nur einen zentralen Begriff andeutet.

( We must distinguish different concepts of unmodified objectivities, of which the “object simpliciter,” namely the something identical which is perceived at one time, another time directly presentiated, a third time presented pictorially in a painting, and the like, only indicates one central concept. )

( Ibid., I, § 91, Hua III/1, 211; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 222 )

The expressions “pure objectival sense” ( “purer gegenständlicher Sinn” ), “noematic core” ( “noematischer Kern” ), and “of central core” ( “zentraler Kern” ) thus refer to a layer of meaning of the complete object, namely that which we obtain by abstraction of the determinations inherent to the “how” of subjective directedness. The concept of “objectivity” thus has here the sense of the absence of subjective modification, and that of “pure object,” the sense of a correlate prior to any changes of meaning related to the character of acts.

4. The distinction between noematic sense and determinable “object”

We said earlier that the Husserlian sense of objectivity reduces to the intentional or noematic sense, at the expense of the thing in itself, and that in this noematic sense the specifically “objective” moment was the core, obtained by eliminating the characters that inhere in the how of subjective directedness ( remembered, imagined, and so on ). However, the truly foundational sense of object in Husserl does not reduce either to the noematic sense or the noematic core, but to a final noematic layer, that of the “object” as a pure X, a pure “something,” pure identical substrate of variable determinations:

Es scheidet sich als zentrales noematisches Moment aus: der “Gegenstand,” das “Objekt,” das “Identische,” das “bestimmbare Subjekt seiner möglichen Prädikate”—das pure X in Abstraktion von allen Prädikaten—und es scheidet sich . . . von den Prädikatnoemen. . . . derart, daß der charakterisierte Kern ein wandelbarer und der “Gegenstand,” das pure Subjekt der Prädikate, eben ein identisches ist. . . . Kein “Sinn” ohne das “etwas” und wieder ohne “bestimmenden Inhalt.”

( The identical intentional “object” becomes evidently distinguished from the changing and alterable “predicates.” It becomes separated as central noematic moment: the “object,” the “Object,” the “Identical,” the “determinable subject of its possible predicates”—the pure X in abstraction from all predicates—and it becomes separated from these predicates or, more precisely, from the predicate-noemas . . . such that the characterized core is a changeable one and the “object,” the pure subject of the predicating, is precisely an identical one. . . . No “sense” without the “something” and, again, without “determining content.” )

( Ibid., I, § 131, Hua III/1, 302-3; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 313–15 )

What may we say about this sense of the concept of object, manifested in general by the quotation marks? How is it different from the standard concept of intentional object, as well as the concepts of object “pure and simple” and of the noematic core? The noetico-noematic parallelism allows us to understand it: just as at the analytic level any grasp of an object may be decomposed into partial intentions, the noematic sense is broken down into layers of partial senses, the fundamental one being the sense of the noematic core ( e.g., a church, abstracted away from knowing whether it is perceived, remembered, etc. ) and, more profoundly, the object “pure and simple” ( the same church as a material thing, abstracted away from its spiritual predicates ). Inversely, however, any directed act, at the synthetic level, no matter what changes affect the object, is not limited to aiming at such or such a state of the object but remains directed at the same object ( if the church is destroyed or the tree burns, the rubble or ash are indeed the remains of that very object, even though it is unrecognizable ). As a result, any grasping of a concrete object involves, at its foundation, the minimal grasp of a pure permanent substrate, the guarantor of the identity of the object. This is the concept of “object”: pure hupokeimenon [ὑποϰειμένον], pure “that-there” or “something,” prior to any determination, defined only by permanence and determinability. We find here the function of the Kantian concepts of a transcendental object or Objekt überhaupt, or of the category of substance: in the absence of the transcendent existence of the object, grounding the identity of the objective correlate in the permanence of an empty grasping. That there is no sense without the “something” means that the indeterminate relation to the object X ( indeed that is the title of the first chapter of the fourth section of the Ideen I: “The noematic sense and the relation to the object” ) precedes any relationship to a determined object, and hence that formal ontology, the theory of the pure “something,” has a foundational status for material ontologies. Thus one should, strictly speaking, as in Kant, translate this occurrence of the concept of “object” by “ob-ject,” to distinguish it from the object provided with a determined noematic sense, meaning by this the permanence of a correlate for consciousness.

5. The twofold sense of “objectivity”: Objektivität and Gegenständlichkeit

Finally the concept of Objektivität, which we translate by “objectivity,” does not refer like Gegenständlichkeit to the relation to an objectity, but to the highest level of objectification, namely intersubjective validity. The objective thing ( “objectives Ding” ) is the “intersubjectively identical physical thing” ( “das intersubjektiv identische Ding,” Ideen I §151, Hua III/1, 352; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. Kersten, 363 ), which is a unit constitutive of a higher order ( “eine konstitutive Einheit höherer Ordnung” ) insofar as it derives from an intersubjective constitution, related to an indefinite plurality of subjects linked by a reciprocal comprehension “for which one physical thing is to be intersubjectively given and identified as the same objective actuality [für welche ein Ding als dasselbe objektiv Wirkliche intersubjektiv zu geben und zu identifizieren ist]” ( ibid., § 135, Hua III/1, 310–11; Eng. trans. Kersten, 323 ). In this regard the highest-level objectivity, related to an indefinitely open community, is the “true thing” ( das wahre Ding ), which Husserl calls das physikalische Ding, and which is not simply the “chose physique” ( ibid., § 41, Hua III/1, 83—Ricoeur, or “physical thing,” Boyce Gibson ), but the thing-of-physical-thought ( i.e., as conceived in physics ), just as das physikalische Wahre refers not to “physical truth” but to the truth sought by physical science, which strips nature of its subjective-relative qualities. The “true thing” is not the thing in itself as intelligible cause of all apprehension but the superstructure built up by mathematical thought on the world of appearing objects.

Dominique Pradelle

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Heidegger, Martin. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975. Translation by Albert Hofstadter: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

   . Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991. Translation by Richard Taft: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 5th ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

   . Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited by Ingtraud Görland. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 25. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. Translation by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Husserl, Edmund. Formal und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Edited by Paul Janssen. Husserliana 27. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974.

   . Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen. Edited by Walter Biemel. Husserliana 2. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by W. Alston and G. Nakhnikian: The Idea of Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990.

   . Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. 2 vols. Vol. 1 edited by Karl Schuhmann; vol. 2 edited by Marly Biemel. Husserliana 3.1 and 4. ( HUA ) The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976, 1952. Translation by F. Kersten: Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1989.

   . Logische Untersuchungen. Part 2. Edited by Ursula Panzer. Husserliana 19. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984. Translation by J. N. Findlay: Logical Investigations. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

Kant, Immanuel. Dissertatio de 1770. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote: “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World.” In Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, edited by David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

   . Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–.

   . Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1788. Translation by Werner S. Pluhar: Critique of Practical Reason, edited by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002.

   . Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 4 and 3. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1781, 1787. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

   . Kritik der Urteilskraft. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1792. Translation by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews: Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

   . Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1783. Translation by Gary Hatfield: Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science; Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Gary Hatfield. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			human sciences, moral sciences, social sciences, humanities, human studies
FRENCH			sciences humaines, sciences de l’esprit
ITALIAN			scienze umane, scienze morali, scienze dello spirito
POLISH			nauki humanistyczne

  BILDUNG, EPISTEMOLOGY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HUMANITY, LIGHT, MORALS, SOUL

The expression Geisteswissenschaften refers to an object or constellation of objects of experience: man and his actions in the world, by contrast with Naturwissenschaften, sciences of nature. This distinction is accompanied by a difference in method summed up by Wilhelm Dilthey in the distinction between “to explain” ( erklären ) and “to understand” ( verstehen ). The translation of Geisteswissenschaft gave rise to the formulation of a number of terms that intersect one or the other German meanings, without, however, completely exhausting its sense. Thus one is confronted each time with at least a pair of terms: in English, humanities / moral ( social ) sciences; in French sciences de l’esprit / sciences humaines; in Italian scienze umane / scienze morali. As a result, the choice of translation must come from a more or less clearly embraced decision as to what is understood by the very idea of science.

I. Dividing Science: Geisteswissenschaften and Its Translations

A. Emergence: Germany-England

Geisteswissenschaft, in the singular, appears toward the end of the eighteenth century in relation to a Pneumatologie oder Geisteslehre ( doctrine of the mind ), a study of the intellectual and moral faculties of man. The plural Geisteswissenschaften, today firmly established, is used by Johann Gustav Droysen in his Geschichte des Hellenismus ( 1843, vol. 2, preface ). The irony, however, is that the term starts spreading only in 1849—as a translation of the English “moral sciences.” Dilthey is the one who, in 1883 ( Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften ), gives it its canonical usage and its conceptual dimension to refer to hermeneutic knowledge of cultural works and of mental objects throughout history.

■ See Box 1.

1

The structuring of a term: Dilthey’s antitheses

With Dilthey, the science of Geist ( mind ) is no longer the knowledge of man in general, his faculties, his critical or moral reason, but rather a bundle of disciplines and empirical sciences whose objects are determined by the different historical manifestations of Geist. At the same time, the differences in method within the sciences of nature are no longer limited to a simple partition between two groups of disciplines within the universe of science.

The same year ( 1883 ) in which Dilthey published his essay on Geisteswissenschaften, Wilhelm Windelband introduced a distinction between what he termed monothetic ( monothetisch ) and idiographic ( idiographisch ) sciences, and applied the distinction to the domains that Dilthey had sought to characterize. The first, monothetic sciences, are those, like the natural sciences, that aim to give order to diverse phenomena by building a system of concepts or laws having the most general possible validity. The second, idiographic sciences, are those that, like the historical sciences, deal with events in their concrete singularity and their individual becoming. In reality, as concerns Dilthey, this distinction is relative not to the object of study but to the method. If the object itself were at issue, it would not be Geist but Kultur, in the sense understood by Heinrich Rickert, who, in the wake of Windelband, criticizes the concept of Geist.

This situation yields two major consequences:

1. On the one hand, Geisteswissenschaften become, with their plurality, empirical disciplines, which leads to the translation into French not as sciences morales but as sciences humaines. By this transformation, the term Geisteswissenschaften no longer covers the rigorously scientific sense of a moral or philosophical reflection; rather, it leads to a separation with philosophy, which is thenceforth placed on a higher level of abstraction.

2. On the other hand, and in consequence, this situation yields a definitive fusion of the determinations of method and content in a single term, Geisteswissenschaften, which does not take place in other languages. To the contrary: in other languages this situation provokes a proliferation of terminology that the synthetic character of the German term prevents.

These phenomena are perfectly summed up by Dilthey in the following lines:

Besides the natural sciences, a group of conceptual cognitive results emerged naturally from the tasks of life itself. These results are linked to one another by their common object. [Neben den Naturwissenschaften hat sich eine Gruppe von Erkenntnissen entwickelt, naturwüchsig, aus den Aufgaben des Lebens selbst, welche durch die Gemeinsamkeit des Gegenstandes miteinander verbunden sind.] History, political economy, the sciences of law and of the state, the study of religion, literature, poetry, architecture, music, of philosophical world-views and systems, and finally, psychology are such sciences. All these sciences refer to the same grand fact: the human race [Alle diese Wissenschaften beziehen sich auf dieselbe große Tatsache : das Menschengeschlecht] which they describe, narrate, and judge, and about which they form concepts and theories.

What one customarily separates as physical and psychical is undivided in this fact of the human sciences. It contains the living nexus of both. We ourselves belong to nature, and nature is at work in us, unconsciously, in dark drives. States of consciousness are constantly expressed in gestures, looks, and words; and they have their objectivity in institutions, states, churches, and scientific institutes. History operates in these very contexts.

Of course, this does not exclude the possibility that the human sciences employ the distinction between the physical and the psychical whenever their purposes require it. But then they must remain conscious that they are working with abstractions, not with entities, and that these abstractions are valid only within the limits of the point of view within which they are projected. . . .

For it is clear that the human sciences and natural sciences cannot be logically divided into two classes by means of two spheres of facts formed by them. Physiology also deals with an aspect of man, and it is a natural science. Consequently, the basis for distinguishing the two classes cannot be found in the facts taken on their own. The human sciences must be related differently to the physical and to the psychical aspects of man. And that is in fact the case [Denn es ist klar, daß die Geisteswissenschaften und die Naturwissenschaften nicht logisch korrekt als zwei Klassen gesondert werden können durch zwei Tatsachenkreise, die sie bilden. . . . Die Geisteswissenschaften müssen sich zu der physischen Seite der Menschen anders verhalten als zur psychischen. Und so ist es in der Tat].

( The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, 101–2; Die Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 7:91–92 )

There is a measurable difference between these later theses and Dilthey’s earlier suggestions, in the Einleitung of 1883, which still attached the Geisteswissenschaften to the domain of particular objects:

All the disciplines that have socio-historical reality as their subject matter [welche die geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit zu ihren Gegenstände haben] are encompassed in this work under the name “human sciences” [Geisteswissenschaften].

( Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1:56; Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1:4 )

Nonetheless, the plurality of sciences referred to as Geistwissenschaften seem capable of being brought under a certain unity, that of Geist. While the nature of this unity is made increasingly difficult to grasp by Dilthey’s evolution, its effects make themselves felt nonetheless. The plasticity of the notion of Geist, its semantic richness, meant that German did not feel the need to vary its expressions and add to its lexicon in this regard. Thus, a plurality of terms in other languages is required to correspond to the multivocal German word.

Luca M. Scarantino

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Die Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, Abgrenzung der Geisteswissenschaften. Vol. 7 of Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig: Teubner, 1927. Translation by Rudolf A. Makkreel and William H. Oman: “Plan for the Continuation of the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences,” in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. 3 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

   . Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig: Teubner, 1923. Translation by Michael Neville et al.: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Vol. 1 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, edited by Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

B. “Moral sciences,” “social sciences,” “humanities”—France-Germany-England

The original expression “moral sciences” is used by John Stuart Mill in the sixth and last book of his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive ( 1843 ). But the new sense given to the word by Dilthey to its German translation, Geisteswissenschaften, explains, in reverse, the problems faced by the English translators of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Yet these latter difficulties are especially significant when one sets about defining and translating Geisteswissenschaften. The translation of Geist by “mind” does not seem wholly right, inasmuch as “mind” appears to refer primarily to the mental life of the individual; but “mind” may nonetheless also refer to a collection: thus the title of Dilthey’s Geschichte des deutschen Geistes was translated as Studies concerning the History of the German Mind, such that R. G. Collingwood translated Geisteswissenschaften as Sciences of Mind. However, even though Dilthey refers explicitly to the Hegelian concept of Geist, neither “mind” nor “spirit,” the two most likely candidates as translations for Geisteswissenschaften, prevailed when Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes was rendered into English. Two other terms were used instead: “moral sciences” and “social sciences.”

1. “Moral sciences” and Geisteswissenschaften

In French and English, the expressions “moral sciences” and “moral and political sciences,” which for a long time were used to translate Geisteswissenschaften ( see B. Groethuysen, “Dilthey and His School” of 1912, as well as André Lalande’s RT: Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie of 1938 and its entry for “science,” or Raymond Aron’s use of these expressions interchangeably with sciences de l’esprit in 1935 ), fell out of use, and were progressively replaced by “human sciences,” scienze umane, and sciences humaines ( see the English and French translations of Dilthey’s Einleitung, in 1988 and 1942 respectively ). With their indeterminate connotations, these more recent expressions blur the line between two conceptions of science—the first inductive or mathematized, like economics and some sectors of sociology, the second comprehensive, such as history. This is clearly seen by looking, in contrast, at what Mill means by “moral sciences,” namely, essentially political science, sociology, and political economy, underwritten by a science of the laws of mental life.

2. Geisteswissenschaften and “social sciences”

In fact, the phrase “social sciences” has an equally valid claim as does “moral sciences” to serve as the description for these pursuits. At first glance, it does not seem illegitimate to defend this claim even as a translation of Dilthey, who, after all, judges it necessary to give as the subtitle of his Introduction, “Versuch einer Grundlegung der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte”—“An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History,” in Betanzos’s translation. Nevertheless, the concept of Geisteswissenschaften remains irreducible to Mill’s project, for, far from wishing to establish the autonomy of the sciences of mind, Mill wishes on the contrary to widen the field of application of the inductive method to the “sciences of Ethics and Politics” or “moral and social sciences,” or again to the “sciences of human nature and society.” Book VI of Mill’s System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, devoted to the moral sciences, is thus only a “kind of supplement or appendix” ( 2:478 ) to the rest of the system.

It is thus significant that the epigraph of Mill’s book is a quotation from Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain ( 1793 ). Why Condorcet, rather than someone like Hume?

The goal of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature; being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects ( 1793 ) is in fact literally identical with Mill’s, especially since this “science of man” must be completed by the “examination of morals, politics, and criticism.” However, Condorcet, though using the expressions sciences humaines, sciences morales et politiques, and sciences métaphysiques et sociales indifferently, deploys social mathematics in an explicit and systematic way, of which Fourierist calculus is a kind of caricature and in relation to which Auguste Comte remains far in the background.

Despite the idea of a science of human “nature” and the ambiguity of the normative connotation of “moral sciences,” the way in which Mill conceives of these sciences, whose certainty is uncontestable insofar as they concern “the character and collective conduct of masses” ( System of Logic, 2:495 ), explains in advance the future decline of this expression in favor of “social sciences,” that is, of “behavioral sciences” ( see BEHAVIOR ). Whereas the political, cultural, and national sense of Dilthey’s project is to restore the “unity of the German vision of the world,” the social aim of these sciences is to rationalize society, and, for Condorcet, to reduce inequalities by conceiving of, for example, a system of retirement and life insurance.

To compensate, the subjects that are most resistant to such a treatment—for example, art history as compared to economics—seem doomed to subsist under the name “humanities,” with the term “moral” withdrawing of its own accord in deference to the new division between the natural and social sciences. In this context, “humanities” hardly corresponds to what social sciences covers, in particular because of the connotation of the word “science,” whose extension is much narrower than that of Wissenschaft. Its choice in 1961 as the translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Logik der Kulturwissenschaft ( cf. also Rudolf Makkreel, who devotes a work to Dilthey in 1975: Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies ), is in fact much closer in spirit to what Dilthey means. Unlike “humanities” and like the Polish nauki haumanistyczne, in which the term means both human and humanist, “human studies,” used from the nineteenth century on, has the particularity of incorporating the social sciences.

■ See Box 2.

2

Geisteswissenschaften: French and Italian solutions

When the expression sciences de l’esprit is adopted in France after the publication in 1883 of Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, it does not appear to take root except in this technical sense, and its use remains limited to it. And even though Renan speaks of sciences des faits de l’esprit ( sciences of the activities of mind ), founded essentially on philology, the French philosophical tradition remains faithful to the expression sciences morales, used in the wide sense of the study of human intellectual faculties. This meaning was already to be found in the names of pedagogical institutions, and, since 1795, in that of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

The integration into French usage of the constellation of disciplines that Dilthey addresses takes place by way of the notion of sciences humaines. These disciplines are distinguished, especially in ordinary usage, from the sciences sociales, which often rely on formal methods. In addition, the twofold character of sociological studies, which deal with human problems but in a quantified form, often resisted various attempts to classify this discipline with the human sciences. In order to truly encompass all the disciplines corresponding to Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften, whose work was translated only in 1942 under the title Introduction à l’étude des sciences humaines ( before the Faculties of Letters became, in 1958, the facultés des lettres et sciences humaines ), French today tends to use the expression sciences de l’homme, which covers the range of studies concerning the human condition, as well as our individual and collective actions, but thoroughly independently of the methods of investigation used. Thus, before taking up his post at the Collège de France, in 1952, Maurice Merleau-Ponty devoted his course at the Sorbonne to the “Sciences de l’homme dans leur rapport à la phénoménologie,” grouping together psychology, sociology, and history. Regarding this question of the field’s name and its content, Fernand Braudel points out in Les Ambitions de l’histoire that the commonalities and the differences between a human science, history, and the sciences du social. These, he writes, are

more scientific than history, more articulated than it with regard to the mass of social facts. . . . [T]hey are—another difference—deliberately focused on the actual, that is, on life, and they all work on what can be seen, measured, touched . . . . Our methods are not the same as theirs, but our problems [certainly] are . . . . And though there is dependency, and enriching dependency, of the historian with regard to the social sciences, he maintains a position outside them.

( On History [translation modified] )

We may note, finally, that a new edition of the French translation of Dilthey’s Einleitung was published in 1992 under the title Introduction aux sciences de l’esprit, as though it was judged preferable to return to a literal translation rather than use the various equivalents that had previously been offered.

Parallel to the moral sciences, which betrays an aspiration of submitting the study of the human mind ( moral philosophy ) to rules of analysis as precise as those governing the study of nature, we must also mention the notion of Moralwissenschaft introduced by Georg Simmel ( Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, 1892 ) to distinguish it from Geisteswissenschaften understood in Dilthey’s sense, which Italian rationalism develops under the name of scienza della morale, a variation on filosofia della morale, whose meaning is different from filosofia morale ( cf. Banfi, “Rendiconti del Regio Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere” ) The distinction becomes less trivial once Italian begins widely using the notion of scienze morali in the same sense as the French sciences morales, and the expression scienze dello spirito to translate the idealist connotation of Geisteswissenschaften. Italian thus appeals to a lexical plurality very much like that of French to satisfy the different connotations of the German expression. Though we may gather together under the notion of scienze umane the collection of disciplines defined by Dilthey, they are not all included in scienze morali. Antonio Banfi thus points out in his polemic against Benedetto Croce that, “for the rest, . . . in Germany they continue to speak of Geisteswissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaften in a sense that is comparable to, but wider than, that which the scienze morali had for us, and they remember that the position and function of philosophy with regard to these disciplines are still of some interest” ( “Discussioni” ).

Luca M. Scarantino

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banfi, Antonio. “Discussioni.” Studi filosofici 2 ( 1941 ).

   . “Rendiconti del Regio Istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere.” Sui principi di una filosofia della morale. 67 ( 1933–34 ).

Braudel, Fernand. Les Ambitions de l’histoire. Edited by Roselyne de Ayala and Paule Braudel. Vol. 2 of Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel. Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1997. Translation by Sarah Matthews: On History. Part 2 of History and the Other Human Sciences. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.

II. Conceiving the Science of Man: The Philological and Historical Model

At bottom what determines the gap between Geisteswissenschaften and the social sciences is the way in which each conceives of history and the knowledge it is possible to have of it. Already in 1876, Dilthey considered the isolation in which the science of history was confined as responsible for the inability of Geisteswissenschaften to constitute themselves as autonomous, and he countered Comte and Mill with the “German spirit of historiography.” The “sciences of mind” are, he argues, the result of the process by which philology and the literary humanities of the Renaissance humanists transform themselves into a comparative study of the productions of the mind. In still other words, two factors are decisive for the birth or acceptance of the idea of Geisteswissenschaften: a philological tradition and the appearance of historical consciousness.

In this respect, Dilthey is partially anticipated in both the theses and the terminology of Ernest Renan’s L’Avenir de la science ( chap. 8, written in 1848–49, published in 1890 ). Educated in the German tradition, Renan contrasts the sciences of nature with the “sciences of humanity,” that is, the philological and historical sciences, even while anticipating the reasons for the limited character of his own reception. Clearly inspired by the use of the term “philology” in Germany, at a time when it was used to describe German studies and the studies of literature, art, and religion, which are structured on the model of studies of antiquity, Renan emphasizes philology as an “exact science of the things of the mind” or “science of the products of the human mind,” and thus defines the general orientation of the sciences of humanity, rather closely in line with the future Diltheyan conception of Geisteswissenschaften ( chap. 8 ).

If we inquire, not what is particularly German about Geisteswissenschaften, but rather what in French resists the literal translation of “sciences of the mind,” Renan indicates first the absence of philology, which would explain the simplicity and the violence of Auguste Comte’s apprehension of history. Renan thinks that the latter’s conception of it is “the narrowest” and his method “the coarsest.” The model is no longer Comte’s ( “Comte understands nothing of the sciences of humanity, since he is not a philologist,” Renan writes to Mill, 21 October 1844 ), but rather that of Vico: the history of humanity is deciphered in the history of language. And Condorcet’s project of setting up “a universal language” is just as much at the opposite extreme from the philologist’s love of language. Deploring the “withering of the scientific spirit” due to the system “of public instruction which makes science a simple means of education and not an end in itself,” Renan is in the end targeting what he calls a typical characteristic of the French mind: “a whole petty manner of saying ‘bah’ to the qualities of the scientist in order to raise oneself up by those of the man of sense and the man of wit . . . and which Mme de Staël so rightly called the ‘pedantry of trifling [pédantisme de la légèreté]’ ” ( 1995, chap. 6 ).

The Italian reception of Dilthey’s project and the acceptance of scienze dello spirito is by contrast much easier, given that Benedetto Croce contributes to a revival of interest in Vico, in whom he saw a precursor of Hegel. This reception also, however, has as a background the philological tradition of the Renaissance humanists. The expression of “human sciences,” a clear calque of studia humanitatis, which the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, a disciple of Petrarch, distinguished from studia divinitatis, appears in French in the seventeenth century with the same meaning ( Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 11:308 ), that is, before acquiring its modern meaning. But the idea of the thing had in fact existed before the imposition of the current nomenclature: Vico studies institutions, myths, and language relying on the philology of Lorenzo Valla, and defends the specificity of the philological method and the certainty of its sorts of knowledge relative to the mondo civile. We can understand why Renan and Dilthey refer to him, as their respective projects of an “embryogeny” of the human mind and of comparative psychology are inscribed in the tradition of La Scienza nuova ( 1744 ).

The translations of Geisteswissenschaften thus fall on one side or the other of a fault line between two conceptions of the “human sciences,” which correspond more or less to the division separating Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophies. The expression “social sciences,” replacing sciences morales, refers to a rationality that implies quantification and prediction: the “humanities” are then merely what remains after the social sciences have gone about the tasks of quantification and prediction. By contrast, expressions like sciences de l’esprit, “human studies,” and Geisteswissenschaften have as their background the philological and historical, that is, the interpretive conception of the human sciences.

■ See Box 3.

3

Between Sciences Humaines and the “Human Sciences”

  BEHAVIOR, EPISTEMOLOGY, LIGHT, MORALS, PRAXIS, STRUCTURE

The expression sciences humaines ( human sciences ) is specific to French culture, situated in a philosophical discourse ( which claims to engage in an “epistemology of the human sciences” ) and in institutional arrangements ( the Département des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société at the CNRS, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme ). It originated in the reversal of a theological opposition: after contrasting “science of man” with “science of God” ( which means that human capacity for knowledge of the world is finite compared with an infinite divine capacity ), “science of man” was contrasted with “science of nature.” The origins of this reversal can be found particularly in Malebranche ( préface to La Recherche de la Vérité, 1674 ). What is fundamentally involved is the articulation of the biological, psychological, and sociological dimensions of the “human phenomenon.” The term “anthropology” ( until recently always accompanied in French by an adjective: anthropologie physique, culturelle, sociale, philosophique, and so on ) thus acquired an architectonic function only in the titles of individual works, as a doctrinal position taken and not as an institutional norm. See HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS; cf. CULTURE, HUMANITY.

Things are indeed different in German, where the term Geisteswissenschaften bears the stamp of a philosophical conception of the “objective spirit,” with or without the methodological opposition between “understanding” ( Verstehen ) and “explanation” ( Erklären ). They also differ in British and American usage, where “anthropology” is common and universal, “social science” is oriented toward practical applications of sociological and economic knowledge, and “human sciences” ( by contrast with the humanities, a set of “literary” disciplines ) is clearly oriented toward the study of living human beings in their medical and environmental aspects; or in Italian, where scienze umanese are distinguished from the scienze morali. See also SECULARIZATION.

Jean-Claude Gens

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Keith Michael. Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975.

Banfi, Antonio. Principi di una teoria della ragione. Vol. 1 of Opere. Milan: Parenti, 1960. First published in 1926.

Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de. “Discours de réception à l’Académie française.” Vol. 1 of Œuvres, edited by Arthur O’Connor and François Arago. Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847–49. First published in 1782. Translation: “Reception Speech at the French Academy.” In Selected Writings, edited by Keith Michael Baker. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.

   . Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progress de l’esprit humain. Vol. 6 of Œuvres, edited by Arthur O’Connor and François Arago. Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847–49. Translation by June Barraclough: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979.

Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig: Teubner, 1923. First published in 1883. Translation, with an introductory essay, by Ramon J. Batanzos: Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History. Detroit, MI.: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Translation by Michael Neville, Jeffrey Barnouw, Franz Schreiner, and Rudolf A. Makkreel: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Vol. 1 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. French translation by L. Sauzin: Introduction à l’étude des sciences humaines. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942.

Goldmann, Lucien. The Human Sciences and Philosophy. Translated by Hayden V. White and Robert Anchor. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.

Granger, Gilles-Gaston. Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man. Translated by Alexander Rosenberg. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1983.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739.

Lécuyer, Bernard-Pierre. “Sciences sociales ( Préhistoire des ).” In Encyclopaedia Universalis. Paris: Encylopaedia Universalis, 1984.

Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. Edited by J. M. Robson. Vols. 7–8 in Collected Works. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1973–74.

Renan, Ernest. L’Avenir de la science. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. First published in 1890. Translation by Albert D. Vandam and C. B. Pitman: The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848. London: Chapman and Hall, 1891.

Vico, Giambattista. La Scienza Nuova. 2 vols. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. Rome: Laterza, 1974. First published in 1744. Translation by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch: The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968.

Wartburg, Walther von. Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Verlag B. G. Teubner, 1934–98.

GEMÜT ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			mind, mood
FRENCH			âme, cœur, sentiments, affectivité, esprit
GREEK			thumos [θυμός]
LATIN			mens, animus

  HEART, SOUL, TO SENSE, and CONSCIOUSNESS, FEELING, GEFÜHL, GENIUS, GOGO, INGENIUM, PATHOS

Gemüth ( today written Gemüt ) is one of those terms that has no substitute, that refers to the register of the soul/mind without any of these equivalents being satisfactory. At the same time, it is one of the oldest philosophical terms in the German language, present from Eckhart to phenomenology. In Gemüth, the prefix ge- indicates a gathering, a unity. The word is formed from Muth, the mind of the man, the state of the soul, courage, humor—its meanings cover the range from the Greek thumos [θυμός] to the English “mood,” but it also acquires some highly specific senses, such as Anmuth ( grace ) and Demuth ( humility ). Because of its difference from the soul, Seele, it is perceived as the equivalent of the Latin animus in relation to anima. But W. T. Krug notes precisely that “since the French do not have a special word for Gemüth, they translate it by âme [Seele],” which in turn has repercussions for Gemüt ( RT: Allgemeines Handwörterbuch, 2:185–87 ).

In the strict sense, Gemüt is most often an internal principle that animates the mind and its affections. Its purview is sometimes limited to the affective part when it is in competition with Geist, but not always—especially in its Kantian use. From the heights of mysticism, the word moves progressively, starting in the nineteenth century, into the bourgeois register of comfort and well-being through its adjectivization into gemütlich, which, in common language, took on the sense of “nice”—the French colloquial sympa is in the end a rather faithful translation. But this banalization cannot completely hide the exploitation of Gemüt and of the associated register of terms referring to irrational powers in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, the 1920s and 1930s, going hand in hand with the exploitation of a tradition of “Germanic” profundity that invoked Eckhart, Cusanus, and Paracelsus: the term Gemüt itself was sufficient to call up the superiority of the German language, rooted in archaic depths.

I. The Mystic Soul

The first conceptual determination of Gemüt comes from German mysticism, where it refers to the whole of a man’s internal world, the interior of representations and ideas: “There is a force in the soul which is called gemüete” ( Ein kraft ist in der sêle, diu heizet daz gemüete ). A “free spirit” is “ein ledic gemüete” ( Die rede der unterscheidunge, in Eckhart, Die deutschen Werke, 5:190.9 ), but gemüete refers to something deeper than the mind, as suggested by the expression “your depth and your mind” ( dînen grunt und dîn gemüete, ibid., 5:255.8 ). Sermon 83 ( ibid., 3:437.4–8 ) establishes the coherence between geiste, mens, and gemüete, referring both to Saint Paul ( Eph. 4:34 ) and to Augustine, which makes it possible to specify that mens or gemüete refers to the superior part of the soul, selen ( “caput animae”: Enarratio in Psalmum, 3.3; RT: PL 36:73 ). In the sixteenth century, Grund and Gemüth are still narrowly associated with Paracelsus, where Gemüth refers to the “very depths of ourselves,” the place “where we find ourselves entirely reunited” ( Braun, Paracelse, 187 ):

The Gemüth of men is something so considerable that no one can express it. And like God himself, Prima Materia, and heaven, which are all three eternal and immovable, such is the Gemüth of man. It is thus that man is happy by and with his Gemüth, that is, he lives eternally and no longer dies.

( Paracelsus, Liber de imaginibus )

It goes without saying that the investment of the notion of Gemüth in this tradition is significant, and also includes Jakob Böhme ( Of the Three Principles, 10.37 ), who leaves his own mark on the nascent philosophical vocabulary, as we can see in Gottfried Leibniz.

This determination is massively reaffirmed in German romanticism, in particular in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion ( twenty-four occurrences ), where he defends the idea that the seat of religiosity is “a province in the soul [eine Provinz im Gemüt]” ( from the “Apologie,” Reden ), and in Novalis, in particular Heinrich von Ofterdingen ( 1.6 ).

II. The Transcendental Faculty

One of the most spectacular deletions in the translation of Kant’s works into other languages is the systematic disappearance of the term Gemüt in favor of “spirit” or “mind.” Yet Kant, unlike the idealist philosophers who follow him, does not, in the Critique of Pure Reason, use Geist, and he uses it in alternation with Gemüt in the Critique of Judgment. Vittorio Mathieu, the Italian “reviser” ( 1974 ) of Giovanni Gentile’s translation ( 1909 ) of the Critique of Pure Reason, sees Gentile’s use of spirito for Gemüth as a “traduzione tipicamente gentiliana”—in other words, an idealist corruption of Kant’s sense, which he corrects by substituting for it the word animo.

■ See Box 1.

1

Gemüt in the Critique of Pure Reason

The term Gemüt is especially frequent in Transcendental Aesthetic. In section 1.A.19, intuition is only possible if the object is given to us. That, in turn, necessarily presupposes “dadurch . . . daß er das Gemüt auf gewisse Weise affiziere”: in various translations, “if it affects the mind [das Gemüth] in a certain way” ( Guyer and Wood ); “à la condition que si l’objet affecte d’une certaine manière notre esprit [das Gemüth]” ( Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, French translation by Tremesaygues and Pacaud ); “si l’objet affecte d’une certaine manière notre esprit” ( Barni and Marty ); “parce que l’objet affecte l’esprit sur un certain mode” ( Renaut, with a note ); “in quanto modifichi, in certo modo, lo spirito” ( Gentile and Mathieu ). The translation of Gemüth by esprit and spirito continues with the word’s second occurrence in A.20: “la forme pure des intuitions sensibles en général se trouvera a priori dans l’esprit” ( Tremesaygues and Pacaud ); “la forme pure des intuitions sensibles en général . . . se trouvera a priori dans l’esprit” ( Barni and Marty ); “laquelle réside a priori dans l’esprit” ( Renaut ); “la forma pura delle intuizioni sensibili in generale . . . si troverà a priori nello spirito [Gemüth]” ( Gentile and Mathieu ).

Section 2 of the Critique of Pure Reason makes manifest the implications of translating the term when these difficulties are not taken into account. Thus we read A.22/B.37, “Der innere Sinn, vermittelst dessen das Gemüt sich selbst, oder seinen inneren Zustand anschauet, gibt zwar keine Anschauung von der Seele selbst, als einem Objekt.” For “vermittelst dessen das Gemüt sich selbst,” Guyer and Wood translate “the mind intuits itself.” Barni and Marty render Kant’s phrase as, “Le sens interne, par le moyen duquel l’esprit s’intuitionne lui-même, ou intuitionne son état intérieur, ne nous donne aucune intuition de l’âme elle-même comme d’un objet.” In Renaut, we find, “Le sens interne, par l’intermédiaire duquel l’esprit s’intuitionne lui-même, intuitionne son état intérieur, ne fournit certes pas d’intuition de l’âme elle-même comme objet.” Gentile and Mathieu give, “Il senso interno, mediante il quale lo spirito intuisce se stesso, o un suo stato interno, non ci dà invero nessuna intuizione dell’anima stessa, come di oggetto.” Only Tremesaygues and Pacaud even call our attention to the specificity of Kant’s use of Gemüt, thus: “Le sens interne, au moyen duquel l’esprit [das Gemüth] s’intuitionne lui-même ou intuitionne aussi son état interne, ne donne pas, sans doute, d’intuition de l’âme elle-même comme d’un objet [Objekt].”

All of these translations, even the one by Tremesaygues and Pacaud, have the defect of collapsing Gemüt into “mind,” losing the contrast between mens, spiritus, and animus, and leading to a backward projection of the German-idealist Geist or the spiritualist mind into the Kantian text. Even when it is a matter of translating a passage in which Kant explicitly distinguishes Gemüt from Seele as animus and anima ( see again A.22/B.37, “Der innere Sinn, vermittelst dessen das Gemüt sich selbst, oder seinen inneren Zustand anschauet, gibt zwar keine Anschauung von der Seele selbst, als einem Objekt,” where a distinction is drawn in Kant’s German between Gemüt and Seele; or the note to “Concerning Sömmering’s Work on the Soul,” AA.13.33 ), the French translator of the Pléiade edition, Luc Ferry, renders Gemüt by esprit. Such translations thus integrate Kant into German Idealism, separating him by the same stroke from the tradition of empirical psychology.

For Kant, Gemüt is presented from the start as a collection of transcendental powers, their foundation and their source at the same time. The Transcendental Logic invokes it at the beginning:

Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of which is the reception of representations ( the receptivity of impressions ), the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations ( spontaneity of concepts ).

( Critique of Pure Reason, A50/B74, trans. Guyer and Wood )

In the Critique of Judgment, Gemüt functions as the framework within which the faculties work reciprocally, without being at any moment positively determined, transcendentally or anthropologically. In §49, Kant even defines the Geist ( mind ) at the heart of Gemüt as “its vivifying power.” This does not make him a mystic, but rather inscribes him in a search for the formulation of a vocabulary of feeling, one of the decisive issues of moral and aesthetic thought in the eighteenth century. In the continuity of the neutral space between passivity and activity linked by sentiment, Kant dissociates Gemüt from the practical meaning that the term commonly held before him, in the tradition of Leibnizianism, in works by Christian Wolff, Friedrich Meier, and Moses Mendelssohn. In his 1808 dictionary, Adelung gives a standard account of the word’s eighteenth-century meaning, as expressing “the soul” ( Seele ) related to desires and will, by contrast with the theorizing “mind” ( Geist ) ( RT: Versuch eines vollständingen, s.v. ). The term, which thus means for Kant “the set of the transcendental faculties,” drifts progressively into the domains of psychology and ordinary language, whereas German Idealism, in its theological inspiration, gives primacy to the term Geist. The Geistesgeschichte of the beginning of the twentieth century, a sort of history of ideas in a metaphysical mode, reintroduces Gemüt forcefully among the irreducibly “Germanic” notions of the mind, opening the way for Nazi exploitation of the term. A characteristic of a certain literary romanticism, Gemüt retains, even in its ambiguity, a descriptive virtue that Husserl’s and above all Scheler’s phenomenology would turn to advantage.

Denis Thouard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ball, Philip. The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Böhme, Jakob. De Tribus Principiis oder Beschreibung der Drey Principien Göttlichen Wesens. Originally published in 1619. In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by K. W. Schiebler, vol. 3. Leipzig: Barth, 1841. Translation by John Sparrow: Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence. London: Watkins, 1910.

Braun, Lucien. Paracelse. Geneva: Slatikine, 1995.

Eckhart, Meister. Die deutschen Werke. Edited and translated by Josef Quint. 5 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1958–. Translation by M. O’C. Walshe: German Sermons and Treatises. 3 vols. London: Watkins, 1979–87.

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In RT: Ak., vols. 3–4. English translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. French translation by Luc Ferry: Critique de la raison pure. Paris: Éditions de la Pléiade, 1980. French translation by Alexandre J.-L. Delamarre and François Marty, from the translation by Jules Barni: Critique de la raison pure. Edited by Ferdinand Alquié. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1990. French translation by André Tremesaygues and Bernard Pacaud: Critique de la raison pure. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. French translation by Alain Renaut: Critique de la raison pure. Paris: Flammarion, 2006. Italian translation by G. Gentile ( 1909 ) and V. Mathieu ( 1974 ): Critica della ragion pura. Bari, It.: Laterza, 1987.

Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” In Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, edited by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 1:181–358. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960–. Translation by Palmer Hilty: Henry von Ofterdingen: A Novel. New York: F. Ungar, 1964.

Paracelsus. Essential Theoretical Writings. Edited and translated by Andrew Weeks. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2008.

   . Liber de imaginibus. In Sämtliche Werke I. Abteilung: Medizinische, naturwissenschaftliche und philosophische Schriften, vol. 4. Edited by Karl Sudhoff. 14 vols. Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1922–33.

Scheler, Max. Wesen und Form der Sympathie. Originally published in 1923. In Gesammelte Werke, edited by Manfred S. Frings, vol. 7. 6th ed. Bern: Francke, 1973. Translation by Peter Heath: The Nature of Sympathy. Introduction by Graham McAleer. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008. Originally published in 1954.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Über die Religion [Discourses on religion]. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997. Originally published in 1799. Edited and translation by Richard Crouter: On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

GENDER

FRENCH			différence des sexes, identité sexuelle, genre
GERMAN			Geschlecht
ITALIAN			genere
SPANISH			género

  GENRE, GESCHLECHT, SEX, and BEHAVIOR, DRIVE, NATURE, PEOPLE, PLEASURE

After the end of the 1960s, when biologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers studying sexuality began to take into account what Anglo-Saxon authors refer to as “gender,” the debate reached the fields of other European languages, without there being a decision to use, for example, genre in French, genere in Italian, género in Spanish, or Geschlecht in German, as translations of gender. This sort of dodge is explained by the meaning Anglo-Saxon authors, in particular American feminists, gave to “gender” with regard to what goes by the name “sex” in English and sexualité in French.

The debate on the differences of the sexes ( male and female ) began with Robert Stoller’s book Sex and Gender ( 1968 ). In the preface to the 1978 French edition, Stoller defines “the aspects of sexuality which we call gender” as being “essentially determined by culture, that is, learned after birth,” whereas what is properly called “sexual” is characterized by anatomical and physiological factors, insofar as they determine “whether one is male or female.” If “gender” is a term considered untranslatable, this is because it does not have the same extension as sexuality, sexualité. Indeed, sexuality, as understood by psychoanalysis, disappears in the distinction established by these American authors between biological sex and the social construction of masculine and feminine identities. This is a distinction that many adherents are beginning to reinterpret, and that contemporary psychoanalysis can only, and more radically, call into question.

I. The Distinction between “Sex” and “Gender” and Its Reinterpretations

The English term “sex” can reasonably be translated by sexe in French, as both languages define sexuality as “the collection of psychological and physiological notions” that characterize it. However, it is sometimes inaccurate to translate “sex” by sexe, given that in English “sex” is in many circumstances contrasted with “gender,” which is not the case in French. The distinction between “sex” and “gender,” which was laid out by Stoller in 1968 and adopted by feminist thought in the early 1970s ( see, in particular, Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender, and Society ), represents for this movement a political and sociological argument in the name of which we must distinguish the physiological and the psychological aspects of sex, without which we would land in a biological essentialism with normative import regarding sexual identity.

The specific attempts to separate the respective contributions of nature and culture in this regard proliferated in the last third of the twentieth century. However, the reliance on a distinction between sex and gender remained unique to English terminology. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions, regarding “gender,” Oakley’s usage ( “Sex differences may be ‘natural,’ but gender differences have their source in culture” ). It also refers to feminist usage of the term as representing one of its major uses. The OED second edition ( 1989 ) defines the term in this way: “[i]n mod. ( esp. feminist ) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.” The most recent online version ( June 2011 ), however, updates the entry to read:

The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one’s sex. Also: a ( male or female ) group characterized in this way.

In this context, psychoanalysis, and the meaning it gives to the difference between the sexes, did not have as decisive an influence in the English-speaking world as it did in France. In the Anglo-Saxon world, behaviorism was dominant during the period in which the distinction between sex and gender was established, a dominance that was especially maintained by British psychology and philosophy. This distinction was thus in line with a climate of confidence regarding the possibilities of modifying behavior relative to the sexual roles previously subordinate to normative criteria. Suddenly, it appeared unnecessary that female behavior should be in step with female sex, biologically understood.

After the 1990s, the term “gender” became more and more common, and passed into general use where “sex” had been used previously. It follows that the psychologists or feminists who currently refer to gender are not assumed to be following strictly the distinction between sex and gender. In addition, feminist theory has in large part rejected the distinction for the following reasons:

1. It is difficult to distinguish what derives from “sex” and what from “gender.”

2. The idea that “ ‘gender’ as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as ‘the body’ or its given sex” has been rejected ( Butler, Bodies That Matter ). This rejection is based on the argument that sex cannot be considered a neutral tabula rasa ( see Gatens, “A Critic of the Sex/Gender Distinction” ).

3. The American feminist Judith Butler often maintains that sex is retrospectively materialized as “primary,” as a result of the fact that our approach to gender sees culture as “secondary.” She describes “the ritualized repetition by which [gender] norms produce and stabilize not only the effects of gender but the materiality of sex.” Her work presupposes that “the construal of ‘sex’ [is framed] no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies” ( Butler, Bodies That Matter ).

4. Some theorists interpret sex itself as a cultural construction. This is the perspective adopted by Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex, when he declares:

It seems perfectly obvious that biology defines the sexes: what else could sex mean? . . . [N]o particular understanding of sexual difference historically follows from undisputed facts about bodies. . . . Organs that had been seen as interior versions of what the male had outside—the vagina as penis, the uterus as scrotum—were by the eighteenth century construed as of an entirely different nature.

The author explains that he is attempting, in this work, to retrace “a history of the way in which sex, as well as gender, is created.”

5. Feminists and other theorists who rely on the term “gender” today do not necessarily adhere to the primitive distinction between sex and gender, especially since the term “gender” has become a euphemism for “sex.” Similarly, when a theorist uses “sex,” the word is not understood as referring to a notion that, unlike “gender,” is universal, abstracted away from history and culture. Thomas Laqueur’s argument has had a profound effect in this regard.

■ See Box 1.

1

Gender and gender trouble

  GESCHLECHT, SEX

The term “gender” first assumed its meaning as part of a narrative sequence in feminist theory. First there was “sex” understood as a biological given, and then came “gender,” which interpreted or constructed that biological given into a social category. This story was, at least, the one that held sway as feminist anthropologists ( Ortner, Rubin ) sought to distinguish between an order of nature and an order of culture. Nature was understood to come first, even though no one thought one could identify the scene of nature apart from its cultural articulation. Its “firstness” was then ambiguously temporal and logical. The formulation helped to make sense of important feminist propositions such as the one made by Beauvoir in The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” If one is not born a woman, then one is born something else, and “sex” is the name for that something else we are prior to what we become. For “gender” to name a mode of becoming had theoretical consequences, since it meant that regardless of what gender is assigned at birth, gender still has to be culturally assumed, embodied, articulated, and made. Moreover, if sex names what is biologically given, and if gender belongs to another order, then there is nothing in one’s sex that destines one for any particular kind of position in life; there are no social tasks or cultural meanings that can be derived exclusively or causally from one’s sex. One can, for instance, be born with reproductive organs but never give birth. And even if certain forms of heterosexual intercourse are physically possible, that does not mean that it is psychically possible or desirable. In other words, sex does not operate a causal effect on behavior, social role, or task, and so, with the sex/gender distinction in place, feminists actively argued against the formulation that “biology is destiny.”

It became clear, though, that if one only understood gender as the cultural meanings that sex acquires in any given social context, then gender was still linked with sex, and could not be conceptualized without it. Some feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz argued that if gender is the cultural interpretation of sex, then sex is treated as a given, and there is no way then to ask how “sex” is made or what various cultural forms “sex” may assume in different contexts. Indeed, if one started to talk about the cultural meanings of “sex,” it appeared that one was talking rather about gender. This position became even more difficult to maintain as feminist scholars of science insisted not only that nature has a history ( Haraway ), but that even the definition of “sex” is a contested zone in the history of science ( Laqueur, Longino ). If “sex” has a history, and a conflicted one at that, then how do we understand “gender”? Is it then necessary to take gender out of the narrative sequence in which first there is “sex,” which belongs to a putatively ahistorical nature, and only after there is “gender,” understood as endowing that natural fact with meaning?

Upending the sex/gender distinction involved taking distance from both structural linguistics and cultural anthropology. But it became all the more important once it was conceded that both sex and gender have histories, and that these histories differ, depending on the linguistic contexts in which they operate. So, for example, the very term “gender” was throughout the 1980s and 1990s nearly impossible to translate into any romance language. There was le genre in French and el género in Spanish, but these were considered to be grammatical categories and to have no bearing on the concrete bodily existence of those who were alternately referred to as “he” or “she.” But experimental writers such as Monique Wittig and Jeannette Winterson contested the idea that grammar was actually separable from bodily experience. Wittig’s Les guérillères and Winterson’s Written on the Body became provocative texts that never allowed their readers to settle on the gender of the figures and characters being described. Moreover, they suggested that the way we see and feel gender is directly related to the kinds of grammatical constructions that pose as ordinary or inevitable. By either combining, confusing, or erasing grammatical gender, they sought to loosen the hold that binary gender systems have on how we read, feel, think, and know ourselves and others. Their grammatical idealism proved to be exciting as experimental fiction. And yet, the institutions of gender seemed to march along, even when brave souls refused to give their infants genders at birth, with the idea that such acts might bring to a halt the institution of gender difference.

The translation of “gender” into German was more difficult, since the word Geschlecht operates as both biological sex and social gender. This term enforced a strong cultural presumption that the various cultural expressions of gender not only followed causally and necessarily from an original sex, but that gender was in some ways mired in sex, indissociable from it, bound up with it as a single unity. The term for gender in Chinese carries many of these meanings that are variously expressed by the conjunction of phonemes and numbers: “gender” is xing( 4 )bie( 2 ). The numbers denote “tones,” and there are four of them for each of the two terms. Thus, xing( 2 ) means something different from xing( 4 ). Indeed, this roman system is already a translation of Chinese characters, so makes something of a grid out of a graphic sign. Xing( 4 ) is a term meaning “category or kind,” but it also means “sex” and so sustains a relation with those languages that link sex to species. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did the term begin to mean “gender,” so in order to distinguish gender from sex, some feminist scholars in China put the expression meaning “social”—she( 4 )hui( 4 )—before the term xing( 4 )bie( 2 ). Bie( 2 ) means “difference,” and thus links with those formulations of gender as sexual difference.

Like genus in Swedish, which implies species-being, so Geschlecht in German implied not only a natural kind, but a mode of natural ordering that served the purposes of the reproduction of the species. That the first German translators of Gender Trouble chose to translate “gender” as Geschlechtsidentität ( sexual identity ) may have been an effort to move away from species discourse, or perhaps it was a way of responding to those emerging queer arguments that claimed that binary sex was understood to serve the purposes of reproducing compulsory heterosexuality ( Rubin, Butler ). The problem with that choice, however, was that it confused gender with sexual orientation or disposition. And part of the analytic work of understanding gender apart from biological causality and functionalism was precisely to hold open for the possibility that gender appearance may not correspond to sexual disposition or orientation in predictable ways. Thus, if the biologically mired conception of sex implies that women and men desire only one another, and that the end result of that attraction is biological reproduction, the queer critique relied on analytic distinctions between morphology, biology, psychology, cultural assignment and interpretation, social function, and possibility. If “gender” named this very constellation of problems, then it sought, in Foucault’s language, to undo the “fictitious unity of sex” ( History of Sexuality, vol. 1 ) in which drive, desire, and expression formed a single object that became the condition and object for sexual regulation.

For the French, the term “gender” was at first incomprehensible, since genre clearly referred exclusively to grammar and literary form. When Gender Trouble was first proposed to a French press, the publisher proclaimed that it was inassimilable, suggesting that it was a kind of foreign substance or unwanted immigrant that must be kept outside the French borders. Clearly, it was considered an American term, possibly the intellectual equivalent of McDonald’s. Although the term did enter the language through conferences, seminars, the titles of books, and even a newly established field ( études de genre ), its culturalism was somehow associated with its Americanism, and some French intellectuals feared that it was a term meant to deny sexual difference, the body, seduction, and Frenchness itself.

For some feminist historians who worked between French and Anglo-American frameworks, gender became importantly bound up with the question of sexual difference. Joan Scott argued that one should not only consider gender as an attribute of a body, or as a way of endowing biological bodies with cultural meaning. In her view, gender is a “category of analysis” which helps us understand how the basic terms by which we describe social life are themselves internally differentiated. For instance, Scott can analyze terms such as “labor,” “equality,” or even “universality” using gender as a critical category. As a result, we can criticize how the public sphere and labor are often conceptualized as masculine spheres. The very way in which the sphere is delimited not only valorizes certain modes of labor, and laborers of the masculine gender, but it also reproduces the categories of gender. In Scott’s work, those categories do not always adhere to a set of bodies, though sometimes they do. They also provide the implicit scheme by which valuable and nonvaluable work is described, forms of political participation are differentially valorized, and versions of universality are articulated with a masculine presumption and bias.

Scott is one of many feminist theorists who would dispute the absolute difference between sexual difference and gender ( cf. Braidotti, Irigaray, and Schor and Weed ). “Sexual difference” is not a term that marks an exclusively biological beginning and then becomes transformed in the course of a subsequent and separable cultural and historical articulation. Rather, sexual difference is precisely that which, whether in the biological or the cultural sciences, occasions a set of shifting articulations. Following Lacan, one might say that sexual difference is precisely the site where biology and culture converge, although not in any causal way ( thus, eluding from another direction the “biology is destiny” formulation ). For Scott, no one cultural articulation of sexual difference exhausts its meaning, because even though we never find this difference outside of a specific articulation, it eludes any capture or seizure that would fix its meaning for all time. Moreover, sexual difference is as much articulated by forms of power as it is a matrix for actively articulating such modes of power. We are not only talking about sexual difference as a “constructed” difference ( though some do that ), but in Scott’s work, sexual difference is a matrix through which and by which certain kinds of articulation take place. If that seems like a conundrum, it probably is; it is what Scott refers to as one of the paradoxes she has to offer.

Although some feminists sharply contrasted the discourse on “gender” with that of “sexual difference,” they usually associated gender with a theory of cultural construction, though that no longer seems to be the case. “Gender” is now the name for a set of debates on how to think about the biological, chromosomal, psychological, cultural, and socioeconomic dimensions of a lived bodily reality. Consider, for instance, the international athletic debate about Caster Semenya, an athlete who was suspected of being more male than female, but who ran as a qualified woman in international athletic competitions. The International Association of Athletics Federations finally adjudicated the case and confirmed that she qualified to run as a woman, without saying whether she “really” was one. For this organization, gender was established by a set of measures and norms that required the expertise of lawyers, biologists, psychologists, geneticists, and endocrinologists. In other words, Semenya’s “gender qualifications” were decided by an interdisciplinary committee, and not by a single standard imposed by a single science. Those experts not only had to learn each other’s languages, but they had to translate each field into their own to come to an understanding of how best to name gender in this instance. Her gender qualifications were the result of a negotiated conclusion.

Those who debate matters of sexual difference and gender tend to conjecture what happens at the very beginning of life, how infants are perceived and named, and how sexual difference is discovered or installed. The psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche argued that it was not possible to reduce the question of gender to an expression of biological drives, understood as separable from cultural content. To understand gender, we must first understand drives ( see Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale” ). For Laplanche, gender assignment happens at the very beginning of life, but like all powerful words of interpellation, it is first encountered as so much “noise” to an infant who does not yet have linguistic competence to discern what is being said. In this way, gender assignment arrives on the scene of infantile helplessness. To be called a gender is to be given an enigmatic and overwhelming signifier; it is also to be incited in ways that remain in part fully unconscious. To be called a gender is to be subject to a certain demand, a certain impingement and seduction, and not to know fully what the terms of that demand might be. Indeed, in being gendered, the infant is put in a situation of having to make a translation.

Laplanche’s first point follows from a correction of a translation error. The “instinct” ( a term that Strachey uses too often to translate Trieb ) makes the drive possible, but the drive institutes a life of fantasy that is qualitatively new, and that is not constrained by the teleologies of biological life. What is endogenous and exogenous converge at the drive, but when something new emerges, it is a sign that the drive has veered away from its instinctual basis. This only happens once biological processes have been intervened upon by the adult world, by forms of address, words, and forms of physical proximity and dependency. Something enigmatic is communicated from that adult world, and it enters into the life of the drive. It is precisely because of this interruption that the infant’s emerging sense of his or her body ( or a body outside of clear gender categories ) is not the result of a biological teleology or necessity.

The literary critic John Fletcher asks, in “The Letter in the Unconscious,” how are we to rethink “the psychic constitution and inscription of a sexually and genitally differentiated body image ( the repression and symbolization of what enigmatic signifiers? ) [as] the ground or, at least, terrain for the formation of gendered identities.” In other words, Fletcher, drawing on Laplanche, asks whether the most fundamental sense of our bodies, what Merleau-Ponty would call a “body-image” is in some ways the result of having to translate and negotiate enigmatic and overwhelming adult “signifiers”—terms that relay the psychic demands of the adult to the child.

As we have seen, the term “gender” in English-language contexts usually refers to a cultural meaning assumed by a body in the context of its socialization or acculturation, and so it often makes use of a distinction between a natural and cultural body in order to secure a definition for gender as an emphatically cultural production. But these last positions lead us to ask another question: what is the mechanism of that production? If we start with the naming of the infant, we start to understand gender as a social assignment, but how precisely does that assignment work?

To answer this question, we have to move away from the notion that gender is simply an attribute of a person ( Scott has already shown us that ). Or, rather, if it is an attribute, we have to consider that it is attributed, and we have yet to understand the means and mechanism of that attribution or more generalized assignment. For Laplanche, gender is resituated as part of the terrain of the enigmatic signifier itself. In other words, gender is not so much a singular message, but a surrounding and impinging discourse, already circulating, and mobilized for the purposes of address prior to the formation of any speaking and desiring subject. In this sense, gender is a problem of translating the drive of the other into one’s own bodily schema.

In other words, one is not born into the world only then to happen upon a set of gender options; rather, gender operates as part of the generalized discursive conditions that are “addressed” enigmatically and overwhelmingly to an infant and child and that continue to be addressed throughout the embodied life of the person. Laplanche argues that gender precedes sex and so suggests that gender—understood as that bundle of enigmatic meanings that is addressed to the infant and so imposed as part of a discursive intervention in the life of the infant—precedes the emergence of the “sexually and genitally differentiated body image.”

This last view is counterintuitive to the extent that we might want to argue that sexual differentiation is, for the most part, there from the start ( although recent research on intersex has called this presumption into question throughout the biological and social sciences ). But are there conditions under which “sex,” understood as sexually differentiated morphology, comes to appear as a “given” of experience, something we might take for granted, a material point of departure for any further investigation and for any further understanding of gender acquisition? Consider that the sequence that we use to describe how gender emerges only after sex, or gender is something superadded to sex, fails to see that gender is, as it were, already operating, seizing upon, and infiltrating somatic life prior to any conscious or reflexive determination of gender. And if gender is relayed, traumatically, through the generalized scene of seduction, then gender is part of the very assignment that forms and incites the life of the drive, sexuality itself, that makes us scramble for words to translate a set of effects that emerge from one domain only to be relayed into another. We might ask, which gender? Or gender in what sense? But that is already to move ahead too quickly. If gender is relayed through the overwhelming language and gestures of the adult, then it arrives first as a kind of noise, indecipherable, and in demand of translation. For now, it is most important to note that the assignment of gender arrives through the enigmatic desire of the other, a desire by which somatic life is infiltrated and that, in turn, or simultaneously, incites a set of displacements and translations that constitute the specific life of the drive or, sexual desire. Is somatic life determinable outside this scene of assignment? To the extent that bodily “sex” appears as primary, this very primariness is achieved as a consequence of a repression ( refoulement ) of gender itself. Indeed, gender is in part constituted by unconscious wishes conveyed through the enigmatic assignment of gender, so that one might say that gender emerges, from early on, as an enigma for the child. And the question may well not be, “what gender am I?” but rather, “what does gender want of me?” or even, “whose desire is being carried through the assignment of gender that I have received and how can I possibly respond? Quick—give me a way to translate!”

Judith Butler

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.

   . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Clarey, Christopher. “Gender Test after a Gold-Medal Finish.” New York Times, 19 August 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/sports/20runner.html.

Fletcher, John. “The Letter in the Unconscious: The Enigmatic Signifier in Jean Laplanche.” In Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives, edited by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton. ICA Documents, no. 11. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” In vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 111–40. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.

   . “Triebe und Triebschicksale.” In vol. 10 of Gesammelte Werke, Chronologish Geordnet, edited by Anna Freud et al., 210–32. London: Imago Publishing Co., 1913–17.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

   . “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964.” In vol. 11 of The Seminar, edited by Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977.

Laplanche, Jean. “The Drive and the Object-Source: Its Fate in the Transference.” In Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, and the Drives, edited by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton. ICA Documents, no. 11. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992.

Laplanche, Jean, and Susan Fairfield. “Gender, Sex and the Sexual.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 8, no. 2 ( 2007 ): 201–19.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Longino, Helen E. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Woman, Culture and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67–87. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974.

Rubin, Gayle S. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.

Schor, Naomi, and Elizabeth Weed, eds. The Essential Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In Gender and the Politics of History, edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller, 28–50. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

   . Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Shepherdson, Charles. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.

Wittig, Monique. Les guérillères. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969.

II. The Notion of “Gender” through the Lens of Psychoanalysis

If “gender” is untranslatable in many languages, it is because the term is related to a history of two different problems that were developed in parallel, encroaching on one another without ever meeting. Yet, with regard to Stoller’s distinction between biological sex and the social construction of male and female identities, psychoanalysis sees in sexuality a combination of psychological and physiological factors. However, when the problems raised by Stoller and the American feminists reached France, the reevaluation there of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis showed that it was necessary to give up the dualism of psychology and physiology to arrive at an understanding of drives and fantasies, as the terrain on which sexual identity is formed. When Freud defines the erogenous body in 1905 ( in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ) and in 1915 ( in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes ) clarifies out of which heterogeneous elements the drives are constituted—impetus, aim, source, and object—he introduces the idea that these drives have a destiny, which makes them rather different from psychological or physiological givens. The terrain on which it is decided whether a given person identifies as male or female concerns the destinies of these drives, the links they have with scenarios of sexual climax in which the subject is in relation to figures of otherness, taken in part from the details of early interaction with adults. Sexuation thus takes place in the domain of the formation of pleasure, displeasure, and anxiety, from which are woven the experiences and thoughts of infants immersed in an adult world that supports them, threatens them, carries them, even while also being intrusive and alien.

From the point of view of psychoanalysis, the social determinations of gender are one of the materials by which fantasies and drives are created. The physiological givens of sex are one of the other materials in this affair, but they are not on the same level as the others: societies always give a content to the difference of the sexes. This difference, as anthropologists have shown, structures all the activities of exchange, rituals, divisions of space, subsistence, circuits of permitted and forbidden marriages, and so on. Since gender is nothing but the system of the division of social activities, it acquires, depending on the society, different contents. The common point among anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and some theorists of gender is that human sexuation is anything but natural, that it has no content that is commanded by an essence or by nature, even if that nature is determined by the different roles of men and women in procreation. But the agreement between these different approaches stops at this negative point.

To give an account of sexuation, psychoanalysis uses other notions besides the physiological and the psychological. This is why Robert Stoller, like many other psychoanalysts, contributed to a confusion regarding the sexual in the psychoanalytic sense. And gender theories have inherited this confusion. Sexuality is neither physiological nor psychological. It is related to drives and fantasies. The biological and social givens are only taken into account by fantasies and drives, with their specific organization. Given this conceptual modification, the question of knowing whether Freud was wrong to affirm that there is, during the “phallic phase,” a single libido and that it is male in nature may be asked against a different background.

Monique David-Ménard
Penelope Deutscher

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Browne, June, ed. The Future of Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

   . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of the Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

David-Ménard, Monique. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

   . “Sexual Alterity and the Alterity of the Real for Thought.” Translated by Diane Morgan. Angelaki 8, no. 2 ( 2003 ): 137–50.

Deutscher, Penelope. Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1997.

Fraisse, Geneviève. Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Gatens, Moira. “A Critic of the Sex/Gender Distinction.” In Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Oakley, Ann. Sex, Gender, and Society. London: Temple Smith, 1972.

Stoller, Robert. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity. New York: Science House, 1968.

GENIUS

FRENCH			génie
GERMAN			Genie, Geist, Naturell, natürlich Fähigkeit, Witz
LATIN			genus, genius

  AESTHETICS, ART, CONCETTO, DAIMÔN, DUENDE, GEMÜT, GOÛT, IMAGINATION, INGENIUM, MADNESS, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, PLASTICITY, SOUL, SUBLIME, TALENT

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, La Harpe writes in the introduction to his work Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne: “But what may be surprising is that these two words, genius and taste, taken abstractly, are never found in Boileau’s verses, nor in Racine’s prose, nor in Corneille’s dissertations, nor in Molière’s plays. This manner of speaking . . . is from our century.” How did an old word, as rich in diverse and vague meanings as the word “genius” is, come to occupy the center of aesthetic and philosophical discussion in the Enlightenment, in England, France, and Germany? What remains of these debates today?

I. Confusion or Semantic Richness

Concerning the word genius, Ernst Cassirer warns in his Philosophy of the Enlightenment, in the chapter concerning “the fundamental problem of aesthetics,” against “attempting to interpret the developments of thoughts and ideas simply on the basis of the history of a word.” Thus, he adds, Shaftesbury “did not coin the word ‘genius’; he adopted it from common aesthetic terminology. He is the first to rescue the term from the confusion and ambiguity that had previously attached to it and to give it a fruitful and specifically philosophical meaning.”

Although this analysis is correct, and Shaftesbury was indeed the author of this philosophical “stroke of genius,” it remains the case that the history of the word “genius,” like that of any word ( but in this case especially ), will help us clarify what Cassirer calls “confusion” and “ambiguity,” which may only be inexhaustible semantic richness.

The word “genius,” in its various romance forms, is related to Latin, and hence shares an Indo-European origin common to several languages ( *gn, “to be born,” “to engender” ). Gigno, gignere, thus means “to engender,” “to produce,” “to cause.” Several nouns are derived from it. Genus is birth, race, and, in an abstract way, class ( see PEOPLE ). Genius is initially the divinity presiding over an individual’s birth, and then each person’s guardian divinity, with which the first becomes confused, so much so that genius comes to mean one’s natural inclinations, appetites, the intellectual and moral qualities peculiar to each individual. In this last sense, the word duplicates the compound word ingenium, another derivative of gigno ( see INGENIUM ).

II. From Ingenium to Génie

When the word génie, a calque of genius, appears in French in the sixteenth century ( François Rabelais, 1532 ), it manifests the richness of meaning derived from its Latin origins. It refers in general to natural tendencies, character, an innate disposition for an activity or art. It becomes more specific later, referring to a superior mental aptitude ( before 1674 ), and finally, by metonymy, to a superior individual, a génie ( 1686 ).

Concurrently, however, in the sixteenth century, génie takes up the Latin sense of “divinity” and thus comes to mean a “spirit,” good or bad, which influences our destiny ( hence, eventually, René Descartes’s “evil genius,” the malin génie we find in his Meditations of 1641 ), then, by extension, an allegorical being personifying an abstract idea and its representation, and finally, in fantastical writings, a supernatural being endowed with magical powers ( definitions taken from RT: DHLF ).

These two series of meanings, seemingly very distinct, are in fact intimately related. To be a genius is to have a part of the creative faculty of a god, thus to participate in something external and superior to oneself. To be a genius is to be considered, or to consider oneself to be, a creative source like a god. A certain hubris thus underlies this notion, which is clearly confirmed in the romantic conception of genius ( on hubris, cf. VERGÜENZA, II ).

It is a peculiarity of French that it did not create a word directly calqued on ingenium ( except ingénieur, “engineer” ). However, this Latin word, which we find in the Italian ingegno and the Spanish ingenio, and which is commonly used in philosophical terminology in the classical period ( cf. Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind of ca. 1622 ), refers both to a certain penetration of the mind and to a synthetic faculty for comparing ideas that are distant from one another, and thus to “find” in the sense of “invent.” In this sense we may contrast, as Giambattista Vico does in particular, the creativity and inventiveness of “ingenious” thought with the sterility of analytic thought, which remains content with mechanically deriving consequences from premises given at the start. It is admitted, however, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that ingenium, translated into French as génie, is at work ( to different degrees, to be sure ) in all individuals and in all spheres of activity, although the manifestations are especially visible in the cases of poets and artists.

It is in the eighteenth century that the notion of genius takes on a new meaning and becomes throughout Europe an object of reflection in the domain of aesthetics and, more widely, of philosophy ( hence claims for the “birth of genius” in the eighteenth century ). In earlier centuries it was admitted that a work of art was born on the one hand from the conjunction of knowledge and craft proper to a given art and capable of being acquired, and on the other hand from a quality peculiar to the individual, a natural gift called “genius.” During and after the eighteenth century, however, the latter quality acquires a greater importance, even an overblown one, almost to the point of causing the other factors to be forgotten. Genius becomes a power of creation ex nihilo, irreducible to any rule and impossible to analyze rationally. At the same time, whereas classical aesthetics rested on the notion of imitation, genius would come to be characterized by the absolute originality of its productions, by their inimitable character.

Although this new meaning given to the notion of genius is a European phenomenon, it is interesting to note that it is not uniform—there are national differences in the definition of what is given by “genius,” in the importance accorded to it, in the interpretation to which it is subject. In this sense, we may speak of an “untranslatability” between the notions of genius that appeared in the literature devoted to it in England, Germany, and France.

III. English “Enthusiasm” and French “Rationalism”

It is generally agreed that Shaftesbury had a decisive influence on the way in which the question of genius was posed in the eighteenth century, by popularizing the notion of “enthusiasm” ( Letter concerning Enthusiasm [1708] ). Enthusiasm comes from the artist’s agreement with nature, where the latter is considered the “sovereign artist,” “universal plastic nature.” The enthusiasm of the artist is a “disinterested pleasure,” provoked by the presence within him of a divine inspiration, “genius,” which makes him the near kin to, and the equal of, the genius of the world. The artist feels living within him his consubstantiality with the creative act, and Shaftesbury writes that “such a poet is indeed a second Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove” ( “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author” [1710], in Characteristics of Men, 111 ). The artist is not content with imitating the products of nature, but rather participates in the act of production itself. His work, which is the giving of form, creation from an internal model, only makes manifest the presence of the infinite in the finite.

Shaftesbury’s “enthusiastic” conception of genius was not taken up immediately or without hesitation in France. In fact, most French authors who discuss genius in the first half of the eighteenth century do so in a much more traditional, “rationalist” manner. Their approach to genius is less metaphysical, and more a search for its “natural” and “moral” causes. Thus for Jean-Baptiste Dubos, in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture ( 1719 ) ( Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting ):

On appelle génie l’aptitude qu’un homme a reçue de la nature pour faire bien et facilement certaines choses que les autres ne sauraient faire que très mal, même en prenant beaucoup de peine.

( We call genius the aptitude that a man receives from nature to do certain things well and easily, that others can only do badly, even with great effort. )

In this sense, genius, which concerns all human activity, does not differ much from talent, and Dubos seeks its natural causes in “a happy arrangement of the organs of the brain,” the influence of the land and climate, education, and the frequent company of artists and philosophers. No matter what, the natural gift must be developed by training and work: “The happiest genius can only be perfected by long study.”

Charles Batteux, in the first part of his highly influential treatise Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe ( The Beaux-Arts reduced to a single principle [1746] ), himself defines genius as

une raison active qui s’exerce avec art, qui en recherche industrieusement toutes les faces réelles, tous les possibles, qui en dissèque minutieusement les parties les plus fines, en mesure les rapports les plus éloignés; c’est un instrument éclairé qui fouille, qui creuse, qui perce sourdement.

( an active reason that is exercised with art, that industriously seeks out all its real aspects, all the possible ones, that meticulously dissects its smallest parts, measuring its most distant relations; it is an enlightened instrument that digs, delves, and dully penetrates. )

Genius is thus assimilated into a higher reason, and not into a mysterious power granted to certain men. The imitation of nature remains the supreme law of all arts, but the artist may discover things that have escaped others. Poetic enthusiasm is explained by Batteux in purely psychological terms:

Ils [les poètes] excitent eux-mêmes leur imagination jusqu’à ce qu’ils se sentent émus, saisis, effrayés; alors Deus ecce Deus, qu’ils chantent, qu’ils peignent, c’est un Dieu qui les inspire.

( They [the poets] excite their imaginations themselves until they feel moved, seized, frightened; then Deus ecce Deus, they sing, they paint, it is a God that inspires them. )

It may be Helvetius, in book 5 of his De l’esprit, who does the most to reduce the share of mystery and originality of genius. According to him, genius in artists, but also in philosophers and scientists, consists in “inventing,” but invention is only possible thanks to favorable conditions, and is facilitated by the environment, the tendencies of the period, and sometimes luck. There is a diffuse mass of genius in the world that only a few lucky people manage to express.

We thus see a typically French resistance ( the origin of which we might find in Cartesian mistrust of imagination ) to an exaltation of the creative genius that would make the artist a rival of God. Voltaire, in the article “Génie” in Questions sur l’Encyclopédie ( 1772 ), asks: “But fundamentally is genius anything other than talent? What is talent, except the disposition to succeed at an art?” And for Buffon, genius, if it must imitate nature, must follow its slow, laborious, and obstinate step. It must exhibit more reason than heat, since for Buffon, genius is essentially, according to the remark loaned to him by Hérault de Séchelles, “nothing but a greater aptitude for patience” ( “qu’une plus grande aptitude à la patience,” Séchelles, Voyages, 11 ).

It is this mistrust, this critical and reductive will that aims to submit genius to the laws of reason, even if they are the laws of “sublime reason,” that those influenced by Shaftesbury oppose. For them, the presence of genius in a work of art is manifested with brutal clarity; it can only be felt, not analyzed, since indeed it deprives the witness of his critical faculties. This is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses, in his Dictionnaire de musique ( 1768 ), in the article “Génie”:

Ne cherche point, jeune artiste, ce que c’est que le génie. En as-tu: tu le sens en toi-même. N’en as-tu pas: tu ne le connaîtras jamais. . . . Veux-tu savoir si quelque étincelle de ce feu dévorant t’anime ? Cours, vole à Naples écouter les chefs-d’œuvre de Leo, de Durante, de Jommelli, de Pergolèse. Si tes yeux s’emplissent de larmes, si tu sens ton cœur palpiter, si des tressaillements t’agitent, si l’oppression te suffoque dans tes transports, prend le Métastase et travaille. . . . Mais si les charmes de ce grand art te laissent tranquille, si tu n’as ni délire, ni ravissement, si tu ne trouves que beau ce qui transporte, oses-tu demander ce qu’est le génie ? Homme vulgaire, ne profane point ce nom sublime.

( Young artist, do not seek out what genius is. If you have it: you feel it in yourself. If you do not have it: you will never know it. . . . Do you wish to know whether some spark of this consuming fire animates you? Run, fly to Naples and listen to the masterpieces of Leo, Durante, Jommelli, Pergolese. If your eyes fill with tears, if you feel your heart palpitate, if you are overcome with trembling, if you feel suffocated in your raptures, take hold of your collected Metastasio, and get to work. . . . But if the charms of this grand art leave you peaceful, if you have neither delirium nor ravishment, if you find merely beautiful that which is transporting, do you dare to ask what genius is? Vulgar man, do not profane this sublime name. )

( Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 5:837–38 )

IV. Diderot and Genius as “Release of Nature”

Denis Diderot, Shaftesbury’s translator, goes the farthest in France in deepening the analysis of genius in Shaftesbury’s direction. He takes up the idea that the mystery of genius is that of creation, but he makes the source of creative genius not God or gods, but rather nature as a general power. For him, genius is a release or expression of nature ( “ressort de la nature” ), and thus has a biological foundation. As such, it is infallible, like the instincts of animals. This is why, in poetry, it tends to be manifested among those who remain close to nature, like children, women, or primitives ( “Poetry wants something enormous, barbarian and savage,” Discourse on Dramatic Poetry [1758], in Diderot, Œuvres complètes, 3:483 ). The manifestions of the creative power of nature in the artist of genius can only be on the order of the bodily, the perceptual, the affective, the imaginative, and the words fureur, ivresse, mouvements du cœur ( “furor,” “intoxication,” “movements of the heart” ) are used again and again by Diderot and those who follow him, especially in the Encyclopédie ( RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire ).

Thus, in the article “Génie” in the Encyclopédie ( RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire ), written by Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, but to which Diderot seems to have contributed ( as suggested by Voltaire in his own article “Génie” in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie ), the natural state of genius is movement: “More often than not, this movement produces storms,” and genius is “carried away by a torrent of ideas.” Thus understood, genius is not the special province of artists; philosophy, too, has its geniuses, “whose systems we admire as we would poems, and who construct daring edifices that reason alone does not know how to inhabit.” In philosophy, as in art, “the true and the false are not at all the distinctive features of genius,” and thus “there are very few errors in Locke and too few truths in Lord Shaftesbury: the former, however, is nothing but an extended mind, penetrating and accurate, and the latter is a genius of the first rank.”

Like Diderot in his “Encyclopédie” and his Discourse on Dramatic Poetry, Saint-Lambert in “Génie” insists on the contrast between taste ( goût ) and genius ( génie ), a question that remains at the center of the problem of genius through Immanuel Kant and even later. “Taste is often distinguished from genius. Genius is a pure gift of nature; what it produces is the work of a moment; taste is the work of study and time. . . . Genius and the sublime shine in Shakespeare like lightning in a long night.” ( Throughout the eighteenth century, Shakespeare is the paradigm of genius, insofar as he is irreducible to reason, rules, or taste. ) Saint-Lambert adds that the rules of taste are constantly transgressed in works of genius, since “strength, abundance, a certain rudeness, irregularity, sublimity, pathos—these are the characteristics of genius in art.”

Though the nature of genius remains impenetrable in the final analysis, it is nonetheless possible to study the conditions that favor or disfavor its manifestation. In this regard, what Diderot says about poetic genius in Discourse on Dramatic Poetry is of general value. There are times, mores, circumstances that are more poetic, more appropriate for creation than others: “In general, the more civilized and polite a people is, the less their habits are poetic: everything is weakened by becoming gentler.” ( Vico had already said the same thing in his Scienza nuova [1725–44], while giving the notion of poetry a much wider sense, since for him primitive peoples “create” their own world by means of poetry. ) Diderot also calls into question the particular conditions—social, political, economic—that may prevent the genius of an individual from manifesting itself, and he shows in the article “Éclectism” in the Encyclopédie how men can frustrate the designs of nature. This marks the appearance of the romantic theme of the misunderstood genius, the exceptional man condemned to die of hunger, with the concomitant call that the government should subsidize unknown artists. At the same time, interest begins to shift from the abstract notion of genius to the concrete one, obtained by metonymy, of the “man of genius,” who takes up a place in ideal human typology, alongside the saint and the hero.

V. How Germany Takes over the French Word, in Order to Make Genius Its Own

The word Genie, borrowed from French, appears in the German vocabulary with Johann Adolf Schlegel’s translation in 1751 of Batteux’s treatise on the Beaux-Arts. ( Batteux’s other translators had translated génie by Geist, Naturell, natürliche Fähigkeit, and above all Witz. ) Beginning in the eighteenth century, the notion of genius acquires more and more importance in Germany in discussions of art, language, and the history of peoples, especially when the Sturm und Drang literary movement ( with political overtones ) appears in the 1770s. These discussions obviously reach their full significance in the period in which Germany begins vigorously to affirm itself in literature, philosophy, and politics.

The first German authors of treatises on genius recognized that “the French prompted [them] to think about this concept with care,” but very early on their reflection distances itself from its French sources ( except Diderot and Rousseau ), leading them in new directions. This process happens in stages. Johann Georg Sulzer, with his idea of the “reasonable genius,” Moses Mendelssohn, and even Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, so opposed to French influence, attempt to preserve what they can of the “rationalist” critique, notably in the demands of rules and taste, while recognizing that genius, as an expression of nature and creative originality, had its own inalienable rights. With Johann Georg Hamann, the break becomes radical and violent, and the superior rights of genius in art and life are imperiously demanded. Influenced by Rousseau, but especially by the English poet Edward Young—author of the celebrated Night Thoughts ( 1742–45 ), in which he insists on the absolutely “original” and inimitable character of works of genius, which cannot be discussed but only admired—Hamann adds mystical overtones to these thoughts on genius. Faith has nothing to do with reason, and what faith is in life, genius is in art. His Socratic Memorabilia ( 1760 ) applies the Socratic method to the notion of genius, which we may see or feel, but never understand. Genius embraces the past and future, and only poetry is capable of capturing its visions.

For Hamann, who goes farther in this sense than Diderot, genius cannot be known by contemporaries. The man who has it is above the crowd, misunderstood and mocked by it, since he is often close to madness, and sometimes there are “incidents at the border between genius and madness.” It is not Apollo but Bacchus who governs the arts. Genius has two faces: one denies and holds reason in contempt, the other affirms, creates, and produces: “My crude imagination has always forbade me from imagining a creative genius deprived of genitalia” ( letter to Herder, 1760 ).

Johann Gottfried Herder extends Hamann’s ideas in the direction of literary nationalism, a notion that flourishes in Germany, and then in the whole of Europe. In many writings, he comes back to the theme of genius, which, for him as well, is indefinable:

It is with genius as with other delicate and complex concepts: we may, in individual cases, grasp them by intuition, but they are nowhere exactly delimited and without mixture. They give as much trouble to philosophers seeking a general, clear and precise idea, as Proteus gave Ulysses when he tried to pin him.

( Cited by Grappin, La théorie du génie, 224–25 )

However, Herder insists above all on the idea that the genius of an artist is not a purely individual phenomenon, but only expresses the “mind” or, if you like, the “genius” of a people, and is only manifested when the time is right to receive it. Its forms also vary with the times; from this comes the interest in the study of chants and popular traditions that modern poets must nevertheless not simply parrot, pretending to be “Germanic bards,” but whose authentic inspiration they must recover, as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did.

VI. Genius According to Kant

We cannot understand the famous pages Kant devotes to the subject of genius in the Critique of Judgment ( 1790 ) without taking into account the discussions in Germany since the middle of the eighteenth century, of which we have just seen a few examples. Kant effects a balanced synthesis of these writings and gives them in addition the proper philosophical foundation that was lacking. He thus escapes the reductive rationalism of the French tradition and the mysticism of the Schwärmerei.

This balance is shown in the definition Kant gives of genius ( §46 ):

Genius is the talent ( natural endowment ) which gives the rule to art. Since talent, as an innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to Nature, we may put it this way: Genius is the innate mental aptitude [ingenium] through which Nature gives the rule to Art.

( Critique of Judgment, trans. Meredith, 168 )

Kant thus does not fear using two terms repudiated by the apologists of genius, but for him, nevertheless, the rules ( “the beautiful pleases without concepts” ) are given in works of art not by reason but by nature. We find here the idea that dominates the thought of the eighteenth century since Shaftesbury. For Shaftesbury, nature “gives the rule to art in the subject” by the “agreement of the faculties.” Imagination and understanding constitute, by their union, genius, which consists in a “happy relation, which science cannot teach nor industry learn, enabling one to find out ideas for a given concept, and, besides, to hit upon the expression for them—the expression by means of which the subjective mental condition induced by the ideas as the concomitant of a concept may be to others” ( Critique of Judgment, §49, trans. Meredith, 179–80 ). The proportion and the disposition of these faculties cannot be produced by the rules of science or imitation; those who have the natural gift by which they manage to do so are “favored by nature,” and their works have an absolutely original character.

One of the most important characteristics of this definition is Kant’s limitation of the notion of genius to artistic creation:

Nature prescribes the rule through genius not to science but to art, and this also only in so far as it is to be fine art.

( Critique of Judgment, §46, trans. Meredith, 168 )

We must not confuse genius with “powerful brain”: Newton can clarify and teach his methods; Homer or Wieland cannot.

In his Anthropology ( 1798 ), Kant returns to the question of genius, “this mystical name,” and seems to widen the term to spheres other than the fine arts, identifying it as the “exemplary originality of talent [Talent]”: thus Leonardo da Vinci is “a vast genius [Genie] in many domains,” but we may consider that these “many domains” relate to the “arts” in general, not science, so that there is no real contradiction with what is said in the Critique of Judgment. We also find, in Anthropology, a remark at the linguistic level whose “nationalist” character is revealing about German sensibilities of the time regarding genius: “We Germans let ourselves be persuaded that the French have a word for this in their own language, while we have no word in ours but must borrow one from the French. But the French have themselves borrowed it from Latin ( genius ), where it means nothing other than an ‘individual spirit’ [eigentümlicher Geist]” ( Kant, Anthropology, §57, trans. Gregor, 93–94 ).

Finally, Kant asks whether the world profits from great geniuses because they often cut new paths and open up new perspectives, or whether “mechanical minds” that lean on “canes and crutches to the understanding” have not contributed more to the growth of sciences and the arts. He does not answer the question, saying only that we must be careful of “men called geniuses,” who are often only charlatans.

VII. The Twilight of Genius

With romanticism, we witness an apotheosis of genius, corresponding to a veritable “sacralization of art in bourgeois society,” as Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in Truth and Method. Today, we still speak of the “genius” of an artist, but the notion is hardly an object of theoretical reflection, and we may say, again with Gadamer, that we are witnessing the “twilight of genius.” Paul Valéry, in Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, reacts against the idea that a sleepwalking unconsciousness, quasi divine, mysteriously inspiring, presides over artistic creation. That is, in effect, the “observer’s” point of view. If we ask the artist, he is much more down-to-earth about it; he speaks of his technique, not his genius.

Alain Pons

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Batteux, Charles. Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe. Critical ed. by J. R. Mantion. Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1989.

Bruno, Paul William. “The Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in Kant’s Third Critique.” Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1999.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Diderot, Denis. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Roger Lewinter. Paris: Club français du livre, 1969–73.

Dieckmann, Herbert. “Diderot’s Conception of Genius.” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 2 ( 1941 ): 151–82.

Dubos, Jean-Baptiste. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture. Edited by Pierre Jean Mariette. 2 vols. First published 1719. New ed., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967.

Engell, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Fleck, Christina Juliane. Genie und Wahrheit: Der Geniegedanke im Sturm und Drang. Marburg, Ger.: Tectum, 2006.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen, Ger.: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960. Translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall: Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. London: Continuum, 2004.

Grappin, Pierre. La théorie du génie dans le préclassicisme allemand. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by M. J. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nihjoff, 1974.

   . The Critique of Judgment. Edited by Nicholas Walker. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. First published in 1790.

Klein, Jürgen. “Genius, Ingenium, Imagination: Aesthetic Theories of Production from the Renaissance to Romanticism.” In The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, edited by Frederick Burwick and Jürgen Klein, 19–62. Amsterdam, Neth.: Rodopi, 1996.

La Harpe, Jean-François de. Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne. Paris: Didier, 1834.

Mathore, Georges, and Algirdas Julien Greimas. “La naissance du génie au XVIIIe siècle: Étude lexicologique.” Le Français Moderne 25 ( 1957 ): 256–72.

Murray, Bradley. “Kant on Genius and Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 2 ( 2007 ): 199–214.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Dictionnaire de musique. First published in 1768. In Œuvres complètes, vol. 5. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1995. Translation by William Waring: A Dictionary of Music. London, 1779.

Séchelles, Hérault de. Voyages à Montbard. Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1890.

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Wang, Orrin N. C. “Kant’s Strange Light: Romanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius.” Diacritics 30, no. 4 ( 2000 ): 15–37.

GENRE

“Genre” is caught up in several different networks, all derived from the Greek genos [γένος] ( from gignesthai [γίγνεσθαι], “to be born, become” ) and its Latin calque genus. These networks are constantly interfering with one another.

I. Biology and Classification

The biological network is the starting point, as witnessed by the Homeric sense of genos: “race, line.” It is discussed by Aristotle, in particular in his zoological classifications, in contraposition to eidos [εἶδος], “genus/species.” See PEOPLE.

This network of classifications, in which “genre” takes the meaning of “category, type, species,” is notably used in the theory of literature, with the question of “literary genres” ( Ger. Gattung ). See ERZÄHLEN and HISTORY. Cf. FICTION, RÉCIT, STYLE.

II. Ontological and Logical Networks

The more philosophically pertinent network is nonetheless that of ontology, as in the case of eidos: see IDEA and, in particular, SPECIES. Genos may thus designate kinds, that is to say also the senses, of being. See PEOPLE / RACE / NATION, Box 5; see also ANALOGY, HOMONYM, TO BE, and the explanation of the notion of “category” in ESTI, Box 1.

The ontological network is thus related to the logical network, as we may see in the terms “generic” and “general,” as opposed to the singular and the universal: see PROPERTY, UNIVERSALS.

III. The Contemporary Debate over “Gender” and “Sex”

The biological sense of “engenderment” cuts across debates on sexual identity ( male or female ), which take up the grammatical debates about the “gender” of nouns ( masculine, feminine, neuter ): see SEX, Box 1. The English “gender” is an example; its translation into French as genre understood in the sense of sexuation is clumsy, whereas the German Geschlecht easily refers not only to line, generation, people, nation, race, but also to sexual difference: see, besides GENDER and GESCHLECHT, SEX, and HUMANITY ( esp. MENSCHHEIT ).

GERMAN

Syntax and Semantics in Modern Philosophical German: Hegel and Kant

  AUFHEBEN, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, DASEIN, ERSCHEINUNG, LOGOS, SEIN, WORD ORDER

Philosophical German appears comparatively late, alongside a persistent and influential Latin idiom. This double circumstance informs the history of efforts to translate into and from philosophy written in German, and in particular it explains the fetishism that attaches to substantives that are supposed to be “untranslatable” ( and are in fact largely left untranslated: Dasein, Aufhebung, etc. ), to the detriment of syntax and context. Hegel’s German, which was very early criticized for being unreadable, illustrates the problem in a concentrated form. Confronted by the regular architectonics of Kant’s prose, Hegel advocates a different syntax characterized by its economy, by its expansion of the philosophical lexicon, and by transitions and entailments wrought through by negations—and disconcerting for this reason to the translator. However, a detailed study of Hegel’s texts, in which a return to ordinary languages is associated with a rigorous effort of conceptualization, shows that these features provide a major point of entry into the Hegelian universe. At the same time the peculiarity and flexibility of Hegelian syntax influence a philosophical terminology that forces the translator to engage in a difficult process of arbitration in order to follow its movement.

I. Semantic Phantoms and Syntactical Energy: What Kind of Esotericism?

Until the end of the eighteenth century, there was little German philosophy in the German language. With a few exceptions—which are not, moreover, particularly noteworthy ( Plouquet, Knutzen, Thomasins )—German philosophers wrote in Latin or in French: thus, up to 1770, Althusius, Weigel, Kepler, Agrippa, Sebastian Franck, Paracelsus, Leibniz, and Kant. At the same time, since the beginning of the sixteenth century, religious discourse had been establishing itself in the language of the people ( that is the meaning of the adjective deutsch ), and from the twelfth century forward there had been a literature in German that had assimilated foreign traditions—Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, etc. This late attempt at devising a properly philosophical discourse from within the language of others bore fruit massively and quickly. Philosophical German takes shape over the course of about three decades, with an explosive force that was to last more than a century, and is in certain respects still not finished: many concepts of today’s universal philosophical discourse are rooted in ( and sometimes even make direct use of ) the philosophical German of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This historical peculiarity was also manifested in philosophical literature in German. There are, for instance, only a few incursions of German into Leibniz’s French ( his use of the comma, for instance ), but traces of Latin abound in the German of philosophers: not only a general rhetoric and a syntax dominated by centuries of scholastic training, but also a lexicon that is often directly transposed—though sometimes varying from author to author—into the new theoretical idiom. Latin phantoms often continue to haunt new German semantic developments, in parentheses, in italics, etc. A tenacious habit is formed, an embarrassing academic tic that is no longer mocked by the laughter of great comedians: a mania for the concept cited in a foreign language, first in Latin, notably in German texts, and now in German, quoted, for example, in French texts.

Thus the reception of German philosophers, in France preponderantly but elsewhere as well, has been marked by a pathology ( in the Kantian sense of the term ) that goes hand in hand with defeatism and renunciations in the work of translation: a typical ( often magical ) response to alterity, which we see less among the English, Italians, and others than among the French translators of German philosophy, and still less in French translations of texts in English, Italian, and so on. The respectful, even timid approach to which this has led ends up constructing jetties or breakwaters concentrating difficulties in interpretation around specific notions, usually in the substantival form, and the constant practice in German of nominalization has encouraged this fetishism. We owe to this attitude particular linguistic gestures: a contrite resort to neologisms, a mortified preservation of the German term in French, and to an extent in other languages as well ( e.g., Dasein ). These fixations on the paradigm revive in philosophy the Byzantine debates about words conceived as markers composed of piled-up stones to which everything can be attached: ex-votos, scrolls full of glosses, tresses of exegeses.

These fixed points, veritable intersections of glosses, are so many occasions to depart from the continuous flow of another’s discourse to sing the praises of one’s own text. But this almost structural reflex long remained blind to the risks it involved: the notions in question are semantic tumuli in which political, ideological, and in general conflictual stakes are constantly appearing and overlapping, thus dividing readers in their own country.

One philosopher concentrates several dimensions of this spreading syndrome: Hegel. On the one hand, he seems to have a vague awareness of it and to try to escape it by practicing an autonomous, relatively new, and innovative language, at the risk of being accused of obscurity. But on the other hand, the very success of his attempt, along with the difficulty of translating and commenting on his discourse, has encouraged the reproduction and return of the very behavior he was opposing. This was also a way of confining his philosophy to his own field and protecting his successors against it: the most Hegelian of these successors, Marx, also played the card of criticizing Hegelian discourse qua discourse. Today, this philosophical language seems to have had its day. Only Heidegger followed its tradition of adopting the linguistic backdrop and foundation of human experience, with consequences that are at once related and very different. Philosophical German seems to have fallen back on an ordinary, translatable, clear discourse that can be put into English. But the subterranean influence of Hegel’s philosophical language on modern theoretical discourses in history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology in the broad sense remains considerable and deserves close examination insofar as it has created a new relationship between the totality of the elements of discourse and thought about what is. It exhibits a kind of general relativity that disturbs the previously accepted space-time of speech: the relationship between void and plenitude in discourse is inverted, and syntactical energy alone deploys the conceptual formations that are inconceivable outside this movement of positing and negating. The ordinary, iconic base-10 numeral system collapses and along with it the pantheon of neo-theological concepts: accounting is carried out on the binary basis of what is and what is not; language tends toward the base 2 of identity and difference or, to put it another way, toward the logic ( the speech ) of being.

This inversion has cast Hegel’s writings into a kind of dark night. Hegel is one of the philosophers about whom the question of readability is almost immediately raised: and since this question is practically never posed in connection with other German philosophers of the period, including Fichte and Schelling, who can also sometimes be “hard to follow,” it seems that this difficulty constitutes the peculiarity of Hegel without necessarily being conceived as an effect of the singularity of his thought. To it we can oppose ( and this opposition also has to do with him and constitutes the essence of his problem ) the great clarity of Jacobi, Reinhold, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and other writers and pose the question the other way around: Is it not, according to Hegel, precisely the clarity of a philosopher’s writing that reveals that the truth is not displayed, but simulated, play-acted—or even outmoded, old, familiar?

Not only are Hegel’s works—if we set aside the notes on his lectures made by students and posthumous publishers—all difficult to read, but they seem to say that it cannot be otherwise. The difficulty of reading them is part of the experience of the truth, of the pain and effort of work. The dressing gown of the do-nothing philosopher mentioned at the end of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Mind includes, a contrario, an allusion to the “clarity and distinctness” of Dutch windows and the comfort of the familiarity of the Cartesian “stove-heated room.” Finally, the very form of some of his texts shows them to be based on the necessity of an initial obscurity: the paragraphs dictated in their rigorous form are then commented upon in the author’s explanatory Remarks, and then re-commented upon and elucidated in clearer language by the editors, in the form of additions.

Today, we can adopt this scheme for reading Hegel at the outset ( moreover, in the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel analyzes this “advantage” enjoyed by the later reader ), but Hegel’s contemporaries and first readers did not see things that way. Schelling complained explicitly of the headaches that reading the Phenomenology gave him ( though these might also have been caused by the book’s anti-Schelling polemics ). Goethe and Schiller concocted a pedagogical plan that was supposed to allow Hegel, by assiduously consulting a mentor in clarity, to achieve transparency in his discourse ( this did not work ). As for contemporary reviews, they all deplore “the repetition of formulas and the monotone aspect.” In other words everyone at least acted as if the difficulty of Hegel’s work had to do with his manner ( people fell back on his Swabian origins, his religious training, and the influence of the esotericism of the mystics ) and not with the very essence of his philosophy, even though in several places Hegel himself takes up the question of legibility and denounces the esotericism of philosophies of the intuition of the absolute, their obscurity and their elitism. This paradox frames the whole question of Hegel’s language. Heine, followed in this by the left-wing Hegelians, proposed a practico-rational response to this paradox: Hegel did not want to be understood “immediately”; he was working for the long term and had first to overcome the barrier of censorship. That, Heine says, is why Hegel’s language is verklausuliert, hard to understand, en-claused or perhaps “claused-off”—it is not a pathological “manner” from which his prose suffers, imposed and ultimately external, but the objective, strategic effect of a political decision: a mode of the freedom of thought.

The question seems not to have been treated in itself. For instance, Koyré’s study, which in theory deals with it, drifts into fragmentary expositions of the system and ultimately proves disappointing. Inversely, Hegel’s language is often discussed in more general books, notably in connection with a gloss on this or that term—which is a way of not entering into Hegel’s way of expressing himself. However, we can mention a work in recent French philosophical literature that is very interesting from this point of view: Cathérine Malabou’s L’Avenir de Hegel, which investigates the notion of plasticity in connection with Hegel’s way of expressing himself and studies in depth the relationship between the predicative proposition and the speculative proposition.

II. Modern Philosophical Language: The Kantian Model and Its Hegelian Critique

We must first return briefly to the origin of this difficult language and look into Hegel’s linguistic culture. The allusion to Hegel’s “Swabian speech” ( in contrast to that of Berlin, the Rhineland, etc. ) connotes a general practice of discourse oriented toward the inner and a weakness of dialogic effort ( which Swabian poets compensated by the power of an affective movement toward the other ), in short, a kind of regional psychology that is redolent of the Pietist stable and that is supposed to manifest itself also in Hölderlin, Hegel’s friend and interlocutor. Robert Minder’s study of the Swabian Fathers goes in this direction by emphasizing the influence of religious training and the practice of using a secret code. But there is no lack of counterexamples, beginning with other Swabians like Schelling and Schiller.

Nonetheless, this idiosyncrasy plays a role in a general philosophical language that had been created not long before and had already imposed itself: that of Wolff, Kant, and Fichte, revised by Bardili and Reinhold. But if Kant was quite early on considered the creator of the German ( indeed, European ) philosophical language, it was especially as the founder of a technical vocabulary that some contemporary commentators already judged to be unfamiliar, esoteric, and obscure.

What characterizes this modern philosophical language?

In the first place the abundance of vocabulary and its specialization, running counter to its ordinary meanings and its ordinary forms: in their great dictionary, the Grimm brothers expressed their astonishment at the philosophical meaning that Kant gave to the word Anschauung, which goes back to the traditional intuitio with all its ambiguities. Then the extreme length of the sentences and the production of heavily loaded phrases, to which, however, the reader quickly grows accustomed and which are explained in a way by the recourse to an unproblematic syntax, persistent rhetorical procedures, and regular reference points, which are themselves situated in the ground plan of an architecture that is already self-explanatory. Kant’s language can thus be approached in an “optical” manner, through geographical intuition: the massiveness of the load implies the simplicity of the articulations. The critical continents each have their own vocabulary, their axes. Only a little practice is required to get one’s bearings, and in the end one also discovers many of the characteristics of Latin style.

It is thus a kind of writing that translates well, provided that an effort is made not to forget anything, that one places the commas correctly, and that one has correctly understood the order of modifiers in the German sentence—in order to avoid, for example, making the traditional and in fact rather stupefying error made by French translators who render reine praktische Vernunft as raison pure pratique ( practical pure reason ), which is a kind of contradiction, whereas the German phrase means “pure practical reason,” as opposed to impure practical reason, that is, to technical reason. This constitutes a double, ongoing offense against the German language and against Kant’s thought. If there is somewhere in his work the hypothesis of a practical pure reason ( as opposed to what? Certainly not to a pure pure reason! ), it could be called, hypothetically, nothing other than praktische reine Vernunft. The reason for this error has to do with the conditions under which the first translators were working: they were not true speakers of the original language; they translated German as if it were Latin and thus reproduced the modifiers in the order in which they occur in the German phrase.

In addition, this writing justifies the recourse to lexicons: even during Kant’s lifetime, as early as 1786, lexicalization had begun. Carl Christian Ehrhart Schmid had undertaken to redistribute the Kantian system alphabetically by listing in order the meanings of technical expressions. Kant himself, moreover, did not hesitate to engage in operations of self-lexicalization and definition for which he often provided the Latin equivalent, an attitude virtually nonexistent in Hegel, who was fundamentally hostile to specialized onomastics.

Not only did Kantian discourse translate rather well, but it was good for certain philosophical temperaments: Kant’s general ground plan, the reliability of his definitions, the modesty of the critical ambition, all exhibit a set of reassuring reference points. This quality strongly contributed, for example, to the consolidation of the Kantian moment in the pair of thinkers that provided the foundation for teaching philosophy in French schools: Descartes and Kant. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Kant’s language established itself: everyone spoke it, reworked it, adapted it. Everyone except Hegel, who was very familiar with it, but rejected most of it, while at the same time benefiting from the reworking that Fichte was the first to subject it to.

Confronted by this language, Hegel developed, mainly during his stay in Jena, an apparently obscure, even oneiric idiom whose functioning is completely different and presents, among other characteristics, two symptoms. The first of these is the nonexistence, indeed the impossibility, of a Hegel-Lexikon comparable to the Kant-Lexikon. In this case there are only lists of the occurrences of terms, heavily overloaded by the proliferation of the latter, detailed in the order of the volumes of Hegel’s complete works. The notions and concepts of Hegel’s philosophy cannot be detailed. They exist meaningfully only in the totality of the text; dictionary classifications break down precisely the moment they are found. Or again: Hegel’s notions and concepts exist practically only in syntagmatic expressions. The philosophical reader used to rigorous codes is frustrated: the lack of this tool elicits a malaise that was sufficiently foreseeable for Hegel to warn the reader about it in his preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, for instance.

The second symptom—which is no doubt connected with the first, but not for practical reasons—is the Hegelian corpus’s resistance to translation. Historically ( so far as French is concerned ), translation began with a work that was not written by Hegel, the Aesthetics, translated by Charles Bénard in the early 1840s, and finished with what was the most “completely his,” the Phenomenology of Mind and the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, with translations appearing almost into the second half of the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia, translated by Vera in the second half of the nineteenth century, represents an intermediate linguistic state insofar as it was published with Hegel’s explanatory remarks and additions written by the editor after Hegel’s death.

We might add to these symptoms a comparative analysis of the different “Hegelian idioms” constructed in French to translate Hegel. While Hegel did not have an opportunity to really consider these symptoms ( even though he was the first philosopher to practice what Althusser would call a “symptomatic reading,” or lecture symptomale, to psychoanalyze his time and to conceive moments and figures as situations ), he did think about his difference from other philosophical languages. His is a language that knows it is different, that wishes to be different, that shapes and elaborates its difference, and if necessary exhibits it brutally: Hegel writes against Kant, against Kant’s “barbarous” lingo and his dogmatism of subjectivity, which overthrew, to be sure, the dogmatism of objectivity ( roughly speaking, eighteenth-century rationalism ) but which in a way still speaks the latter’s language, insofar as it dogmatically mimes—even in the arrangement of the table of contents—objectivity.

In the same way but more politically, Hegel repeatedly declares his opposition to special languages like “the language spoken by Molière’s physicians”: that of German jurists and Kantian philosophers. To explain, he uses a democratic argument that may now seem comic when we realize how narrow his own informed readership is. But his criticism of the esotericism of Schelling’s absolute knowledge is not based on a criticism of Schelling’s discourse ( which he long spoke—and created—with Schelling, to the point that we cannot always tell who wrote some of the articles in their Kritisches Journal der Philosophie ).

Hegel’s hostility to Kantian discourse ends up taking an extremely aggressive form. A good illustration of this is found in the chapter on Kant in Lectures on the History of Philosophy ( Werke, 20:330ff. ). At the beginning of the paragraph devoted to the term “transcendental,” Hegel calls such expressions “barbarous.” A little later, commenting on the expression “transcendental aesthetics,” he almost criticizes Kant’s recourse to the etymological meaning of “aesthetic” by contrasting it with the modern sense: “Nowadays aesthetics means the knowledge of the beautiful.” A few lines further on, he quotes Kant’s statement regarding space: “Space is no empirical Notion which has been derived from outward experiences,” and he comments, “But the Notion is never really anything empiric: it is in barbarous forms like this that Kant, however, always expresses himself.”

A whole series of such annoyed asides might be collected in Hegel’s works. Here is one more, which occurs not long after the ones already cited: “The ego is therefore the empty, transcendental subject of our thoughts, that moreover becomes known only through its thoughts; but of what it is in itself we cannot gather the least idea. ( A horrible distinction! For thought is nothing more or less than the ‘in-itself.’ )”

This criticism does not bear solely on Kant’s language. Basically, it is aimed at Kant’s way of doing philosophy, presenting it as a simple translation of the metaphysics of the Understanding ( the Enlightenment ) into subjective dogmatism. Kant describes Reason, all right, but in an unreflected, empirical way. His philosophy lacks concept ( Begriff ), and he uses only “thoughts of the Understanding” ( Gedanken ). As a result, and contrary to appearances, Kantianism lacks philosophical abstraction, it “threshes out” ordinary logic: its abstraction is no more than the dead abstraction of already existing concepts; it is not work, effectiveness, creation. Which explains why in other circumstances Hegel is capable, paradoxically, of reproaching Kant for his abstract discourse.

III. Hegel’s Language: A Mutation of the Economy of the Syntagma and the Paradigm

Confronted by this situation, Hegel writes a philosophical prose that he considers nondogmatic ( neither formal nor mythical ), nonabstract, substantial, and well expressed, but which we, on the other hand, often find very abstract, confusing, cryptic, coded, and poorly expressed.

How should we describe this language? Before characterizing it in any way, we must repeat that the specifically Hegelian language is not uniformly distributed. Not only have we seen that his work has several strata, but also we find in a single work of his whole pages that are not stricto sensu “Hegelian,” particularly in the prefaces and introductions. But precisely these “protected” pages are also the site of a struggle between discourses: even in the phases of presentation, ordinary language is rapidly enveloped and invested by phenomenological or speculative discourse, and this is shown by the ruptures, anacolutha, and other anomalies that rapidly increase, to the confusion of the reader.

In sum, what characterizes Hegel’s language is superficially a certain vocabulary but more profoundly a mutation of the economy of the syntagma and the paradigm in three major aspects.

1. The invasion of the lexical by the syntagmatic: early on, and in a massive way, Hegelian discourse reassembles, from the array of syntactic material before him, what we may call “empty words.” By “empty words” we mean those that are now excluded by computer applications, such as articles, personal pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, common verbal forms—auxiliaries: not only does their mass threaten to saturate research procedures, but the very interest of these words is considered to be nil. In Hegel this procedure of gathering “empty words” has the effect of producing notions that are not fixed in an iconic representation or a traditional semantic content but instead express moments of process or pure relationships. For example, Sein für anderes, Anderssein, An sich and Ansich, Für sich and Fürsich, an und für sich, das an und fürsich seiende, bei sich sein, in sich sein, etc. It is very difficult to make isolated iconic uses of these terms, which can exist only in the movement of sentences in which they slip one into another and divide. In Hegel there are even phases of explicit interest in less common empty words, which he uses in major ways, even as concepts: also, auch, daher, dieses, eins, etwas, hier, ist, insofern, etc.

The bulk of these terms easily absorbs the few elements of ordinary philosophical discourse that were already constituted in the same way and which we encounter in other philosophers writing in German: das Ich, das Sein, das Wesen. In the same way this mass absorbs substantivized infinitives ( das Erkennen, das Denken, etc. ), that is, it inserts process, the in-finite, the active verbal element into frameworks usually reserved for nominal substance. We might say the same about the numerous substantivized adjectives: das Wahre takes precedence over die Wahrheit. In the works’ first printed editions, where the first letter of a substantivized adjective is not systematically capitalized, this slippage leads to another difficulty in reading, forcing the reader to choose between this form ( e.g., “the True” ) and the other possibility, namely the elision of a substantive later picked up again, and which must then be found correctly in everything that precedes ( e.g., “true knowledge” ). Finally, as a result of a sort of “general syntactical preference,” Hegel often does not repeat, when he recalls it, a substantive that has been elided but instead substitutes for it a pronoun that is identifiable only by its gender, whereas the reflex of the reader ( for instance, the translator ) is to repeat this substantive, adding a deictic. The effect of this procedure is to force the reader to memorize, a historicization of the act of reading at the expense of habits of spatial orientation on the material surface of words, the presence of a capital letter on substantives, etc.

The result is a great frequency of identical or quasi-identical forms, which creates an impression of rhapsodic repetition and monotony, sometimes elevated by flights of rhetoric that are polemical or almost lyrical and that break all the more strongly with the whole: suddenly there is a whiff of cultural substance, images or concrete references, a proverb, a quotation of another author that plunges the reader into a second state. In the Phenomenology this often happens at the end of chapters, and in the last chapter, but in general Hegel does not use quotation marks to set off quotations, nor does he use proper names, references, and footnotes, just as he avoids examples, metaphors, and comparisons—the substantial baggage that cannot be unpacked without leaving the movement of the dialectical development.

2. This effect of monotony is made stronger by the simplification of the specifically syntactical material. For example, we find in Hegel a near monopoly of the present tense. Heidegger calls that his “vulgarity” and reproaches him for it. Similarly, connectives and modals are reduced to a few that assume identical logical-rhetorical functions: wenn, dann ( inverted clause ), so, hiermit, somit, indem, erst, nur, oder, überhaupt, bloß, rein, allein, nun. This relative sobriety seems to be induced by the phenomenon we have just described, the invasion of the lexical by the syntagmatic in Hegel’s prose: from a strictly stylistic point of view, by combining with the richness of Schelling’s syntactical vocabulary, for example, or by practicing through variation a pseudo-semanticization of syntactical words, the Hegelian text seems to have arrived at a complete disequilibrium, a sort of monster. Nevertheless, the deepest reason for the extreme syntactical austerity in Hegel’s prose goes to the heart of his project: what applies to the conceptual lexicon applies also to the syntactical one.

3. The result ( and partly the cause ) of all this is a prose that makes connections and transitions into so many “decisive” moments. Much is at stake in the emergence and abolition of correlations, which constitutes a major difficulty for French translations that seek to depart from the spatial successiveness of the movement ( by reorganizing the order of words in the French manner: that is more or less the tendency of Jean Hyppolite, and we can say that it is encouraged by the tradition of Kant translations that have no difficulty with transitions and displacements within vast wholes whose interior is in some sense open ), or to escape the linguistic continuum of semantic networks by recourse to neologisms ( or quasi-neologisms: Anschauung, anschauen: intuitionner; Einsicht: intellection; Gleichheit, gleich, systematically rendered as égalité or égal to the detriment of the much more frequent meaning of qualitative identity, or even resemblance ), or by setting up new networks; for example, by translating Selbst as soi, one establishes a false network with the reflexive pronomial soi of en soi, pour soi, etc. but loses the strong correlation with the paradigm of identity ( dasselbe, selber, etc. ).

In comparison with the Kantian sentence, the Hegelian procedure of arranging-and-loading is completely original. We can intuitively perceive the content of the great, relatively symmetrical Kantian sentences, but in Hegel symmetrical periods are immediately destroyed, bent, and rendered unilateral, or else they twist themselves into ropes because the reversals of symmetries are not rhetorical aspects ( specular reminders ) of the external exposition but always the movement of the thing itself. Negativity is constantly at work and requires a strong and persistent effort on the part of anyone who wants to recollect the whole. This aspect is connected with Hegel’s hostility to “pictures,” whose apprehension through reading is never truly free of representation ( the concept’s being outside itself ) and finally emerges in a consciousness that is more religious than philosophical. In Hegel, “picture-like” is clearly pejorative and connotes an address to a weak sort of thought. The necessity of attentive memory, of reading step by step, and of rereading constitutes the difficulty of philosophical work, as opposed to approaches to the true that do not plunge into the thing itself.

IV. The Beginning of the Phenomenology of Mind

This verbal strategy excludes direct dialogue with the discourse of others at the same time that Hegel’s philosophy presents itself as a pure and simple dialectical collection of what is already there in contemporary philosophical discourse.

Thus the question of the beginning is raised. How can one begin without proceeding like traditional authors, for example, by referring to differences with others, or by definitions? It might be interesting to examine the beginning of the beginning: for example, the first sentences of the first paragraph of the introduction to the Phenomenology, which is itself a kind of prolegomenon, an initiation.

The introduction is formally distinct from the content of the experience of consciousness, of which phenomenology is the science, the knowledge, and in a way already the system.

It corresponds to the chapter on Absolute Knowledge, in which all the moments intersect and overlap, and therefore in which there are no longer any moments, where knowledge is complete ( and can begin to be set forth as the true ). It is thus not a moment but the empty concept of knowledge whose possibility is postulated as knowledge of what is, of the in-itself, of the Absolute, and as a knowledge that cannot be immediate and can attain truth ( science as system, the pure logos of being ) only by fulfilling and abolishing this difference in a history that is at the same time a demonstration, a succession of verifications in the thing itself.

The person who begins this history is also the one who rejects the last philosopher to have conceived this difference between knowledge and being in itself, that is, Kant. And thus, the first moment in the Phenomenology is devoted to Kant. But it is also devoted to another negation, another difference: the one that the philosophy of identity situates between absolute knowledge and natural consciousness. And Hegel’s point of departure consists in thinking simultaneously of the unity of the Kantian procedure and the philosophy of identity. To that end Hegel explains that Kant merely reflects common sense, that he simply follows Locke’s thought to its logical outcomes. Kant cannot, in fact, know, because he does not move beyond the understanding and does not subject the critique to a dialectical verification. Critical thought is a delusion. Idealism, on the other hand, remains contingent and arbitrary: it does not demonstrate the indifference of the subject and the object but studies each of them in itself, compares and identifies them: identity is constructed, it is not an autogenous result. The Phenomenology continues: Kant’s philosophy and the philosophy of identity are abstract and based on presuppositions. Kant simply conceives and posits the abstract difference between Being and Knowledge, whereas Fichte and Schelling conceive the abstract identity of being and knowledge. But all of them, under this identity, developed all the forms of the totality, which can now be recuperated: this is the Hegelian windfall. This recuperation is that of the modern, atomized subject whom it is also a question of reconciling with himself, with his culture, with the organic, with religion, the state, ethics, etc., in an adequate language.

It is in this context that the beginning of the Phenomenology of Mind should be read. The first sentence is both a stasis in the discourse of common sense and a switching-on of Hegelian discourse:

Es ist eine natürliche Vorstellung, daß, eh in der Philosophie an die Sache selbst, nemlich an das wirkliche Erkennen dessen, was in Wahrheit ist, gegangen wird, es nothwendig sey, vorher über das Erkennen sich zu verständigen, als das Werkzeug, wodurch man des Absoluten sich bemächtige, oder als das Mittel, durch welches hindurch man es erblicke, betrachtet wird.

( C’est une représentation tout à fait naturelle de penser qu’en philosophie, avant d’aborder la chose elle-même, savoir, la connaissance effective de ce qui est en vérité, il est nécessaire de s’accorder préalablement sur la connaissance que l’on considère comme l’outil qui permettra de s’emparer de l’absolu, ou comme le moyen au travers duquel on l’aperçoit. )

( Trans. J.-P. Lefebvre, Paris: Aubier, 1991, 79 )

( It is natural to suppose that, before philosophy enters upon its subject proper—namely, the actual knowledge of what truly is—it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it. )

( Trans. J. B. Baillie, 1910; New York, Harper, 1967, 131 )

( It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject-matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to get hold of the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it. )

( Trans. A. V. Miller, 1977; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 46 )

The expression “es ist eine natürliche Vorstellung, daß” has a quasi-trivial status ( which the French translator assumes by adding “tout à fait” ( “entirely” ), as one might say “mais naturellement” ( of course ). Similarly, the expressions “die Sache selbst,” “das wirkliche Erkennen,” “was in Wahrheit ist,” “das Absolute,” “sich zu verständigen,” are all in the ordinary register: the thing itself with which we are concerned, true knowledge, the true, the absolute, coming to agreement, etc. And at the same time Hegel delivers a first packet of rigorous conceptualization, made more precise and stabilized by more than a year of labor on the text of the whole of the Phenomenology of Mind: the Vorstellung, représentation in the French translation, “supposition” and “assumption” in the English, also has the precise sense that Hegel assigns to it in the Phenomenology as a whole, in its definitive hierarchy. The statement is already virtually turned around: to say what follows the word daß is nothing but, is only, Vorstellung, representation, and furthermore merely natural representation, because representation is the concept’s being outside itself. Sache selbst ( the thing itself ) will be the principal marching order for the whole dialectical procedure ( insofar as it is not external ); wirklich already connotes the effectiveness that is not a pure and simple thingly or abstract “reality”; was in Wahrheit ist can also be read in an ontological sense as what, in truth, is; and verständigen, which designates agreement, also connotes the universality of the understanding, Verstand.

But it is not solely a matter of intertextual echoes. The words natürliche Vorstellung, with which the Phenomenology begins, also refer to the current state of philosophical reflection. This moment in the history of philosophy, Hegel’s text proposes, has become a “nature,” an immediate given whose aporias ( here, the richest knowledge is at the same time the poorest: aiming at the truth, one ends up in the clouds of error ) necessarily imply that the way of dialectical doubt that the opening of the preface describes is indeed commencing.

If Kant is in fact the subject here, then it is Kant insofar as he was the last to pose the question of knowledge and thus to walk off with the philosophical jackpot. Thus it is a strange Kant, fairly “Lockified” and revised by Fichte. And still, the critique of the organon “with which one grasps oneself” and of the milieu “through which one perceives” also refers to the very beginnings of philosophy. And thus we are already in the thing itself in the Hegelian sense, apparently devoting ourselves to avoiding a particular way of missing it. This will be the schema for the writing of the whole Phenomenology of Mind; Hegel’s opening sentences describe, capture, and instantiate the effect on his writing of a procedure that consists in designating moments that already contain other moments and are already no longer themselves. Or, to put it another way, Hegel’s language cannot not be a mere figure, simply a figure, of common language, of the language common to the greatest number of philosophers, and finally of common language as such, insofar as this common language always tends to test once again its “economic” essence, its aptitude for elementary reduction, that is, it tends to reinvest always once again in the word’s pure time, leaving it to mute indices to designate images with a gesture, even if these images are complicated concepts that are supposed to be heavy with history.

V. The Dynamicization of Semantemes

What is at issue should not, however, be understood under cover of a cluster of cliches regarding the contradictory meaning of certain terms that can designate a thing and its contrary: Hegelian concepts themselves, considered in their apparent semantic autonomy, are part of these mutations and redistributions. Here we think, of course, of the famous Aufhebung, which has become a test of strength for heavy lifters since Hegel himself pointed out that the term could signify both “abolish” and “preserve.” He mentioned this precisely because this curiosity did not appear in his statements, because of the elementary law that holds that a term is never alone but is caught up in a general context and a particular syntagma, which guide the term’s meaning without there being any need for long additional glosses. And thus, when Hegel says nothing, the term has the sense dominant in the language ( “abolish” ), which itself explains, by an explicit context, the cases ( which are statistically in the minority ) in which the term means, on the basis of a primary negative sense, to withdraw something from circulation, from presence hic et nunc, and to put this thing aside, to protect it, and to intend it for later. It is precisely because there is no possible iconic use of his concepts but only contextualized uses that this word has the meaning that Hyppolite very calmly translated by supprimer ( abolish, cancel ). Apart from this negative meaning, what does the expression Aufhebung der Aufhebung mean in Hegel’s work? Only a pure knickknack of semantic inanity would remain.

Another consequence of the dynamics of Hegelian language is the necessity the French translator encounters of sometimes varying, more or less lightly, the translation of terms identical in the German text: thus gleich occupies a spectrum ranging from “identical” ( dominant ) to “equal” ( much rarer ), by way of “similar” or even “same”; Anschauung ranges from “contemplation” to “intuition,” by way of “vision” pure and simple, or even “spectacle.” These variations cannot but collide with the fetishistic relationship to isolated words. But that relation is precisely what is unfaithful because it obscures the effects of context, which are always semantically decisive. Conversely, certain terms, which are different in German, will be found in context always translated by the same French terms: the French word intelligence can translate Klugheit, Verstand, Einsicht, Intelligenz. Recourse to translator’s notes makes it possible to respect the desire for verification that the reader may feel. Finally, the reading contract between the translator and his reader also commits the former not to play in an arbitrary manner with these necessary variations and to give the reader the benefit of his knowledge of the contexts: on this contractual basis we see that the same expressions are usually translated in the same way, when the author of the original text supervises the play of meaning in these expressions. We might list such cases: allgemein ( general, universal ), erscheinen ( appear, in the trivial sense; be manifested phenomenally ), bestimmen ( determine, intend ), darstellen ( exhibit, represent ), dasein ( be there, exist ), etc. What would one say about a translation that always translated Hegel’s different prepositions ( an, ab, aus, auf, durch, etc. ) each by the same French preposition? The statements would be jammed. In Hegel, no doubt more than in other philosophers, semantic units, semantemes, are themselves subject to movement. If iconic immobility eventually seizes them, it will be because Hegel has lost the game. It is not impossible that he himself may have sometimes contributed to this sclerosis.

Jean-Pierre Lefebvre

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Glockner, Hermann, ed. Hegel-Lexikon. Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1957.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986.

Koyré, Alexandre. Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1971.

Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Translated by L. During. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Minder, Robert. “Herrlichkeit chez Hegel, ou le Monde des Pères Souabes.” Etudes germaniques ( 1951 ): 275–302.

O’Neill Surber, Jere. Hegel and Language. Albany: State University of New York, 2006.

Warminski, Andrzej. Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Züfle, Manfred. Prosa der Welt. Einsiedeln, Switz.: Johannes, 1992.

GESCHICHTLICH ( GERMAN )

FRENCH

historique/historial, historicité/historialité

  DESTINY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, and AUFHEBEN, DASEIN, EREIGNIS, ES GIBT, PRESENT, TATSACHE, TIME, TO BE

The German term geschichtlich is translated into English as “historical” but into French as historique when it appears in Hegel and as historial in Heidegger ( the distinction is not drawn in English translations ), and similarly for the noun Geschichtlichkeit, historicité or historialité. This is not a matter of secondary variation or translator’s caprice. What the shift from the historique to the historial shows in French is the profound debate that took place in German philosophy, from Hegel to Heidegger, on the nature of what is truly historical, in other words, what makes a sequence of events history. The resources of the language are here invoked in a complex network that superimposes a famous pair of contraries ( Geschichte/Historie, geschichlich/historisch ) and a strange etymology, das Geschehen, in English “happening, event, becoming,” a sort of lexical matrix in which the relation between history and what happens is put into general question.

I. Geschichte, Historie, Geschehen

The examination of Geschichte, geschichtlich in Heideggerian terminology may begin with this remark of Heidegger in Gesamtausgabe:

The country that can claim R. Descartes among its great thinkers, the founder of the doctrine of humanity understood as subjectivity, does not have a word for Geschichte in its language, by which it could distinguish the term from Historie.

( Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 79 )

The first difficulty is thus to gain access to what the term Geschichte covers. The term is always understood by Heidegger to contrast with Historie, in the sense of historical science, historical studies, historiography.

Hegel had noted it:

In our language, the term History [Geschichte] unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes quite as much the historia rerum gestarum, as the res gestae themselves; on the other hand it comprehends not less what has happened [das Geschehene], than the narration of what has happened [Geschichtserzählung].

( Hegel, Vorlesungen, 83; Philosophy of History, 60 )

Raymond Aron comments:

The same word in French, English, and German applies to historical reality and the knowledge we have of it. Histoire, history, Geschichte refer at the same time to the becoming of humanity and to the science that men attempt to build to understand their becoming ( even if the equivocation is attenuated, in German, by the existence of words, Geschehen, Historie, which only have one of the two senses ).

( Aron, Dimensions de la conscience historique )

The decisive difference does not rest on the fact that German has two words where French has only one: the twofold meaning of histoire is also found in Geschichte. The important point is that German has, for Geschichte, a properly etymological resource in the verb geschehen, “to happen, to occur,” which yields the noun das Geschehen, “becoming,” and the substantivized adjective Geschehene, “what has become.”

It is this resource that is continuously exploited by the philosophers of German Idealism. For Schelling, das Geschehene, that which has happened or has become ( according to Ranke’s expression: was geschehen ist )—for instance, Caesar having crossed the Rubicon, the Battle of Marignano in 1515, that is, so-called “factual” history ( or “treaties and battles” history, in contrast with the problem-history dear to the Annales school )—is still not at the level of “history properly speaking” ( die eigentliche Geschichte ) or the level of what is “properly historical” ( eigentlich geschichtlich ), as Hegel says ( Vorlesungen, 83 ). Schelling writes:

Was wäre alle Historie, wenn ihr nicht ein innrer Sinn zu Hilfe käme? Was sie bei so vielen ist, die zwar das meiste von allem Geschehenen wissen, aber von eigentlicher Geschichte nicht das geringste verstehen.

( What would all history be if an inner sense did not come to assist it? It would be what it is for so many who indeed know most all that has happened, but who know not the least thing about actual history. )

( Schelling, Weltalter, Einleitung; The Ages of the World, Eng. tr. Bolman )

The distinction is twofold: between Historie ( science of history, historical studies ) and Geschichte ( history, res gestae ), but also between “everything that has happened” ( das Geschehene ) and “history properly speaking” ( die eigentliche Geschichte ). History properly speaking is irreducible to what has happened. It gets its meaning only from reappropriation or interiorization, from a way of knowing things not by rote ( auswendig ), but by the heart ( inwendig ), as Hegel says ( Phänomenologie des Geistes, 35; Phenomenology of Spirit, 23–24 ). Speculatively, the lexical relation between Geschehenes and Geschichte is thus an index less of the proximity of two concepts or fields, than of the distance, even the abyss, that separates them.

II. Geschichtlich and Historisch: Heidegger, the Historial, and the Historic

If we move from the lines by Aron cited above to Heideggerian thought, it appears that the attenuation of the ambiguity that obtains between the nouns Geschichte and Historie becomes a radical differentiation at the level of the corresponding adjectives, geschichtlich versus historisch. Historie having been rejected as the mere chronological listing of events, and thus as the expression of a “calculating thought,” Geschichte endows itself with a completely different relationship to temporality, proper to a “meditative thought.”

We must nevertheless begin by recalling, in François Fédier’s words, that “in the first period of his teaching at Freiburg, before 1923, Heidegger means by historisch what he will later call geschichtlich, that is, what is fully historical—in that any human being can only live in view of a dimension of being in the midst of which, having one day transmitted something which will be historical, he becomes fully in his turn the inheritor of a history” ( Fédier, “Phénoménologie” ).

In French, then, Heidegger’s adjective geschichtlich has been rendered historial, and the term historique has been used for historisch. Historial in French is not a neologism but an archaicism. We find it in Vincent de Beauvais, Le Miroir historial du monde, French translation of the Speculum historiale printed in Paris in 1495, but also in Montaigne. Henry Corbin, one of Heidegger’s French translators, declared that “I coined the term historialité, and I think the term is worth keeping. There is the same relationship between historialité and historicité as between existential and existentiel” ( see DASEIN and ESSENCE ). This translation was nevertheless contested by J. A. Barash, who maintains historique and historicité, notably on the grounds that the terms geschichtlich and Geschichtlichkeit are not neologisms for Heidegger, and the aforementioned translation would amount to distancing him from the debates of his immediate predecessors and his contemporaries “in his age.” Without having to settle this debate here, we can restrict ourselves to the following two remarks: ( 1 ) Corbin’s initiative, which we think a happy one, is also related to his vision of “hiero-history,” notably in Iranian Islamic spirituality; ( 2 ) the reliance on a single term, from Hegel to Heidegger in this case, does respect an existing lexicographical continuity, but the same term may take on entirely different overtones and thereby be newer than a neologism: thus divertissement is not a neologism in Pascal, nor is Dasein in Heidegger. In short, translation also takes place within a single language.

Does Corbin’s translation of geschichtlich ( in Heidegger ) by historial stand up to Barash’s criticism? Yes, and we should even be grateful to Corbin, who simply ran into these problems about the meaning of geschichtlich in Heidegger first, and brought them to our attention, and in addition found resources in French to solve them. To study this question is to ask: how does Geschichtlichkeit—a word that seems to have been created by Hegel, taken over by Schelling and then Heine—take on a different meaning in Heidegger that radically differs from that which it had in Hegel?

III. Geschichte and Geschichtlichkeit: From Hegel and Schelling to Heidegger

The historicity ( Geschichtlichkeit ) described by German Idealists comes from a metaphysical conception—indeed this is the first time that history is conceived metaphysically—in which it refers to the dimension proper to the Spirit in its path toward itself, the concept of historicity being at bottom only the conceptualization of the necessity of this “toward.” This path or ordeal ( which is no doubt indissociable from a Christology ) is thought of by Hegel as “negativity,” with all that entails in terms of seriousness, pain, and patience; it is “the enormous labour of world-history” ( Phenomenology of Spirit, preface, Fr. trans. J.-P. Lefebvre mod., 38, 46; Eng. trans. Miller, 8, 17 ). History is a way for Spirit to come to itself, the work of its coming to itself; history accomplishes and reveals ( ironically, Schelling would add ) what is proper to the Spirit, in a mobility that is essential to it, as Marcuse emphasized in 1932: “Historicity ( Geschichtlichkeit ) indicates the sense of what we aim at when we say of something: it is historical ( geschichtlich ). . . . What is historical becomes in a certain way ( geschieht ). History as becoming ( Geschehen ), as mobility, that is the problem posed” ( Hegel’s Ontology ). The problem Marcuse identifies is also, in a way, the start of German Idealism. There is indeed a “history of self-consciousness,” a decidedly transcendental history, as established by Schelling in the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, translating in his own way the genetic preoccupation of Fichte’s philosophy. This history becomes legible in mythology understood as theogony, that is, as history rather than as a doctrine of the gods, Göttergeschichte rather than Götterlehre: it is the theogonic process of human consciousness.

For Heidegger, on the other hand, historicity is not anchored in the Spirit ( the very term “spirit,” Geist, is “avoided” in Being and Time, as made explicit in his § 10 ), but “in” Dasein ( if we can say that, since Dasein has no inside ) and its facticity, the investigation of which is the purview of the existential analytic. Remarkably, it is in Heidegger’s critical encounter with Aristotle ( following the so-called “Natorp report,” translated into French as Interprétation phénoménologique d’Aristote of 1922 ) rather than Hegel that historiality ( as distinct from historicity ) comes to be conceived as mobility inherent to any human life. In the compressed study of the links between Aristotelian ethics and physics, the ethical aspect of the ontological mobility of human life is made apparent. The clarification of the ethics foreshadowed in 1922 is reserved for the existential analytic of Being and Time, in the perspective of a “hermeneutics of facticity.” Faktizität ( facticity ) constitutes, as Gadamer points out ( in “Heidegger und die Griechen” ), a sort of counterproof of everything that, in German Idealism, bears the mark of the Absolute ( Spirit, self-consciousness, etc. ), and as such indicates the difference of the appeal to historicity in absolute idealism and in the existential analytic: whence the abyss that separates Geschichtlichkeit-as-historicity from Geschichtlichkeit-as-historiality, the world of the Spirit and the “self-world” ( Selbstwelt ).

Heidegger seems indeed to have established a link between the “metaphysics of subjectivity,” which Descartes supposedly founded, and the fact that the French language does not have access to this dimension of history referred to by the German term Geschichte, or, even worse, collapses the historial and the historique. No doubt we must understand that Geschichte indicates a dimension of history that is not captured by a subjectivity, the action of a subject ( even a collective one ), understood such that it would be capable of “making history” ( cf. Pasternak: “No one makes history” ). Geschichte indicates a dimension of history that is all the more essential for being incapable of being “made” by man as an actor or agent and does not derive from what Heidegger called Machenschaft in the 1930s. Machenschaft is, in the common sense of the term, a warped machination, a tissue of dark actings. For Heidegger the term has a stronger sense: Machenschaft is what comes out of a doing/machen, from the effectivity of an efficient cause, for example, of an “operational” subject and thus derives from an implicit ontology of beings as “doable” or “makeable,” that is, an implicit ontology that falls already within the rule or the spirit of modern technique conceived as a Gestell, whose counterpoints are Gelassenheit and Ereignis ( cf. F. W. von Herrmann, Wege ins Ereignis; see COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, II ). “What hells must the human being still cross, before he learns that he does not make himself?” Heidegger asks in a letter of 12 April 1968, to Hannah Arendt. The aspect of “history” designated by the German term Geschichte is one that man cannot, then, “make,” but which he is able to allow to geschehen ( become ), or not. Geschichte thus indicates what comes to man, but not from man.

IV. Geschichte, Geschehen, Geschick: From the Historial to the History of Being

Hegel and Schelling, as we have seen, attempted in a way to separate Geschichte, history, from Geschehen, what happens or becomes in itself. Heidegger seems, on the contrary, to link them back together. Geschichte indicates a Geschehen, “becoming” or “happening,” whose original meaning Heidegger sometimes traces back to Luther, in whom we find the word in the feminine as die Geschichte or die Geschicht, but much more frequently in the neuter, das Geschicht. In this sense Geschicht is göttliche Schickung, divine dispensation; Heidegger hears Geschicht as Luther does: as if deriving, if not from God, at least from a Geschick, a “dispatch” of which man is at best the recipient, and of which he must acknowledge receipt—of which he is even a Schicksal, a fate or a destination. What is truly geschichtlich, historial, is by that fact geschicklick, “destinal” or “epochal.”

In sum, Geschichte should be understood:

1. on the basis of Geschehen, “des Geschehens dessen, was wir Geschichte nennen, d. h. des Seins dieses Seienden [the happening-occurring of what we call Geschichte, that is, of the Being of this being]” ( Gesamtausgabe, 34: 82 ), as arrival or advent, and future, to come ( Ger. Zu-kunft, irreducible to the future; cf. Péguy’s French neologism: évenir; see PRESENT ). Geschichte is only accessible as such to a meditating, noncalculating thought, whence Heidegger’s frequent homages to Jacob Burckhardt;

2. in the direction of a Geschichtlichkeit ( according to the term that first appears in Hegel, Schelling, and Heine ), historicité or historialité, in English “non-historiographical historicality,” itself rooted in the temporality of Dasein. The specific mobility of Dasein, whose time is given on the basis of the future, throws it on an adventure ( Geschehen ) in which its historiality is rooted, related to the finitude of temporality in the being-toward-death taken on as such. Heidegger expresses this way of understanding Geschichtlichkeit in this manner: “Die Zeit nicht haben, sondern sich von ihr haben lassen, ist das Geschichtliche ( Not having time in our possession, but being such that it takes possession of us, that is the historial ).”

The possibility of a Geschichte contains the possibility of an Ungeschichte ( non-history ), of a Geschichtsverlust ( loss of history ) or a Geschichtslosigkeit ( absence of history ), when the historial dimension comes to be lacking.

In 1927 historiality is the epic of Dasein. But Geschichte becomes important to the thinking about fundamental ontology when the latter comes to be inscribed in the perspective of a Seinsgeschichte ( histoire de l’être ), or even a Seynsgeschichte ( histoire de l’estre ). “Historial” indicates that what concerns us may come to us without coming from us, unlike the “historical,” even though the latter term refers both to a chronological account based on a vulgäres Zeitverständnis ( a “vulgar conception” or “common understanding” of time ) and to the idea that history, since it is capable of being made by man, would fall within the domain of the “doable,” becoming thus a non-history in which nothing more can happen to us.

Pascal David

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt, Hannah, and Martin Heidegger. Briefe 1925–1975. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998. Translation by Andrew Shields: Letters, 1925–1975, edited by Ursula Ludz. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004.

Aron, Raymond. Dimensions de la conscience historique. Paris: Plon, 1985. First published in 1961.

   . Politics and History: Selected Essays. Edited and translated by Miriam Bernheim Conant. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

Fédier, François. “Phénoménologie de la vie religieuse.” Heidegger Studies 13 ( 1997 ): 145–61.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. “Heidegger und die Griechen.” Vol. 3. In Gesammelte Werke. 10 vols. Tübingen: Mohr, 1985–95.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Vol. 3. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. In Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

   . Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Vol. 12. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. In Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by John Sibree: The Philosophy of History. Rev. ed. New York: Wiley, 1944.

Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie ( vom Ereignis ). Vol. 65. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989. Translation by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly: Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

   . Identität und Differenz. Vol. 11. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2006. Translation by Joan Stambaugh: Identity and Difference. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

   . Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Vol. 61. Edited by Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985. Translation by Richard Rojcewicz: Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

   . “Was ist Metaphysik?”; “Vom Wesen des Grundes”; “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit”; “Zur Seinsfrage.” In Wegmarken. Vol. 9. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by David Farrell Krell, William McNeill, et al.: “What is Metaphysics?”; ”On the Essence of Ground”; “On the Essence of Truth”; “On the Question of Being.” In Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Kisiel, Theodore, and Thomas Sheehan, eds. Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

Le Goff, Jacques. Saint Louis. Translated by Gareth Evan Gollrad. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

Marcuse, Herbert. Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. Translated by Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

Parvis, Emad. On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.

Péguy, Charles. Œuvres Complètes en prose. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1988.

Polt, Richard. The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Renthe-Fink, L. von. Geschichtlichkeit: Ihr terminologischer und begrifflicher Ursprung bei Hegel, Haym, Dilthey und Yorck. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1964.

Schelling, Friedrich von. Weltalter-Fragmente. Edited by Klaus Grotsch. Vol. 13. In Schellingiana. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2002. Translation by Jason M. Wirth: The Ages of the World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

GESCHLECHT ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH

race, kinship, lineage, community, generation, gender, sex

  AUTRUI, DASEIN, GENDER, GENRE, HUMANITY, LEIB, MENSCHHEIT, PEOPLE, SEX

As Heidegger reminds us, in a text that Derrida has commented upon at length, Geschlecht is impressively multivocal. It refers to race but also to kinship, generation, and gender, as well as the notion of sex, which divides all of the former: “The word equally means the human species [das Menschengeschlecht], in the sense of humanity [Menschheit], and species in the sense of tribe, stock, or family [Stamme, Sippen, und Familien], all of which is further intersected by the generic duality of the sexes [das Zeifache der Geschlechter].” This is why Geschlecht lends itself to a serious task of intralinguistic translation, which consists in finding equivalents for its various significations, in order to better circumscribe its meaning. The stakes of such a task are twofold: it must remove confusion about the different orders of belonging but also question the constitution and destination of human diversity.

I. The Multivocity of Geschlect

Four meanings of Geschlecht must be distinguished:

1. Paternal or maternal lineage ( Geschlecht vom Vater / von der Mutter ). It serves in this sense to assign identity. Thus, in Gotthold E. Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise [Nathan der Weise], Nathan reveals that of his adopted daughter: “Do you not even know of what lineage the mother was [was für Geschlechts die Mutter war]?” ( IV, 7 ). But once this identity is specified in the sense of belonging to a lineage, it may become a sign of distinction. This is why Geschlecht also refers, in a more restrictive way, to nobility. To belong to a Geschlecht also refers, more narrowly, to nobility, as is shown in the same play ( ibid., II, 6 ) by the exchange between Nathan and the Templar regarding von Stauffen’s family: “NATHAN: Von Stauffen, there must be more members of this noble family [des Geschlechts]. TEMPLAR: Oh, yes, they were, there are yet many members of this noble family [des Geschlechts] rotting here.”

2. Geschlecht also refers to a larger community, whose extension varies from tribe to humanity in general, by way of a people or a race. Humanity as a whole is thus referred to as das Menschengeschlecht, das sterbliche Geschlecht, or das Geschlecht der Sterblichen ( the race of mortals ). In a significant displacement of meaning from vertical to horizontal solidarity, Geschlecht may also mean a collection of individuals born at the same time: a generation.

3. In a different register Geschlecht refers to sexual difference ( der Geschlechtsunterschied ). Geschlecht is both sex in general and each sex in particular, male ( das männliche Geschlecht ) and female ( das weibliche Geschlecht ).

4. Finally, in a more abstract register, Geschlecht refers to the genus, in the sense of logical category, in the widest sense. It thus refers to the different genera of natural history as well as all sorts of objects and abstractions.

This multivocity, which owes much to the Greek genos ( see PEOPLE ), is problematic when we must translate Geschlecht into other languages. While the last two senses are easily identifiable and do not lead to confusion as long as context reveals when we must think of a sex or genus in a logical sense, translation becomes infinitely more complex once the term refers to a lineage, a generation, or a community or when it intersects with terms referring to people, nation, or race. In such cases the polysemy of Geschlecht is compounded by the polysemy of terms like “people,” “race,” and “nation” that must nonetheless be kept distinct from one another and from Geschlecht. What is more, this polysemy turns out to be problematical even in German itself, where Geschlecht competes with terms that share aspects of its sense, and which, whenever they are introduced or used, raises a theoretical difficulty and entails a polemic.

II. The Disambiguation of Geschlect and Its Difficulties

Between Kant and Herder a whole enterprise of terminological distinction may be said to be undertaken that aims at restricting the uncontrollable breadth of meanings of Geschlecht and substituting for it new, univocal concepts: Stamm and Rasse. In the essay Determination of the Concept of Human Race [Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse, 1785], Kant attempts to give Rasse a restrictive sense that preserves the unity of human kind, removing all equivocal use of the term. The goal is to avoid all confusion between species or kind and the races and to block attempts to think of the diversity of the “races” as grounded in an original diversity of distinct generations:

Thus the concept of a race [der Begriff einer Rasse] contains first the concept of a common phylum [der Begriff eines gemeinschaftlichen Stammes], second necessarily hereditary characters of the classificatory difference among the latter’s descendants. Through the latter, reliable grounds of distinction are established according to which we can divide the species [die Gattung] into classes [in Klassen], which then, because of the first point, namely the unity of the phylum [die Einheit des Stammes], may only be called races [Rassen] and by no means kinds [Arten].

( Kant, Bestimmung des Begriffs )

Races ( Rassen ) are thus different classes of a genus whose unity of origin remains intact. This implies, however, that peoples and nations are no longer the primary natural divisions of humankind. Rasse intervenes between Volk and Geschlecht. This is why, in the same year in which Kant’s essay is published, Herder argues in the second part of Reflections on the Philosophy of History of Mankind ( 1785 ) against the idea that we might use Rasse ( for which he writes “Race” ) as an operative concept to determine such a primary division:

Some for instance have thought fit, to employ the term of races for four or five divisions, originally made in consequence of country or complexion: but I see no reason for this appellation. Race refers to a difference of origin, which in this case either does not exist, or in each of these countries, and under each of these complexions, comprises the most different races. For every nation is one people.

( Herder, Reflections )

However, it is above all in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ( 1797 ) that Kant attempts to fix the meanings of the term, by way of the characteristics that differentiate four types: those of the person ( der Person ), the people ( des Volks ), race ( der Rasse ), and the human species ( der Menschengattung ). Geschlecht and Rasse are essentially distinguished, then, by their finality. The first term, Geschlecht, is reserved for sexual difference, which has a twofold end in nature—the preservation of the species and, thanks to femininity, the culture and refinement of society. The second, Rasse, applies to a difference whose only end is assimilation, the mixing that gives the human its unity ( die Zusammenschmelzung verschiedener Rassen ). Geschlecht, Stamm, Rasse: the issue of the choice of terms is thus twofold. It relates both to considerations of the unity of humankind and of its finality.

Another sign of difficulty raised by Geschlecht comes from the possibility of using the word to refer to both horizontal solidarity ( a generation ) and vertical solidarity ( the succession of generations ). Such is, in effect, the reorientation of meaning that Luther declares, in a text that illustrates the difficulties of the word:

And his mercy extends from one generation [Geschlecht] to another. We must become accustomed to the usage in the Scripture which calls the succession of begettings and natural births Geschlechter. This is why the German word Geschlecht is not sufficient, but I do not know of a better. We call Geschlechter the stocks and the union of blood brotherhoods [geblüter Freundschaften], but the word here must mean the natural succession between father and the child of his children, such that each of the members of this succession has the name Geschlecht.

( Grimm, art. “Geschlecht,” 1984 )

This confusion is found in the translation of the Hebrew term tōledōṯ [תּוֹלְדֹת], in Genesis 10, where, describing Noah’s descendants, a shared humanity that Luther describes as “the table of peoples [die Völkertafel]” is laid out:

These are the families [die Nachkommen] of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations [in ihren Geschlechtern und Leuten]: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

( Gn 10:32, Luther’s terms in brackets )

The retranslation of the same passage by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig is thus significant ( Die fünf Bücher der Weisung ). They use Sippe ( kinship ) rather than Nachkommen, and the phrase nach ihren Zeugungen, in ihren Stämmen ( according to their generations, in their tribes ) instead of in ihren Geschlechtern und Leuten, thus distinguishing between vertical begetting ( Zeugungen ) and differentiated horizontal division ( Stämmen ). Geschlecht disappears, as though it were loaded with too much ambiguity to still refer to generation in the strict sense of begetting.

Geschlecht thus concentrates, even more than “people,” “nation,” or “race,” the risks involved with any designation of community: that of being led back to an order of belonging deriving primarily from generation and ascendancy ( thus from sexuality as well )—that is, the risk of a contamination of politics by genealogy.

Marc Crépon

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derrida, Jacques. “Geschlecht I and II.” In Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, 395–453. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Translation by Ruben Berezdivin and Elizabeth Rottenberg: “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference.” Translation by John P. Leavey, Jr.: “Heidegger’s Hand ( Geschlecht II ).” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other. 2 vols. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 2:7–62. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–8.

Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 12. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985. Translation by Peter D. Hertz: On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Vol. 13. In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by B. Suphan. 33 vols. Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913. Translation by Frank E. Manuel: Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Robert B. Louden: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

   . Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschen Rasse. In Gesamtsausgabe. Vol. 8. Determination of the Concept of a Human Race. §6 in Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by R. Louden and G. Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Krell, David Farrell. “One, Two, Four—Yet Where Is the Third? A Note on Derrida’s Series.” Epoché 10 ( 2006 ): 341–57.

GLAUBE ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			faith, belief
FRENCH			foi, croyance

  BELIEF, CROYANCE, and FAITH, FEELING, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, TRUTH

German vocabulary does not mark the distinction between faith and belief. It has a single word, Glaube, where English, French, and most Romance languages have two, which refer respectively to the ( more or less deeply held ) adherence to the dogmas of a religion and the ( more or less perceptible ) assent to all manner of representation or propositional content. This does not mean that German speakers do not have an idea of the distinction, but they nonetheless have difficulties giving it an expression in language.

I. The Difficulty of Translating Hume into German

A good example of these difficulties is found in German translations of English-language philosophical works that rely particularly on the notion of belief. Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding may be seen as a test case. The second part of section 5 aims to give, on the basis of the notion of belief, a “solution” to the “sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding” raised in section 4. The conclusions we derive from experience rest on a belief that derives from sentiment or feeling, or even some instinct or mechanical tendency, and that may be described as a union of perception ( direct or indirect, by way of memory ) of an object and a certain link discerned between this object and another by habit. The German translations of this text—whether modern ones such as Richter’s or older ones such as that by W. G. Tennemann, which contains Reinhold’s essay On Philosophical Scepticism and in which German Idealism read Hume—systematically rendered “belief” by Glaube. However, for the same reason, as remarked by Richter in the English-German glossary accompanying his edition, these translations cannot capture the difference with “faith” as discussed in section 10, on miracles; for “faith” “in the religious sense,” they still rely on Glaube.

II. Luther’s Work on Language: Glauben / Der Glaube

The difficulty is also felt within German texts themselves, as the example of Luther shows. It is no doubt in his work, as the theologian of salvation by “faith alone [sola fide]” ( as opposed to works ) that Glaube takes on the status of a concept: his emphatic use of the word leaves a lasting mark on philosophy, most of all German Idealism. What is more, we find in Luther linguistically oriented remarks regarding the construction of the verb glauben ( for instance, whether it should take the preposition an, rather than in ). In a sermon from 1544 transcribed by Veit Dietrich, Luther draws the distinction between faith and belief:

A rich man, possessing great wealth and money, if he believes [glaubt] that he will not die of hunger this year, this is not faith [Glaube]. He who, by contrast, is destitute and yet still holds to the Word of God, according to which God will as his father procure him subsistence . . . , he does believe [glaubt] correctly.

( Luther, Hauspostille, WA, vol. 52 )

As in French and other Romance languages, the verb glauben may refer both to what we call “faith” and to “belief,” depending on their objects ( in this case, believing in one’s fortune and in the generosity of God ). But in the first phase, the verb is in a strange way opposed to the noun of the same family, Glaube: there are ways of believing, glauben, that do not manifest Glaube. The problem is that Luther has a single family of words, glauben/Glaube, to describe the terms he is contrasting. This is not strictly speaking a problem of translation: French and other Romance languages have always drawn the distinction in this in advance. But the distinction that these languages have at their disposal does not make it possible to render Luther’s work on his own language, except by violating its usage.

III. Glaubensphilosophie

A problem of translation does arise later, with the controversy started by Jacobi and what was called Glaubensphilosophie. Its origin lies in Kant’s expression: “I was obliged therefore to abolish knowledge [Wissen] to make room for belief [Glauben]” ( Kritik der reinen Vernunft ). The translation of Glauben here is difficult. The objects that Kant attributes to it—God, liberty, immortality—are suggestive of faith, but the jurisdiction to which it belongs, practical reason, blocks any translation that would refer too directly to a religious reality. Croyance ( belief ) is in fact the translation adopted by all the French translators of the Critique of Pure Reason, from J. Barni, revised by P. Archambault, to A. Renault; in English, Kemp-Smith gives “to make room for faith,” as do Paton and ( more recently ) Guyer and Wood.

Glauben here has a suppleness that French and English, always forced to choose between foi and croyance or “faith” and “belief,” between religious and epistemological usages, do not. A grammatical phenomenon arises in addition. In the problem raised by Kant, it is a question not of a Glaube, but of a Glauben, that is, of a nominal infinitive, the “to believe,” against which another nominal infinitive is contrasted, the “to know.” In addition, the difference of form between der Glaube and das Glauben is tenuous: Glaube, a weak masculine, becomes Glauben in the accusative and the dative.

The title of Hegel’s response to Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi in 1802, Glauben und Wissen, should thus be translated as To Believe and To Know, except that this is also misleading: the work’s concern is not just with an investigation, à la Hume, of the degrees of certainty and of assent in human understanding. When Jacobi claims that all Wissen must “rise up” to a Glauben, he has God in mind above all, which—here Jacobi follows Kant—cannot be known, only believed. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, and Hegel all have the same object in view in the controversy: God, or the absolute. The title Faith and Knowledge—Foi et savoir in French—as a translation of Hegel’s work would thus allow us to get around the difficulty, but it immediately gives rise to another one. A francophone reader may in effect be tempted unilaterally to lay down a familiar distinction between faith and reason, whereas for Kant, whom Hegel is discussing, Glauben is not distinguished from reason but rather results from the transfer of competencies of theoretical reason to practical reason. In fact, the question of Glauben und Wissen, which is prevalent throughout the beginning of German Idealism, brings together two questions that French habits tend to separate: that of the relationship between faith and reason on one hand, and that of the certainty to which human knowledge may lay claim on the other ( and we may see in this a continuation of the debate between Kant and Hume: cf. Jacobi, “David Hume” ). The characteristic use of Glaube in German makes it possible to intertwine these questions so as to make them inseparable, whereas the separation of faith and belief encourages the French- and Romance-language reader to distinguish two different orders of problems.

Philippe Büttgen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Di Giovanni, George. Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

   . “Hume, Jacobi, and Common Sense: An Episode in the Reception of Hume in Germany at the Time of Kant.” Kant-Studien 88 ( 1997 ): 44–58.

Fries, Jakob Friedrich. Wissen, Glauben und Ahndung. Edited by L. Nelson. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1905. First published in 1805. Translation by Kent Richter: Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense. Edited by Frederick Gregory. Köln: J. Dinter, 1989.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Glauben und Wissen. Edited by H. Glockner. In Jubiläumsausgabe. Vol. 1. 4th ed. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Translation by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris: Faith and Knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. Edited by Stephen Buckle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Translation by Raoul Richter: Eine Untersuchung über den menschlichen Verstand. Edited by Raoul Richter. 12th ed. Hamburg: Meiner, 1993. Translation by M.W.G. Tennemann: Untersuchung über den menschlichen Verstand. Jena: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1793.

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. “David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus: Ein Gespräch.” 1787. In Werke. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Fleischer and Jüng, 1815. Translation by George di Giovanni: “David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue.” In The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, edited by George di Giovanni, 253–338. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.

   . “Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung.” In Werke. Vol. 3. Leipzig: Fleischer and Jüng, 1816.

Kant, Immanuel. “Vorrede zur zweiten Ausgabe.” In Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 4:7–26. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: “Preface to the Second Edition.” In Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood, 106–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke, Weimar 1883–1929 ( Weimarer Ausgabe—WA ). Online at http://www.lutherdansk.dk/WA/D.%20Martin%20Luthers%20Werke,%20Weimarer%20Ausgabe%20-%20WA.htm.

   . Luther’s Works. Edited by Helmut T. Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan. 55 vols. St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955.

   . Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Weimar: Böhlar, 1883–.

Tavoillot, Pierre-Henri. Le Crépuscule des Lumières: Les documents de la “querelle du panthéisme” ( 1780–1789 ). Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995.

GLÜCK, GLÜCKSELIGKEIT, SELIGKEIT, WOHLFAHRT ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			happiness, luck, welfare
FRENCH			bonheur, félicité, béatitude, chance, fortune, prospérité
GREEK			eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία], eutuchia [εὐτυχία], makariotês [μαϰαϱιότης]
LATIN			felicitas, beatitudo

  HAPPINESS, and DAIMÔN, DESTINY, LIBERTY, MORAL SENSE, MORALS, PLEASURE, PRAXIS, VIRTUE

The difficulty of the German Glück comes from its double meaning of “happiness” and “luck.” Among German-speakers themselves, the criticisms of eudaimonism, beginning with Kant, focus on an unhealthy closeness between merit and chance. This explains in particular the addition of the compound Glückseligkeit ( from selig, “blessed” ), awkwardly translated into French as félicité, whereas the term usually only aims to express—with varying degrees of success—the conception of happiness dissociated from the accidents of chance. However, the difficulties of the users of Glück also relate to the power of the Aristotelian tradition in the moral thought of the German Enlightenment, and leads to the European or supranational dimension of the problem. The pair Glück-Glückseligkeit is consciously related to the distinction drawn in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics between eutuchia [εὐτυχία] ( good fortune ) and eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία] ( happiness ), to which the difficulties of the third term makariotês [μαϰαϱιότης], which refers to the happiness of the gods, must also be added. The translation of the last term by Seligkeit and the intensive use of the word in religious contexts is reflected in Glückseligkeit, whose spiritual dimension resists attempts at translation. In English, at the same time, it is on the contrary the absence of this internalized dimension that explains how “happiness” could have opened the way to a philosophy of the common good and political happiness, for which other European countries do not have an equivalent.

I. The Greek Roots of the Debate

A. Eudaimonia and eutuchia

The question of happiness is a central problem of Greek thought. In the first pages of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle summarizes the tradition:

Let us resume our inquiry and state, in view of the fact that all knowledge and choice aims at some good, what it is that we say political science aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action ( tôn praktôn agathôn [τῶν πϱαϰτῶν ἀγαθῶν] ). Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, ( tên eudaimonian [τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν] ) and identify living well and faring well with being happy ( to d’eu zên kai to eu prattein [τὸ δ’ εὖ ζῆν ϰαὶ τὸ εὖ πϱάττειν] ) σοντ λα μἄμε ψηοσε Ϙυᾤἄτϱε ηευϱευχ ( τᾀιευδαιμονειν [τῷ εὐδαιμονεῖν] ).

( 1.4, 1095a ll. 14–20; Barnes trans. )

The term eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία] used by Aristotle is not found in archaic texts; it does not appear in Homer, and is rare in Pindar. Olbos [ὄλϐος], the Homeric term usually translated as “happiness,” designates prosperity given by the gods to men, the enjoyment of that material happiness ( and not just wealth, ploutos [πλοῦτος] ) which, in a well-ordered cosmos, is the sign of a good life. Olbos is progressively replaced by eudaimonia, a term coming from the family of daiomai [δαίομαι], “to share”: eu-daimôn [εὐ-δαίμων] is literally he “who has a good daimôn,” a good distributive divinity ( a good spirit ), and hence “a good share.” Eudaimonia, like olbos, refers in the first instance to the prosperity and happiness of the man favored by the gods ( thus, Hesiod, Works, 824: eudaimôn te kai olbios [εὐδαίμων τε ϰαὶ ὄλϐιος] ). It would be difficult to speak, regarding eudaimonia, of an internalization of the idea of happiness; someone is eudaimôn who knows how to take advantage of the external conditions of existence.

However, through the Aristotelian conception, the term acquires a practical and ethical specificity: eudaimonia is decidedly distinguished from good luck ( eutuchia [εὐτυχία], from tuchê [τύχη], “fate, fortune” ): “For many declare happiness ( eudaimonia ) to be identical with good luck ( eutuchia ),” Aristotle writes in the Eudemian Ethics ( 1.1.1214a25f; Barnes trans. ). Euripides, however, is able to play with the three terms: “No man can count on his happiness ( eudaimôn anêr [εὐδαίμων ἀνήϱ] ). Some have luck ( eutuchesteros [εὐτυχέστεϱος] ) and fortune ( olbou epirruentos [ὄλϐου ἐπιϱϱυέντος] ) on their side but never happiness ( eudaimôn d’an ou [εὐδαίμων δ’ ἂν οὔ] )” ( Medea, 1228–30; Collier and Machemer trans. ). The question of the permanence of the elements that compose happiness, hence the problem of time, plays an essential role here. Contrary to the extreme volatility of fortune and external goods, virtuous activities guarantee happiness by their stability ( bebaiotês [βεϐαιότης]; Nicomachean Ethics, 1.10.1100b12 ):

Success or failure in life ( en tautais sc. tais tuchais [ἐν ταύταις sc. ταῖς τύχαις] ) does not depend on these, but human life, as we said, needs these as well ( prosdeitai [πϱοσδεῖται] ), while excellent activities or their opposites are what determine happiness or the reverse ( kuriai d’ eisin hai kat’ aretên energeiai tês eudaimonias [ϰύϱιαι δ’ εἰσὶν αἱ ϰατ’ ἀϱετὴν ἐνέϱγειαι τῆς εὐδαιμονίας] ).

( 1100b ll. 8–11; Barnes trans. )

The Aristotelian definition of happiness may seem like a moral one in the modern sense, insofar as it refers to the virtuous activity of the subject ( to the point where Tricot, for example, consistently translates to ariston [τὸ ἄϱιστον], the best, the most excellent, by the French Souverain Bien [Sovereign Good], 1.8.1098b32, for example ). However, the supplement eutuchia once again relates this definition of the happiness of a man to the share granted to him by the gods.

B. Eudaimonia and makariotês

The temporal perspective that plays an important role in determining the difference between eutuchia and eudaimonia also comes into play for the term makariotês [μαϰαϱιότης]. Hoi makares [οἱ μάϰαϱες], the blessed ones, is the expression that designates the gods ( Iliad, 1.329 ). This happiness proper to the gods can only be tasted by mortals after death. This is why makarios [μαϰάϱιος] often refers to the deceased ( the Ger. selig, “blessed,” has the same use: die Seligen )—unless the vocative in familiar speech is just equivalent to “my good man” ( Plato, Protagoras, 309c ). Thus when Aristotle, putting the final touches on his definition of eudaimonia, adds to virtuous activity the fact of being sufficiently provided with external goods, and not simply living but also dying in this state, he also expresses the maximum and the limit of this conception:

We shall call blessed ( makarious [μαϰαϱίους] ) those among living men in whom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled—but blessed men ( makarious d’anthropous [μαϰαϱίους δ’ ἀνθϱώπους] ).

( Nicomachean Ethics, 1.10.1101a ll. 20–21 )

The divide between happiness and blessedness is that between profane and sacred, immanence and transcendence. It is of course made much of in religious texts, and is found discussed in almost all languages. In Saint Thomas Aquinas, this important Aristotelian concession is immediately emphasized: “[Aristotle] maintained that man does not achieve perfect felicity, but only a limited kind” ( Posuit hominem non consequi felicitatem perfectam, sed suo modo ) ( Summa contra gentiles, III, 48 ). Aquinas reaffirms this distinction in the Summa theologica in a systematic way, contrasting imperfecta beatitudo ( accessible to men on earth ) to celestial beatitudo perfecta ( which is inaccessible to them ):

Final perfection for men in their present life is their cleaving to God by activity which, however, cannot be continuous or consequently single, for activity becomes multiple when interrupted. That is why we cannot possess perfect happiness now, as Aristotle admits.

Aquinas, Summa theologica, prima secundae, q. 3, a. 2, reply 4; T. Gilby trans.

In Latin, the original distinction between a profane felicitas ( = eudaimonia ) and a sacred beatitudo ( = makariotês ) is lost. Seneca’s vita beata is not peculiar to the gods. The Latin words felicitas and beatitudo are practically synonymous; for Aquinas, it is thus the adjective that introduces the necessary distinctions.

■ See Box 1.

1

From happiness to apathy and ataraxia

The independence of eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία] with regard to external goods is already invoked by Democritus ( B 40, 170, 171 DK ), who, like Heraclitus ( B 119 DK ), reinterprets the daimôn [δαίμων] psychologically and ethically, and is solidly established with Plato ( Laws, 664c ). However, it remains a paradoxical idea; when Xenophon relates the dialogue between Euthydemus and Socrates, this paradox is clearly still fresh:

“But, granting this to be as you say,” added Euthydemus, “you will certainly allow good fortune to be a good?” “I will,” said Socrates, “provided this good fortune consists in things that are undoubtedly good.” —“And how can it be that the things which compose good fortune should not be infallibly good?” —“They are,” answered Socrates, “unless you reckon among them beauty and strength of body, riches, honours, and other things of that nature.” —“And how can a man be happy without them?” —“Rather,” said Socrates, “how can a man be happy with things that are the causes of so many misfortunes?”

( The Memorable Things of Socrates, Bysshe trans. )

Aristotle, in turn, conceptualizes eudaimonia contrary to what the word says: minimizing the share of chance and external goods ( eutuchia [εὐτυχία] ), he makes happiness depend on the highest excellence, that is, not on politics but on theôria [θεωϱία], which makes man similar to god ( Nicomachean Ethics, 10.7; see PRAXIS ). But the Stoics and Epicureans, who push the self-sufficiency of the sage to the extreme in different ways, are in the end forced to make real terminological inventions. For the two schools, happiness, far from being the good share that we enjoy until the end, is essentially characterized by its privative aspect, a point on which Stoic a-patheia [ἀ-πάθεια] ( absence of passion, passivity; Plutarch, Dion, 32 ) and Epicurean a-ponia [ἀ-πόνια] and a-taraxia [ἀ-ταϱαξία] ( absence of bodily suffering and absence of disturbance in the soul; Diogenes Laertius, 10.96; see PLEASURE ) converge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Xenophon. The Memorable Things of Socrates. Bk. 4, chap. 2. Translated by E. Bysshe. London: Cassell, 1888.

II. Glückseligkeit: Internal Happiness

In German, the distinction between blessedness and happiness does not pose a problem. The adjective selig and the corresponding noun Seligkeit clearly contrast with Glück and glücklich. The division, however, is not always so strict: we must emphasize the importance, in the eighteenth century, of the movement that leads the German language to use sacred vocabulary in profane contexts, under the influence especially of the sacralization of the world in Pietist language. Thus, without being celestial, the extreme happiness of a heart fully absorbed by love, that of the sage or monk, may demand the use of the term Seligkeit. However, despite its relative desacralization, Seligkeit still designates a happiness that can do without the external world, a religious happiness, or at least, a highly spiritualized one.

By contrast, the most commonly used word in German for expressing immanent or profane happiness does raise some difficulties. Glück reunites what the Greek disjunction between eutuchia and eudaimonia tried to separate. On one side, Glück refers to chance. It lies on the side of luck, or “favorable accident.” In ancient texts, the word Glück is often used in a neutral way, without any positive connotation. We find some examples in Goethe:

Das Glück ist eigensinnig, oft das Gemeine, das Nichtswürdige zu adeln und wohlüberlegte Taten mit einem gemeinen Ausgang zu entehren.

( Fortune is capricious; she often ennobles the common, the worthless, while she dishonors well considered actions with an ignoble outcome. )

( Egmont, act IV, scene 2 )

Here, the French and English equivalents of the word Glück would be “fortune.” In this sense, Glück seems like an inappropriate word for philosophers: it is too inconstant, independent of the will of men, and associated with the unpredictable wheel of fortune ( das Glücksrad ). In French, the word for “happiness,” bonheur, also, originally, has the sense of good fortune ( the word comes from bon and heur ). But today it only seems to have this meaning in a secondary way, and in rare fixed expressions ( porter bonheur à quelqu’un, au petit bonheur, par bonheur, etc. ). Voltaire’s article on “Félicité” in the RT: Dictionnaire philosophique clarifies the difference between un bonheur and le bonheur: “Un bonheur is a happy event. Le bonheur, taken indefinitely, means a succession of such events.”

The second meaning of Glück is indeed that of happiness strictly speaking: the fully satisfied consciousness, as the RT: Le nouveau petit Robert French dictionary has it. Standard German uses the two senses of Glück and its antonym Unglück ( bad luck or unhappiness ). The union within a single German word of the idea of a happy accident, luck, and that of happiness strictly speaking, is to some extent inconvenient for philosophers. For it is impossible to speak of happiness in the absence of a certain duration or stability: “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy” ( Nicomachean Ethics, 1.7.1098a 18–20; Barnes trans. ).

The extremely strong influence of Aristotelian reflection on happiness, beginning with the Renaissance, clearly explains the efforts at lexical differentiation, and especially the introduction of the compound Glückseligkeit, related to the attempts at definition made throughout the eighteenth century by Christian Wolff and his successors. In Wolff’s German Ethics, joy ( Freude ) is defined as a sort of permanent pleasure ( Vergnügen ), and happiness ( Glückseligkeit ) as a “state of permanent joy.” The stability of Glückseligkeit is thus vigorously championed. Lexically, happiness-Glückseligkeit seems to escape the instability characterizing Glück. The adjective glückselig, formed from Glück and selig, initially means “marked by happiness, rich in happiness.” Happiness-Glückseligkeit is not an accident. While the word is not a neologism, it acquires an important role in philosophical and theological texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a certain way, behind Glückseligkeit, it is usually appropriate to read eudaimonia. This is also what is suggested by the philosophical dictionary of synonyms published at the end of the Enlightenment by Johann August Eberhard, RT: Versuch einer allgemeinen deutschen Synonymik:

Glückseligkeit includes physical and moral good. The Greek word eudaimonia, which in the most widespread philosophical schools refers to the quintessence of all sorts of good, has thus been translated by it.

For the texts of the eighteenth century in Germany, the translation of Glückseligkeit by “happiness” or bonheur seems in this sense more appropriate than “felicity,” which in French ( félicité ) is of a more limited usage.

Philosophical German appeared to have recovered the Greek triad eutuchia/eudaimonia/makariotês in the form of Glück/Glückseligkeit/Seligkeit. In fact, however, the philosophical and lexical status of Glückseligkeit remains rather precarious. On one hand, the influence of Seligkeit confers a passive connotation onto Glückseligkeit, which becomes as a result “apathetic” or “quietist,” and in this way clearly different from the eudaimonia that Aristotle had defined as a kind of “activity.” Aristotle had compared happiness-eudaimonia with “living well and faring well” ( to eu zên kai to eu prattein [τὸ εὖ ζῆν ϰαὶ τὸ εὖ πϱάττειν] ), but eu prattein also means “to succeed” ( Nicomachean Ethics, 1.2.1095a19 ). The modern era did not really take over this dynamic conception of happiness inherent to Aristotle’s position; whether defined as freedom from worry, in the Epicurean manner, or as a moment of satisfaction, modern happiness remains relatively static. A notable exception is the distinction established by Diderot between what he calls “circumscribed happiness” and “expansive happiness”:

There is a circumscribed happiness which remains in me and which does not extend beyond. There is an expansive happiness which propagates itself, which throws itself on the present, which embraces the future and which revels in moral and physical enjoyments, in reality and fantasy, hoarding money, honors, paintings and kisses pell-mell.

( “Man” )

By contrast, the definition proposed by Christian Wolff places happiness decidedly on the side of the sentiments; Glückseligkeit is both more internal and more spiritualized than the Greek word. This tendency is again emphasized by the erroneous but widespread etymology of the eighteenth century, according to which selig and glückselig ( indeed often written seelig, glückseelig ) are descended from Seele, soul. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, glückselig/Glückseligkeit undergo a certain evolution. Today, they refer to little more than a very spiritualized happiness. The severe critique of eudaimonism by Kant and his successors seems thus to be accompanied by certain lexical modifications. Glückseligkeit, though it has not entirely disappeared, has fallen into disuse. In contemporary texts, we find Glück ( or glücklich ) where an eighteenth-century author would have used Glückseligkeit ( or glückselig ) without fail. Thus, if the eighteenth century in Europe is the one in which happiness is most discussed, it is one in which happiness is not discussed with the same terms as those in common use today. Kant had already shown the way by using the adjective glücklich rather than glückselig with Glückseligkeit, most of the time. For in everyday language, Glück was always the more frequently used word for referring to happiness.

III. The Inconstancy of Fortune: Glückseligkeit, Nature, and Freedom in Kant

Whereas contemporary usage draws a rather clear line between Glück and Glückseligkeit and places the latter term on the side of a notion of felicity that seems to be definitively outmoded, the Kantian critique tends, in contrast, to devalue happiness-Glückseligkeit because of its compromising association with Glück. It is impossible, first, to give an objective definition of happiness:

It is unfortunate that the concept of happiness is one which is so vague [Es ist ein Unglück, daß der Begriff der Glückseligkeit ein so unbestimmter Begriff ist], such that even though all men wish to achieve happiness, they are never able to say in a clear and univocal fashion what they truly wish for and desire.

( “Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,” in Kants Gesammelte Schriften )

By playing on the German words Unglück and Glückseligkeit, Kant shows that the philosophical question of happiness and eudaimonism is also a problem of vocabulary. Glückseligkeit is a feeling; the search for happiness is a desire. Yet, a feeling, wherever it may come from, is always physical ( cf. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ). It is this point that explains the Kantian refusal to make happiness the final end of human activity. To construct a practical philosophy on the idea of happiness would be, for Kant, to accept the contamination of morality by the pleasure principle. Moreover ( and this would be the second moment of Kant’s critique of the misuse of Glückseligkeit ), the concept of Glückseligkeit is related to external circumstances and thus to the happy accidents referred to by Glück. The subject is incapable of determining the conditions that make it possible for him to achieve happiness:

The problem of determining reliably and universally which action would advance the happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and hence. . . there can be no imperative with regard to it that would in the strict sense command to do what makes us happy because happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of the imagination.

( Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals )

Kant emphasizes the fundamentally empirical element of the definition of happiness:

To be happy ( glücklich zu sein ) is necessarily the demand of every rational but finite being and therefore an unavoidable determining ground of its faculty of desire. For satisfaction ( die Zufriedenheit ) with one’s whole existence is not, as it were, an original possession and a beatitude ( Seligkeit ), which would presuppose a consciousness of one’s independent self-sufficiency, but is instead a problem imposed upon him by his finite nature itself, because he is needy and this need is directed to the matter of his faculty of desire, that is, something related to a subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure underlying it by which is determined what he needs in order to be satisfied with his condition.

( Critique of Practical Reason, §3 )

Kant thus destroys the efforts made in Germany to differentiate Glückseligkeit and Glück. Happiness-Glückseligkeit suffers from the inconstancy of fortune ( Glück ). For Kant, happiness remains fundamentally within the sphere of nature. Human freedom has no part of it.

■ See Box 2.

2

Glückseligkeit in Hegel

Hegel takes up the Kantian criticism of eudaimonism:

To estimate rightly what we owe to Kant in the matter, we ought to set before our minds the form of practical philosophy and in particular of “moral philosophy” which prevailed in his time. It may be generally described as a system of Eudaemonism, which, when asked what man’s chief end ought to be, replied Happiness ( Glückseligkeit ). And by happiness Eudaemonism understood the satisfaction of the private appetites, wishes, and wants of the man: thus raising the contingent and particular into a principle for the will and its actualization. To this Eudaemonism, which was destitute of stability and consistency, and which left the “door and gate” wide open for every whim and caprice, Kant opposed the practical reason, and thus emphasized the need for a principle of will which should be universal and lay the same obligation on all.

( Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences I, addition to §54 )

In the Philosophical Propaedeutic from the years 1808 to 1811, Hegel had strongly emphasized the necessary terminological distinctions:

Well-being ( Wohlsein ), as the adaptation of the external to our internal being, we call Pleasure ( Vergnügen ). Happiness ( Glückseligkeit ) is not a mere individual pleasure but an enduring condition [which is] in part the actual Pleasure itself [and], in part also, the circumstances and means through which one always has, at will, the ability to create a state of comfort and pleasure for himself. The latter form is the pleasure of the mind. In Happiness, however, as in Pleasure, there lies the idea of good fortune [good luck] ( Glück ): that it is an accidental matter ( zufällig ) whether or not the external circumstances agree with the internal determinations of the desires. Blessedness ( Seligkeit ), on the contrary, consists in this: that no fortune [luck] pertains to it: that is, that in it the agreement of the external existence with the internal desire is not accidental. Blessedness can be predicated only of God.

The opposition to the principles of eudaimonism is especially virulent in Hegel’s early works. Thus, in the article “Faith and Knowledge” of 1802, Hegel even accuses Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte of unconscious eudaimonism:

What is the relation of this basic character to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte? So little do these philosophies step out of this basic character that, on the contrary, they have merely perfected it to the highest degree. Their conscious direction is flatly opposed to the principle of Eudaemonism. However, because they are nothing but this direction, their positive character is just this principle itself.

Nevertheless, one has the impression that, without rejecting the fundamental criticism of eudaimonism, Hegel later seeks to attenuate Kant’s critiques of the concept of happiness. In the Phenomenology of Spirit ( §602 ), he notes:

The moral consciousness cannot renounce happiness and drop this element out of its absolute purpose. . . . The harmony of morality and nature, or—seeing that nature is taken account of merely so far as consciousness finds out nature’s unity with it—the harmony of morality and happiness, is thought of as necessarily existing; it is postulated.

Hegel confers a certain dignity upon happiness-Glückseligkeit in this manner. The first version of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences explained that the idea of happiness conditioned a choice that must be made from among one’s various present desires: Happiness is the confused representation of the satisfaction of all drives, which, however, are either entirely or partly sacrificed to each other, preferred and presupposed. Hegel no longer rejects the superior form of the concept of happiness ( Glückseligkeit ) on the side of nature, as Kant had done. Similarly, in the additions to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right due to his student Gans, we read:

In happiness, thought already has some power over the natural force, of the drives, for it is not content with the instantaneous force of the drives, for it is not content with the instantaneous, but requires a whole of happiness ( eni Ganzes von Glück ).

In this passage, the coexistence of the terms Glückseligkeit and Glück nevertheless poses problems for the translator. In his translation of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, Robert Derathé translates the two terms respectively as félicité and bonheur. Here, Glückseligkeit does indeed refer to a superior form of happiness, a stable and spiritualized happiness, and Glück a temporally more limited happiness—good fortune. However, the Hegelian passage also refers to the whole of pre-Kantian thinking on Glückseligkeit, very visible especially in popular philosophy of the eighteenth century, and Aristotelian and Leibniz-Wolffian in inspiration ( see, for example, the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Christian Garve, one of the protagonists of popular philosophy ). The translation of Glückseligkeit by “happiness” in the Hegelian text would enable us to emphasize this intertextual link, but would to some extent smooth over the distinction between Glückseligkeit and Glück.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hegel, G.W.F. G.W.F. Hegel: Faith and Knowledge. Translated and edited by W. Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977.

   . Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

   . Hegel’s Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William Wallace with a foreword by Andy Blunden. Marxists Internet Archive, 2009. First published in 1830.

   . Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

   . Philosophical Propaedeutic, by GWF Hegel. Edited by Michael George and Andrew Vincent. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. First published in 1860.

IV. Political Happiness: The Anglo-American Path

The English translation of eudaimonia, “happiness,” does not have the spiritualist aura and connotation of Glückseligkeit. The dividing line between “happiness” and “bliss,” “happy” and “blessed” or “blissful” is clearly marked. “Happiness” has a much more immanent ring than the German Glückseligkeit; its etymological connection to chance and “happening” ( happenstance, happily ) remains strong. This no doubt explains why the English word is able, in the eighteenth century, to raise the political possibilites implicit in the Aristotelian understanding of happiness, notably in the Scottish school of the philosophy of moral sense. Thus, in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue ( 1725 ), Francis Hutcheson finds the touchstone of the morality of our actions in the statement “that Action is best, which accomplishes the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers” ( cf. also the expression of “happiness of mankind” ). This possibility is expressed especially clearly in the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In this text, happiness does not refer only to an individual good, but to a collective one as well, that is, in the proper sense of the term, a civil or political good. It concerns, for example, the right to determine the type of government suited to the city ( cf., on this point, D. Sternberger’s article “Das Menschenrecht, nach Glück zu streben” ).

In this sense, the term “happiness” approaches the idea of welfare ( in Ger. Wohlfahrt, “salvation,” “prosperity” ) of which the French Revolutionaries will give a rather exact translation when they speak of the salut public. “Welfare” ( and Wohlfahrt ) refers to the image of the traveler who, having escaped the obstacles and dangers of the journey, arrives in a safe harbor. Where “happiness” ( or Glück ) refers only to the sphere of immanence, “welfare” or Wohlfahrt often have a religious connotation, though it is barely perceptible today. We may note, in this regard, that the French translation of “welfare state” or Wohlfahrtstaat by État providence accentuates this aspect that has become attenuated in English and German; the Spanish for welfare state, Estado de bienestar, embeds the immanent aspect of the term by compounding bien, “well” or “good,” with the stative estar rather than existential ser ( see SPANISH ). Alongside Wohlfahrt, which refers to a public or private salvation, German also has a word reserved for the public sphere: das Gemeinwohl, the common good.

Christian Helmreich

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa contra gentiles. Edited by V. Bourke. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.

   . Summa theologica. Vol. 16. Translated by T. Gilby. London: Blackfriars, 1969.

Bien, Günther, ed. Die Frage nach dem Glück. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1978.

Blumenberg, Hans. “Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?” Studium Generale 6 ( 1953 ): 174–84.

Diderot, Denis. “Man.” In vol. 2 of Œuvres completes. Edited by J. Assézat. Paris: Garnier, 1875. First published in 1773–74.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Egmont. Edited by Frank G. Ryder. New York: Continuum, 1992.

Guyer, Paul. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Kant, Immanuel. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften ( Akademie Ausgabe ), 4:387–463. Edited by Paul Menzer. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. First published in 1785. Translation by Leo Rauch and Lieselotte Anderson: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant’s Foundations of Ethic. Baltimore: Agora, 2007.

   . Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Edited by O. Höffe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002. Translation and edited by Mary Gregory: Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Kraut, Richard. “Two Conceptions of Happiness.” Philosophical Review 88 ( 1979 ): 167–97.

Lännström, Anna. Loving the Fine: Virtue and Happiness in Aristotle’s Ethics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

Spaemann, Robert. Happiness and Benevolence. Translated by Jeremiah Alberg. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

Sternberger, D. D. “Das Menschenrecht, nach Glück zu streben.” In Gesammelte Schriften, 4:93–114. Frankfurt: Insel, 1990.

Warner, Richard. Freedom, Enjoyment and Happiness: An Essay on Moral Psychology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

White, Stephen A. Sovereign Virtue: Aristotle on the Relation Between Happiness and Prosperity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

GOD

ARABIC			Allah [الله]
BASQUE			jainko / jinko, Jaungoikoa
FINNISH			jumala
FRENCH			dieu
GERMAN			Gott
GREEK			theos [θεός]
HEBREW			Ël [אֵל], Èloah [אֱלוֹהַ], Èlohïm [אֱלֺהִים]
HUNGARIAN			isten
ITALIAN			dio
LATIN			deus
PORTUGUESE			deus
RUSSIAN			bog [бог]
SPANISH			dios

  ANALOGY, BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, DAIMÔN, DESTINY, DEVIL, DUENDE, OIKONOMIA, OMNITUDO REALITATIS, RELIGION, SVET, THEMIS, TO BE, WELT

All European languages contain words for designating the divine. This comes from the Judeo-Christian beliefs of the populations that speak them and also from the prebiblical foundations of the European region.

The presence of this vocabulary is not a trivial matter, since Christian missionaries did meet certain peoples for whom it was necessary to borrow a word—the Latin deus, for example, used as a proper name—for lack of a native equivalent.

I. European Languages Today

The French dieu comes from the Latin deus, as does the Spanish dios, the Portuguese deus, and the Italian dio.

Germanic languages use words like the German Gott and the English “god.” The etymology of these terms is unclear. Two Indo-European roots have been suggested. One means “to invoke,” the other “to pour, to offer a libation” ( see Gr. cheô [χέω] ). God would thus be whatever is invoked or that to which a libation is offered. There is a temptation to hear a link, etymologically unfounded however, between “god” and “good.” Whence certain euphemisms such as the exclamation “My goodness!” The vernacular French le bon Dieu thus sounds mildly pleonastic to the Germanic ear.

The word bog [бог], common to Slavic languages with slight variations, may be related to the Sanskrit bhaga, “lord.” The latter term may come from a root meaning “to distribute,” evoking the Greek daimôn [δαίμων] ( demon ) from daiomai ( δαίоμαι ) ( see DAIMÔN ).

The Hungarian isten is borrowed from the Persia ištán, identical to the Pehlevi yazdan ( cf. Rédei, “Über die Herkunft” ).

Jumala in Finnish may originally be a proper name, that of the supreme God, lord of the sky.

The Basque jainko/jinko designates both a god in general and the Christian God, also called Jaungoikoa, “the Lord on high.”

II. Classical Languages and Holy Writings

The Greek theos [θεός] exists already in Mycenean as teo. Its true etymology remains obscure ( see RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ). It may be from *thesos [*θεσоς], from tithêmi [τίθημι] ( cf. also RT: Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européenes; see THEMIS ). The Greeks offered various fictional etymologies related to different ways of representing the divine. The first of these etymologies derived theos from the verb tithêmi, “to place” ( Herodotus, II, 52, 1: “they placed [thentes ( θέντες )] all things” ), which suggests the idea of a setting-up of the world, rather than a creation ex nihilo. The verb theô [θέω], “to run,” was also suggested ( Plato, Cratylus, 397c; Cornutus, De die natali, 1 ). This is based on the identification of the gods with the celestial bodies, found in late Plato ( Timaeus, 40a–d ) and his school ( Epinomis, 984d ), and it plays with the fact that ether ( aithêr [αἰθήϱ] ), the clarity of the sky in which the gods reside, is itself interpreted as that which “is always running” ( aei-thein [ἀεὶ-θεῖν] ).

The Church Fathers ( cf. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought ) took up both hypotheses and added a third by way of the noun thea [θέα], “spectacle”—the gods having made the world visible ( Eusebius of Caesaria, Preparatio Evangelica, V, 3, 182D ).

The ancient form of the Latin deus is deiuos. The word, paradoxically, has nothing to do with the Greek theos but is in fact related to the Sanskrit devas. Ju-, in Ju-piter, designates the clarity of the sky, related to dies, “the day”; the sense survives in the expression sub Dio, “under the open sky.”

The association of the sky with divinity is old and widespread. If we believe Suetonius ( Life of Augustus, 97, 2 ), the Etruscan word for “god” was aesar, perhaps related to the Germanic word for iron ( Ger. Eisen ), the metal that falls to earth in meteorites ( cf. Lat. sidus and Gr. sidêros [σίδηϱоς] ). There is a late echo of this “celestial” etymology when Hölderlin claims to believe that God is “manifest like the sky [offenbar wie der Himmel]” ( “In lieblicher Bläue,” Sämmtliche Werke ).

The sacred books of Judaism, and then of Christianity, of course, speak often of God. In them the Greek translates Hebrew terms. Thus the word present in all Semitic languages, Ël [אֵל], which no doubt expressed the idea of power. There is also an elongated form, Èloah [אֱלוֹהַ]. As for Èlohim [אֱלֺהׅים], more frequent in Hebrew, the plural ending ( -īm ) probably indicates majesty.

Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, give God the name of Allah [الله]. He is already known as the supreme God and creator of everything before the advent of Islam ( Qur’an, XXIX, 61; XXXI, 25; XLIII, 87 ). The word is the contraction of al-ilā [اﻹ] which pairs a form of the common noun El with the article. The word thus oscillates between its linguistic status as a common noun and its usage, which makes it a proper name.

III. Modern Forms

The scholarly register of European languages has kept the Greek root theo- and uses it in several dozen technical terms, some more common than others.

Some of them are old, such as “theology.” Plato coins theologia [θεоλоγία] to refer to the way in which the gods should be spoken of, one more dignified than what is later called “mythology” ( Republic II, 379a ). The word “theology” keeps that meaning for a long time, as found in Pascal: “The poets made a hundred different theologies” ( Pensées, Br. 613 ). In Latin Augustine uses the word in his polemic with Varro to mean a philosophical doctrine concerning the divine, and he explains it as ratio sive sermo de divinitate, “reasoning or discourse concerning divinity” ( City of God, VIII, 1 ). For Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the word also refers to the essence of God in himself, in his tripartite nature, as opposed to the benevolent action of God in human history ( oikonomia [оἰϰονομία], see OIKONOMIA ). John Scotus Erigena translates Dionysius’s Greek into Latin in Divine names, I, 15 ( PL, v. 122, col. 463 b ): theologia becomes divinae essentiae investigatio; II, 30 ( col. 599b ): divinae naturae speculatio; then III, 29 ( col. 705b ): “[investigat] quid de una omnium causa, quae Deus est, pie debeat aestimari [it seeks what should piously be conjectured of the unique cause of everything, which is God].” The word appears in its modern sense in Abelard around 1120, as the title of his Theology, named after its opening words, Summi boni. It finally becomes established in Thomas Aquinas, as referring to a science.

“Theocracy,” most often understood today in the sense of a “clerical regime,” did not originally refer to the power of the human administrators of the sacred but rather the opposite: Flavius Josephus coined theokratia [θεоϰϱατία] in a defense of Judaism. He indicates by it the fact that the divine Law is what has power in Judaism, rather than any particular person.

Other technical uses of the root theo- are found in the sort of words whose construction gives them an air of antiquity but that are in fact the result of the modern thirst to come up with ancient titles. The most well-known case is that of “theodicy,” coined by Leibniz as the title of his book published in 1710, in which he aims to show the justice ( dikê [δίϰη] ) of God ( see THEMIS ).

Rémi Brague

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hölderlin, Friedrich. Essays and Letters. Edited by J. Adler and C. Louth. London: Penguin, 2009.

   . Essays and Letters on Theory. Translated and edited by T. Pfau. Albany: State University of New York, 1988.

   . Poems and Fragments. Translated by M. Hamburger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1967.

   . Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6. Edited by F. Beissner. Stuttgart: Cotta, “Kleiner Stuttgarter Ausgabe,” 1946–1962.

Prestige, George Leonard. God in Patristic Thought. London: Heinemann, 1936.

Rédei, Karoly. “Über die Herkunft des ungarischen Wortes isten, ‘Gott.’ ” Linguistica uraclica [Tallinn] 32 ( 1996 ): 238–88.

GOGO ( BASQUE )

ENGLISH			power of the soul, mind, spirit
FRENCH			puissance de l’âme, esprit
LATIN			anima, spiritus, mens

In Basque, gogo expresses all the processes of interiority and subjectivity. Despite the efforts of some writers to use the term to replace the neologisms arima and espiritu from the Latin tradition ( transpositions of the Latin anima and spiritus ) in the translations of Christian texts, gogo never takes on the sense of “soul” or “spirit.” It refers without exception to the power of the soul ( memory or will ) or to the psychological experience of the subject ( desire, wish, thought, consciousness ) rather than to the soul as such. While there are terms in Basque for “will” ( nahi ), “desire” ( gura ), “thought” ( asmo ) or “memory” ( or[h]oi ), they are in reality often associated and juxtaposed with gogo as a generic term. By way of several derivative terms belonging to its semantic field ( the RT: Diccionario retana de autoridades de la lengua vasca lists about 180 ), we may thus even express “sympathy,” “ennui,” and “disgust,” among other feelings.

I. Gogo as a Principle

Arima has always been the translation of the Christian concept of the soul ( anima ), notably when the latter has a theological sense. In Dechepare, for example, arima is understood in relation to the themes of the resurrection: “arima et gorpucetan or vertan pizturic” ( souls and bodies, all will be immediately resuscitated; RT: Linguae vasconum primitiae, 1.323 ); of creation: “arima creatu” ( ibid., 1.3 ); of salvation: “arimaren saluacera” ( ibid., 1.52: “to save the soul” ); or of the soul in pain: “arima gaixoa” ( ibid., 1.95: “poor soul” ). However, in the first half of the twentieth century, we find several attempts, part of a purist linguistic movement, to replace the term arima by gogo. We thus read in a dictionary from 1916: “Arima ( anima ), alma, voz erdérica sustituible por ‘gogo’ ” ( Arima [anima], “soul,” foreign term replaceable by gogo; López Mendizábal, Diccionario Castellano-Euskera ).

Altube argues against this tendency ( Erderismos ). The basis of his argument was the fear of a “lexicographical poverty,” since the substitution represented a linguistic step backward. In addition, gogo never expresses the concept of the soul in the theological sense, namely, the created soul, which may be resuscitated or saved, since it refers rather to soul understood as a power.

We might therefore think that gogo would be an equivalent for the Latin anima conceived in a more philosophical sense, like the collection of powers of memory, will, or understanding in Augustine, or again as an equivalent to Aquinas’s mens, which groups together intelligence, memory, and will. Pierre de Axular, however, along with all the other authors or translators of Christian texts in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, translates this division of faculties of the soul by using arima: “Arimac bere penac beçala, arimaren potenciec eta botheréc ere, cein baitira adimendua, vorondatea, eta memoria, içanen dituzte bere pena moldeac” (  Just as the soul has its pains, the powers and capacities of the soul, which are understanding, will, and memory, also have their own pains; Gero, 57:586 ).

Nor is gogo generally used to express this division of the soul, since we only find one occurrence of this use in Perez de Betolaça ( sixteenth century ): “Arimako potenziak dira iru: lelengoa, zenzuna. Bigarrena, gogoa. Irugarrena, borondatea” ( The powers of the soul are three: the first, understanding. The second, gogo. The third, will; Doctrina christiana en romance y basquenze ).

The same impossibility of replacing the calque of the Latin word with gogo is confronted by the term espiritu ( or izpiritu ), even though we may find a few texts from the seventeenth century in which gogo is substituted for espiritu in a remarkable way ( thus, in Oihenart: “Glori’ Aitari, Semeari / Eta Gogo Sainduari” [Glory to the Father, to the Son / and to the Holy Gogo] ). When Axular, for example, attempts to find equivalents for the Latin spiritus, he chooses, in his translation of Augustine, the term hats ( breath ): “in ultimo vitae spiritu . . . axquen hatsaren aurthiquitcean” ( in giving the last breath; Gero, chap. 15 ). The only context in which gogo seems truly close to what we mean by “spirit” or “mind” is that of the subjective sphere of affectivity and thought, of the “mental”: “orazione mentala, edo izpirituaz eta gogoz egiten dena” ( mental prayer, or that which is done by the spirit and by gogo; St. Francis of Sales, Philotea ). Similarly, Joanes Leizarraga used gogo to render what is meant in French by the term esprit: “perplexités d’esprit . . . gogo-arràguretaric” [perplexities of the spirit] ( Testamentu berria ).

Gogo is thus always relative to the subject, and its use cannot extend to something else. In this regard, it is not synonymous with the Greek nous, which, according to some, governed the processes of the universe. But we might then think that it is very close to the Latin animus, which evokes will, memory, thought, desire, intention, and mood ( RT: Thesaurus linguae latinae ). We should recall in this context what Leizarraga says of the term arima in the lexicon that follows his translation of the New Testament ( the first ever in Basque ): even though he uses arima several times in the theological sense, there is nonetheless a meaning of the term that is translatable for him by gogo, when the latter is synonymous with “affection”: “Arimá, hartzen da . . . Batzutan, gogoagatic edo affectioneagatic” ( Arimá is taken . . . sometimes for gogo or for affection; Testamentu berria, 1202 ). And indeed, the frequent association of gogo with another term referring to a precise feeling or a better defined faculty shows the entirely subjective character of gogo.

II. Gogo: Different Faculties

Although the powers of the soul are most often referred to by their Latin calques ( zenzuna, memoria, borondate [sense or understanding, memory, will] ), we have seen that Betolaça used gogo to translate “memory.” Axular, for his part, made gogo an equivalent for borondate, or “will.”

Hartcen dugu gogo, hartcen dugu vorondate, obra onac eguin behar ditugula . . . ordea han . . . beharrenean faltatcen dugu. Ceren hartcen dugun gogo eta vorondate hura, ezpaita fina, ezpaita cinezcoa eta ez deliberatuqui deliberatua; nahicundea baita eta ez nahia.

( We take from gogo, we take from will [borondate], that from which we do good works . . . and yet . . . we miss the most necessary. Because gogo and this will [borondate] which we have taken is not authentic, it is not likely and it is not deliberately deliberated; because it concerns bad will [“weak will,” nahikunde] and not will [nahi]. )

( Gero, chap. 3 )

In this text the three terms Axular used to refer to the will all appear: gogo, borondate ( or vorondate ), and nahi. Although borondate is almost always associated in Axular’s work with gogo, there are other places where borondate is equivalent to nahi: “gure nahia, eta vorondatea” ( Gero, chap. 15 ). Nahi in Basque means either “will” or “desire,” and the intertwining of these terms allows this author to associate gogo with desire: “Eta desira hautan, gueroco gogoan eta vorondatean, dembora guztia iragaiten çaicu” ( And in these desires, in gogo and the will of the future, all of our time passes; Gero, chap. 3 ).

A collection of Basque proverbs from 1596 provides us with another example of the usage of these terms. The author translates nay into Castilian by voluntad ( will ) or by deseo ( desire ): “Galdu çe eguic aldia, / ta idoro dayc naya. No pierdas la sazon/ y hallaras el desseo” ( Do not miss the opportunity, / and you will find the desire; Urquijo, Refranero vasco ).

However, even though gogo may be substituted for borondate, for nahi, for desir, or even for gura ( another Basque term closer to “desire” ), these terms are not entirely equivalent to it. This is why Dechepare could write: “gogo honez nahi dicit çure eguina laudatu” ( I want [nahi] to praise what you do in good gogo; RT: Linguae vasconum primitiae, 13 ). The equivalence between gogo and the other terms is not reciprocal: gogo may no doubt replace any other term in its vast conceptual field, but the reverse is not true. Gogo acts in effect as a power that collects together the semantic fields of the will, desire, and memory ( “[cócientcia( k )] orhoitcen çaitu, guztiac [falta] gogora eccartcen derauzquitçu” [( it, conscience ) reminds you of them ( your faults ), it brings them all to gogo; Axular, Gero, 45] ) and of thought ( “eguin çuen, Piramide batcuen eguiteco gogoeta, asmua eta pensua” [He had the gogoeta, the asmo and the thought of making several Pyramids; Gero, 1:26] ). Gogoeta, formed by adding the suffix -eta, means the action that gogo produces and can thus serve to translate the Latin cogitatio. Axular thus writes ( Gero, 36 ): “Gure gogoa ecin dagoque gogoeta gabe; ecin gauteque, cerbaitetan pensatu gabe” ( Our gogo cannot be without gogoeta; we cannot be without thinking about something ). Axular here nevertheless remains ambiguous: by preserving the multivocity of gogoeta, he keeps within the orbit of the Latin cogitatio, but by relating the term to thought alone, he comes close to the reduction that has just been made by Descartes.

Isabel Balza

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Altube, Seber. Erderismos. Euskera 10, no. 1–4 ( 1929 ).

Axular [Pedro Agerre]. Gero. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia ( Royal Academy of the Basque Language ), 1988. First published in 1643. Translation into Spanish by Luis Villasante: Gero. Barcelona: Flors, 1964.

Betolaça, Juan Pérez de. Doctrina Christiana y Basquence, hecha por mandado de D. Pedro Manso, obispo de Calahorra. Bilbao: 1596. Republished by J. A. Arana Martija as “Betolazaren ‘Doctrina Christiana’ .” Euskera 31, no. 1 ( 1986 ): 505–26.

Francis of Sales, Saint. Philotea. Translated into Basque by Joanes Haraneder. Tolosa: 1749. Originally published as Introduction à la vie devoté. Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1609. Translation: Introduction to the Devout Life. New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 2002.

Leizarraga, Joanes. Testamentu berria. In Baskische Bücher von 1571 ( Neues Testament, Kalender und ABC ), edited by T. Linschmann and H. Schuchardt. Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1900.

López Mendizábal, Isaac. Diccionario Castellano-Euskera. Tolosa: 1916.

Oihenart, Arnauld de. Atsotizac Refravac [Proverbs]. In Gastroa Nevrthizetan. Paris: 1657.

Urquijo e Ibarra, Julio de, ed. Refranero vasco: Los refranes y sentencias de 1596. San Sebastián, Sp.: Auñamendi, 1967.

GOOD / EVIL

This dichotomy, fundamental in the fields of ethics and moral inquiry, flows from the Latin: bonum and malum are the neuter nominalization of the adjectives bonus ( good, well behaved ) and malus ( bad, evil ). The etymology of both Latin adjectives, which combine a physical and an ethical sense, is uncertain.

1. On the relationship between diverse kinds of excellence, nobility, courage, and moral quality, see VIRTÙ, Box 1 ); cf. VIRTUE. On the particularly sensitive relationship in Greek between the good or inner kindness and outward beauty, see BEAUTY, Box 1; cf. DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, PHÉNOMÈNE. On the relationship between the true and the good—or more precisely, the “better,” which is fundamental to relativism, see TRUTH, Box 2.

2. The Latinate “good/evil” dichotomy quickly proves unable to render all the nuances of the corresponding Germanic terminological complex, with which it does not coincide. In French, juxtaposing bien/mal and bon/mauvais or bon/méchant, as is commonly done in translating Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, will not suffice to exhaust the more complex play of oppositions in German: Gut/Böse, Wohl/Übel, ( Weh )-Gut/Schlecht.

3. Another constellation that is difficult to translate appears in English in the opposition between “right” and “just,” which is almost impossible to render in French, and in the relationship between each of these two terms and “good”: see RIGHT/JUST/GOOD; cf. FAIR.

4. On the Russian diglossia dobro/blago, see RUSSIAN.

  DUTY, HAPPINESS, MORALS, VALUE

GOÛT

ENGLISH			taste
GERMAN			Geschmack
ITALIAN			gusto
LATIN			gustus
SPANISH			gusto

  AESTHETICS, ARGUTEZZA, BEAUTY, CLASSIC, GENIUS, INGENIUM, MANIERA, SENSE, STANDARD, VALUE

Gusto in Italian and Spanish, goût in French, Geschmack in German, and “taste” in English all have a twofold sense, one gustatory and one aesthetic. European languages borrowed the word for referring to what we now call aesthetic judgment from the vocabulary of the five senses. Though it is important, this semantic ambiguity is not the real source of the constant difficulties presented by the concept of taste in the field of aesthetics. These come rather from specific misunderstandings arising out of the division between aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and ancient theories of art. Related to giudizio, the word gusto as used by Italians in the Renaissance refers to sharpness of judgment, the capacity for discernment, the specific disposition of an artist. It may have an ethical, psychological, even a political meaning. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gusto in Spanish and goût in French retain the senses of sharpness and discernment. Though they are increasingly used in the sense of aesthetic judgment over the course of the seventeenth century, especially in France, their usage does not display a normative character at the start. It is only in the eighteenth century that goût is assimilated to bon goût, at the same time as it takes on a more and more subjective sense, notably under the influence of new philosophical trends. The conceptual development of taste in English-language philosophies of aesthetic experience gives a new direction to thinking about taste, while still preserving for the term the range of meanings attached to gusto and goût.

The real break with the tradition of the theory of art takes place with the Kantian definition of taste, which leads to denying judgments concerning taste any possible objectivity. The loss of this minimal objectivity of judgments of taste, proper to aesthetic intersubjectivity as conceived in the classical period, paved the way for a henceforth dominant conception of taste according to which there is no possible correlation between taste as a faculty of evaluation and the aesthetic properties of the work of art ( this last understood in the philosophically realist sense given to the term “property,” that is, a given that exists independently of consciousness ). Still, the question raised by the multivocity of the concept as the tradition transmits it to us, that of the plurality of its functions and its finalities, remains untouched. The same goes for the question of the translatability of what was really thought in these conceptions, which amply exceed the relation to art.

I. The Continent of Taste before the Age of Aesthetics

Gusto in Italian and in Spanish, like goût in French, derives from the Latin gustus, which means the fact of tasting, the taste of a thing, and the tasting sample ( the Indo-European root, which we find in the Greek geuomai [γεύομαι], means “to feel,” “to taste,” “to appreciate, to like” [RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine] ). Gustus is in competition with sapor, “savor, taste,” and “sense of taste,” physical and moral; sapere, which means “to have taste,” with regard to savory things, is also said of people of taste, discernment, relating the qualities of the palate to those of the mind, whence sapientia, “wisdom” ( Cicero, De finibus, 2.24: “non sequitur ut cui cor sapiat, ei non sapiat palatus” [having taste with the mind does not entail lacking taste with the palate]; similarly, and more generally, sentio and sensus link the senses and judgment; see SENSE ).

Though the Italian definition of gusto in terms of judgment does not really retain the idea of savor, the French and Spanish definitions do. In his RT: Thresor de la langue française tant ancienne que moderne, published in 1606, Jean Nicod, who always explains the meaning of each French word by its corresponding Latin, thus defines taste as intellectus saporum, which he himself translates by “judgment of flavors.” We also find this sense of flavor present in the definition Baltasar Gracián gives of good taste: “un buen gusto sazona toda la vida” ( a good taste adds spice to life ).

A. Gusto as habitus, disposition and judgment in Italian theories

The word gusto early on acquired a metaphorical sense very distant from its gustatory origins: it indicates moods, desires, and drives. It may express, as in Dante, a “bold desire” ( ardito gusto ) ( Paradise, 32.v.122 ) or a “disdainful indignation” ( disdegnoso gusto ) ( Inferno, 13.v.70 ). However, the importance of gusto, its influence and its diffusion in European languages, appear in regard to problems about the experience of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, when Vasari says that Michelangelo had judgment and taste in everything: giudizio e gusto in tutte cose ( Le Vite,* VII ), the word gusto does not refer to a perceptual receptivity; it indicates, of course, an ability to discern properly artistic qualities, the acuity of the “judgment of the eyes,” as in Leonardo da Vinci, but equally and sometimes exclusively it means the dispositions proper, the idiosyncracy inherent to an individual ( an artist or an art-lover ).

This idiosyncracy is often less the mark of artistic sensibility than an expression of temperament, as understood by the then very widespread theory of temperaments, of the specific complezione of the personality of an artist. In the relations between masters and students, the first problem is thus to find affinities, a harmony between each person’s taste and temperament, so that the teaching may be as productive as possible. This is why Antonio Francesco Doni insists in his treatise, regarding the art of drapery, that the disciple should take care in choosing his master:

Questi panni sono tutta gratia e maniera che s’acquista per studiare una materia fatta d’altro maestro che piu t’é ito a gusto che alcuno altro.

( These draperies are all grace and style [maniera], which one acquires by studying a matter created by a master who is better suited to your taste than any other. )

( Il Disegno )

What is decisive here is not gusto as a capacity of judgment, but rather the disposition or temperament as the expression of a unique individuality, insofar as these determine the artist’s maniera, or his style. Taste is not just the principle of identity of a maniera or an artist: it can also refer to a group, an artistic school, even a nation ( for Vasari, for example, the Germans have a gusto gotico, which is essentially suited to their dispositions and temperament ).

Gusto also takes the meaning of a certain faculty of judging and evaluating aesthetic or artistic qualities and tends progressively to replace giudizio, which is often reduced to an act of perception, a way of discerning and distinguishing that calls upon both sensibility and intellect. In the sixteenth century, a text by Paolo Pino shows the orientation of gusto in relation to giudizio, despite their obvious multivocity:

Sono varii li giudicii umani, diverse le complessioni, abbiamo medesmamente l’uno dall’altro estratto l’intelletto nel gusto, la qual differenzia causa che non a tutti aggradano equalmente le cose.

( The judgments of men are varied and their temperaments different, we have in the same way extracted one from the other the intellect from taste, and this difference is why things do not please everyone in the same way. )

( Dialogo di pittura; trans. M. Pardo )

In the seventeenth century, a theorist as careful as Bellori in fixing the clarity and precision of artistic concepts cites Nicolas Poussin’s definition of painting ( written in Italian ) with deference. Yet Poussin considers gusto to be a synonym for maniera and stile ( a relatively new word at the time ):

Lo stile è una maniera particolare ed industria di dipingere e disegnare nata dal particolare genio di ciascuno nell’applicazione e nell’uso dell’idea, il quale stile, maniera o gusto si tienne dalla parte della natura e dell’ingegno.

( Style is an individual manner and ingenuity in painting and drawing born of a genius which is the individual’s alone, in the application and the use of the idea; this style, manner, or taste, comes from nature and the mind. )

( “Osservazioni di Nicolo Pussino,” in Bellori, Le Vite; trans. A. Sedgwick Wohl )

A different definition by Filippo Baldinucci can in a sense be said to complete this one, by making a fundamental determination, one that in fact dominates artistic activity until the beginning of the nineteenth century: gusto is the exercise of judgment in the adequate application of the rules of art:

Gusto e Buon gusto, si applicano anche alle opere d’arte, nelle quali l’autore abbia seguite le regole del bello, ed abbiano grazia, eleganza, garbo, e simile.

( Taste and good taste also apply to works of art, those in which the author has followed the rules of the beautiful and which possess grace, elegance, delicacy, and other similar things. )

( Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del disegno )

In this alliance with systems of rules for the arts, gusto can resolve the tension that existed between its original, idiosyncratic, and individual sense, and the demand for universality proper to art and the classical theory of art.

B. Predominance and exemplarity of gusto: Baltasar Gracián

In Spanish in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gusto rarely implies a judgment of taste in the properly aesthetic or artistic sense. Indeed, it appears rather more like a mode of implicit evaluation, a value judgment that is exercised in well-determined circumstances, namely in the world of the court and the political sphere. It refers to the idea of skill, the faculty of adapting oneself with ingenuity to the behavior of others, and knowing how to extract the greatest profit from it. In Baltasar Gracián, who develops the most precise theory of taste, gusto does not have the creative fertility of ingenio ( spirit ) or genio ( genius ), both of which, however, imply el ejercicio y cultura del gusto ( the exercise and cultivation of taste ) ( Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio ). When it is exclusively a capacity and a mode of judgment, gusto is not distinct from genio. However, it is distinguished from it insofar as gusto is exercised over a period of long maturation; it is the fruit of the study of books, works, and men, even though it reveals itself in an immediate mode. Like ingenio, gusto is an act that can take place only at the right moment, when the mind is truly absorbed and when matters have arrived at their highest degree of perfection. Whence the difficulty in clearly defining gusto, which, like the subtlety of agudeza and the dazzling inventiveness of ingenio, can capture the characteristic feature within a plurality of relations and sensible qualities, thus attesting to the superiority of someone who is capable of such just and perspicacious judgment. If ingenio is the art of spiritual invention, gusto is the most perfect acuity in the art of discernment. In this sense, true gusto obeys a teleology of perfecting itself as buen gusto, as correct evaluation. Ingenio, agudeza, and gusto have a common trait: they occur in a unique, privileged mind, one in which the genio reaches its peak of excellence and ephemeral glory, in conformity, in this aspect, with the vision of the world of many Jesuit theorists. Insofar as it is manifest in rare moments of the life of the mind, gusto is inaccessible to youth ( too uneducated ) and impossible in old age ( too feeble ). It is a form of knowledge ( gustar implies saber, to know ). As to its origins, Gracián writes, “Si la admiracion es hija de la ignorancia, también es madre del gusto” ( If admiration is the daughter of ignorance, it is also the mother of taste ) ( El Criticón ). This admiration, however, which also applies to the circumstances of life, to the most exceptional qualities of things, and to art, requires a superior form of discernment, necessary for the wise man to carry out his task, such that taste in the end encompasses the whole of life, whether practical or contemplative.

With Gracián, the denial of any possible universality to taste appears for the first time with striking clarity, couched in multiple repetitions of the claim that it is a rare capacity. Thus in the Oráculo manual ( Pocket Oracle ), maxim 28: “How truly wise the man who was unhappy at the thought he might please the masses! An excess of applause from the vulgar never satisfies the discreet”; or maxim 39: “Recognize things at their peak, at their best, and know how to take advantage of them. . . . Not everyone can, and not all those who can know how to” ( trans. J. Robbins ). This power of selection ( elección ), this faculty of judging in both moral and aesthetic matters, goes hand in hand with ingenio, since mind and taste are “twin brothers.” Only buen gusto is able to grasp the imperceptible grace of something, a being or a work, all the nuances of this despejo, which Amelot de la Houssaie translates into French as the je ne sais quoi, and which represents the vida de toda perfección ( the life of all perfection ). Only buen gusto can discern in the despejo the superior quality that is the perfection of perfection without which all beauty is dead. Thus,

Es eminencia de buen gusto gozar de cada cosa en su complemento.

( It’s the height of good taste to enjoy things at their most perfect. )

( Oráculo manual, §39; trans. J. Robbins )

The idea that taste as specific judgment is known by its extreme rarity, that is to say, by a faculty that only a few can exercise adequately, is thus radicalized. It appears in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in France, in Germany with Schopenhauer, who is inspired by de Houssaie’s translation for his own translation of Gracián into German, and, more indirectly, in Nietzsche.

C. Taste and rules

The French meaning of goût borrows relatively little from the dominant Italian or Spanish models. One of the characteristics of the word and its uses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is to imply, openly or tacitly, a denial of the logical categories inherited by Scholasticism, and to oppose what was then called “the language of pedants.” We do not find this desire for autonomy, and sometimes provocation, in Italian or Spanish texts. Narrowly related to tact, fine discernment, the spirit of opportunity, French goût is considered more in terms of relations, cleverly mastered situations, or the act of judgment than in terms of judgment of idiosyncratic properties or dispositions as in Italy. The ancient sense of enjoyment and fine discernment takes on a new value in Bossuet, especially when he cites the phrase of the dying Grand Condé: “‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we shall see God as he is, face to face.’ He repeated in Latin, with marvelous taste, these great words” ( Oraison funèbre du Grand Condé, 1687 ). The word expresses the idea of an extraordinary pleasure, an exceptional acuity of mind, that is a mixture of sympathy in the most affective sense and clairvoyant intelligence.

■ See Box 1.

1

La Rochefoucauld’s definition of taste

For La Rochefoucauld, taste refers to a faculty of “judging soundly,” which comes close to wit without really being assimilated to it. Like Dominique Bouhours, Antoine Gombauld Chevalier de Méré, and many others among his contemporaries, La Rochefoucauld makes taste a specific form of judgment that does not consist in a purely intellectual act, but that is not reducible to affects either, nor, most importantly, to a feeling like aesthetic pleasure, in the sense used in the eighteenth century. More precise than Pascal’s esprit de finesse, it is central in the relations to others or toward artworks, even though the logic constituting this mode of evaluation cannot be analyzed except by a description.

La Rochefoucauld’s definition of taste is in a way paradigmatic:

This term “taste” has many meanings, and it is easy to make mistakes with it. There is a difference between the taste which carries us towards things and the taste which makes us know and discern their qualities by applying rules to them: one may like comedy without having taste which is fine and delicate enough to judge it well, and one may have taste which is good enough to judge comedy well without liking it.

( “Du goût,” in Maximes et Réflexions diverses, §10; trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère )

If it is possible to “judge comedy well without liking it,” this is because there is a faculty of evaluation that can distinguish the artistic or aesthetic qualities of a work with greater clarity than that of most people. That presupposes then that there are unique and exceptional qualities inherent in works and an especially clear-sighted power of evaluation that we call taste.

It is precisely this conception of an adjudicating activity whose basis seems to lack any justification that will later become the object of all the misunderstandings and ambiguities surrounding the use of the term “taste.” This remark holds true as well for the notion of a rule ( the taste that cleaves to the rules described by La Rochefoucauld ), indissociable from the power of “good judgment.” The rule was never, for the theorists of the seventeenth century, a rigid and more or less arbitrary norm imposed by groups of dominant art-lovers, but rather an essential mediation in relation to a work of art. It is the exemplification of the exceptional achievement of a work ( that of a Raphael or a Carracci ), to which it is not appropriate to conform, strictly speaking, but which is to be imitated in an act that is itself freely creative. If the translation of the notions of taste and rules rested on so many misunderstandings, it is because aesthetic criticism, especially since Lessing, deliberately referred to the more normative sense that was given to the terms “taste” and “rules” in the eighteenth century by Charles Batteux and, above all, Voltaire.

Taste in the eighteenth century in France takes two different shapes. One tends to affirm the rarity of a faculty that is truly able to discern the unique properties of a work of art. The other is part of the birth of aesthetics, and aims to respond to specifically philosophical demands. In cultivated circles, to write about, interpret, and evaluate a painting or a sculpture requires something other than the general faculty of judgment: above all, “an exquisite taste” is required, that is an aptitude for grasping the rarest nuances and the most delicate aesthetic properties that escape the perception of most viewers.

There are a thousand men of good sense for one man of taste, and a thousand people of taste for one of exquisite taste.

( Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb,” trans. Margaret Jourdain )

This belief, though foreign to any elitism in the nineteenth-century sense, certainly runs the risk of being inconsistent with a line of thought primarily concerned with determining the conditions of a universal judgment. The question of the universality of aesthetic judgment tends indeed to arise with the influence of English theorists. Voltaire attempted to resolve this inconsistency in a way that, while not always original, was considerably influential. The importance of his writings on the subject is that they take advantage of the multivocity of goût, appealing sometimes to the meaning inherited from the seventeenth century, and sometimes giving the concept an explicitly normative inflection. What distinguishes him from the authors of the previous century is that he defines taste as a necessary reference to the rules of classicism. The rule, which was productive insofar as it had the value of an example, becomes a norm, which is a rule that is henceforth fixed, unchangeable and more or less incontestable. Thus, he writes, “[T]here was no longer any taste in Italy” ( The Age of Louis XIV ). The phrase means that Italian artists no longer conformed to the system of rules proper to the classical ideal, and that they produced extravagant works like those of Bernini and Borromini. Taste is based less on an aesthetic subjectivity than a sort of legislation that is immanent to the works produced, as in this phrase: “The real reason is that, among people who cultivate the fine arts, many years are required to purify language and taste” ( ibid. ). “Taste” here refers to a sort of ideality in the union of the rules applied correctly and the genius of the artist. Hence, for example, regarding Addison, “Addison’s words breathe taste” ( ibid. ), that is, they are works in which we see the alliance of good sense, imagination, and respect for the rules. This is why Voltaire considers Addison to be a “perfected Rabelais,” that is, like a Rabelais who had shown taste. His conception of taste, unlike that of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos or Diderot, constitutes a final movement of resistance against English influence insofar as, for him, the power of aesthetic judgment precisely does not derive from sentiment or the intellect: what is most important is the correct fit between the creative act and the system of rules of the theory of classical art. And it is, above all, this somewhat dogmatic position that was widely spread throughout Europe, much more so than the writings of Charles Batteux or Rousseau, to the point where French taste became synonymous with normativity and arbitrary objectivism about aesthetic criteria. This usage and meaning of the word have survived down to the present as a counterexample and a concept to be avoided in any aesthetic theory. They are not, however, especially representative of the thought of the eighteenth century, since we find very different conceptions in Du Bos, the abbé Trublet, Montesquieu, and Batteux. Thus, the abbé Trublet gives an active role to the sentiment of beauty only to those who are genuinely cultivated:

Since arguments require instruction, it appears that the appreciation of the beautiful belongs in the first instance to people of cultivated taste; the dilemma is resolved in their favor.

( Essays upon Several Subjects of Literature and Morality )

However, the original claim in his book is that the more taste, that is, cultivated taste, is developed, the more feeling and reason are destined to blend with one another.

This is the final attempt to surmount the growing antinomy between aesthetic feeling and rational thought in the Enlightenment. But Rousseau prevents this possible synthesis for a long time, by effecting a decisive reversal. The word “taste” now becomes an indefinable notion:

Of all the natural gifts Taste is the one which is felt the most and explained the least; it would not be what it is, if we could define it: for it judges objects on which judgment has no purchase, and serves, so to speak, as glasses for reason.

( “Goût” in Dictionnaire de musique )

In reality, goût is an instinct for Rousseau ( as it is for Leibniz ), and the feeling of the beautiful cannot be a judgment in the sense of an expression relating concepts and empirical data. The judgment of taste is thus not truly a judgment, as understood in logical thought—that is, a statement that may lead to an objective proposition—just as an evaluative proposition for Frege, Wittenstein, and logicians cannot be a true proposition, since its truth-value cannot be determined. Inexpressible sentiment and mental activity irreducible to any objectification—this is how taste, as conceived by Rousseau, appears in the Kantian problem of reflective judgment and in contemporary aesthetics.

II. The Properly Aesthetic Genesis of “Taste”

The aesthetic construction of the English “taste” plays a central role in the eighteenth century, as we are reminded by the author of the entry “Taste” in A Companion to Aesthetics ( Cooper 1992 ). The English term inherits a considerable history that began, as we have seen, in the Renaissance. According to the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, in conformity with Italian and French traditions, “taste” is the instrument of a reflection on the perfection of art in England:

Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The gusto grande of the Italians, the beau idéal of the French, and the great style, genius, and taste among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing.

( “The Great Leading Principles of the Grand Style . . . ,” Third Discourse in Discourses )

“Taste” is thus part of the European history of the concept. But it is in England that this history is reworked by philosophers and thenceforth is part of a context that is proper to the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

The usage of “taste” makes it at first a term that rationalizes social distinctions. The word refers to a rule and justification for developing a discourse on civilization, the mores whose danger is always a division between civilized and barbarous tastes. When good taste is exercised, pleasure develops in society. “Taste” is here very close to “relish,” or “delectation.” But the meaning of the term shifts, coming to refer also to an operation of the subject that begins in feeling. The word thus means aesthetic experience as, and the experience of, contemplation, which presumes both a theory of perception and of evaluation. The fragility and the ambiguities of this concept must then be emphasized, as it attempts to delineate a unique mode of judgment while at the same time recognizing that which is immanent in the emotions.

“Taste” thus appears in the first instance as a prescriptive concept in which art and society are intertwined. The rules of taste do not have an absolute value, but are rather aimed at raising individuals up to a state of being civilized. Taste becomes noticed as part of polite society with Addison and Steele’s Spectator, which, from 1711 to 1714, offers chronicles of customs, arts, and social behaviors in order to observe and spread the rules of life and British politeness of gentlemen and their culture. The intent is “[t]o discover, how we may, to best Advantage, form within our-selves what in the polite World is call’d a Relish, or Good TASTE,” writes Shaftesbury in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Making oneself a subject of taste has as a necessary correlate the correction and daily adjustments that politeness requires as a set of collective rules of propriety that yield the improvement of society.

Beyond its application to the production of pleasure in society, the word “taste” is associated with the presence in humans of a natural sense that functions as an immediate possible evaluation. Taste can thus be compared with having a gift or a talent whose innate or acquired nature is debated. Etymologically, “taste” comes from the Latin tangere; it is initially a matter of touching, tact, in the proper and the figurative senses. It evokes a delicate and spontaneous appreciation. The use of “taste” presupposes reflection about the notion of sense, understood as sensory device. In 1759 Alexander Gerard published “An Essay on Taste,” which received the prize given by the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts for the best essay on the subject. According to the essay, which consists of a summary of different theses on taste being discussed in Scotland at the time, taste structures the perception of “works of art and genius” and may be related to the principles by which the mind receives pleasure or pain. These principles are the internal senses: those of novelty, grandeur or sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue. The union of the internal senses shapes and perfects taste insofar as it makes it possible to excite the most exquisite pleasures. To discover the deepest qualities of taste, the internal senses are aided by judgment, the faculty that distinguishes different things, separates truth and falsehood, compares objects and their qualities. Judgment introduces the possibility of not only perceiving but also of assessing the meaning of a work. It operates after the powerful exercise of feelings by the internal senses, which allow one to experience pleasure or displeasure; judgment then brings to taste the depth of penetration. “Taste” now refers to a compound operation, both perceptual and intellectual, immediate and mediated, perceptive and evaluative. Hume, in Of the Standard of Taste, also takes account of the composite character of taste. “Taste” cannot be defined only by the internal correctness of sentiments, even if the philosopher must accept the variety of tastes, proof of the vital and ordinary attraction that all individuals have for their own sentiments. At the same time, taste presumes agreement, a process of evaluation that assesses the relations of works to beauty. The delicacy of taste by which the mind refines emotions makes correct expressions of artistic judgment possible. This aesthetic capacity requires an exercise by which the real qualities of a work are identified. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, offers a similar figure of the “man of taste” who distinguishes slight, often imperceptible differences of beauty or ugliness.

The tension expressed by “taste” between perception and evaluation continues to enrich aesthetic reflection. The work of the English art critic Clive Bell, Art ( 1914 ), for instance, interestingly extends the construction of aesthetic emotion in terms of “sense” and “taste” by suggesting a return to personal experience in art on the basis of an “aesthetic emotion” that is not reducible to a simple subjective representation of the contemplated object. On the side of the value of art, Malcolm Budd in Values of Art ( 1995 ), focusing on the determination of the artistic value of a work, posits the experience of the work of art as an act of intelligence and discusses Hume’s standard of taste.

III. Taste Put to the Test of Philosophical Reflection: From Transcendental Subjectivity to Taste as a Method of Determining Value

A. The transcendental revolution: Geschmack as reflective judgment

Though English philosophers draw attention to the productivity and autonomy of aesthetic subjectivity, they nevertheless remain faithful to traditional conceptions of taste as a faculty of discernment of a certain type. The real break with all previous theories of taste comes with Kant’s critical philosophy, which attempts to destroy the idea dear to Baumgarten of a cognitive aesthetics, founded on rational and normative principles.

It is in Baumgarten’s Metaphysica and Aesthetica that we find one of the first properly philosophical definitions of taste, insofar as it attempts to renew the problem of relations between the sensible and the intelligible. This means that the concept does indeed now fall within the specific domain of philosophy. Baumgarten, however, who writes and thinks in Latin, is keen to preserve the rhetorical and humanist heritage by reconciling it with the demands of Leibnizian metaphysics, here represented especially by Wolff’s school. For Baumgarten, gustus is, like the other faculties, a form of knowledge ( cognitio inferior ), a sensible experience of reality:

Gustus significatu latiori de sensualibus, i.e. quae sentiuntur, est judicium sensuum.

( In the widest sense, taste in the domain of the sensible, that is, what is felt, is the judgment of the senses. )

( Metaphysica, §608 )

It is thanks to this sensory organ that the object of judgment is felt. Gustus is thus determined as a sensible faculty of judgment, but one that presupposes some training to reach full maturity ( maturitas ), a bit as in Gracián: “Talis gustus est sapor non publicus ( purior, eruditus )” ( The taste that corresponds is an uncommon flavor [purer and more cultivated] ) ( ibid. ). Insofar as this faculty is effectively cognitive, since it accounts for certain experiences of reality, it may commit errors of judgment, as in the case of perceptual illusions. It is thus central as a facultas diiudicandi, as a faculty of judging aesthetically.

Kant’s aesthetic thought rests in part on the rejection of this perspective, which still makes it possible to intellectualize the forms of sensory judgments, or rather, of judgments, which would imply both a sort of virtual intelligibility and a minimal objectivity. The original meaning of Geschmack, as the word is used beginning with the Critique of Pure Reason, in the famous note ( to §1 ) on the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” is based on a radical rejection of gustus as conceived by Baumgarten:

The Germans are the only ones who now employ the word “aesthetics” to designate that which others call the critique of taste. The ground for this is a failed hope, held by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, of bringing the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason, and elevating its rules to a science. But this effort is futile. For the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as their most prominent sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as determinate a priori rules according to which our judgment of taste must be directed; rather the latter constitutes the genuine touchstone of the correctness of the former.

( trans. Guyer and Wood, 173 )

This note explicitly condemns the project of the Aesthetica, and no further allusion is made to it, even in the third Critique, where its claims are indirectly refuted. Indeed, in the Critique of Judgement ( 1.1 ), the first definition of taste makes it a faculty of judgment that deals less with an object than with a mode of representation:

Geschmack ist das Beurteilungsvermögen eines Gegenstandes oder einer Vorstellungsart durch ein Wohlgefallen oder Missgefallen ohne alles Interesse. Der Gegenstand eines solchen Wohlgefallens heisst schön.

( Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful. )

( “Analytic of the Beautiful,” §5; trans. J. C. Meredith )

Kant’s desire to conform above all to his project of a transcendental philosophy is clear from this first definition on. For his judgment of taste does not deal with the object as such, nor with its properties, nor with a rule of art, nor even with the aesthetic sensation that the object incites, but with the mode of representation born from the sensation. And this mode of representation in its turn causes a specific sentiment that is none other than the sentiment of pleasure conceived of as the Bestimmungsgrund ( basis ) of the aesthetic experience. Insofar as it is manifested by a sentiment, taste is a form of reflective judgment referring to the structures of aesthetic subjectivity as it is understood from within the project of a transcendental philosophy. This is why the only predicate Kant allows definitively for the beautiful is the feeling of pleasure. One of the great difficulties encountered in making judgments of taste as described in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” is to want to reconcile the self-referential character of taste with the requirement of universal communicability, subjectively grounded—that is, with the claim to subjective universality.

B. Geschmack on trial

If Hegel gives a relatively restricted role to the problem of taste in his Lectures on Aesthetics, it is because he disqualifies the latter as a criterion for the understanding of a work of art. As a manifestation of aesthetic subjectivity, taste is for him an essential obstacle to the genuinely philosophical analysis of art. A large swathe of aesthetic thought in the twentieth century ( especially that of Lukács and Adorno ) is influenced by this condemnation, and actively embraces its theoretical consequences. Taste henceforth ceased to be a constitutive element of interpretation; it is no longer anything more than a parasitic form of subjectivism.

In Hegel, Geschmack is used without any reference to the problem of reflective judgment that exercised Kant. When he analyzes it, it is exclusively in a polemical way, to attack eighteenth-century theories of art:

Another kind of interest consisted not in the express aim of producing genuine works of art directly but in the intention of developing through such theories a judgement on works of art, in short, of developing taste. As examples, Home’s Elements of Criticism, the works of Batteux, and Ramler’s Einleitung in die schönen Wissenschaften were books much read in their day. Taste in this sense concerns the arrangement and treatment, the aptness and perfection of what belongs to the external appearance of a work of art ( Geschmack in diesem Sinne betrifft die Anordnung und Behandlung, das Schickliche und Ausgebildete dessen, was zur äusseren Erscheinung eines Kunstwerks gehört ). Moreover they drew into the principles of taste views which were taken from the old psychology and had been derived from empirical observations of mental capacities and activities, passions and their probable intensification, sequence, etc. But it remains ever the case that every man apprehends works of art or characters, actions, and events according to the measure of his insight and his feelings; and since the development of taste only touched on what was external and meagre, and besides took its prescriptions likewise from only a narrow range of works of art and a limited training of the intellect and the feelings, its scope was unsatisfactory and incapable of grasping the inner [meaning] and truth [of art] and sharpening the eye for detecting these things.

( Introduction to Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 1:27 )

The concept of taste thus no longer has anything but a negative meaning, for the purpose of showing the weakness of earlier theories; it refers more to frankly erroneous conceptions than to a precise function. Art lovers and connoisseurs have, according to Hegel, been focusing on technical details, secondary and contingent understandings. This excessive attention to the “external manifestation” of a work of art is the sign, according to Hegel, of an aesthetics that gives a dominant role to sensation, sensory perception, and even sentiment. Taste thus becomes synonymous with immediate sensation, subjectivity that is exclusively attached to the least essential aspects of a work of art. It has not only lost all critical fertility but also turns out to be a secondary activity, screening off the deeper meaning of art, since it refers to the perceptible as such, that is, to what is inadequate for spirit. This contrast between “taste” as sensible knowledge relying on rules external to its object, and “spirit” as true knowledge of art may be surprising, precisely because it remains a pure opposition, ending in a condemnation and a radical rejection of taste. It is thus not as a “moment” that taste is eliminated, but as a false path, noxious and contrary to spirit as interiority. The difficulty of determining a precise meaning, some kind of use for taste comes from the fact that Hegel has subjected it to a trial that is strongly conditioned by an opposition to any form of sensualism or subjectivism. Through this concept, Hegel takes aim above all at the primacy of sensation, at feeling as a positing of subjectivity, at the recognition of appearance as such—in other words, at the eighteenth century.

C. The positivity of Geschmack as a fundamental mode of evaluation

Nineteenth-century thought inquires increasingly into the nature and functions of value judgments. This reactivation of value judgments, however—implicit in Schopenhauer, central in Nietzsche, and then problematic in Max Weber and Rickert—brings with it a rehabilitation of taste as a mode of evaluation.

With Schopenhauer, taste regains its philosophical dignity, since it is an expression of the will to live ( Wille zum Leben ). This metaphysical notion of the will to live is based, according to Schopenhauer, on the life sciences. Thenceforth, it is possible to form a physiology of taste, of theories of the specific activity of the sense organs having a positive cognitive value. The aisthêsis [αἴσθησις] of taste thus conceived, determined by physiology, optics, and the medical sciences, necessarily escapes transcendental subjectivity and Hegelian critique, becoming itself a major interpretive form, not only of art but also of reality and culture. The meaning of the word is still implicit in Schopenhauer’s demonstrations ( for example, those regarding the important question of style, and especially philosophical style ) and it is never conceptualized as such: Geschmack refers most often to taste in the Spanish sense ( remember that Schopenhauer translated Gracián ), and especially the French sense as transmitted by the eighteenth century. If he thinks of Geschmack in the sense of gusto and goût, it is in order to produce new criteria of a mode of philosophical reasoning of which Nietzsche is the main beneficiary.

When Nietzsche uses Geschmack, it is most often as a constitutive element of evaluation and to make it central to a determination of any possible value.

Und ihr sagt mir, Freunde, dass nicht zu streiten sei über Geschmack und Schmecken? Aber alles Leben ist Streit um Geschmack und Schmecken! Geschmack: das ist Gewicht zugleich und Wagschale und Wägender; und wehe allem Lebendigen, das ohne Streit um Gewicht und Wagschale und Wägende leben wollte!

( And you say to me, friends, there is no disputing over taste and tasting? But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting! Taste: that is weight and at the same time scales and weigher; and woe to anything living that would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighers! )

( “Von den Erhabenen,” in Also sprach Zarathoustra, of Werke, 2:373; “On Those Who Are Sublime,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of Complete Works, trans. G. Parkes )

We note that in the translation of the Latin adage “de gustibus coloribusque non disputandum” the German retains only the gustatory part: Geschmack and Schmecken, taste and what has flavor.

Among the many uses Nietzsche makes of the concept of taste, these lines from Zarathustra have the particular interest relying on the three emblematic figures of the scale, weight, and the weigher. The triple relation clearly shows an effort to overcome the purely subjective dimension of the evaluation by positing correlates and constitutive criteria of axiological experience. Balance and weight do not refer to the principle of subjectivity of evaluation, any more than they would be mere metaphors intended to communicate that taste is a value judgment. In reality, the emblematic definition of “taste” is already axiological: it presupposes that any thought is an interpretation, evaluation, and conflict at the same time. This does not mean exactly that taste is a sufficient condition for deciding the value or nonvalue of something, but that it must be rehabilitated insofar as it is constitutive of any evaluation, thus as one of the means of resolving certain ethical and aesthetic questions. “What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons” ( The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff and A. del Caro, §132 ), or “It is we thinkers who first have to determine the palatableness of things and, if necessary, decree it” ( Daybreak, §505; trans. M. Clark et al. ). If any sensation or perception already contains an evaluation, taste must be constitutive of value judgment and evaluation.

■ See Box 2.

2

“The Yes and No of the palate”

It is precisely this primacy of the evaluative that is most often the object of misinterpretation, incomprehension, and principled opposition by commentators.

The way in which Habermas cites the phrase “the Yes and No of the palate,” which Nietzsche uses in §224 of Beyond Good and Evil, is in this regard especially significant.

In this paragraph, Nietzsche contrasts the “historical sense” ( der historische Sinn ) that “we other Europeans claim as our peculiarity,” this faculty that “the moderns” have for understanding all the forms of evaluation and of tasting all things, with the capacity for rejecting and excluding that “the men of an aristocratic civilization” had toward anything that did not agree with their own value system. It is thus that the French of the seventeenth century, he says, were incapable of appreciating Homer:

The very definite Yes and No of their palate, their easy nausea, their hesitant reserve toward everything foreign, their horror of the poor taste even of a lively curiosity, and altogether the reluctance of every noble and self-sufficient culture to own a new desire, a dissatisfaction with what is one’s own, and admiration for what is foreign—all this inclines and disposes them unfavorably even against the best things in the world which are not theirs or could not become their prey.

( Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann )

Habermas thus interprets Nietzsche’s way of proceeding: “Nietzsche enthrones taste, ‘the Yes and No of the palate,’ as the organ of a ‘knowledge’ beyond true and the false, beyond good and evil” ( “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 96 ). To invalidate Nietzsche’s thought, Habermas does not even bother with an argument: it suffices for him to emphasize what is in his eyes the exorbitant role of taste as a mode of knowledge, in order to make it a sort of model of irrationality.

IV. Crisis and Reevaluation of the Functions of Taste in Contemporary Aesthetics

The refusal to grant cognitive content to judgments of taste and evaluation is characteristic of a philosophical attitude that is widely shared today. The question of the meaning and the function of “taste” is thus endlessly deferred, or even ruled out a priori, including in the domain of aesthetics. The rather general argument that disqualifies aesthetic judgment founded on taste is that one can never, on the basis of a perception of the artistic and aesthetic properties of a work of art, derive or infer a judgment, or rather a proposition with any sort of objectivity or validity. Taste thus seems fated to refer almost always to the structures of subjectivity, thus to the Kantian problem of reflective judgment. The growing disqualification of value judgment in aesthetic reflection since the nineteenth century only confirmed the discredit cast upon taste.

In contemporary aesthetics, taste is a concept that most often has only a negative meaning, or presents an evident lack of content. Deprived of any possibility of reference ( for example, to the work of art as such or to the activity of the subject of aesthetic experience ), its definitions are for the most part purely negative. Thus, Reinhard Knodt claims, “Das Zeitalter des guten Geschmacks ist vorbei” ( The time of good taste has passed ) ( Aesthetische Korrespondenzen ). This type of claim, returned to over and over again in aesthetic criticism, tends to eliminate the notion of taste as a capacity of discerning aesthetic and artistic properties at one blow, without ever analyzing what it implies. For this critique is directed at a semantic content that was never the one transmitted by the tradition; it relies on the erroneous and anachronistic idea of taste as conformity to a system of more or less arbitrary norms. With few exceptions, defining this concept no longer consists in determining a precise sense for it, but rather in producing ideologically based arguments that are hostile to any idea of any aptitude for discerning aesthetic qualities in a work of art and determining them according to a hierarchy.

In the twentieth century, the aesthetic thought that develops in the field of analytic philosophy is the only one that attempts to restore a precise semantic content to the notion of taste. Taste is not simply assimilated to an arbitrary form of value judgment or an idiosyncratic fact. It is with regard to the question of the definition of aesthetic concepts and the determination of aesthetic properties of a work—hence of acts of predication—that the notion has been rehabilitated, in particular by Frank Sibley. His article “Aesthetic Concepts” ( Philosophical Review ) provoked a number of reactions and polemics, precisely because it claims to affirm the positivity of taste, its productive and effective activity in the determination of an aesthetic property of an object. For Sibley, a statement about specifically aesthetic qualities cannot be distinguished from one about sensible qualities unless we appeal to a type of activity that is different from that of simple perception, namely the exercise of taste: “Therefore, when a word or expression is such that its application requires taste or perceptivity, I will call it an aesthetic term or expression, and similarly, I will speak of aesthetic concepts or concepts of taste.” Sibley’s whole problem, and especially that of his successors, is to break out of this somewhat circular reasoning contained in the definition: taste is a necessary condition for the production of aesthetic concepts, and these concepts presuppose the exercise of taste as a specific capacity for discerning the qualities or properties proper to art. Without going further here into this problem, which has the merit of raising again the question of the logic of aesthetic predicates and aesthetic criteria, we may see here a rehabilitation of taste, not as a transcendental faculty but as a necessary condition of the validation of aesthetic concepts.

The appeal to ordinary language, or rather the desire to accept it as such, or as the possibility of resolving certain logico-semantic aporias, are proper to analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein, considering the semantic content of aesthetic concepts just as problematic as that of other philosophical notions, uses the term Geschmack several times. In the Vermischte Bemerkungen, he writes, “Feilen ist manchmal Tätigkeit des Geschmacks, manchmal nicht. Ich habe Geschmack” ( Sometimes polishing is a function of taste, but sometimes not. I have taste )” ( Culture and Value, trans. P. Winch ). In every case, the word Geschmack is curiously used in a noncritical, that is, nonphilosophical way. Even though the Bemerkungen belong to Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought, Geschmack here preserves all the density and the clarity of words of ordinary language. This leaves intact the possibility of using the word without losing the useful irresponsibility that allows one to say that, after all, taste is taste.

Jean-François Groulier
Fabienne Brugère

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated, with commentary, by Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. 2nd. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Baldinucci, Filippo. Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del disegno. Vols. 2–3 of Opere. Milan, 1809. First published in 1681, in Florence.

Batteux, Charles. Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un seul principe. In vol. 1 of Principes de la littérature. Lyon, 1802. Les Beaux-Arts was first published in 1746. Translation by John Miller: A Course of the Belles Lettres, or the Principles of Literature. London, 1761.

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Metaphysica. 7th ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: G. Olms, 1963. First published in 1779.

   . Aesthetica. 2 vols. Hildesheim, Ger.: G. Olms, 1970. First published in 1750–58.

Bell, Clive. Art. Edited by J. B. Bullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. First published in 1914.

Bellori, Giovan Pietro. Le Vite de pittori scultori e architettori moderni. Rome, 1672. Translation by Alice Sedgwick Wohl: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Bouhours, Dominique. La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit. Paris, 1687. Translated anonymously: The Art of Criticism: or, the Method of Making a Right Judgment upon Subjects of Wit and Learning. Introduction by Philip Smallwood. Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1981. English translation first published in 1705.

Budd, Malcolm. Values of Art. London: Penguin, 1995.

Cooper, David, ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Diderot, Denis. “Lettre sur les sourds-muets à l’usage de ceuz qui entendent et qui parlent.” 1751. Translation by Margaret Jourdain: “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of Those Who Hear and Speak.” Pp. 158–218 in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works. Edited by M. Jourdain. Chicago: Open Court, 1916.

Doni, Anton Francesco. Il Disegno. Venice, 1549.

Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. With preface by Dominique Désirat. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993. First published in 1719. Translation by Thomas Nugent: Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music: With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients. 3 vols. London, 1748.

Gerard, Alexander. An Essay on Taste: With Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alembert, Mr. De Montesquieu. London, 1759.

Gracián, Baltasar. Agudeza y arte de ingenio. 2 vols. Edited, with notes, by Ceferino Peralta, Jorge M. Ayala, and José Ma. Andreu. Zaragoza, Sp.: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004. First published in 1648.

   . El Criticón. Edited, with commentary, by Miguel Romera-Navarro. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938–40. First published in 1651. Translation by Paul Rycaut: The Critick. London, 1681.

   . Oráculo manual y Arte de prudencia. Edited by Benito Pelegrín. Zaragoza, Sp.: Guara, 1983. First published in 1647. Translation by Jeremy Robbins: The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence. Edited by J. Robbins. New York: Penguin, 2011.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Studies. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. First German edition published in 1985.

Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds. Art in Theory 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. Vols. 12–14. Edited by Hermann Glockner. Stuttgart: Frommann, 1937. Translation by T. M. Knox: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Hume, David. “Essay of the Standard of Taste.” Pp. 133–53 in Selected Essays, edited by Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. First published in 1757.

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Vol. 3–4 of Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Akademieausgabe: Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–22. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

   . Kritik der Urteilskraft. Vol. 5 of Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Akademieausgabe: Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–22. Translation by J. C. Meredith: Critique of Judgement. Edited by J. C. Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.

Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen, eds. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition. An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

La Rochefoucauld, François de. Maximes et Réflexions diverses. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1957. First published in 1678. Translation, with introduction and notes, by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère: Collected Maxims and Other Reflections. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1967. Translation, with introduction and notes, by Edward Allen McCormick: Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Méré, Antoine Gombauld, Chevalier de. Œuvres. 3 vols. Edited by Charles Henri Boudhors. Paris: Roches, 1930.

   . Conversations of the Mareschal of Clerambault and the Chevalier de Meré: A Treatise of Great Esteem Amongst the Principal Wits of France. Translated by Archibald. Lovell. London, 1677.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de La Brède. Essai sur le goût. Introduction and notes by Charles-Jacques Beyer. Geneva: Droz, 1967. First published in 1757. Anonymous translation: “Essay on Taste.” Pp. 257–314 in An Essay on Taste: With Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alembert, Mr. De Montesquieu, edited by Alexander Gerard. London, 1759.

Moriarty, Michael. Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1989.

   . Complete Works. 18 vols. Edited by Oscar Levy. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964.

   . Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Edited and translated by Maudemarie Clark et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

   . The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams et al. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

   . Werke. 3 vols. Edited by K. Schlechta. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997.

Pino, Paolo. Dialogo di pittura. Critical edition. Introduction and notes by Rodolfo and Anna Pallicchini. Venice: Daria Guarnati, 1946. First published in 1548. Translation by Mary Pardo: “Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di pittura: A Translation with Commentary.” Ph.D. diss. University of Pittsburgh, 1984.

Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by Robert R. Wark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. First published in 1790.

Saisselin, Rémy G. Taste in Eighteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections of the Origins of Aesthetics; or, An Apology for Amateurs. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965.

Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Translated by Steven Randall. Foreword by Arthur C. Danto. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987. Translation by Richard E. Aquila and David Carus: The World as Will and Presentation. 2 vols. Longman Library. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008–10.

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Hildesheim, Ger.: G. Olms, 1978. First published in 1711.

Sibley, Frank. “Aesthetic Concepts.” Philosophical Review 68 ( 1959 ).

   . Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics. Edited by John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. First published in 1759.

Trublet, Nicolas-Charles-Joseph. Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale. Geneva: Slatkine, 1968. First published in 1735. Anonymous translation: Essays upon Several Subjects of Literature and Morality . . . Translated from the French of the Abbot Trublet. London: Printed for J. Osborn, 1744.

Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccelenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani. 9 vols. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Sansoni: 1878–85. First published in 1568. Translation by Gaston du C. de Vere: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 10 vols. New York: AMS, 1976.

Voltaire ( François-Marie Arouet ). Le Siècle de Louis XIV. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1929–30. Translation by Martyn P. Pollack: The Age of Louis XIV. Everyman’s Library no. 780. London: Dent, 1961.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains. 2nd rev. ed. Edited by Alois Pichler. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

GOVERNMENT

“Government” comes from the Latin gubernare, which, like the Greek kubernaô [ϰυϐεϱνάω], refers to being at the helm of a ship, hence to direct, to command. The term initially refers to governing or directing a collectivity or any kind of institution, before coming to be applied more specifically to political communities. It is applied at once to the way in which a collectivity is directed ( good or bad government, or what is today called “governance” ), to the regime by which this mode of directing is instantiated ( the types of government ), and finally to the actual authority exercising “executive” power, which has the power of constraint distinct from “legislative” and “judiciary” powers. We may focus here on the difference between the English and French networks, with English often speaking of “government” where continental traditions speak of the powers of the “State” instead. See STATE/GOVERNMENT, and LAW. See also HERRSCHAFT, POLIS, POLITICS, STATE.

  AUTHORITY, DOMINATION, DROIT, LEX, MIR, POWER

GRACE

The Latin gratia ( from gratus, “pleasant, charming, dear, grateful” ) refers to a way of being agreeable to others or vice versa. It suggests “favor, gratitude, good relations,” including at the physical level: “charm, attractiveness.” Church language has made special use of it to render the Greek charis [χάϱις] ( e.g., gratificus, benevolent = charistêrios [χαϱιστήϱιος] )—when, for example, the Virgin Mary is addressed as “full of grace,” we hear that she is dear, benevolent, and charming. The term thus hovers at the boundaries of the aesthetic and the religious.

I. Aesthetics of Grace

1. For the Greek charis, and the way in which chairein [χαίϱειν] refers to the pleasure of being, the joy of existing in the beauty of the world, see PLEASURE, I.A. Cf., for an entirely different connotation, the German Gelassenheit ( see SERENITY ).

See also WELT, Box 1, on kosmos [ϰόσμος]; and BEAUTY, Box 1, on the study of the syntagma kalos kagathos [ϰαλὸς ϰἀγαθός].

2. On the terminological network put in place in the Italian aesthetic of the Renaissance, see LEGGIADRIA, “grace, lightness.” See also SPREZZATURA; cf. ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, DISEGNO.

3. On the relation between grace and beauty, and the je ne sais quoi, see BEAUTY, Box 4, GOÛT; cf. BAROQUE, INGENIUM, STILL.

II. Grace and the Divine

On divine grace as related to the organization of the world, besides charis and WELT, Box 1 ( see above, I.1 ), see the Russian SVET, “light, world”; see also BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, “divine-humanity.” For the relation between grace and cunning, or divine machination, see OIKONOMIA, TALAṬṬUF; cf. RUSE; between grace and pardon, see PARDON.

For Anmut and the German terminological network, see GEMÜT.

See also, related to grace as a calling, BERUF; cf. PIETAS, SECULARIZATION.

  DESTINY, GOD, LOVE, RELIGIO

GREEK

Constancy and Change in the Greek Language

  AIÔN, EPOCHÊ, ESSENCE, ESTI, EUROPE, LOGOS, RUSSIAN, SUBJECT, TO TRANSLATE, UNDERSTANDING

We know that it is difficult to translate ancient Greek, the “mother tongue” of philosophy, into any vernacular language, and that it has been thus since it was first translated into Latin. Less well known is the difficulty of translating it into modern Greek, which can be attributed in particular—despite the exceptional longevity of the language—to the vagaries of the diglossia that constitutes its historical evolution.

Theophilos Voreas, professor of philosophy at the University of Athens toward the end of the nineteenth century, is generally recognized as the father of a rigorous policy in the creation of philosophical terminology in modern Greek. Despite his attempt, there is still major variation in the translations into modern from ancient Greek. The teaching of the latter in schools and the domination into the 1970s of an archaist language, Katharevousa, which literally means “purified,” hid these difficulties for a long time. Despite the upheaval of syntax between ancient and modern Greek, it seemed that it was enough to use the ancient terms to believe one had a clear idea of what was in question. Intuition and translation are not the same thing, however; the increasing use of the demotic language, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, made manifest the imprecision in modern uses of ancient philosophical terms and the modifications these had suffered owing to successive translations, as well as to the mediation of other European languages. While it is true that a translator can always resolve difficulties by simply going back to the ancient terms ( which is often done ), this practice only defers the problem of meaning. The proliferation of translations into modern Greek of the ancient texts written in Greek or Latin, as well as that of modern texts written in other languages, makes it possible to gain a better understanding of the scope of the shifts and the misunderstandings they may cause.

NOTE: For convenience, I have chosen the Erasmian pronunciation for ancient Greek ( including for koinê ), and I have opted for iotacism ( generally, the use of “i” for ι, η, ει, οι, υι ) for modern Greek—though I have relied on “y” for υ and on “o” for ο and ω. For the accents, I have adopted the varied usage of the authors themselves, some adopting ancient accentuation, others simplifying, and still others suppressing the breathings and accents on the monosyllables, but accepting a tonic accent for the rest. Finally, the simplification of current grammar replaces the ancient third declension with the first, which is accepted in Katharevousa; thus, for σϰέψις, we write σϰέψη. Furthermore, even though current grammar has suppressed the ancient infinitive, it is nevertheless preserved in an idiomatic fashion: we speak of becoming ( to gignesthai [το γίγνεσθαι] ), thinking ( to noein, to phronein, to skepsasthai [το νοείν, το φϱονείν, το σϰέπτεσθαι] ), and so on. Finally, I have constantly relied on Babiniotis’s RT: Lexiko tês neas Hellênikês glôssas ( Dictionary of the modern Greek language ) as a guide.

I. The Historical Context

A. The evolution of Greek

The unity of Greek, since the archaic world, is a phenomenon that never ceases to amaze those who examine it. Recent studies show that this unity goes back to the Mycenean period and has adapted to the specific changes of the evolution of any language. However, Greek has undergone serious crises, especially when attempts have been made to restore an older language or establish a nobler one, with claims that the current language, produced by an evolution marked by cultural integration, has become impoverished.

We find this phenomenon in Russian, for example—where Ferguson distinguishes “diglossia” ( the same language containing a vulgar and a noble language ) from “bilingualism” or “multilingualism” ( the copresence of two or more national languages in the same country ). “Diglossia” in modern Greece is considerable, to the point of making it difficult, or even impossible, to translate certain terms from ancient and medieval Greek.

The unity of Greek was acquired piecemeal: first, through the shift from a syllabic linguistic system ( the writing called Linear B ) to an alphabetical system ( inherited from the Phoenicians, who may themselves have gotten it from the Greeks ); then, in agreement with a variety of related dialects that clearly did not impede communication; and finally, thanks to the political evolution of archaic Greece, which contributed to the arrival of Hellenic wisdom. From the philosophical point of view, it is this last stage that is essential, since a terminology was built on it that made the progressive creation of a philosophical language possible.

The distribution of cities around cultural and ritual centers such as Delphi and Delos may explain why this first unitary structure of the language had such historical dynamism. These centers radiated in a sphere that was delimited by the colonial extension of the different cities, promoting the constitution of a common world. This type of topology guaranteed Greek a kind of unity, contrasting with the dispersion described in the biblical episode of Babel. In the Hellenic space, even when political actions involve mobility ( as in the Trojan War or Ulysses’s adventures ), the center of reference remains circumscribed by the contours of a fixed territoriality. The Homeric epics and the Hesiodic genealogies constitute a mythical testimony of the formation of a topological unity that assigns Greek its historical rootedness, and attest as well to Greek’s status as a lasting reference point for education and culture ( see BILDUNG, Box 1 ), as factors unifying a common world.

These breaks become more pronounced in the classical period. The Attic language, symbol of the Athenian city, animated by democratic structures and a dominant politicoeconomic will, is the product of a break with dialectal practice. The expansion of philosophy owes much to Attic, which consolidated philosophical terminology according to the norms imposed by Athenian philosophy—the Academy, the Lyceum, the Garden, and so on. The adoption of Attic by the Macedonian court, when it concludes the political unification of Greece, is not unrelated to the rapid evolution of Greek into a “common” ( koinê ) language. This language spread throughout Alexander’s empire, beyond the Hellenic space. Cosmopolitanism thus favors the banalization of koinê, which contributes to the persistence of Greek in the Roman Empire before the domination of Latin ( starting in the second century BCE in administration and after the fourth century CE in the cultural sphere ). Having become a lingua franca, Greek achieved a communicational proximity and produced a civilizing impact without precedence in Europe, imposing Hellenic culture on the whole Mediterranean region.

■ See Box 1.

1

Athens, or the homophony of the world

Aelius Aristides ( 117–189 CE ), a Greek from Mysia and a Roman citizen living in the empire, wrote a praise of Rome ( Roman Oration ) and a praise of Athens ( Panathenaicos ), which together are the most extreme praise of the Greek language and a testament to its role in the empire.

For Rome, the world is no longer divided into “Greeks” and “barbarians,” since “Roman” became “the name of a sort of common race” ( Roman Oration, paragraph 63 ), and the whole ecumene is spatially accessible and “tamed” ( 101 ). But while Rome is all-powerful, it is monodic. “Like a well-cleaned enclosure, the inhabited world pronounces a single sound, more precise than that of a chorus” ( 30 ); we should even say that it is mute: on the model of the army, an “eternal chorus” ( 87 ), “everything obeys in silence” ( 31 ).

Athens presents the reverse model: rather than extending, it is the “center of the center” ( Panathenaicos, paragraph 15 ), which offers “an unmixed, pure language [elikrinê de kai katharan . . . phônên, as the Katharevousa aims to be], without anything disturbing it, a paradigm of any Greek conversation” ( 14 ). Here, the universality is no longer territorial but logical; in Attic, idiom, language, and speech all merge: “All without exception speak the single common language of the race [tou genous; see PEOPLE], and through you [i.e., the Athenians] the whole universe has become homophone” ( 226 ). Greek, the “definition and criterion of education and culture [horos tina paideias; see BILDUNG]” ( 227 ), is the language of sharing, appropriate for public life—to the extent that there can still be one, under Rome.

Barbara Cassin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristides, Aelius. Panathenaicos and Roman Oration. In Aristides in Four Volumes, translated by Charles Allison Behr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Oliver, James H. “The Civilizing Power.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 58, no. 1 ( 1968 ).

   . “The Ruling Power.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 43, no. 4 ( 1953 ).

B. The vagaries of diglossia

The synchronic unity of diverse dialects, to which were added, first, the diachronic unity of Attic, then the more active unity of koinê, did not prevent linguistic crises. These concern the deliberate choice of the type of language that could best express Greek in its historical authenticity. It is in this context that we may speak of linguistic conflicts peculiar to diglossia.

The first conflict took place, in antiquity, in the name of the defense of Attic against the universalization of Greek, which was interpreted as implying the language’s banalization and its integration into different cultural contexts. In this turbulent history, the most significant event is the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, in Alexandria around the third century BCE. By adapting to the “common” language, the Judaic message was spread more easily.

■ See Box 2.

2

Greek, the sacred language

  TO TRANSLATE

The Jews of Alexandria, organized in a politeuma, spoke Greek and undertook the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek beginning in the third century BCE. It is by way of a piece of propaganda coming out of this milieu of Hellenized Jews in Alexandria, the Letter of Aristeas, that the legend of the so-called Septuagint translation was disseminated. According to the letter, King Ptolemy II Philadelphus ( 285–247 BCE ) commissioned seventy-two ( or seventy ) Jewish scholars, sent to Alexandria for the purpose by the high priest of Jerusalem, to translate the Pentateuch into Greek, for the needs of Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt. Each of the translators supposedly worked separately, and they all produced miraculously identical versions. This was the first translation of the sacred Hebrew texts into a Western language and in all likelihood the first collective translation known. The legend of these uniform translations, attributed to divine inspiration, leads paradoxically to the negation of the Septuagint as a product of translation and to the authentication of the translated text as completely homologous to the original. The audience for the translation, encouraged by the legend, came to obscure the Hebrew origins of the translated books and played a decisive role in the process of Hellenization of Jewish monotheism. Further, while rabbinical Judaism, especially beginning with the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, was hostile to the translation, it was adopted by the authors of the Christian scriptures, and until Saint Jerome, by almost all Christian communities. Thus the Greek version of the Septuagint became the Mediterranean Bible for the more and more Hellenized Jews, and then of the early church, which made it its Old Testament in all the regions of the empire where it spread, until Western Europe opted for Latin.

Cécile Margellos

Inversely, the reactions in response to the hegemony of koinê Greek based their arguments on history itself, endowing the language with an ideological background. In the Hellenistic period, resistance animated by nostalgia gave rise to “Atticism”—a purified and quasi-artificial language, practiced by erudite people and philosophers. Atticism was imposed at the expense of the natural evolution of the language and its dialects, thenceforth establishing two languages, one for intellectuals and one for the people. Thus the problem of diglossia was born in antiquity, and its ideological background has been at work unceasingly within Greek culture ever since.

Much later, in the ninth century, a second major conflict arose over the status of modern Greek. It is likely that the substitution of Latin for Greek in the West and the pressure of the multilingualism of the empire, arising from Roman conquests, led to the fragmentation of koinê into several dialects. The Hellenization of the Eastern Empire, which preserves Atticism with few modifications until the Byzantine Renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, undoubtedly served to slow down the pace of this fragmentation, but it never managed to weaken Greek’s diglossia, which was encouraged by the increasingly hierarchical shape the state and the church acquired beginning in the fourth century. Written and administrative language reveals a difference both of class and culture. During Ottoman domination, new transformations came up against the need to preserve the ecclesiastical language, since the only organized institution was that of the church. During this period, then, not only Atticism but also koinê became incomprehensible to people under the pressure of the evolution of the spoken language in a more popular direction, slowly forming what was called the “demotic” language. Knowing all of these languages at once was considered a feat and indicated a higher level of culture.

However, it is not in the regions occupied by the Ottomans, covering the multiethnic collection of the Balkans, that Greek’s diglossia displayed its perverse effects, since the clergy spreading the language and the faith was generally little educated and sided with spoken and popular speech. It is rather in the Hellenic schools of Italy, where an archaist language was being taught, that we see the source of the purified language ( Katharevousa ). By disturbing the natural evolution of the language, the purists initiated a proliferation of debates that were only solved in the second half of the twentieth century ( 1976 ), when the Greek government, faced with the excesses of the purified language imposed by the regime of the colonels ( 1967 ), decided to install the spoken language as the only official one by a unanimous vote in the parliament.

■ See Box 3.

3

Demotiki and Katharevousa

To understand the contrast between demotiki and Katharevousa, we must give some of the cultural context that laid the foundations for the 1821 Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. Several intellectuals, including Adamantios Koraïs, who lived in France, promoted the idea of a return to the past and felt the need for a new language that was adapted to teaching and more authentic than the vulgar language. Was it necessary to return to ancient Greek, or create a purified language, called, for this reason, Katharevousa? The first option was received unenthusiastically, so that although classical antiquity was still idealized, the second option was the one adopted. Koraïs had insisted on the role of language in the formation of a new Greece, affirming that the character of a nation is recognized by its language. For him, ancient Greece had joined liberty and pure language, whereas Ottoman domination favored an impure language. Henceforth, only the knowledge of ancestral texts would be capable of purifying the language of foreign elements. Paradoxically, this partisan of the Enlightenment initiated an ideology of pure language that would have negative effects on philosophy in Greece, thenceforth tributary to the discourse of others, whether modern or European, creators of new thoughts at the time when the Greeks remained under the Ottomans. Once officially recognized, this language was adopted in the universities, especially for the teaching of philosophy.

The defense of a demotic language in science came rather late. It can be attributed to Greeks living in the diaspora in the nineteenth century—in Paris ( Psicharis ), in England and the Indies ( Pallis, Emphaliotis ), as well as in Istanbul ( Vlastos ) and Bucharest ( Photiadis ). The result of this struggle was the formation of an educational association, in 1910, that fought for the adoption of the demotic as the official language. Meanwhile, however, the translation of the Bible and some ancient tragedies into demotic provoked an outcry and a political debate. The project failed under the pressure of partisans of Katharevousa, led by G. Mistriotis, professor at the University of Athens, who spoke of the need to save the “national language.” A vote in the parliament in 1911 provisionally closed debate, despite a liberal government directed by E. Vénizelos, who was sympathetic to the innovators. An article of the Greek constitution forbade the official use of the demotic language, ignoring its place in daily life.

But when, in 1945, Charálampos Theodoridis wrote his Introduction to Philosophy in demotic, the book was highly successful. Philosophers continued to hesitate about the choice of language, until the government established demotic as the only official language of the Greek republic in 1976. Six years later, an association for the Greek language published a manifesto signed by seven well-known personalities—including Odysseas Elytis, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, and Georgios Babiniotis, the most gifted linguist of the time—criticizing the legal establishment of the language, seeing in it a linguistic and expressive constraint likely to destroy “the foundations of the freedom of thought” in the name of an “artificial” demotic established by self-described “modernists.” Reactions followed, reopening a debate that was believed closed, and whose tangible result was the retention by some writers of “breathing marks” and accents suppressed by the most recent version of demotic, and the use of a language that avoids what some consider the “mistakes” of modern Greek.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Browning, Robert. Medieval and Modern Greek. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Christidis, A. F. [Anastasios Phoebus], ed. “Strong” and “Weak” Languages in the European Union: Aspects of Linguistic Hegemonism. 2 vols. Thessaloniki: Center for the Greek Language, 1999.

Ferguson, Charles A. “Diglossia.” Word 15 ( 1959 ): 325–40.

Fishman, Joshua. “Bilingualism with and without Diglossia; Diglossia with and without Bilingualism.” Journal of Social Issues 32 ( 1976 ): 29–38.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, and Michael Silk, eds. Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009.

Kopidakês, M. Z. Historia tês hellênikês glôssas [History of the Greek language]. Athens: Greek Literature and History Archive, 1999.

Lamprakê-Paganou, Alexandra, and Giōrgos D. Paganos. O ekpaideutikos demotikismos kai o Kostis Palamas. [Teaching the demotic language and Kostis Palamas]. Athens: Pataki, 1994.

Mackridge, Peter. Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Moleas, Wendy. The Development of the Greek Language. 2nd ed. Bristol, UK: Bristol Classical Press, 2004.

Theodoridis, Charálampos. Introduction to Philosophy ( in Greek ). Athens: Éditions du Jardin, 1945.

C. The philosophical context of Hellenic modernity

Philosophy was born speaking Greek, which for at least a millennium was its only language. We may add to this another millennium, for while in the West, the hegemony of Greek disappeared in the Roman period, Latin-speaking philosophers continued to use it until the beginning of the Middle Ages. This is a unique phenomenon, implying that there is a “historical” link between a particular language, Greek, and the birth and development of philosophy. Indeed, it is said, under Heidegger’s influence, that Greek ( with which German is associated ) is the philosophical language par excellence.

■ See Box 4.

4

Heidegger: “The prephilosophical language of the Greeks was already philosophical”

Let us agree with Jean-Pierre Lefebvre: the way in which Heidegger thinks about the complex historical relationship between Greek, German, and philosophy constitutes “ontological nationalism.”

Ousia tou ontos means in translation: The beingness of beings [Seiendheit des Seienden]. We say, on the other hand: The being of beings [Sein des Seienden]. “Beingness” is a very unusual and artificial linguistic form that occurs only in the sphere of philosophical reflection. We cannot say this, however, of the corresponding Greek word. Ousia is not an artificial expression which first occurs in philosophy, but belongs to the everyday language and speech of the Greeks. Philosophy took up the word from its pre-philosophical usage. If this could happen so easily, and with no artificiality, then we must conclude that the pre-philosophical language of the Greeks was already philosophical. This is actually the case. The history of the basic word of Greek philosophy is an exemplary demonstration of the fact that the Greek language is philosophical, i.e., not that Greek is loaded with philosophical terminology, but that it philosophizes in its basic structure and formation. The same applies to every genuine language, in different degrees to be sure. The extent to which this is so depends on the depth and power of the people who speak the language and exist within it. Only our German language has a deep and creative philosophical character to compare with the Greek.

( Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom )

Barbara Cassin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Ted Sadler. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre. “Philosophie et philologie: Les traductions des philosophes allemands.” In Encyclopædia universalis. Vol. 1, Symposium: Les enjeux. Paris: Encyclopaedia universalis France, 1990.

Without rejecting this rather dated view, now shaken up by the worldwide expansion of Anglo-American philosophy, we must admit that Greek, though it has persevered, has not managed to preserve the fertility of the philosophical past that it helped shape, even in the space it rules. The program begun several decades ago in Greece of promoting modern and contemporary Greek philosophers is revealing: their fame can rarely, in current conditions, extend beyond the boundaries of Hellenism.

To explain this shortcoming, it is common to invoke the fall of Byzantium and the rule of Greek-speaking lands by the Ottoman Empire. According to this explanation, the Ottoman Empire comprised four hundred years during which, in the extensive territory populated by people of Greek origin ( stretching from Moldova to current Greece and from Asia Minor to the coast of the Black Sea ), a complete intellectual desert supposedly lay. The local populations, thanks to the Church and some teachers attempting to preserve Greek, were most often reduced to speaking the popular language. On the other hand, the intellectuals who sought refuge on the Ionian islands that had escaped the Ottomans, or in Italy, were perceived as a source of hope for the future of an independent Greece.

During this period, philosophical texts were sometimes written in Latin and often in an archaist form of Greek, more rarely in simple Greek. They are mostly commentaries on ancient thought, especially Aristotle, who was in fashion in Padua and Venice. Theophilos Korydaleus ( d. 1646 ), who reorganized the patriarchal School of Constantinople, may be considered with Gerasimos Vlachos ( d. 1685 ) to be the pioneer of modern Greek commentary on the works of Aristotle. Aristotle’s presence in the Balkans became a major element of the renewal of ancient philosophy in Greek-speaking space, linking up with the beginning of the Ottoman period when Gennadius II Scholarios, the first patriarch after the fall of Constantinople, established Aristotelianism over against Gemistus Plethon’s Platonism.

In the following period, Neohellenic philosophy—essentially that practiced in universities—spoke Katharevousa: a language that brought it closer to its prestigious past, even though that past was read in the light of the European philosophies in fashion at the time. A friend of Adamantios Koraïs, Neophytos Vamvas ( d. 1855 ), took up both the “ideology” of Destutt de Tracy and of F. Thurot, and the rhetoric of H. Blair, which dominated the British landscape of the eighteenth century. He was the first to occupy the chair of philosophy at the University of Athens ( 1837 ). T. Reid and D. Steward, through their translations, also had their hour of glory among French-speaking Greek philosophers, alongside the spiritualists V. Cousin and T. Jouffroy, who were ascendant for a time. In another domain of thought, C. Koumas ( d. 1836 ) defended critical philosophy, initiating the more and more active presence of German philosophy in Greece, which in turn intensified the introduction of ancient philosophy in teaching. Thus, the cult of antiquity, illuminated by the lights of European philosophy, became the motive element of the intellectual renewal of modern Greece. In contrast, Greek-Christian ideology remained the permanent point of reference for conservative philosophers in Greece.

At the same time, the social crises opened the way for socialist thought, with Platon Drakoulis and Georgios Skliros ( d. 1919 ). The latter’s claims were taken up in turn by J. Kordatos and Dimitrios Glenos, another philosopher trained in Germany, where he participated in debates in favor of the demotic language. On the philosophical level, Glenos opposed to the dynamic idealism of the Hegelian school what he called “dynamic realism,” that is, dialectical materialism interpreted by means of a synthesis between Democritus and Heraclitus. For him, any reference to the Greek philosophical past entailed a creative historicity that is able to appropriate it in the context of the concrete givens of contemporary life. Glenos was a subtle analyst of social divisions, which he interprets as the result of diglossia. After him, we must wait until the reform that was urged, between 1950 and 1960, by another German-trained philosopher, E. P. Papanoutsos, to witness the modernization of philosophy in education.

Finally, philosophy is expressed above all in literature, where several authors had already written in demotic. The great poet Kostis Palamas ( 1859–1943 ) brought literature and philosophy together in the light of Nietzsche. In his wake, but also in those of Bergson ( whose student he was ) and Marx, Nikos Kazantzakis ( 1883–1957 ) was a fervent defender of demotiki, which he enriched with powerful and original work. The real philosophical revolution in modern Greece is thus found, not in pure philosophy, but in literature. Greek literature, a generator of thought, uses new forms to rehearse the origins of Greek thought, when, with Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plato, literature and philosophy were not distinguished from one another. Writers are thus the ones who defended the demotic language against the Katharevousa of academic philosophers.

II. Translating Greek into Greek?

A. Logos and orthologiko

Since ancient times, the multivocity of the term logos is the most spectacular sign of the permanence of the Greek language. Its ambivalence, which mainly conjoins the senses of “speech” and “reason,” requires a constant reliance on context, which is sometimes still insufficient to clarify the word’s meaning. Yet, while the understanding of logos as “word” or “speech” remains intact in modern Greek, it is not so with the senses of “gathering together” and “reason.” ( We will not pause to consider the first of these, since, occluded in most dictionaries though used by some philosophers inspired by Heidegger, it would require a lengthy study in its own right. )

To say “reason,” modern Greek relies, much more than on logos, on the semantics of thought ( noisi [νόηση], skepsi [σϰέψη] ). There are nevertheless vestiges of what may have been the term’s ancient semantic core: “what is the reason for your position . . . ” ( ποιος ο λόγος . . .  ), “I have no reason to . . . ” ( δεν έχω λόγο να . . .  ). However, instead of using logos to say “reason” in the sense of ratio, modern Greek speaks rather, by inflection, of “what is rational” or of “the logical” ( logiko [λογιϰό] ). It is from the expression orthos logos [οϱθός λόγος], “right or straight reason,” that we take “rational” and “rationalism,” forming the portmanteau words orthologiko [οϱθολογιϰό] and orthologismos [οϱθολογισμός], respectively. We can understand why, given this situation of deficiency and complementation, philosophers prefer to keep the old word, even if the dictionary avoids it. In his translation into modern Greek of Jacques Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Lazos writes that “Derrida mainly uses the words discours, parole, raison, or logos to translate λόγος. In Greek, logos has all these meanings. Thus I translate all these words with the word logos and place the corresponding French term in parentheses.” In sum, even when he preserves the term logos, a Greek today must clarify in parentheses which sense he is using. Moreover, the sense of “reason” is exceptional and is identified with “cause,” or, when referring to something “rational,” paired with orthos: orthos logos. This transgression of the modern dictionary is found in other translators, who use logos to refer to the Stoic divine ( Reason ), to the second person of the Christian Trinity ( Word ), to seminal reason—these are therefore calques rather than translations—as well as to Kant’s pure reason. The confusion of these translators is such that they sometimes use logos while adding, in parentheses, logikos [λογιϰός] ( rational ), or, inversely, that they use logos for all contentious cases that concern thought ( cf. Y. Tzavaras in Plotinus, Enneads, 30–33 ). As a result: either we keep logos without translating it, or we translate it by “reasoning,” “constitutive power,” “logical capacity,” “notion,” “rationality,” “discussion,” and so forth, but leaving a fringe of untranslatability.

To get a grip on this situation, Babiniotis draws up, in his Dictionary, a table for the word logikos [λογιϰός] ( rational, logical ), considering how best to express logos in the sense of “reason.” He explains that “the λογιϰός ( rational ) refers to what is related to λόγος, in the sense of the functioning of the intellect ( νου ), the discursive thought ( διάνοιας ), the logical thought ( λογιϰής νόησης ) of man.” Then, having articulated the word’s sense by means of contrasts with the irrational, the insane, and so on, Babiniotis appeals to the semantic range attached to the faculty of thinking in the sense of phrenes [φϱένες], to place in relief the proper character of someone who acts rationally ( emphron ) [έμφϱων] or irrationally ( aphron [άφϱων], paraphron [παϱάφϱων] ). These clarifications confirm that the notion of logos [λόγος], “reason,” is manifested above all by a derived form, logikos, itself clarified by the varied semantics of thinking and thought.

In the face of the texts of ancient philosophy, a Greek-speaker is just as helpless as a French- or English-speaker. Even more so, perhaps, since he or she is tempted to set aside the difficulty by not translating at all, rather than to admit the limits of his or her language.

B. Skepsis and the field of thought

To translate “think” and “thought” in ancient Greek, we use, on the one hand, the semantics of the “intellect” ( noos [νόος], noys [νοῦς], nous )—to apprehend ( noein [νοεῖν] ), intellection ( noisis [νόησις] ), to think discursively ( διανοεῖσθαι ), discursive thought ( dianoia [διάνοια] )—and, on the other, that of the “mind” ( phrin [φϱήν] )—to think sensibly, in conformity with good sense ( phrono [φϱονῶ] ), practical intelligence ( phronisis [φϱόνησις] ), and so forth. Later, the notion of “spirit” ( pneuma [πνεῦμα] ) is added, introduced by Stoicism in the sense of “breath” ( wind and breath of life ); Christianity dematerializes pneuma and thus ensures for the term an impressive promotion into more transcendental realms. Although this evolution complicates the project of translation, current confusions are due less to language than to choices that, rather than retaining the usual sense of “intellect,” confuse nous with “spirit,” “wit,” “intelligence,” as Pierre Hadot does in his translations of Plotinus ( cf. his justification in Enneads, 38 ). Such hesitations are also found among Greeks, when they refer to Le Seene and Lavelle’s philosophy of mind by the expression “philosophy of νοῦς” and not pneuma [πνεῦμα] ( cf. Charálampos Theodoridis, Introduction to Philosophy ).

But the fact that in modern Greek the ancient terminologies of thought ( noêsis [νόησις] ) and reflection ( skepsis [σϰέψις] ) have been fused together leads to more palpable difficulties. Skepsis, a concept discussed by the Skeptical school, leads to paradoxes in modern texts, when we speak, for example, of “the thought of the Skeptics”( η σϰέψη των σϰεπτιϰών ) or the “thinkers of reflection” ( ή των στοχαστών της σϰέψης ). An analogous fusion took place with the semantics of the activity of contemplating ( stochazomai [στοχάζομαι] ). Whereas in antiquity, stochazomai means “to aim,” “tend toward,” or even “to seek” and “to conjecture,” in modern Greek it means both the common activity of reflecting as well as the more elevating one of thinking, “meditation” ( stochasmos [στοχασμός] ). In the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ( Solomos [1798–1857] to Palamas [1859–1943] ), stochazomai is used to indicate thought—whence the use of stochastis [στοχαστής] to mean “thinker.” In addition, the activity of reasoning and calculating ( logizomai [λογίζομαι], ypologizo [υπολογίζω], logariazo [λογαϱιάζω] ) is often confused with the activity of thinking ( skeptomai [σϰέπτομαι] ) as well.

Although contemporary Greek translators and philosophers are trammeled by these different inflections of key philosophical terms, they do not confront them as problems. To avoid semantic confusion, they often prefer to keep the ancient terms, although, in common language, the semantics of skeptesthai and skepsis ( for instance ) have dominated since the middle of the twentieth century. The junction between ancient and modern Greek occurs at nous [νοῦς] ( or νους ), which expresses the seat of thought, while giving the impression of preserving the ancient sense of “intellect.” Although the term was most often used in compound expressions meaning “to have in mind,” “to keep one’s head,” “to be sensible,” and so on, it has a general and encompassing sense that goes beyond the archaic one of the noun “project” and the classical one of the highest faculty of thinking, “intuition.” Babiniotis speaks of the “collection of spiritual faculties [πνευματιϰών δυνάμεων] of man, allowing him to apprehend reality and articulate its data.” This generalization reveals that we may associate nous [νους] with other activities, such as judging [krino [ϰϱίνω] ), imagining ( phantazomai [φαντάζομαι] ), reasoning ( sullogizomai [συλλογίζομαι] ), reflecting ( skeptomai [σϰέπτομαι] ), or meditating ( stochazomai [στοχάζομαι] ). In the latter case, Solomos writes in his dialogue on language: “Come to your [faculty] of thought [τòνοῦ], contemplate [στοχάσου] the evil produced by written language.”

Matters become complicated once we get to the semantics of the word skepsis, which is used to clarify the senses of the other terms meaning “to think” and “thought.” For stochazomai [στοχάζομαι], the Dictionary mentions: ( 1 ) “I think deeply” ( skeptomai vathia [σϰέπτομαι βαθιά] ), “I think discursively” ( dianooumai [διανοούμαι] ); ( 2 ) “I think well” ( skeptomai kala [σϰέπτομαι ϰαλά] ), with as synonyms “I calculate” ( ypologizo [υπολογίζω], logariazo [λογαϱιάζω] ). The same goes for the other sense of νους: “capacity for someone to think ( να σϰέπτεται ), to produce logical thoughts ( σϰέψεις ), to create in a spiritual way; . . . to judge according to the circumstances,” and so forth. This predominance of the semantics of skeptomai [σϰέπτομαι] and skepsis/skepsi [σϰέψις/σϰέψη] is the more troubling in not always having been the case: thus, in his Philosophy of the Renaissance, Logothetis, a defender of Katharevousa in philosophy, limits the semantics of skepsis to specifically Skeptical schools of thought ( Montaigne, Charron ), associated with skepsis and amphivolia ( doubt ), and uses the semantics of nous to refer to “thought” and that of logos to mean “reason.”

With regard to σϰέψη, Babiniotis speaks of the “collection of points of view and positions someone holds regarding a social phenomenon, a way of analyzing it and interpreting it; theory,” preceding this sense by others such as “process during which we manipulate certain data in our brains, to end up with a result”; or again, “what someone thinks ( σϰέπτεται ) of an affair; idea, reasoning.” The duality of the general sense, which brings in both social action and theory ( understood as “vision of the world” ), widens the domain of action of skepsis. If we add to skeptomai the sense of reasoning and meditating, we realize that the term has become untranslatable.

We should observe that the semantics of nous [νοῦς] has never, since Parmenides’s time, replaced fully the semantics of skepsis, used since Homer—well before the Skeptics gave the term its philosophical destiny and well before it conquered modern Greek in claiming for itself the sense of “thought.” In Homer, skeptomai means to look in all directions in order to observe. Ulysses says: “I happened to glance aft ( skepsamenos [σϰεψάμενος] ) at ship and oarsmen and caught sight of their arms and legs, dangling high overhead. Voices came down to me in anguish, calling my name for the last time” ( Odyssey, 12.244–49 ). This sense of looking attentively in several directions leads to a sense of what one might call “looking at by means of thought,” of thinking on the basis of at least two possibilities. For example, in Sophocles, the verb sometimes means “to look at” or “to see” ( Ajax, 1028 ) and sometimes “to reflect” or “to think through” ( Oedipus Rex, 584 ). In the second case, Creon responds to Oedipus’s accusations: “Think [skepsai ( σϰέψαι )] first about this: other things being equal, do you find the cares of power preferable to a rest which nothing disturbs?” We find the same ambivalence in Plato’s texts. In the Protagoras, Socrates says that the examination of health requires observation of the parts of the body and adds that he desires, in the interest of reflection [pros tên skepsin ( πϱòς τὴν σϰέψιν )], to do the same thing for the pleasant and the good, in order to reveal the thought [tês dianoias ( τῆς διανοίας )] of his interlocutor and see if his conception is similar to or different from that of most men ( 352a–b ). This last specification isolates the pre-Skeptical sense of skepsis: it is a reflection that presents a choice between two or more positions.

The Skeptics reject this choice, giving the same weight to each position and suspending all judgment as a result ( see EPOCHÊ ). Skepsis differs from dianoia [διάνοια] ( discursive thought ), analyzed as identical to “intention.” In modern Greek, when we clarify the sense of dianoia—which is used most often to mean inventiveness or genius, however—we speak of the “functioning of thought ( σϰέψης ) which codifies sense data in concepts and representations” ( Babiniotis ). Everything works as though in modern Greek, skepsis and skeptomai were the genus of which noetic and discursive thought were the species. This extensive character of skepsis is explained by the fact that the process of reflection may intervene in action, alongside “deliberation.” The Skeptics exploited this perspective, whereas Plato avoided combining these elements.

To the question “what is scepticism ( skepsis )?,” Sextus Empiricus responds: it is “an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of ( ta nooumena ) in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgment and afterwards to tranquility” ( Outlines of Scepticism, 1.8 ). If the Skeptic supposes that, as a result of the equality of the two sides of an argument, no reasoning may be more persuasive than its opposite or any other, he envisages, thanks to the suspension of judgment, the arrest of discursive thought ( dianoia ), thus also of seeking and deliberation. This approach entangles theory with action, inasmuch as it must take account of all possible directions—with a consequent modification of the semantic landscape of the ancient language. As a result, another path is opened, from which modern Greek derives its own concepts, requiring us to negotiate an intralinguistic translation for a whole collection of past philosophical notions.

The semantic modifications of modern Greek also concern other uses, for example, the use of “brain” or “brains” to refer to the collection of mental faculties, as a synonym of “spirit” ( pneuma ) and “thought.” Even more than in French, the metaphor of the brain expresses “human thought” ( anthroponi skepsi [ανθϱώπινη σϰέψη] ) in Greek—so much so that E. Roussos, translator of the fragments of Heraclitus ( Peri physeos ), renders tis autôn noos [τίς αὐτῶν νόος] ( fr. 104 DK ) first by “what is their brain/thought [το μυαλό]?” and then by “thought” [ὁ νοῦς], whereas K. P. Mihailidis ( Philosophes archaïques ), more prudently, translates noos by nous. In agreement with other translators, the latter acts with the same prudence when he translates nous [νοῦς] and noein [νοεῖν] in Parmenides, whereas Roussos once again innovates by translating noein by to na to ennois [τό νά τό ἐννοεῖς], that is, “I apprehend the meaning” [έχω στο νου μον, or again, συλλ αμβάνω στη σϰέψη μου]. Further, in his philosophy manual for students, P. Roulia observes that Parmenides “found in thought ( σϰέψη ) the stability necessary for knowledge. However, he was led to identify thought ( σϰέψη ) and reality.” And his celebrated statement ( fr. 3 DK, τὸ γὰϱ αὐτὸ νοεῖν τεϰαὶ εῖναι ) means: “When we think ( σϰεφτόμαστε ), we determine things ( νου ) with our intellect. Our thought ( νόηση ) thus is identified with reality. Reality is as a consequence intelligible ( νοητή ).” Roulia worries at this point whether students will clearly understand what is at issue here, where three processes may be confused: reflecting, thinking, and apprehending—but many philosophers are in the same position.

Tzavaras, who is currently the most inventive translator working in the field of ancient Greek philosophy, often reserves the ancient Greek for the pre-Socratics, but he takes more chances when translating Plotinus and the German thinkers. As to the first, in his anthology of several texts of the Enneads ( 30–33 ), he opts in favor of skeptomai to translate phronô, noô, and dianooûmai. For example, “They are as good as gods, insofar as they do not think ( δενσϰέπτονται ) sometimes correctly and sometimes wrongly, but think ( σϰέπτονται ) always what is correct in their intellect ( μέσα στο νου τους )” ( 5.8.3.23–25: ϰαλοὶ δὲ ᾗθεοί. οὐ γὰϱ δὴ ποτὲ μὲν φϱονοῦσι, ποτὲ δὲ ἀφϱαίνουσιν, ἀλλ’ ἀεὶ φρονοῦσιν ἐν ἀπαθεῖ τῷ νῷ ). Further, even though he has a tendency to preserve the terms dianoia and noêsis, he sometimes translates “the thoughts” ( hai noêseis [αἱ νοήσεις] ) by “the thoughts of the intellect” ( skepsis tou nou [σϰέψεις του νου] ) ( 5.5.1.24 ). Additionally, although he translates νοῦς νοῶν by νοώνν ους, he suddenly changes direction and translates: “however, when you think it ( όταν όμως τον σϰέπ τεσαι ) . . . , think ( σϰέψου ) that it is a matter of the good, for as the productive cause of the reasonable ( έλλογης ) and intellective ( νοητιϰής ) life, it is a power of life and the intellect ( νου )” ( 5.5.10.9–12: ὅταν δὲ νοῇς . . . , νόει τἀγαθόν—ζωῆς γάϱ ἔμφϱονος ϰαὶ νοεϱᾶς αἴτιος δύναμις ὢν [ἀφ’ οὗ] ζωῆς ϰαὶ νοῦ ).

Given this situation, would not a reverse attitude, reducing all the semantics expressing “to think” and “thought” to that of skepsis and skeptesthai, have a better chance of expressing what is at issue? This option was taken up by Vayenas to translate some of Heidegger’s texts from the Wegmarken, using skepsis for “thought” most of the time, regardless of the philosopher in question ( Parmenides, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel ). Parmenides’s fragment 3, where it is said that “thinking and being are the same,” now becomes: τὸ ἴδιο εἶναι σϰέψη ϰαὶ εἶναι. Regarding Kant, he specifies that “I think” ( skephtomai [σϰέφτομαι] ) means: “I link up a given variety of representations” ( which corresponds to “judge” ). Further, he translates tranzendentale Überlegung or Reflexion by “reflection/transcendental thought” ( huperbatiki skepsi [ὑπερβατιϰὴ σϰέψη] ), Reflexion-begriffe by “apprehensions of thought/reflection” ( antilipsis tis skepsis [αντιλήψεις τῆς σϰέψης] ), and Sein und Denken by “to be and to think” or “Being and thinking” or “Being and Thought” ( εἶναι ϰαὶ σϰέψη ). The Hegelian usage of the Cartesian ego cogito sum is rendered as “I think, I am” ( σϰέπτομαι, εἶμαι )—which we also find in many other works, including high school philosophy manuals. Finally, the Heideggerian formula of “Western thought” is rendered by dytiki skepsi [δυτιϰὴ σϰέψη], which resembles common expressions like “modern Greek thought,” “socialist thought,” whereas one could use dianoisi [διανόηση] and stochasmos [στοχασμός]. The massive presence in Vayenas’s work of the semantics of skepsis, no doubt owing to his desire to conform to contemporary linguistic usage, accentuates the confusion and justifies the position of those who wish to return to a pre-Skeptical semantics. These vagaries show how difficult “thought” and its cognates are to translate into modern Greek, if only because the dominant translation by skepsis at bottom tends to mean “reflection” rather than “thought.”

C. Ousia, huparxis, hupostasis: Essence and existence

At first sight, ousia [οὐσία] should not pose a problem in modern Greek, since it is commonly used today to indicate the essence and nature of something. However, the evolution of the sense of the term, beginning in antiquity, has greatly complicated the task of modern Greek philosophers. The meaning already shifted importantly between Plato and Aristotle, as the first conceives ousia in the common sense of “property” ( material goods ) and in the philosophical sense as the essence of something, whereas the latter adds other meanings, available and obligatory as a result of identifying ousia and hupokeimenon [ὑποϰείμενον] ( this identification requires him to designate by ousia sometimes the eidos [εἶδος], “form, species, or specificity”; sometimes the composite of matter and eidos; and sometimes matter itself ). The Stoics in turn envisage ousia as an indeterminate substrate, whereas Medioplatonist and Neoplatonist thinkers return to the sense of “essence,” and Christology assimilates ousia and hupostasis [ὑπόστασις], enriching ousia with other values, which modern Greek no longer commands.

In addition, the Latin translation of ousia by substantia creates problems for Greek translators, thenceforth confronted with new philosophies, coming from the Renaissance and modernity, where the notion of substance becomes central. Although they take this mediation more and more seriously, and translate “substance” not by ousia but by hupostasi, they are usually satisfied with standardizing ousia for antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages—by not translating it.

The problem arising from the pair “essence”/“existence” is thenceforth rendered very complex. Let us take Vikentios Damodos ( d. 1752 ) as a guide. Trained in Aristotelianism in the Flaginian school in Venice and Padua, he was an adept of nominalism and was influenced by Descartes and Gassendi. He associates ousia and huparxis [ὕπαϱξις] ( existence ), starting with the Thomist notion of “composite substance” constituted by essence ( essentia ) and being as existence ( esse )—even though this is for him a conceptual and not, as it was for Aquinas, a real distinction. Damodos knows that in Thomism, the individual substance is not to be confused with the essence, since the latter must combine with being or existence to form substance. However, this distinction was constantly obscured by modern translators when they dealt with philosophies that give accounts of substance, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the modern era. Logothetis, for example, translates substantia and essentia by ousia. He even magnifies the confusion by specifying that Nizzoli considers that ousia signifies particular things ( ta kath’ hekaston [τὰ ϰαθ’ ἕϰαστον] ). Tzavaras, aware of the difficulties, is the only one to have taken a different path, choosing in his anthology of texts of Plotinus to translate ousia by “to be” ( einai [εἶναι] ). These confusions in the use of a term as important as ousia reveal that the word is not only untranslatable in French or English ( where it is rendered by “essence,” “substance,” “reality,” “being” ), but is equally so in Greek. Moreover, once medieval and modern mediation comes in, associating with ousia the notion of “substance” conceived by Thomism according to the unity of essentia and esse ( and existentia ), things get out of hand entirely.

Let us then start over, beginning this time from the verb huparchein [ὑπάϱχειν]. It initially meant “to begin,” “to be at the origin of,” “to take the initiative”; then, “to exist prior to”; and then, “to be at the disposal of”; and finally, “to belong to.” The latter sense is used in logic to express “attribution.” Aristotle writes, for example, “If A is not attributed to any B, B will not be attributed to any A,” or “If A is not an attribute of any B, then B will not be an attribute of any A” ( εἰ . . . μηδενὶ τῷ B τὸ A ὑπάϱχειν, οὐδὲ τῷ A οὐδενὶ ὑπάϱξει τὸ B; Prior Analytics 1.2 ). The sense of “attribute” conceived as a mode of belonging may be understood as “that which contributes to something,” near the common usage “to be at the disposal of something or someone.” It is in this sense that we use the expression ta huparchonta [τὰ ὑπάϱχοντα]: ta huparchonta designates the present situation, existing things. This sense of the expression thus opens onto the question of existence. While in antiquity, the expression’s ambivalence is the order of the day, the evolution of the language went in favor of simplification, to the advantage of the sense of “to exist.”

This modern usage of huparchein, to mean the existence of something or other, had to confront in our own time the problem of translating existence as used in existentialism, which assigns existence only to humans. The very name of this school of thought already sets in contrast two terminologies: huparxismos [ὑπαϱξισμός] and existentialismos [ἐξιστενσιαλισμός]. Today, the first expression is generally preferred to the calque. The name of a philosophical school is of course no more than a matter of convention, but the translation of the concept of existence itself reveals more tenacious difficulties. Thus, when Malevitsis translates, in 1970, Jean Wahl’s book Les philosophes de l’existence, he chooses hupostasis [ὑπόστασις], and not huparxis [ὕπαϱξις], to render existence. Malevitsis bases his decision on Heidegger’s and Jasper’s refusal to be identified as existentialists, and seeks to avoid the confusion between the ontic existence of beings and the existence proper to humankind. This is why he avoids the traditional translation by huparxis. The idea is important, for since antiquity, the semantics of huparchein has lost its secret complicity with the subtleties of the semantics of archê/archô/archomai ( principle and beginning, foundation/I command/I begin ). The term hupostasis, however, also has a long history, which is rooted in Neoplatonism and in Christology, reaching its culmination with the formation of the term substantia ( substance ). The interference with the question of “being” increased the opacity of its meaning to such an extent that even Malevitsis is forced to add the term huparxis in brackets to avoid confusion.

Thus, the analysis of the most important words in ancient philosophy can give no comfort to translators who believe in the transparency of meaning, even though they are Greek-speakers.

Lambros Couloubaritsis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexiou, Margaret. After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Andriopoulos, Dêmêtrios Z. Neo-Hellenic Aesthetic Theories. Athens: Kabanas, 1975.

Apostolopoulos, Ntimês. Syntomê historia tês neoellênikês philosophias [Concise history of Neohellenic philosophy]. Athens: Hellêno-Gallike Enôsis Neôn, 1949.

Argyropoulou, Rôxanê, Athanasia Glykophrydi-Leontsini, Anna Kelesidou, and George Vlachos. Hê ennoia tês eleutherias ston neoellêniko stochasmo [The notion of liberty in Neohellenic thought]. Athens: Academy of Athens, 1996.

Beaton, Roderick, and David Ricks, eds. The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past ( 1797–1896 ). Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009.

Boudouris, Konstantine, ed. Conceptions of Philosophy: Ancient and Modern. Athens: Ionia, 2004.

Cassin, Barbara. “Le statut théorique de l’intraduisible.” In Encyclopédie philosophique universelle: Le discours philosophique, edited by J.-F. Mattéi, 998–1013. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998.

Couloubaritsis, Lambros. Aux origines de la philosophie européenne: De la pensée archaïque au néoplatonisme. 3rd ed. Brussels: De Boeck University, 2000.

   . “Problématique sceptique d’un impensé: Hè skepsis.” In Le scepticisme antique: Perspectives historiques et systématiques. Lausanne, Switz.: Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 1990.

Demos, Raphael. “The Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment ( 1750–1821 ): A General Survey.” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 ( 1958 ): 523–41.

Derrida, Jacques. Platōnos pharmakeia / Jacques Derrida: Eisagōgē, metaphrasē, sēmeiōseis [Plato’s pharmacy / Jacques Derrida: Introduction, translation, notes]. Translated to Greek by Ch. G. Lazos. Athens: Agra, 1990.

Ferguson, Charles A. “Diglossia.” Word 15 ( 1959 ): 325–40.

Glykophrydi-Leontsini, Athanasia. Neoellênikê aisthêtikê kai eurôpaikos diaphôtismos [Neohellenic aesthetics and the European Enlightenment]. Athens: International Center of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research, 1989.

Heidegger, Martin. Wegmarken. Translated to Greek by A. A. Vayenas. Athens: Anagnostidi, n.d.

Henderson, G. P. The Revival of Greek Thought, 1620–1830. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970.

Heraclitus. Peri physeos. Translated to modern Greek by E. Roussos. Athens: Ekdoseis D. N. Papadêma, 1987.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Lexicon of Presocratic Philosophy. 2 vols. Athens: Academy of Athens, 1994.

Logothetis, Constantine I. Hê philosophia tês anagennêseôs kai hê themeliôsis tês neôteras physikês [The philosophy of the Renaissance and the foundation of modern physics]. Athens: Organization for the Publication of Textbooks, 1955.

Mihailidis, K. P. Archaic Philosophers: Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary ( in Greek ). Nicosia, 1971.

Noutsos, Panagiôtês, ed. Hê sosialistikê skepsê stên Hellada: Apo to 1875 hôs to 1974 [Socialist thought in Greece: From 1875 to 1974]. 5 vols. Athens: Gnosis, 1990–.

   . The Origins of Greek Marxism: An Introduction. Ioannina: University of Ioannina, 1987.

Papanoutsos, Evangelos P. Neoellênikê philosophia [Neohellenic philosophy]. 2 vols. Athens: Vasiki Vivliothiki, 1954–56.

Plotinus. Enneads. Translated by Pierre Hadot. Paris: Éditons du Cerf, 1988.

   . Enneadôn biblia 30–33. [Enneads]. Translated to modern Greek by Yannis Tzavaras. Athens: Editions Dodoni, 1995.

Psêmmenos, Nikos, ed. Hê hellênikê philosophia, 1453–1821 [Greek philosophy, 1453–1821]. 2 vols. Athens: Gnosis, 1988–89.

Roulia, P. Ch. Principles of Philosophy ( in Greek ). Athens: Metaichmio, 1999.

Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Edited by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Solomos, Dhionísios. I gynaika tis Zakynthos, Dialogos [The Woman of Zakynthos: Dialogue]. Athens: Editions Patakis, 1997.

Spanos, William V. “Heidegger’s Parmenides: Greek Modernity and the Classical Legacy.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19 ( 2001 ): 89–115.

Stavropoulos, D. N., ed. Oxford Greek-English Learner’s Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Theodoridis, Charálampos. Introduction to Philosophy ( in Greek ). Athens: Éditions du Jardin, 1945.

Wahl, Jean. Les philosophes de l’existence. Paris: Éditions Armand Colin, 1954. Translated to Greek by Christos Malevitsis. Athens: Dodoni, 1970.

GUT / BÖSE, WOHL / ÜBEL ( WEH ), GUT / SCHLECHT ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			good/evil, good/bad
FRENCH			bien/mal, bon/méchant, bon/mauvais
LATIN			bonum, malum

  GOOD/EVIL, and BEAUTY, FAIR, GLÜCK, MORALS, PLEASURE, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, WERT, WILL

Two examples, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, reveal the link formed in Germany between reflection about good and evil and reflection on the powers of language. Formally, the two philosophers have in common the splitting up of the objects of reflection, adding to the initial pair of “good” ( gut ) and “evil” ( böse ) a second pair, wohl/übel or gut/schlecht. This in turn requires studying not only the contrast each pair presents, but also the contrast between the pairs.

I. The Kantian Split: Sensibility and Pure Reason

The second section of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason of the Critique of Practical Reason is distinguished by unusual attention on Kant’s part to the singularity and power of languages. Good and evil are studied there as “the sole objects of a practical reason” ( Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:57, trans. Pluhar, 78 )—the only two objects possible, according to Kant, since any other object “taken as a principle determining the faculty of desire” makes the will lose its autonomy. Further, these two objects themselves, good and evil, must have a secondary status: they are determined by the moral law, which precedes them as it precedes all content in pure practical reason. This is what Kant calls the “paradox of method in a Critique of practical reason” ( 218 ). The demonstration begins by appealing to the “use of language [Sprachgebrauch],” which distinguishes the good ( das Gute ) from the pleasant ( das Angenehme ) and excludes the grounding of good and evil on objects of experience, that is, on the feeling of pleasure and pain. Kant can then deplore the “limitation of the language” ( 80 ), visible, according to him, in the Scholastic uses of the notions of bonum and malum, which do not permit a distinction on this point. Latin’s ambiguity is best seen in its contrast to German, which, Kant notes, does not countenance it—for which, Kant says, praise is due to the language:

The German language is fortunate to possess the expressions that keep this difference from being overlooked. It has two very different concepts and also equally different expressions for what the Latins designate by a single word, bonum [or malum]: for bonum it has das Gute and das Wohl; it has das Böse and das Übel ( or Weh ), so that there are two quite different judgments according to whether in an action we take into consideration its good and evil or our well-being and woe ( bad ).

( Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:59–60, trans. Pluhar, 80–81 )

German thus divides in two the single opposition bonum/malum: into wohl/übel, which relates to the agreeable or disagreeable state in which the subject finds himself; and gut/böse, which always “signifies a reference to the will insofar as the will is determined by the law of reason to make something its object” ( Gesammelte Schriften, 5:60, trans. Pluhar, 81 ).

Here, the French translator, Francis Picavet, can do nothing but preserve the original terms in italics. This is Picavet’s version of Kant’s comment:

La langue allemande a le bonheur de posséder des expressions qui ne laissent pas échapper cette difference. Pour designer ce que les Latins appellent d’un mot unique bonum, elle a deux concepts très distincts et deux expressions moins distinctes. Pour bonum, elle a les deux mots Gute et Wohl, pour malum, Böse et Übel ( ou Weh ), de sorte que nous exprimons deux jugements tout à fait différents lorsque nous considerons dans une action [ce] qui en constitue ou ce qu’on appelle Gute et Böse ou ce qu’on appelle Wohl et Weh ( Übel ).

Picavet’s discomfort is well expressed by his note to this passage: “By replacing the German words that Kant is attempting to define with French words, we could only give a false expression of the thought: their meaning is made clear by their context” ( 61 n. 2 ).

The context here is a doubled contrast that French cannot denote: although French does have the pairs of synonyms that Kant adds to clarify what he means by wohl and übel ( Annehmlichkeit and Unannehmlichkeit; agrément and désagrément, namely “agreement” in the sense of “agreeableness,” and “disagreement” in the sense of “what disagrees with one”; Vergnügen and Schmerze; contentement and douleur; “pleasure” and “pain” [Gesammelte Schriften, 5:58–59; trans. Picavet, 60] ), it has no words other than bien and mal to render Gut and Bóse, notions of good and evil that, according to Kant, do not belong to morality.

Kant’s praise of German is a delicate interpretive matter. The first French translator of the Critique of Practical Reason, Jules Barni ( 1848 ), applies the criticism addressed to Latin to French as well, but for Kant it is no doubt less a matter of exalting his mother tongue than, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, of criticizing Scholasticism and its language.

II. Psychological Qualifications or Moral Values?

French is not, in fact, limited to the pair bien/mal; it also has the pair bon/mauvais, “good”/“bad,” on which Picavet sometimes relies for translating matters related to sensation ( cf. 60: “le concept de ce qui est tout simplement mauvais,” “the concept of what is simply bad,” for “schlechthin Böse,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:58 ). There is nevertheless a reason why this new pair does not allow us to resolve the difficulty. The two pairs bien and mal and bon and mauvais are not of the same grammatical nature. German, however, is able to retain the pairs’ grammatical parallelism, since the ( somewhat antiquated ) pair of adverbs wohl/übel may be replaced by gut/schlecht; both are adverbial and adjectival, and thus grammatically parallel to gut/böse. New difficulties then appear, however, as witnessed by the translation of the first essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality.

The title given to this essay, “Gut und Böse, Gut und Schlecht,” was translated into French as “Bon et méchant, bon et mauvais.” A new split takes place: this time that of two “evaluations” ( cf., e.g., §2 and §7, in Werke, 6.2:273 and 280; trans. Hildenbrand and Gratien, 21 and 30; trans. Diethe, 12 and 21 ), of two ways to impose value judgments on reality, namely that of slaves and that of the noble or powerful. Their relations have two main characteristics. First, the splitting of these evaluations reveals that there is a more fundamental division than that of good and evil, that which contrasts the high and the “low” ( einem “Unten” ), the superior and the inferior ( §2 ). Second, and above all, the conflict does not just run through both pairs, but rather opposes them to one another, the bad according to the slaves being “precisely the ‘good’ of the other morality” ( §11, in Werke, 6.2:288, trans. Diethe, 24 ). According to Nietzsche, the two oppositions form a system, and this system has a history—the age-old and “frightful combat” between “two opposite values ‘good and bad,’ ‘good and evil’ ” ( “die beiden entgegengesetzten Werte ‘gut und schlecht,’ ‘gut und böse,’ ” §16, in Werke, 6.2:299, trans. Diethe, 52 )—insofar as it does not ( as in Kant ) contrast two human faculties ( sensibility and pure reason ), but rather different and unequal men.

It is precisely on reaching the work’s conclusion that the French translation reveals its limits:

Grund genug für mich, selbst zu Ende zu kommen, vorausgesetzt, daß es längst zur Genüge klar geworden ist, was ich will, was ich gerade mit jener gefährlichen Losung will, welche meinem letzten Buche auf den Leib geschrieben ist: “Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” . . . Dies heißt zum mindesten nicht “Jenseits von Gut und Schlecht.”

Car on aura compris depuis longtemps ce que c’est que je veux, ce que je veux justement avec ce mot d’ordre dangereux qui donne son titre à mon dernier livre: Par-delà bien et mal (  Jenseits von Gut und Böse ). . . . Ce qui du moins ne veut pas dire: “Par-delà bon et mauvais” ( Dies heisst zum mindesten nicht: “Jenseits von Gut und Schlecht” ).

Assuming that it has been sufficiently clear for some time what I want, what I actually want with that dangerous slogan which is written on the spine of my last book, Beyond Good and Evil. . . . At least this does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad.”

( §16, in Werke, 6.2:302, trans. Diethe, 36 )

Here, suddenly, the translation of “Gut und Böse” by “bon et méchant” disappears, pushed off the page by the pair “bien et mal.” This is not a small detail, since On the Genealogy of Morality is intended, as its subtitle reminds its readers, “to complete and clarify the recently published Beyond Good and Evil.” The translation “bon et méchant,” “good and bad,” is not at all imprecise, and it works for everything that has gone thus far; the problem is simply that “Gut und Böse” is both adjectival and adverbial, and means both “bon et méchant” and “bien et mal,” that is, both the psychological qualifications associated with the adjectives and the more strictly moral qualifications associated with the adverbs. With the adjective bon, French can render the indeterminacy of Nietzsche’s Gut, which appears in both pairs of words, and whose meaning varies precisely depending on whether it is inserted in one or the other; on the other hand, for Gut and its antonym, French finds itself required to choose between an adjective ( “bon et méchant” ) and an adverb ( “bien et mal” ), that is, between a psychological style and a moral style, which Nietzsche’s method distinctively refuses to separate. With respect to what we saw in Kant, the problem is thus reversed. It is not that French does not have enough distinctions, but that it has too many: bien and mal crowd onto bon and méchant and bon and mauvais.

We should note that Nietzsche’s method aims from the start to be linguistic as well, from its reflections on “the right of the masters to give names” ( §2, in Werke, 6.2:273, trans. Diethe, 13 ), through to the final question on the contribution of “linguistics, and especially the science of etymology,” to “the history of the evolution of moral sentiments” ( §16, in Werke, 6.2:303, trans. Diethe, 37 ). It is furthermore tempting to search out the Greek in Nietzsche’s German, especially in the pair gut/schlecht, which is, so to speak, retranslated from the pair agathos/kakos [ἀγαθός/ϰαϰός] ( §5 ). Nietzsche’s “good” thus makes us hear the Greek untranslatables kalos kagathos [ϰαλὸς ϰἀγαθός] ( see BEAUTY ) and eu prattein [εὖ πϱάττειν] ( see PRAXIS ) ( §10 ), which make his gut appear in its two primary dimensions, distinction and activity.

Despite the link of German with Greek, affirmed several times in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche, unlike Kant, does not grant any privilege to the German language. German, for him, does certainly provide exemplary confirmation of the genealogy of evaluations, deriving schlecht ( bad ) from schlicht ( the senses of “simple,” then “base,” “of low birth,” are listed in the Grimms’ dictionary [RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v.], flowing from the senses of “right,” “flat or straight” ), but it remains the case that “the expressions of the ‘good’ in the different languages . . . all refer to the same transformation of the concepts” ( §4, in Werke, 6.2:275, trans. Diethe, 14 ). Here again, the interpretation will differ, depending on whether we stress the progress of the sciences of language or the alleged origin of the “beautiful blond beast”—which Nietzsche says, however, might be “Roman, Arabic, Germanic, or Japanese” ( §11 ).

Philippe Büttgen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1908. First published in 1788. Translation by Werner S. Pluhar: Critique of Practical Reason. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002. French translation by F. Picavet: Critique de la raison pratique. 9th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. First published in 1943.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6.2. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. Translation by Marion Faber: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Edited by Marion Faber. Introduction by Robert C. Holub. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

   . Zur Genealogie der Moral. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6.2. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. Translation by Carol Diethe: On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Rev. student ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. French translation by I. Hildenbrand and J. Gratien: La généalogie de la morale. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.