ACTOR, AGENCY, AUTRUI [DRUGOJ, MITMENSCH], CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ES, IDENTITY, OIKEIÔSIS, REPRÉSENTATION, SELF [SAMOST’, SELBST], SOUL, STAND, SUBJECT, TATSACHEI / ME / MYSELF
| FRENCH | je, moi, soi | ||
| GERMAN | Ich; Selbst | ||
| GREEK | egô [ἐγώ] | ||
| ITALIAN | io; se, si, si-mismo | ||
| LATIN | ego; ipse |
ACTOR, AGENCY, AUTRUI [DRUGOJ, MITMENSCH], CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ES, IDENTITY, OIKEIÔSIS, REPRÉSENTATION, SELF [SAMOST’, SELBST], SOUL, STAND, SUBJECT, TATSACHE
It is striking to note that certain dominant traditions in European philosophy ( in particular transcendental philosophy, from Immanuel Kant to Edmund Husserl ), and a tradition of grammatical analysis with its origins in antiquity that prevailed in structural linguistics ( Roman Jakobson, Émile Benveniste ), were united in closely associating the possibility of reflexive thought with the use of personal pronouns, taken as indicators of “subjectivity within language.” The Cartesian “ego cogito, ego sum” has thus had its philosophical privilege justified and firmly established. We should qualify this representation in two ways: the linguistic forms that it presupposes are not in any sense universal, and other grammatical analyses are possible; and it is just as important to examine closely the shared linguisticism of Europe and to compare the theoretical effects of the expressions of the so-called sujet de l’énonciation ( the utterer of the speech-event, the “speaking subject” ) and the sujet de l’énoncé ( the “spoken-of” subject, the subject of the utterance ), in order to understand how language predisposes thought to reflexivity within different speculative problematics.
Within this perspective, what is sketched out here is a description of the cycle of the “first person” in modern philosophy—going from the German dialectics of the Ich and the Selbst ( Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his equation Ich = Ich, then his opposition of the Ich to the Nicht-Ich; Friedrich Hegel and his problematizing of self-consciousness as the reciprocity of Ich and Wir ), to the English invention of “self” and “own” ( at the core of John Locke’s self-consciousness ), and finally to the European recognition of the ontological primacy of the ego and the alter ego ( in Husserl’s phenomenology )—so as to then introduce within this thinking the limits envisaged by Arthur Rimbaud’s paradoxical expression “Je est un autre” ( I is another ). This could serve as a common epigraph to the ways thinkers have gone beyond “first-person” subjectivity toward transcendence, impersonal corporeality, or transindividual anonymity, for which Michel Foucault invented the term pensée du dehors ( thinking of the outside ).
I. Having an “I”; Being “a Person”
At the beginning of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ( lectures published in 1797 ), Kant writes:
The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth [Dass der Mensch in seiner Vorstellung das Ich haben kann, erhebt ihn unendlich über alle alleren auf Erden lebenden Wesen]. Because of this he is a person [Dadurch ist er eine Person]; and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person—i.e., through rank and dignity and entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I” [selbst wenn er das Ich nicht sprechen kann], because he still has it in thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I” [ob sie zwar diese Ichheit nicht durch ein besonderes Wort ausdrücken]. For this faculty ( namely, to think ) is understanding.
( Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Louden, 15 )
The text goes on—150 years before Paul Guillaume—to discuss the age when small children stop talking about themselves in the third person and start saying “I”: “durch Ich zu sprechen.” The translator of the French edition of this text, Michel Foucault, renders Kant’s das Ich by le Je. He clearly did not want to adopt the French term—moïté—often used for the technical neologism of the German word Ichheit, invented at the start of the thirteenth century by Meister Eckhart, not only because he considered this a linguistic barbarism, but also because he clearly saw that Kant’s object is the Je ( the possibility of saying “I” ), and not the Moi ( “Me” or “Myself,” that is, the possibility of describing or judging the Self ). At the same time, following the main thread of the text, Foucault had to simplify the doubleness hidden within its opening sentence: to be “a person” ( who is “one” ) is to be able to use the word Ich, but it also means including ( the ) Ich—this “something” that is not a thing—within its representation. In a sense, this is to represent the unrepresentable that the Ich names “for itself [für sich Selbst].”
This formulation is connected to the decisive developments of the Critique of Pure Reason, where the “transcendental subject” is theorized for the first time ( see SUBJECT ). A thesis is here being put forward that is both extremely debatable and determining for the development of Western philosophy. It is debatable because it is Eurocentric, and consequently idealist, and only apparently attentive to the materiality of language. Let us admit with Jakobson that every language contains a complete system of references of the code to itself, from the code to the message, from the message to itself, and from the message to the code—and notably that there is necessarily a class of specific units of meaning ( shifters, or embrayeurs in French ) whose function is to refer to the singularity of an actual message. Personal pronouns correspond exceptionally well to this definition ( as do demonstratives, adverbs of time and place, verb tenses, and so on ). We can thus, following Benveniste’s famous analyses, characterize the individual act of appropriating language as a problem of subjectivity in language—“Language is so organized that it permits each speaker to appropriate to himself an entire language by designating himself as I” ( Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Meek, 226 )—thereby creating a short-circuit between the instance of utterance ( énonciation ) and the statement ( énoncé ). But the fact of using the word “subjectivity” is an indication of the circularity of such definitions, since it takes as given ( as was the case in Kant’s text cited above ) that the “normal” or “implicit” form is one in which the agent, the support of any attribution in a statement, and the “instance of discourse” ( ibid. ) or what carries the word, that is, the generic speaking being ( “man” ), can all be subsumed under one and the same concept. This situation is only characteristic of some languages, however, or even some of their usages. The “simplicity” of the Indo-European system of personal pronouns is not a “linguistic universal.”
In Japanese, for example, we observe two correlative phenomena ( Takao Suzuki ) that contrast with the usages of modern European languages ( or only occupy a place in European languages deemed to be residual, infantile, artificial, or pathological ). On the one hand, the terms we would call personal pronouns ( above all, the equivalents of “I” and “you” ) have no etymological stability: historically, they are substituted for one another, following a continual process of devaluation and replacement, linked to the transformation of marks of respect into marks of familiarity or condescension. On the other hand, the normal form by which speakers are designated in a statement consists of marking their respective position or role in the social relationships ( which are almost always asymmetrical ) within which communication is initiated. Particularly important in this regard are the terms of kinship that, by a characteristic fiction, can be extended to other types of relationship.
It seems that European languages by contrast are made up, over a very long period of time, of a kind of specific universalism, which neutralizes the qualities and the roles of speakers ( or, by contrast, allows them to be emphasized: “The king wishes it to be so,” “Grandfather is going to get angry!” “Madame is served” ), so as to bring out the abstract, and virtually reciprocal, positions of sender and receiver of spoken language: the one who has spoken will then listen, and vice versa. Jakobson is therefore right when he criticizes Husserl’s interpretation of this point in his Logical Investigations, where he says that “the word ‘I’ refers to different persons depending on the situation, and for this reason takes on a new meaning each time.” To the contrary, the meaning of “I” is the same every time; it is what speakers—subjects—possess in common, that by which they individually appropriate for themselves the instrument of communication. It would of course be important to study the interaction of linguistic usages, of institutional transformations ( the emergence of an increasingly broad sphere of formal equality that encroaches on both the public and the private ), and finally of various logico-grammatical theorizations, all of which have made possible the recognition of this norm, its standardization in scholarly as much as in popular language, and its interiorization and conceptualization in notions such as “person,” “subject,” “agency,” “individuality,” “ecceity,” and so on.
Even though it is falsely universal, this thesis has been a determining one for the history of European philosophy. We can return to it, but critically, particularly by situating it within the horizon of the problem of translation. In elaborating a philosophical discourse concerned with subjectivity, we would have to then pay attention to the reciprocal action between concepts and linguistic forms as they differ from one language to another, against a background of shared characteristics. This is indeed one of the keys to the untranslatable “translatability” that characterizes the sharing or colinguisticity ( colinguisme ) of European philosophy, and it is surprising that there have been no major attempts to use the question of personal pronouns as a basis for developing the same kind of philological and philosophical analyses that have been brought to bear on the syntactical and semantic effects of the verb être ( to be ) in the constitution of classical ontology, from Benveniste to Barbara Cassin. There have been a few notable exceptions, such as Jaakko Hintikka’s analyses of the performative nature of the Cartesian cogito, or, more recently, Marco Baschera’s analyses of the Kantian Ich denke as a linguistic act, and also to some extent Ernst Tugendhat’s analyses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Hegel. The ground had been laid, however, on the one hand by the tradition of the critique of the metaphysics of the subject as a “grammatical convention,” which goes from David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche to the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, and on the other hand by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reflections on the originary nature of reference to the subject in different languages, developed by Ernst Cassirer in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms into a summary of the forms of expression of the Ich-Beziehung ( I-relation ).
We will focus our comments on four groups of problems, which will naturally spill over into one another: the naming of the first person, with the possibilities of mention and negation that this allows ( in particular in German ); the connotations of the first- and third-person reflexives ( in English “self”; in French moi, soi; in German Selbst ); the reasons for the recourse to foreign nouns for the subject ( above all, the Latin ego in modern languages ); and finally, the problems posed by the use of the indefinite and the neuter in philosophy ( “one” in English, ça and on in French, for example ). But we have to begin by discussing several difficulties concerning the very notions of person and personal pronoun.
■ See Box 1.
II. Vom Ich
The theory of the subject in German Idealism, from Kant to Fichte and Hegel ( we could gather all of these Vom Ich under the heading of Schelling’s first essay, titled, precisely, “Vom Ich . . .” ) depends on a certain flexibility of the Ich, which can be partially transposed to English, but which has no equivalent in French. French does not nominalize the main subject, but instead offers a reflexive form, le moi, which produces the effect of objectivation, whereas Ich is immediately perceived as an autonym. As a consequence, the Kantian formulation das Ich ( which is closely associated with das Ich denke, often written as das: Ich denke, suggesting by homophony with the conjunction dass, “that,” a near equivalence between nomination and proposition: “the I think,” “[the fact] that I think” ) works both as a reference to a subjective being and as a reference to the linguistic form, to the act of speech in which it is said. Writing le Je ( the I ) only works in French if a grammarian is making a mention of the subject pronoun, or as a Germanism in a philosophical translation, which even then is of fairly recent usage ( Italian, by contrast, uses the Io without any problem, as we see, for example, with Giovanni Gentile, and Spanish philosophy uses Yo—in José Ortega y Gasset or Xavier Zubiri, for instance ). One could not imagine Blaise Pascal writing “Le Je est haïssable” instead of “Le Moi est haïssable” ( The self is detestable; we will return later on to the problem of “Je est un autre” [I is another] ). Consequently, it is practically impossible for a French ear to hear the nominal form of Ich without assuming the reflexive le moi. The ambivalence specific to Kant’s analysis of “self-consciousness” as a reciprocal folding together of appearance and truth, of recognition and misrecognition ( see SUBJECT ), falls back onto the psychological or moral doctrine of the illusions everyone entertains about him- or herself ( and particularly the way one over- or underestimates oneself ).
The absolute “simplicity” of the word Ich, with its particular flexibility, accounts in part for the dialectical power that is deployed in the field of the Ichheit, whose literal transposition into French always presents insurmountable difficulties. One understands why it is in the German language that the speculative philosophy of modern Europe has developed the antithesis of the paths of “being” and of “the I,” an antithesis that seems to repeat very ancient theological alternatives concerning the “name of God” ( Cassirer, “Sprache und Mythos,” 139: “Der Weg über das Sein und der Weg über das Ich” ). Here are three examples:
1. In the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794, Fichte gave an interpretation of the Kantian transcendental apperception that is based on the homology between the logical principle of identity ( A = A ) and a proposition that can also be written algebraically Ich = Ich ( “Ich gleich Ich” ). This proposition, which can be understood to mean “Ich bin Ich,” is ontological in the strict sense, since it expresses what is proper to Ich as being, its internal reflexivity and its self-identity, and the way in which Ich poses itself as self-consciousness ( Fichte’s expression for Selbstbewusstsein is “Das Ich setzt sich schlechthin als sich setzend” [The Ich posits itself as a pure self-positing] ). It is thus a subjective absolute that brings to philosophy a new foundation in the form of an intellectual intuition ( in this sense, it cancels out the effects of Kant’s critique ). French can do no better than to translate this as Moi = Moi, even occasionally risking Je suis Je. A sentence that sought to render Fichte’s prose into French might offer the following: “Je suis absolument parce que je suis; et je suis absolument ce que je suis; ces deux affirmations étant pour le Moi [Ich]. . . . Le Moi [Ich] pose originairement son propre être” ( I am absolutely because I am; and I am absolutely what I am; these two statements for the Self. . . . The Self originarily posits its own being: Œuvres choisies de philosophie première, French trans. Philonenko, 22 ). Here, however, the French translation is incapable of conveying the symmetry of the German text. It thus fails to translate ( unless it glosses it in a commentary ) the movement proper to subjective idealism, which goes further back than the logical principle of identity, to the transcendental identity of the Ich, perceiving itself and uttering itself in its own immediacy.
2. This failure of translation is even more apparent in the following stage of the Fichtean dialectic, when it is stated that in its movement of self-positing, Ich “posits itself immediately both as Ich and as Nicht-Ich,” contradicting this time the form of the principle of identity in its traditional development ( A is not non-A ). Indeed, Nicht-Ich—the negation not of a predicate, but of a singular term, which for this reason Tugendhat considers an absurdity, ein Unding, and which literally also means a “non-thing”—is not ( le ) Non-Moi ( Non-Self ) but it is, in the simplicity of one and the same negation, both “[all] that which I am not” and the “nothingness of the I,” even its annihilation, that is, its being deprived of any substantial determination. A formulation such as “. . . in the self [Fr.: le Moi] I oppose a divisible not-self to the divisible self,” about which Fichte tells us that “the resources of the absolutely and unconditionally certain are now exhausted” ( Science of Knowledge, trans. Heath and Lachs, 110 ), does not allow us—in French, by means of the expression Non-Moi—to understand that Nicht-Ich still contains within it the form of the subject, but modified by a negation ( or that Nicht-Ich is an Ich that negates itself as such ). French masks, therefore, the linguistic roots of the elaboration that led Fichte to overcome the interpretation of the opposition between Ich and Nicht-Ich as an antagonism between subject and object ( or between consciousness and the world, or freedom and nature ), and to make it the expression of an intersubjectivity or “constituent interpersonality,” an originary unity of the “I” and the “You” ( or of the person of the subject and the person of others ).
3. Hegel, for his part, incessantly criticized what he considered to be the “formalism,” the “motionless tautology [bewegungslose Tautologie],” of the equation Ich = Ich. This is one of the central threads of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which begins with the analysis of the emptiness of sense certainty, described as suspended in a purely verbal self-referentiality ( “Das Bewusstsein ist Ich, weiter nichts, ein reiner Dieser; der Einzelne weiss reines Dieses, oder das Einzelne,” an almost untranslatable sentence because of the equivocality of Ich and the alternation of masculine and neuter: “Consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure ‘I’; or I am in it only as a pure ‘This,’ and the object similarly only as a pure ‘This’ ”; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, 58 ). In the same text, however ( the chapter “Die Wahrheit der Gewissheit seiner selbst” [The Truth of Self-Certainty] ), Hegel introduces in turn an expression based on the syntax of personal pronouns in order to set in motion the dialectics of self-consciousness: “Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich, ist” ( ed. Hoffmeister, 140 ). This expression is immediately followed by the famous discussion of “autonomy and non-autonomy of self-consciousness: lordship and bondage.” The extant translations—“I that is We” and “We that is I” ( Fr.: “Un Moi qui est un Nous, et un Nous qui est un Moi,” or “Un je qui est un Nous, et un Nous qui est un Je” )—do not adequately render the movement of identification that passes through the other, which Hegel makes the active force of the progression of Spirit ( Geist ). In order to mark the appropriation of alterity in the interiority of the same subject, through the negation of negation, we would need to translate by forcing the syntax: “I that We are, We that I am” ( Fr.: “Moi que Nous sommes, Nous que Je suis” ).
For once, the detour via the French terminology of the moi is useful, since this Hegelian formula transposes an idea originally expressed by Rousseau:
À l’instant, au lieu de la personne particulière de chaque contractant, cet acte d’association produit un corps moral et collectif composé d’autant de membres que l’assemblée a de voix, lequel reçoit de ce même acte son unité, son moi commun, sa vie et sa volonté.
( At once, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body composed of as many members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will. )
( Contrat social, 1.6, trans. Cress, 24 )
But where Rousseau described in a naturalistic manner how an individual was formed from individuals, even if he is attributed the interiority of a consciousness after the fact, as a way of interpreting the enigma of an alienation that is at the same time a liberation, Hegel places us from the outset in the immanence of the subject, which he connotes by the use of the first-person singular and plural. He uses what Benveniste calls the difference between a “person in the strict sense” and an “amplified person” ( in other words, the fact that “I” is both opposed to “We” and included in it to make a person ) as a means of presenting the tension between the two terms as a sort of conflictual reflection inherent in the constitution of the subject, which is the decisive moment in the transformation of the individual spirit into a universal spirit that knows itself ( Geist as an absolute form of the Selbst ).
III. From the Moi to the “Self,” from the “Self” to the Soi
Leaving aside the semantics of the German Selbst, which is remarkable by virtue of the possibilities of forming compound words from it ( for example, Selbstbewusstsein, Selbstbestimmung, Selbstständigkeit, Sebsterfahrung, Selbstbildung, Selbstverständigung, etc. ) ( see SELBST ), we will now look more closely at the double displacement that occurs between French and English: from moi to “self,” from “self” to soi. What we have is a minor drama of betrayal. Played out initially within a very short space of time, it has continuously informed the conflictual relationship between the psychologies and philosophies of personal identity that are particular to these two languages ( from the opposition between Hume and Rousseau in the eighteenth century, to the difference of approach between the American pragmatists such as William James or George Herbert Mead, and the French phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre or Paul Ricœur ).
In his An Essay concerning Human Understanding ( 2.27, Of Identity and Diversity ), Locke invented two major concepts of modern philosophy: “consciousness” and “the self” ( see CONSCIOUSNESS ). His immediate context and background was the invention of the expression le moi in French philosophy and literature ( Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche ). It was Pascal, as we know, who popularized the moi: “Je sens que je puis n’avoir point été, car le moi consiste dans ma pensée” ( I feel that I might not have been, since the moi consists of my thought [Pensées, B469/L135] ); “Qu’est-ce que le moi? . . . Où est donc ce moi, s’il n’est ni dans le corps ni dans l’âme? Et comment aimer le corps ou l’âme, sinon pour ces qualités, qui ne sont point ce qui fait le moi, puisqu’elles sont périssables?” ( What is the moi? . . . Where then is this moi, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul? And how is one to love the body or the soul if not for those qualities which are not what makes up the moi, since they are perishable? [ibid., B323/L688] ). But Descartes, in his Discourse on Method ( fourth part ), had already written: “Ce moi, c’est-à-dire mon âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis” ( This moi, that is to say my soul, by which I am what I am ). And this striking formulation had already been interpolated by the French translator in the course of the Fourth Meditation ( Descartes, Œuvres, 9:62 ). The substantivization of the self-reference ( ce moi, Ego ille ) is at the heart of the Cartesian interrogation of identity. It imposes a very strong grammatical constraint on any translations: to go from the expression le moi to “the self” is to enact a profound transformation, such that it is no longer possible to go back the other way. This is why Pierre Coste, the French translator of Locke, had to create, in turn, le soi, an innovation whose effects are still felt today. ( Coste’s note to his translation of Locke’s Essay says: “Pascal’s moi in a sense authorizes me to use soi, soi-même, in order to express the feeling, which everyone has within himself, that he is the one and the same [ce sentiment que chacun a en lui-même qu’il est le même]; or, to put it more clearly, I am thus obliged to translate it out of an indispensable necessity; for I could not express in any other way the meaning it has for my Author, who has taken the same liberty with his own Language. The circumlocutions I could use in this instance would get in the way of what he is saying, and would render it perhapscompletely unintelligible.” ) But present-day usages of the English “self” and the French soi do not really correspond to one another. One cannot write in French mon soi ( as in the English “myself” or “My Self” ), much less use this noun in the plural ( unlike the English “ourselves” ). Rather than establishing a universal concept, translation opens out onto a drifting-apart of meaning.
The way in which Locke takes advantage of the particularities of one language to transform the problematics that originated in another is quite remarkable. Indeed, although English has not developed any expression equivalent to the form das Ich or le moi, it does have at its disposal a great variety of usages for “self,” which incline the English-language conceptualization of the subject to imagine it as a disposition or property of oneself. The term “self” ( whose etymology remains obscure ) encompasses both a pronominal usage ( corresponding to the Latin ipse ) and an adjectival usage ( corresponding sometimes to the Latin ipse, and sometimes to the Latin idem; thus “myself” and “oneself,” or “the same,” “the selfsame” ). There are early nominal uses, both with and without the article ( “self,” “the self” ). Finally, there are different combinations: “self” compounded with pronouns and possessives, written either as a single word to emphasize its pronominal function ( itself, himself, myself, oneself ), or as two separate words, introducing a noun tending to substitute for the pronoun itself as a form of intensification ( itself, himself, myself, oneself ); or compounded with nouns or adjectives, to form notions of an action being applied to the subject itself, such as “self-conscious” and “self-consciousness” ( as in the Greek terms formed with auto- and heauto-, where Romance languages would use a genitive construction: causa sui, compos sui, cause de soi, maîtrise de soi, conscience de soi ).
■ See Box 2.
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To, auto, h( e )auto, to auto: The construction of identity in Greek
We have retained a large number of composite terms calqued from the Greek, often via Latin, and constructed using the pronoun autos, -ê, -o [αὐτός, -ή, -ό], such as “autograph, autodidact, automaton, autonomous”, to refer to the action that the subject carries out personally and most often on himself ( written in one’s own hand, someone who teaches himself, that which moves by itself, that which establishes its own laws ). This formation was virtually as extendable and generalizable in ancient Greek as the compound words in Selbst- are in present-day German ( see SELBST ); in French it has also brought several recent inventions in which the second term is French ( for example, auto-allumage [self-lighting, 1904], RT: DHLF, s.v. auto ). Autos is itself made up of the particle au [αὖ], which indicates succession ( then ), repetition ( again ), or opposition ( on the other hand ); and of ho, hê, to [ὁ, ἡ, τό], a deictic ( this one, that one ) that in classical Greek becomes the definite article “the” ( although ho men, ho de [ὁ μέν, ὁ δέ], for example, continue to mean “this one, that one” ). The first and literal sense of autos is thus something like “on the other hand, and then this one here, in contrast to that other one” ( cf. RT: Dictionnaire grec français, s.v. ). Autos grammatically has three essential uses: 1. In cases other than the nominative, it acts as a reminder pronoun in the third person, with an anaphoric usage ( auton horô [αὐτόν ὁϱῶ], “I see him”; ho patêr autou [ὁ πατήϱ αὐτоῦ], “the father of him,” “his father,” as in the Latin eius, eorum ). 2. It is used as an emphatic pronoun or adjective ( Lat. ipse, Fr. même ), either on its own ( as in the Pythagorean Autos epha [Aὐτὸς ἔφα], “The Master says” ), or apposed to a personal pronoun ( egô autos [ἐγώ αὐτός], “it is me in person who,” “myself” ) or to a noun ( auto to pragma [αὐτὸ τὸ πϱᾶγμα], “the thing itself”; dikaion auto [δίϰαιоν αὐτό], “what is just in itself” ). It is often used in this way at the same time as the reflexive pronoun, heautos, -ê, -o [ἑαυτός, -ή, -ό], which is itself a combination of two pronouns: he [ἕ], a third-person personal pronoun, which we find in Homer, followed by autos; when the reflexive is contracted into hautou, -ês, -ou [αὑτоῦ, -ῆς, -оῦ], the two are only distinguished in terms of breath ( rough breathing for the reflexive, transliterated by an aspirate h ); thus the Delphic formula given in the Charmides ( 165b ), “to gignôskein auton heauton [τὸ γιγνώσϰειν αὐτὸν ἑαυτόν], “to know oneself in oneself,” and the fact of being “auto kath’ auto” [αὐτὸ ϰαθ’ αὐτό] indicates the separate ontological status, “in oneself and by oneself,” or perhaps “in oneself and for oneself,” of the Platonic idea. 3. Finally, when it is immediately preceded by the article ho autos, hê autê, to auto [ὁ αὐτός, ἡ αὐτή, τό αὐτό], it has the same meaning as the Latin idem, “the same.” The Greek makes a very clear distinction by its word order between “ho autos theos [ὁ αὐτὸς θεός],” “the same god,” and “hautos ho theos [αὑτὸς ὁ θεός],” “the god himself.” In Greek, then, a constellation of terms tightly binds together the two aspects of identity: ipseity, or the constitution of a self, and “sameness,” the construction of an identity-to-oneself or to another-than-oneself. A number of languages have analogous procedures, such that the presence of an article makes the difference in meaning: French ( soi ) même / le même ( que ), German Selbst/dasselbe, in contrast to Latin ipse/idem, and English “self”/“same.” But in Greek, the article is primarily a constituent of the term itself, au-t-os. There follows from this a quite singular and informative series of linguistic gestures that one could characterize, along with Friedrich Schleiermacher, as constituting a kind of schema of how the Greeks conceived of identity. This series is, de facto, philosophically determining. Let us start with the article. Greek only has a definite article ( unlike Latin, which has none, or French, for example, which distinguishes between le, definite, and un, indefinite ). In archaic Greek, what will become the article, ho, hê, to, manifestly has a strong, demonstrative meaning, which is why it functions referentially, or as a liaison, close to a relative pronoun ( see RT: Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque, 188, 192ff. ). When, after Homer, it becomes an article, this little word remains remarkably consistent. Its presence alone next to a noun confers upon it a presumption or a presupposition of existence, so we find it regularly next to proper names ( in Greek, one says ho Sokratês [ὁ Σоϰϱάτης], “the Socrates,” and not “Socrates” ). It is used even more clearly to differentiate the subject from the predicate in a sentence in which word order alone is not sufficient: one would not say in Greek “a is a,” but rather “the a is a ( or “a the a is,” or “is the a a,” etc. ). Someone like Gorgias, for example, uses this as an argument against the identity of the subject and the predicate, in the form in which a statement of identity is made. Thus, for instance, with “to mê on esti mê on [τὸ μὴ ὂν ἐστὶ μὴ ὂν],” “the nonbeing is a nonbeing,” one says, whether one likes it or not, that the subject “to mê on [τὸ μὴ ὂν],” “the nonbeing,” has another type of consistency and existence than the predicate “mê on [μὴ ὂν],” “a nonbeing” ( De Melisso Xenophane Gorgia, 978a25b = G.3–4, in Cassin, Si Parménide, 636 ). This is also why the article can be used so easily to “substantivize” not only adjectives ( to kalon [τὸ ϰαλόν], “the beautiful one” in Plato’s Symposium ), participles, and infinitives ( to on [τὸ ὄν ] and to einai [τὸ εἶναι], “the being” and “Being” ), but all sorts of expressions ( see, for example, TO TI ÊN EINAI, the “essence of what being was,” the “quiddity” of Aristotle in Latin ), as well as words or whole sentences, which go from being used to being mentioned, as if put into quotation marks ( in Aristotle, for example, cf. Metaphysics, Γ.4, 1006b13–15 ). The first and strongest testimony to this organization of identity as a function of the constellation to, auto, to auto is the way in which Parmenides’s Poem constructs the identity of being. Following what he calls “the road of [it is]” ( which, moreover, is referred to as hê men [ἡ μὲν], “this one,” in opposition to hê de [ἡ δὲ], “that one,” 2.3 and 5 ), Parmenides discusses the whole range of forms and possibilities, syntactical as well as semantic, of the verb esti [ἔστι], “is” ( third-person singular, 2.3; see TO BE ), ending with to eon [τὸ ἐὸν], “the being” ( substantivized participle, 8.32 ), that is, the subject identified as such only at the end of the road ( and a demonstrative article, emphasized with a particle, will thereafter be sufficient to refer to it: to ge [τό γε], 8.37, “the/that in any case,” or to gar [τὸ γὰϱ], 8.44, “the/that indeed” ). One of the crucial points of the operation occurs in fragment 3, whose meaning has been so controversial, but acclaimed by Heidegger as the guiding principle of Western philosophy: “to gar auto noein estin te kai einai [τὸ γὰϱ αὐτὸ νоεῖν ἐστίν τε ϰαὶ εἶναι],” which could be translated literally as “a same indeed is both thinking and being.” One might interpret this phrase as meaning that thinking and being are one and the same, and understand it along with Heidegger not as a declaration of subjectivism and idealism avant la lettre—being is only ever what we think it is—but as a “belonging together” of being and thinking, and thus as a determination of man himself ( An Introduction to Metaphysics ). But one could also interpret it in terms of how this to auto is formed: to, “the”/“this”; au, “again, once more”; to, “the”/”this.” The particle joins together the same element two times; “the same” in Greek is articulated as “the re-the,” “this re-this.” In other words, the consistency of identity ( to auto, “the same” in the sense of a same thing, something identifiable as being the same as itself ) is nothing other than the conjunction ( te kai ) of thinking and being. Indeed, this is where being itself, properly articulated, will find in te eon the name of a subsisting and knowable subject, or ipseity par excellence. Barbara Cassin BIBLIOGRAPHY Cassin, Barbara, ed. Si Parménide: Le traité anonyme. Lille, Fr.: Presses Universitaire de Lille, 1980. Heidegger, Martin. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Edited by Petra Jaeger. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 40. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt: Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Loveday, T., and E. S. Forster, eds. and trans. De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia. In The Works of Aristotle, vol. 7 of 12. Loeb Classical Library. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913. Parmenides. The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary. Edited by A. H. Coxon. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1986. . Parménide: Sur la nature ou sur l’Étant. La langue de l’étre. Edited, translated, and commentary by Barbara Cassin. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Edited and introduction by Manfred Frank. 7th ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999. Translation by James Duke and Jack Forstman: Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Edited by Heinz Kimmerle. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977. Translation by Andrew Bowie: Hermeneutics and Criticism. Edited by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. |
No less decisive is the reciprocity, bordering on equivalence, that is established between “myself” and “my own” when the subject, addressing himself, is referring to that which belongs most closely or properly to him. “My own, confirm me!” the poet Robert Browning will write ( “By the Fire Side” ). This reciprocity enables Locke to fuse a modern problematic of identity and diversity with an ancient problematic of appropriation ( oikeiôsis, convenientia; see OIKEIÔSIS ), terms at either end of a spectrum between which notions concerning recognition, consciousness, memory, imputation, responsibility for oneself and one’s own actions, all insinuate themselves. In English, “own” is both an adjective and a verb. As an adjective, it is combined with the possessives “my,” “his,” and so on, as an intensifier ( “my own house,” “I am my own master” ) and separately ( “I am on my own” ). As a verb ( “to own” ), it has a wide range of meanings, including “to possess,” “to admit,” “to confess,” “to recognize,” “to declare,” and “to claim”: these all have the sense of saying something is “one’s own.” Locke draws together all the different senses of the term, separately or in different combinations ( as in: “owns all the actions of that thing, as its own”: An Essay, 2.27.17 ). The result of these constructions is an amalgamation of the paradigms of being and having, which is typical of what has been termed, from the point of view of political philosophy, a “possessive individualism.” Basically, “me” is ( “I am” ) “mine,” and what is “most properly mine” is “myself” ( just as what is most properly “yours” is “yourself,” “his” is “himself,” etc. ).
Even though this amalgamation goes as far back as the Greek discourses on oikeios and idios describing the particularity of the self ( cf. Vernant ), it is only with Locke that it occupies the center ground of modern philosophy. It finds its way through to us, continually reinforced, up until the liminal thesis of Sein und Zeit ( §9 ), in which Martin Heidegger identifies the existential particularity of human Dasein with Jemeinigkeit, another neologism ( this time a German one, literally “being each time mine” ) that is just as difficult to translate as the English “self.” In a sense, then, Heidegger’s neologism “self” turns back into its opposite, since the content of the English “own” ( in German das Eigene ) is merely the imminence of death, the only “thing” that “properly” belongs to each one of us. We will see how Heidegger’s reversal of the Lockean tradition is accompanied by a new revolution in the naming of the subject.
In the passages in Locke’s Essay where the doctrine of personal identity is elaborated ( above all, 2.27 ), all of these virtual senses are brought into play through the slippery movement of the writing. In a first stage we go from the idea of identity as simple “sameness” to that of reflexive identity, or “ipseity”: the word “self” at that point becomes a noun. From comparative expressions ( “the same with itself” ), we move easily to “that is self to itself” ( equivalent to the idea of consciousness ):
Consider what person stands for. . . . When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will any thing, we know that we do so . . . and by this every one is to himself, that which he calls self . . . it is the same self now as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.
( An Essay, 2.27.9 )
Locke provides two equivalent expressions, which could be exchanged for one another: “to be one ( identical ) Person” and “to be one self.” In a second stage, “self” sometimes serves as a substitute for the first person, and sometimes as its double, entering into dialogue with it, and showing concern for it:
Had I the same consciousness . . . I could no more doubt that I, that write this now . . . was the same self, place that self in what Substance you please, than that I that write this am the same my self now whilst I write. . . . That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join its self, makes the same person, and is one self with its, and with nothing else; and so attributes to its self, and owns all the actions of that thing.
( Ibid., §§16–17 )
“Self” as a common noun slips to “self” as an almost proper noun ( without an article ), while retaining the possibility of being understood as a possessive. In equating expressions such as “I am my self,” “I am the same self,” and “I am the same my self,” Locke turns “self” into the representation of oneself for oneself, the term to whom ( or to which ) I attribute what I attribute to myself, what I care for when I care for myself. Finally, Locke gives the name “Person” ( which he defines not as a grammatical or theological term, but as a “forensic term” ) to the “self” that had itself been used to clarify the singularity of “personal identity”:
Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds, what he calls himself, there I think another may say is the same person. . . . This personality extends its self beyond present existence . . . whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, own and impute to itself past actions.
( Ibid., §26 )
From the perspective of inner judgment ( which anticipates the Final Judgment ), Locke translates into the language of the “self” the expression of Descartes, substituting “consciousness” for “my soul” in the process of identifying that by which “I am what I am,” and playing once again on the possessive: “that consciousness, whereby I am my self to my self.”
This idea of being oneself for one’s person obviously suggests an element of reflection, or internal distance. There is thus an uncertainty about the question of knowing whether the identical and identity are “myself,” or rather are “in me” as an object, an image, or a verbal simulacrum. But the “self” for Locke is nothing more than an “appearing to oneself” or “perceiving oneself” that is identical through time. It could not, therefore, in fact split in two, whether the split is imagined to occur between a real self and an apparent one ( as in Leibniz ), or between an actor and a spectator ( Hume, Smith ), or between subject and object, or between I and Me ( in the way that G. H. Mead decomposes the Self into an “I” and a “Me,” which continuously switch places: it would be interesting to explore what Mead’s model perhaps owes to an oblique relation to French ). This vanishing distance is ultimately the pure differential of the subject. It corresponds remarkably to the idea that Locke’s theorization of consciousness attempts to found, marked by a tension between the representation of a fixed point to which the entire temporal succession of ideas would be connected, and that of the flux of representation, the continuity of which would itself produce identity. It appears to us primarily, though, as the effect of a play on words—an ironic state of affairs, when we consider the extent to which Locke tried to separate a theory of knowledge based on pure associations of ideas, from the linguistic “garments” of these ideas.
■ See Box 3.
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The “self” in psychoanalysis It was in the English-speaking world, around 1960, and mainly through the influence of Donald W. Winnicott that the term “self” truly began to appear in psychoanalytical literature. Since then, it has become firmly established in psychoanalysis in its English form, even though there have been occasional attempts to translate it as soi in French, as Selbst in German, or as an equivalent term in other European languages. What seems to hamper these translations is, on the one hand, a cultural particularity implying that the English “self” refers to an aspect of one’s personality that is hidden, or liable to be misunderstood or neglected ( as suggested, for example, by the expression “Take care of yourself” ), and on the other hand, the epistemological difficulty for contemporary psychoanalysts that an unreserved mobilization around this concept has caused. Indeed, when Winnicott defines the “self” as different from the “I,” saying that for him, “the self, which is not me, is the person within me” ( see ES ), some authors see in this new concept a useful complement to the three psychic terms introduced by Freud in his second topology ( the Ich [Ego], the Es [Id], and the Über-Ich [Superego] ), whereas others consider it as bastardization that would bring us back to a pre-Freudian, personalist, even Bergsonian phenomenology of autonomy and of a unified I. In fact, as Jean-Bertrand Pontalis has shown in an excellent analysis of the epistemological aspects of the problem ( “Naissance et reconnaissance du ‘soi’ ” ), the self according to Winnicott and several other English-speaking psychoanalysts should not be interpreted exclusively from a theoretical point of view, in relation to the conceptual apparatus elaborated by Freud. When they introduce the “self,” these authors are in fact concerned about “responding to problems posed by the analysis of their patients, and not about demonstrating the inadequacy or the deficiencies of the Freudian metapsychology.” What was at stake for them, then, was “more the determination of a domain of experience, than the theoretical critique of the validity of a concept.” The “self” was actually first used in 1950 by the New York psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann, who was originally from Vienna, in the context of the “Ego-Psychology” movement. Hartmann set out to dissociate an “I” that is defined by its functions ( motor control, perception, experience of reality, anticipation, thought, and so on ), from a “self” that represented the person as such, as distinct from external objects and other people. This bipartition in effect isolates narcissism, which is exalted in the feeling of plenitude and the self-sufficiency of one’s entire being, whereas, as Pontalis puts it, “the constitution of a self [moi] is linked to the recognition of the other, for whom it serves as a model.” As for the problematic elaborated by Winnicott in the context of what he calls the “transitional object” and the “potential space,” this leads to a distinction between the “true self” and the “false self,” which has often been popularized in a trivial and normative sense. The first is formed in a relation that the subject has with its subjective objects, which takes on a solipsistic character corresponding to the “right to not be discovered, if need be, to not communicate, insofar as any such needs, if they are recognized, reveal that the individual feels he is real in the secret communication that he has with that which is most subjective within him” ( Pontalis, “Naissance et reconnaissance du ‘soi,’ ” 180 ). The “false self” corresponds, for its part, to the need the subject has to adapt to external objects as they are presented to him by the environment. According to Pontalis, this would be close to what Helen Deutsch in 1942 called the “as if” personality, in the sense that it is characterized by a developed behavior and psychological ease that is apparently well adapted, but that functions in a void, notwithstanding a constant oscillation between an extreme submission to the external world and exposure to its misfortunes, and a readiness to react to these misfortunes to one’s own advantage. But this bipolarity of the “true self” and the “false self” has nothing to do with a dichotomy between two personality types, where one, the “true self,” would be the only authentic one, whereas the other, the “false self,” would be more or less alienated by environmental constraints. According to Winnicott, these two “selves” in effect form a pair in which the second protects the first, even if it appears to do nothing more than hide or cross-dress it. For it is important that the “true self,” in its position of noncommunication, should need to be protected. There would, then, only be a genuine pathology in cases where there was a clear split between these two aspects of the personality. Then again, however, concepts of this kind are only relevant, in Winnicott’s eyes, if they prove to be useful at a given moment in a clinical situation, and they do not compromise the Freudian problematic of the self ( moi ). Charles Baladier BIBLIOGRAPHY Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. “Naissance et reconnaissance du ‘soi.’ ” In Entre le rêve et la douleur. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1977. |
IV. Returns of the Ego
French, then, has the duality of the je and the moi, which allows it to problematize identity, and later introspection, from the perspective of both an affirmation of certainty and a passion for existence ( but also for disappearance ); German has the flexibility of the Ich, which encompasses a dialectics of position, of reflection, and of negation; and English has a synthetic expression of moral responsibility and mental appropriation: the “self.” We might then assume that the rules of the game are set, so to speak ( unless and until we take into account other, different languages, of course ), and that it is all a matter, precisely, of translation. A few enigmas remain, however, of which the most striking is the way in which philosophy in the twentieth century has set about reviving the Latin ego, like a Fremdwort that is nonetheless, by definition, absolutely familiar.
A. “Ego-psychology”
It is by no means certain that this “return of ego” poses exactly the same problems in all contexts, first of all because the fact of writing ego or “the ego” in the middle of an ordinary sentence does not produce the same effect of strangeness in all languages. We should reserve a special place for the ( by now universal ) consequences of the generalization of an English psychoanalytic terminology, in which the Ich of Freud’s second topological theory was translated as “the ego,” whereas Es was translated as “the id” ( see ES ). These effects are easier to understand when we explain not only, following Alexandre Abensour, that the term “ego” in English comes out of a psychological and medical vocabulary, but also that it thereby prematurely gave rise to all sorts of composite words referring to the fact of relating ideas and behaviors “to the self,” or even of putting them in “the service of the self” ( “ego-attitude,” “ego-complex,” “ego-consciousness” [sic], “ego-satisfaction,” and so on, leading to all sorts of astonishing redundancies, such as “ego-identity,” all attested by the Oxford English Dictionary [RT] of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ). This influence even extends to certain texts by Lacan, who was notoriously hostile to “ego-psychology,” whence his lecture to the British Psychoanalytical Society on 2 May 1951, “Quelques réflexions sur l’Ego” ( Some reflections on the ego, quoted in Ogilvie, Lacan, 52 ), a title that was not lacking in irony. But the fact that Lacan had in mind a theorization of “paranoiac knowledge” suggests another direction: that of the usages, scientific or parodic, of the word “ego” ( including the expression “my ego” ) to refer to the narcissistic image that the subject forms of itself ( “the ego of the Prime Minister is highly developed” ).
More directly linked to our discussion is the introduction of “egological” terminology in Husserl’s phenomenology, and the very profound effects it produces there. Although Husserl had only used classical terminology in the Logische Untersuchungen ( Logical Investigations ) of 1900–1901 and in the Ideen of 1913—the terminology of transcendental Idealism, posing the usual problems of translation ( thus in Ideen, 1.57: “Die Frage nach der Ausschaltung des reinen Ich,” which Paul Ricœur translated into French as “Le Moi pur est-il mis hors circuit?” [Is the pure self ( Husserl: “the pure ‘I’ ” ) put out of circulation?] )—the texts from his late period, starting with the Cartesianische Meditationen ( the Cartesian Meditations were originally delivered as lectures in German at the Sorbonne in 1929, and were translated into French by E. Levinas and G. Peiffer before they were even published in the original German ) begin to introduce another terminology, that of the “transcendental ego [das transzendentale Ego].” How should we understand this retranslation into Latin, which could seem merely pedantic? We might look for the reason in the context and the intentions of the text, without going into the complexity of the problems raised by the way in which Husserl’s conception of subjectivity evolved. These have provided an endless source of debate for contemporary philosophy, from Sartre’s major article on “La transcendance de l’ego” ( The transcendence of the ego, 1936 ), in which he problematizes the relationship between consciousness, the Je, and the Moi ( self ), to the controversy between Jacques Derrida ( La voix et le phénomène [Speech and phenomena], 1967 ) and Michel Henry ( L’essence de la manifestation [The essence of manifestation], 1963 ) in the 1960s around the question of the auto-affection of the subject.
The first and simplest reason resides in the fact that Husserl cites Descartes, whose philosophical gesture he hopes to repeat:
If we examine the content of the Meditations, we note that we are effectuating a return [Rückgang] to the philosophical ego . . . a return to the ego of the pure cogitationes.
( Cartesian Meditations, trans. Cairns, Introduction, §1 )
The text of Descartes that Husserl invokes is the original Latin text, thus at same time continuing a German university tradition, and marking the persistence of a linguistic universitas common to spiritual Europe, a teleological horizon in which Husserl situates, precisely, the primacy of transcendental subjectivity. We might say that with Husserl’s reprise of Descartes, the ego is immediately perceived as absolutely translatable ( unlike Heidegger’s Dasein, for example, which ends up being perceived as untranslatable into other languages ). The Latin Descartes, whose thought ( re )inaugurates philosophy, symbolically summarized in the use he makes of the noun ego and of the expression “ego cogito, ego sum,” is not so much French as European, and thus universal in the sense of European universality, whose crisis Husserl then undertakes to interpret. Husserl was no doubt unaware of the fact that the turns of phrase used by Descartes in the Meditationes de prima philosophia ( Metaphysical meditations ) to problematize ipseity, in particular the “ille ego, qui iam necessario sum” of the Second Meditation, would not have been possible without a constant back-and-forth movement between ancient Latin and classical French ( “Ce moi, c’est-à-dire mon âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis” [This self, that is to say my soul, by which I am what I am] ). Kant’s reading of Descartes, however, in which Je and Je pense, even Je me pense ( I think myself ), are taken as names for the subject, is tacitly assumed. A circle is thus traced, which we will have to follow back to its origins in order to reinterpret its meaning.
Two themes, respectively opening and closing the arguments developed in the Cartesian Meditations, seem to us to be worthy of attention here. We suggest that bringing them together offers a key to Husserl’s linguistic artifice.
First of all, Husserl describes what he calls a “transzendentale Selbsterfahrung” ( translated into French by Levinas and Peiffer as “expérience interne transcendentale” [transcendental inner experience], and by Marc de Launay as “auto-expérience transcendentale”; compare Dorion Cairns’s English “transcendental self-experience” ), by virtue of which we can gain access to “a universal and apodictic structure of the experience of the I [des Ich] which extends across all of the particular domains of affective and possible self-experience [Selbsterfahrung again]” ( §12 ). This Selbsterfahrung has a specific kind of manifestation, in which consciousness “is given” in the mode of “itself” ( “im Modus Er selbst” ) or of “oneself” ( “Es Selbst” ) ( §24 ). It is then described as Selbstkonstitution ( “constitution de soi-même,” “auto-constitution” ), which is tantamount to saying that the consciousness that is named ego also appears to itself as sufficient, as the origin of its own meanings or qualities. This is what Husserl calls a “transcendental solipsism.” Unlike Kant, however, Husserl does not offer this experience in which the “I” ( Ich ) perceives itself as the “identical pole of lived experiences,” “the substratum of habitus,” and so on, as an illusion constitutive of subjectivity. Nor does he see within it, like Heidegger ( writing at approximately the same moment in Sein und Zeit ), the risk of “missing the sense of the being of sum.” But he makes it the point of departure and the horizon of a “self-interpretation” ( Selbstauslegung ) in which the ego will discover progressively what gives it its meaning, which had not been immediately noticed, except partially.
Now, the essential content of this “discovering of the transcendental sphere of being [Enthüllung der transzendentalen Seinssphäre]” is the constitutive function that intersubjectivity has for the ego itself—what Husserl called, in an analysis that has since become well known, a constitution of the ego as an alter ego, or an “original pairing” ( Paarung ) of the ego:
In this intentionality a new meaning of being is constituted, which transcends the limits of my monadic ego in my self-specificity [der neue Seinssinn, der mein monadisches ego in seiner Selbsteigenheit überschreitet; Levinas and Peiffer translated this as: “un sens existentiel nouveau qui transgresse l’être propre de mon ego monadique”], and it constitutes an ego for itself not as my-self [nicht als Ich-selbst], but insofar as it is reflected in my own I [in meinem eigenen Ich], my monad. But the second ego is not purely and simply there, properly given to us itself [uns eigentlich selbst gegeben; Levinas and Peiffer: “donné en personne”], it is constituted on the contrary as an alter ego, and I am myself this ego [Ich selbst in meiner Eigenheit bin; Levinas and Peiffer: “c’est moi-même, dans mon être propre”], designated as a moment by the expression alter ego.
( Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation, §44 )
Solipsism is thus reversed from the inside, or, to be more exact, it opens out onto a new transcendental problem that is deeply enigmatic by Husserl’s own admission. This relates to the fact that constitutive intersubjectivity ( since the ego would not be the subject of a thinking of the world of objects, if this world were not in its origin common to a reciprocal multiplicity of subjectivities ) has as its condition the representation of “itself as an other,” an alter ego that is both generic and concrete, irreducible to ( the ) ego and yet indiscernible from it ( that is, from the “I” ) in its constitution. Husserl calls this elsewhere ( §56 ) “eine objektivierende Gleichstellung meines Daseins und des aller Anderen” ( an objectifying placing of my being and that of all others on the same level ), which is experienced from the inside ( Levinas and Peiffer translate this as: “une assimilation objectivante qui place mon être et celui de tous les autres sur le même plan”; de Launay proposes the following: “une équivalence objectivante de mon existence et de celle de tous les autres” ).
Through this verbal association, Husserl manages to account for the meaning of his initial choices, but he can only do it by going beyond Descartes and returning to an earlier layer of the humanist tradition. The term alter ego, which became commonplace and even banal in the different European languages during the nineteenth century, in the sense of a close friend, a personal representative, someone in whom you can confide, and so on ( it first appears in French in Honoré de Balzac ), is usually traced back to Cicero’s De amicitia ( Laelius ), where we actually only find the expressions “tamquam alter idem” and “alterum similem sui” to denote a true friend. The fact is, however, that the expression goes much farther back ( Pythagoras: ti esti philos [τι ἔστι φίλоς]; allos egô [ἄλλоς ἐγώ], according to Hermias, In Phaedrus, 199A ). It casts over our entire culture the question of the possibility of experiencing intellectually or affectively something beyond the alternative of self and stranger/other ( Fremd, in Husserl’s text ). This is the question Michel de Montaigne asked in an ethical register, for example, about his unique friendship with La Boétie ( “Because it was he; because it was I” ). Husserl also uses it to inform his reshaping of ontology, at the same time illuminating how we should understand that Descartes had indicated to philosophy the way toward a radical questioning, and yet had missed its transcendental meaning. We might perhaps suggest, then, that from the first, the return to the ego and the return of the ego ( as a universal word ) had been overdetermined by the possibility of saying the alter ego authentically ( see MITMENSCH, NEIGHBOR, and LOVE ).
V. Je Est un Autre: It Thinks ( Me )
Let us immediately articulate this dialectic with another ontologico-linguistic problem, the one indicated by Rimbaud’s expression: “Je est un autre” ( I is an other ). This could be just another way of translating alter ( est ) ego, or even ille ego. However, the uncertainty in French between the masculine and the neuter, and the way in which Rimbaud forces the syntax, points toward other interpretations. These are, moreover, in part suggested by Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny ( 15 May 1871 ), where this expression first appears, since there it is a question for the poet of discovering within himself a disproportionate creative power for which he is not responsible:
J’assiste à l’éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l’écoute. . . . Si les vieux imbéciles n’avaient pas trouvé du Moi que la signification fausse, nous n’aurion pas balayé ces millions de squelettes qui . . . ont accumulé les produits de leur intelligence borgnesse, en s’en proclamant les auteurs!
( I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it. . . . If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which . . . have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the author of them! )
( Trans. Oliver Bernard, in Kwasny, Towards the Open Field, 146 )
At issue for Rimbaud, too, is how to recover the meaning of an ancient kind of delirium, in which madness communicates with enthusiasm:
En Grèce, ai-je dit, vers et lyres rythment l’Action. . . . L’intelligence universelle a toujours jeté ses idées, naturellement. . . . Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.
( In Greece, I say, verses and lyres take their rhythm from Action. . . . Universal Mind has always thrown out its ideas naturally. . . . The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. )
( Ibid., 147 )
What suddenly bursts forth here ( in certain limit-conditions where the “I” escapes from the “Self” [Moi] ) is the paradox of the equivalence between the personal and the impersonal, or better still, borrowing Benveniste’s categories, between a “person” and a “non-person,” in all of its different modalities.
There are basically three types of these modalities, which philosophy has always designated as being on the horizon of the “I,” as its other side, or its limit, or its truth. “Das Wesen, welches in uns denkt,” Kant wrote in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft ( 374 ), in which he sketched out a surprisingly tripartite personification: “Ich, oder Er, oder Es ( das Ding )”—“What thinks in us,” then, could be “Him” or “Her” ( God, Being, Truth, Nature ); it could be “that” ( the body, desires or impulses, the unconscious ); it could be “one” ( the impersonal of a common thought, what circulates as speech between all subjects ). Let us conclude by summarizing these three translations.
“Je est un autre” ( I is an other ) is to say it is God, the only one capable of using absolutely the Ich-Prädikation ( Cassirer ) in order to name himself. We know that the Bible ( perhaps inspired by other models, notably Egyptian, but this is not the place to get into the disputes about which came first ) was originally theophanic in its formulation ( “Éyéh asher éhyéh,” that is, “I am who I am,” or “I am who I will be,” Ex 3:14; see Box 4 ). It gives rise in the mystical tradition to some surprising reversals, such as in Meister Eckhart, where we find the exclusive appropriation of the “I” and the “I am” by the “base of the base” of the soul ( Urgrund ), itself conceived as a creative nothingness that precedes the existence of God. If we accept that the secularization of the divine name in philosophy truly begins with the “ego sum, ego existo,” or “I am, I exist,” of Descartes, we see that this statement, modern by definition, serves in its turn as a point of departure for a series of displacements and reversals. This is the case when Spinoza in the Ethics sets down the factual axiom “homo cogitat” ( since this undefined “man” is very close to an impersonal “one,” he simply expresses one of the ways in which substance or nature thinks itself, and thus produces itself ). It is the case in an entirely different way when the romantic and theosophist Franz von Baader “inverts” the Cartesian cogito: “cogitor [a Deo], ergo Deus est” ( God thinks me, therefore he is, cited by Baumgardt, Franz von Baader ). Without these precedents, Hegel would not have been able to attribute the Self to the Spirit as universal rationality, that is, to overcome the Cartesian formulation asserting the absolute subjectivity of a “thought of thought.”
■ See Box 4.
But “Je est un autre” should also be understood as referring to the power of the individual body, or, as Locke said, to its “uneasiness,” that is, its perpetual motion and desire, of which it is confusedly perceived to be the seat. Parodying Descartes, Voltaire had written ( Philosophical Letters, 13 ): “I am body and I think: I know nothing more than that” ( or “That’s all I know about that [je n’en sais pas d’advantage]” ). Many authors, particularly German-language ones, from Georg Lichtenberg up to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, have for their part emphasized the idea that the subject’s self-reference, and the irreplaceable identity of which it is meant to be sign, are of no use when it comes to imagining the essence of thought: so one should not write Ich denke, except as a derivative effect, but rather es denkt, “it thinks” or “there is thought,” as one says es regnet, “it is raining.” The most interesting consequences of these two points of view occur when they are fused together in a doctrine of the unconscious, as is the case with Freud. In his second topology, the “reservoir of drives” is named Es, which has been translated into French as ( the ) ça, as opposed to the moi ( das Ich ) and the surmoi ( das Über-Ich ) ( which in some ways is the Il, Ille that surmount the ego, a divine or paternal model of authority ). The meaning of these strange grammatical designations for the “instances of the psychic personality” is no doubt to reestablish the ancient idea of the conflict between the different parts of the soul, but in the modern horizon of thought reflecting upon its faculties of expression. This only comes out clearly once they give rise to a reciprocal formulation: the “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” of the New Lectures on Psychoanalysis ( 1932 ), where Es should indeed be conceived as a subject ( or at least “of the subject” ), since Ich is by definition a subject. Subjectivity only arises in a process in which the personal and the impersonal can switch places, the places occupied by a thought that reflects upon itself in the at least apparent unity of a first person, and by a thought that undoes itself and misrecognizes itself in the conflict of representations attached to the body ( life drives, death drives ).
As Abensour notes ( see ES ), the very simple and yet improbable translation of “Wo Es war soll Ich werden” proposed by Lacan ( “Là où c’était, là comme sujet dois-je advenir” [Where it was, I must come into being], Écrits, 864, trans. Fink ) allows us to speak again the “language of ontology.” Should we be surprised that in this respect, Lacan’s translation involves, under the name of grand Autre ( big Other ), a kind of short-circuiting of two previous interpretations of “Je est un autre”? If He is not the unconscious, at the very least we should say, with François Regnault, that “God is unconscious.”
But with this Lacanian reference, we come to the third possible way of understanding the “non-person” and of transforming the “I” into its other: this other appears, then, as the order of language itself, the symbolic. As we know, Lacan is not alone in proposing such an interpretation, in which “ça pense” ( it thinks ) is always already preceded by “ça parle” ( it speaks ). It was also prevalent in Heidegger, for whom the impersonality of language as constitutive was initially presented pejoratively, as a characteristic of improper ( uneigentlich ) being, the “one,” or “any man” ( das Man ), who is essentially the man of public conversation, of the noisy exchange of opinions ( as opposed to the silent figure, “absolutely my own,” of care ). Fleeing the anxiety felt at the possibility of its own death, Dasein or the existent can only respond to the question “Who am I?” by assuming a “public identity,” expressed in language through common meanings ( Being and Time, pt. 1, chap. 4 ). The precise meaning of the French pronoun on ( [das] man ) is certainly not easy to understand because of the interrelation between the phenomenological analysis and the value judgment, but its translations are instructive. English has recourse to no less than three correlative terms—“anyone,” “one,” and “they” ( a term originally used in discussing Heidegger’s text by the philosopher William Richardson, and retained in the standard English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson )—which thus shift the anonymity of the one to the many, in a way that allegorically invokes the masses. In Italian, they privilege the impersonal turn of phrase: si dice, which represents “tutti e nessuno, il medium in cui l’esserci o Dasein, si dissipa nella chiacchiera” ( Everyone and no-one, the medium in which Dasein dissolves into chatter: Bodei, “Migrazioni di identità,” 646 ). Spanish has dicen and se dice; gossip and hearsay are el qué dirán, the “what-will-they-say.”
But such combinations of private identity and public expression ( whose counterpart is the tireless quest for the voices of silence, in mystical experience or in poetry, a non-speech where being preferentially expresses itself, and which would in a sense be situated this side of the “I” as well as of the “one” ) are not strictly necessary. Beyond the alternative of the Lacanian “subject of the unconscious,” speaking or signifying like the truth in the “place of the Other,” and of Heidegger’s anonymous subject-as-multitude of daily chatter, the most persuasive determination has without doubt been proposed by Michel Foucault in his commentary of the neutral in Blanchot. “The other” is thought turning back to its constitutive exteriority, which is essentially the infinite dispersion of the effects of language:
The “I” who speaks—fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space. If the only site for language is indeed the solitary sovereignty of “I speak” then in principle nothing can limit it—not the one to whom it is addressed, not the truth of what it says, not the values or systems of representation it utilizes. In short, it is no longer discourse and the communications of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse ( what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect ) than a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues.
( Foucault, Thought from Outside, trans. Massumi and Mehlman, 11 )
We have covered ( at the cost of certain simplifications ) the cycle of expressions of the subject in the European code of persons. Two hypotheses have emerged, which call for further investigation. The first is that no one language is absolutely sufficient to complete this cycle, but the unveiling of the relationship between language and thought that the subject “consignifies” ( as the Scholastics would say ) can only occur by transferring the question from one language into another language, that is, by reformulating it within this other language according its own syntax. The second is that this cycle clearly reproduces the cycle of the statements at the origin of the metaphysical principle: tautology or identity, conflict or contradiction, repetition or reflection, difference or alienation. These ontological figures are not engendered; even less are they predetermined by language. But what is certain is that without a linguistic formulation ( disposition ), and without the culture of this formulation, they would not be thinkable, and therefore would not have been thought.
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IDEA
I. Idea and Ontology
1. The word “idea” comes from the philosophical Latin idea ( from videre, “to see” ), used notably by Seneca ( Letters 58.18 ) in translating Plato’s Greek idea [ἰδέα] ( from idein [ἰδεῖν], the aorist of horaô [ὁϱάω], “to see” ), which—in a running set of exchanges and cross-references with the closely related term eidos [εἶδος]—means “visible form, aspect,” and later “distinctive form, essence.”
See SPECIES for analysis of the respective networks of the Latin and the Greek ( cf. FORM ).
2. The word has since Plato been one of the key terms of ontology, constantly invested with different meanings in different languages ( idée in French, Idee in German, and so on ), and by different philosophies, at the junction between objectivity ( the “Idea” in Plato and Hegel ) and subjectivity ( “Ideas” in Locke and Kant ), a crossing point that is expressed, for example, by the notion of the “objective reality of the idea” in Descartes ( see REALITY, III ).
See ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, ESTI, REALITY, RES, TO TI ÊN EINAI, UNIVERSALS; and CONSCIOUSNESS, SOUL; cf. CONCEPTUS, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION.
II. Idea and Aesthetics
In Aesthetics, of particular importance is the relationship between the surface or image, and the underlying reality or model.
See BEAUTY, CONCETTO, Box 1, DISEGNO, IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], MIMÊSIS; cf. ART, PLASTICITY.
IDENTITY
“Identity” is derived from identitas, which is from the pronoun idem, “the same” ( no doubt a composite of the demonstrative and of an emphatic particle ), which is one of a cluster of late inventions that are untraceable in classical Latin. Even the English and French terms are polysemic, weaving together the notions of “sameness” and of “ipseity”: it thus encompasses two distinct terminologies in Latin, which open up particular sets of problems.
I. Identity, Sameness, Ipseity
1. In accordance with its Latin etymology, “identity” denotes first of all something that is indiscernible, the “same,” in the sense of “the same as,” or “identical to,” idem. The Greek expresses this identity-indiscernibility with the term ho autos [ὁ αὐτός], to auto [τὸ αὐτό], with the article placed in front of the demonstrative.
2. “Identity” also refers to a person, to personal identity: even in the sense of “oneself,” ipseity, from the Latin ipse, which means “itself,” “in person” ( ego ipse, myself, moi-même in French, etc. ). The Greek expresses this identity-ipseity using the same demonstrative, autos [αὐτός], but without an article, which is sometimes attached to the pronoun: egô autos [ἐγὼ αὐτός], like ego ipse, “myself in person.” This is the meaning of “identity” in “identity card” and “identification procedure.”
See I/ME/MYSELF ( for the Greek, see Box 2 ), PERSON, SAMOST’, SELBST; cf. ES.
3. On the transition from the ontological register to the transcendental register, in which “reflexive” identity is conceived as the condition of possibility of speaking, see I/ME/MYSELF, SUBJECT, and cf. CONSCIOUSNESS, PERSON, SPEECH ACT.
II. The Inextricable Link between the Different Sets of Problems: Essence, Resemblance
Sameness and ipseity are inextricably linked in several essentially philosophical ways:
1. The first way to be oneself is to be verified as being identical to oneself, just as the subject and predicate are in the principle of identity “a is a,” which requires a comparison between two elements that are said ultimately to be one and the same, and indicated either by their position in the order of the words ( see WORD ORDER ), or by the presence or absence of an article ( see I/ME/MYSELF, Box 2; see also PRINCIPLE, and cf. SUBJECT and PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION ).
2. Ipseity refers to the definition, to the essence, to the idea whereby a thing is what it is. Plato links the question of ipseity and intelligibility together with the question of the resemblance to the model and to the idea: the two senses of identity are thus joined dialectically; see EIDÔLON, MIMÊSIS, SPECIES: cf. BEAUTY. For a broader perspective, see ESSENCE, ESTI, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI.
One could compare this to the French, which makes a distinction in word order between “l’homme même” ( the very man ) and “le même homme” ( the same man ).
3. In terms of the question of the image, the expression of identity is directly linked to the question of resemblance, and of similitude, sameness, similis ( Lat. ), homos [ὁμός] and homoios [ὅμоιоς] ( Gr. ), from the Indo-European root *sem, “one,” allowing for attention to be focused on the common points between two entities that remain distinct; in addition to MIMÊSIS and IMAGE, see ANALOGY.
The distinction between sameness and ipseity has been particularly rigorous and inventive in English since Locke ( sameness/identity ): see in particular STAND, where we see the beginning of a new expression of identity in metaphorical terms ( the metaphor of “holding oneself up,” of “taking a stand,” or even the juridical concept of “having standing” ), which is shared by English and German, but not French ( se tenir debout ); cf. STANDARD.
4. Finally, we might consider the problematic extension of self-identity as a question of the individual to a question of collective identity, which leads to varying connotations in names of peoples from one language to another; see NAROD and PEOPLE; cf. FATHERLAND, HEIMAT.
IL Y A
Il y a expresses the presence of something, or the way in which the world is given. The French turn of phrase is quite idiomatic, especially because of the adverb y, which indicates place ( but, according to the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, the y in the expression il y a “has no meaning that can be analyzed”; RT: DHLF, s.v. ). Other languages use simple or complex expressions that contain either the verb “to have” ( há in Portuguese, hay in Castilian Spanish ), “to be” ( esti [ἐστι] in Greek, est in Latin, “there is” in English ), “to give” ( es gibt in German, dá-se in Portuguese, se da in Castilian ), or “to hold” ( tem in Portuguese, and analogously in Castilian ). See ES GIBT, ESTI, HÁ, and SEIN, Box 1. More generally, on the relationship between being and presence, see also TO BE [SPANISH], and ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, NATURE, PRESENT, TO TI ÊN EINAI, WELT.
IMAGE
The English “image” is a calque of the Latin imago, which literally denotes a material imitation, particularly effigies of the dead, and which psychoanalysis invests with its own meaning ( see EIDÔLON, Box 2 ). We begin with the Greek, because of the multiplicity of non-synonymous words denoting the image in the language, and with the German, because of the large number of terms that are derived from Bild.
I. Eidôlon: The Complexity of the Greek Vocabulary of the Image
The Greek names for image always privilege one of its defining or functional characteristics: eikôn [εἰϰών], “similitude,” phantasma [φάντασμα], “appearance in light” ( see PHANTASIA, IMAGINATION, from phôs [φῶς], “light,” and LIGHT ), tupos [τύπоς], “imprint, impression,” and so on. The entry EIDÔLON, the most general term derived from the verb meaning “to see,” and that denotes the image as something visible by which we can see another thing, discusses at greater length the main difficulties of interpretation and translation that have arisen in ontology and optics, via the Arabic ( ma’nā [المعنى]; see also INTENTION ).
Many other Latin terms than imago can be translated as “image” ( simulacrum, figura, forma, effigies, pictura, species ). These respond, but do not correspond, to the Greek terms: “species,” for example, is the translation that Cicero favors for the Platonic eidos [εἶδоς], “idea, essence”; but in other philosophical contexts, the word can denote eidôlon [εἴδωλоν], “image” and “simulacrum.” The Latin entry SPECIES discusses the Latin translations of eidos, in its pairing with eidôlon ( see ESSENCE, IDEA ).
II. Bild: The Large Number of German Derivations
The entry for the German BILD discusses a network of terms that are systematically connected to each other, and that allow us to articulate the relationship of the image to its model: Urbild/Abbild ( model/copy ), Gleichbild ( a copy that is a good likeness ), Nachbild ( ectype ), which can be considered in light of the Hebrew terms in Genesis ( ṣèlèm [צֶלֶם], demūt [דְמוּת] ). This exceptionally broad constellation includes Einbildungskraft, the imagination as the faculty by which one forms images ( see IMAGINATION ), and Bildung, education ( see BILDUNG, CIVILIZATION, CULTURE ).
III. The Complexity of the Problems
1. The aesthetic dimension of the image is discussed in the entry MIMÊSIS, “imitation/representation” ( see IMITATION ); see also DESCRIPTION, TABLEAU.
2. On the literary and rhetorical dimension of the image, see EIDÔLON, Box 1, and COMMONPLACE, COMPARISON; see also ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, INGENIUM.
3. On the possibility of a theology and a politics based on the image as the visible trace of the invisible, see OIKONOMIA ( and ECONOMY ).
4. On the ontology of being and appearing, see APPEARANCE, DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG.
5. On the logic of truth as resemblance and similitude, see FICTION, TRUTH.
6. On the cognitive dimension of the image, see REPRÉSENTATION; see also PERCEPTION, SENSE.
The English “imagination” comes from the relatively obscure imperial Latin word imaginatio ( itself derived from imago, whose principal meaning is “effigy, portrait”; see IMAGE ), whereas the Greek root, phantasia [φαντασία] ( from phôs [φῶς], “light” ), evolved in the sense of “fantasy, phantasm” ( see PHANTASIA, Box 3, for the psychoanalytic lexicon ).
I. The Tension between Production and Reproduction
The difference between phantasia and imaginatio, as shown by the difficulties experienced in translating the Greek into Latin, is the difference between the creative force of apparitions ( PHANTASIA, see DOXA and ERSCHEINUNG ) and the reproductive faculty of images ( see EIDÔLON, MIMÊSIS, and REPRÉSENTATION ), each of these terms also itself being internally distressed by this tension and the value judgments that come with it.
On the Scholastic tradition, based on Avicenna’s translations of Arabic philosophy, see SENSUS COMMUNIS [COMMON SENSE and SENS COMMUN]; cf. INTENTION.
The pair phantasia and imaginatio is put to work in different ways in the German tradition ( Phantasie/Einbildungskraft, see BILD and BILDUNG; here we must take into account the extraordinary richness of the family of words that places the image and the imagination on the side of education and culture ), and in the English tradition, which tends in contrast to differentiate the power to produce fictions depending upon the extent to which it is arbitrary or necessary ( FANCY, see also FICTION ).
II. The Imagination as a Faculty: Aesthetics and Epistemology
This same tension determines the place of the imagination in the play of faculties and the modalities of being in the world. Is the imagination a faculty that is necessary for the exercise of the other faculties, operating somewhere between passivity ( see AESTHETICS, FEELING, PATHOS; cf. SENSE ) and activity ( see REASON; cf. INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, INTENTION, INTUITION, MEMORY, SOUL, UNDERSTANDING )? Or is it rather, as Blaise Pascal puts it, a “mistress of error and falsity” ( Pensées, frag. 41; see TRUTH )?
1. BILD discusses the difference that Immanuel Kant places at the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason, between a “reproductive” empirical imagination and a transcendental imagination that “produces” the schemata, and is thus the condition of possibility of our representations.
2. Prior to and beyond the critical distinctions between concept and intuition, image and idea, the Italian tradition insists on the metaphorical capacity of images and of the imagination in art and in thought ( see ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, DISEGNO; cf. BEAUTY, INGENIUM ).
IMITATION
“Imitation” is borrowed from the derived Latin term imitatio ( imitation, copy, faculty of imitating ). It is one of the major possible translations of the Greek mimêsis [μίμησις] ( see MIMÊSIS ), besides representation ( see REPRÉSENTATION ). Mimêsis, which endured as the key term of aesthetic questions since Plato and Aristotle, is in fact understood sometimes as resemblance, in terms of a pictorial model ( and is in that sense associated with image; see IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON] and IMAGINATION ), and sometimes as representation, drawing most proximately on theatrical models ( see ACTOR ).
I. Imitation and Reproduction
II. Imitation, Logic, Rhetoric
See ANALOGY, COMPARISON, DESCRIPTION, ERZÄHLEN.
IMPLICATION
| ENGLISH | entailment, implicature | ||
| FRENCH | implication | ||
| GERMAN | nachsichziehen, zurfolgehaben, Folge( -rung ), Schluß, Konsequenz, Implikation, Implikatur | ||
| GREEK | sumpeplegmenon [συμπεπλεγμένον], sumperasma [συμπέϱασμα], sunêmmenon [συνημμένον], akolouthia [ἀϰολουθία], antakolouthia [ἀνταϰολουθία] | ||
| LATIN | illatio, inferentia, consequentia |
ANALOGY, PROPOSITION, SENSE, SUPPOSITION, TRUTH
Implication denotes, in modern logic, a relation between propositions and statements such that, from the truth-value of the antecedent ( true or false ), one can derive the truth of the consequent. More broadly, “we can say that one idea implies another if the first idea cannot be thought without the second one” ( RT: Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie ). Common usage makes no strict differentiation between “to imply,” “to infer,” and “to lead to.” The verb “to infer,” meaning “to draw a consequence, to deduce” ( a use dating to 1372 ), and the noun “inference,” meaning “consequence” ( from 1606 ), do not on the face of it seem to be manifestly different from “to imply” and “implication.” Indeed, nothing originally distinguished “implication” as Lalande defines it—“a logical relation by which one thing implies another”—from “inference” as it is defined in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ( 1765 ): “A logical operation by which one accepts a proposition because of its connection to other propositions held to be true.” The same phenomenon can be seen in German, in which the terms corresponding to “implication” ( Nachsichziehen, Zurfolgehaben ), “inference” ( [Schluß]-Folgerung, Schluß ), “to infer” ( schließen ), “consequence” ( Folge [-rung], Schluß, Konsequenz ), “reasoning” ( [Schluß-]Folgerung ), and “to reason” ( schließen, Schlußfolgerungen ziehen ) intersect or overlap to a large extent.
The history of the French verb impliquer, however, reveals several characteristics that the term does not share with “to infer” or “to lead to.” First of all, it was originally ( 1663 ) connected to the notion of contradiction, as shown in the use of impliquer in impliquer contradiction, in the sense of “to be contradictory.” This connection does not, however, explain how impliquer has passed into its most commonly accepted meaning—“implicitly entail”—in the logical sense of “to lead to a consequence.” Indeed, these two senses constantly interfere with one another in European philosophical languages, which certainly poses a number of difficult problems for translators. The same phenomenon can be found in the case of the English verb “to import,” commonly given as a synonym for “to mean” or “to imply,” but often wavering instead, in certain cases, between “to entail” and “to imply.” In French, the noun itself is generally left as it is ( import existentiel, see SENSE, Box 4 ). The French importer ( as used by Rabelais, 1536 ), “to necessitate, to entail,” formed via the Italian importare ( as used by Dante ), from the Old French emporter, “to entail, to have as a consequence,” dropped out of usage, and was brought back through English. The nature of the connection between the two primary meanings of impliquer ( or of implicare in Italian ), “to entail implicitly” and “to lead to a consequence,” nonetheless remains obscure. Another difficulty is understanding how the transition occurs from impliquer, “to lead to a consequence,” to “implication,” “a logical relation in which one statement necessarily supposes another one,” and how we can determine what in this precise case distinguishes “implication” from “presupposition.”
We therefore need to be attentive to what is implicit in impliquer and “implication,” to the dimension of the pli ( pleat or fold ), of the repli ( folding back ), and of the pliure ( folding ), in order to separate out “imply,” “infer,” “lead to,” or “implication,” “inference,” “consequence”—which requires us to go back to Latin, and especially to medieval Latin. Once we have clarified the relationship between the modern sense of “implication” and the medieval sense of implicatio, we will be able to examine certain derivations ( implicature ) or substitutes ( “entailment” ) of terms related to the field of implicatio, assuming that it is difficulties with the concept of implication ( the paradoxes of material implication ) that have given rise to newly coined words corresponding to the original logical attempts. Finally, this whole set of difficulties becomes clearer as we go further upstream, using the same vocabulary of implication, through the conflation of several heterogeneous logical gestures that come from an entirely different systematics in Aristotle and the Stoics.
I. The Vocabulary of Implication and the Implicatio
A number of different terms in medieval Latin can express in a more or less equivalent manner the relationship between propositions and statements such that, from the truth-value of the antecedent ( true or false ), one can derive the truth-value of the consequent: illatio, inferentia, consequentia. Peter Abelard makes no distinction in using the terms consequentia for the hypothetical “si est homo est animal” ( Dialectica, 473 ) and inferentia for “si non est iustus homo, est non-iustus homo” ( ibid., 414 ). It is certainly true that: ( 1 ) illatio appears above all in the context of the Topics, and denotes more specifically a reasoning ( argumentum in Boethius ), allowing for a consequence to be drawn from a given place ( for example, “illatio a causa, illatio a simili, illatio a pari, illatio a partibus” ); ( 2 ) consequentia sometimes has a very general sense, as in “consequentia est quaedam habitudo inter antecedens et consequens” ( De Rijk, Logica modernorum, 2.1:38 ), and is in any case present in the expressions sequitur and consequitur ( to follow, to ensue, to result in ); ( 3 ) inferentia frequently appears, by contrast, in the context of the Peri hermêneias, whether it is as part of the square of oppositions, in order to explain the “law” of opposite, subcontrary, contradictory, or subalternate propositions ( Logica modernorum, 2.1:115 ), or whether it is in order to determine the rules for converting propositions ( ibid., 131–39 ). Nevertheless, it is one of these three terms ( or other related terms ) that in the Middle Ages expresses the logical relationship of implication, and not the terms from the implicatio family. In short, implicatio does not originally refer to implication.
In the twelfth century, a number of treatises were developed on the “implicits” ( tractatus implicitarum ) that studied the logico-semantic properties of propositions said to be implicationes, or relative propositions. The term implicitus, the past participle of the verb implico, was used in classical Latin in the sense of “to be joined, mixed, enveloped,” and the verb implico adds to these senses the idea of “unforeseen difficulty” ( impedire ) and even of “deceit” ( fallere ). The source of the logical usage of the term is a passage from De interpretatione on the contrariety of propositions ( 14.23b25–27 ), in which implicitus renders the Greek sumpeplegmenê [συμπεπλεγμένη], a term formed from sumplekô [συμπλέϰω], “to bind together,” from the same family as sumplokê [συμπλοϰή], which since Plato ( Politics 278b; Sophist 262c ) has referred to the combination of letters that make up a word, and the interrelation of noun and verb that makes up a proposition:
Aristotle: hê de tou hoti kakon to agathon sumpeplegmenê estin; kai gar hoti ouk agathon anagkê isôs hupolambanein ton auton [ἡ δὲ τοῦ ὅτι ϰαϰὸν τὸ ἀγαθὸν συμπεπλεγμένη ἐστίν· ϰαὶ γὰϱ ὅτι οὐϰ ἀγαθὸν ἀνάγϰη ἴσως ὑπολαμϐάνειν τὸν αὐτόν].
( De interpretatione [Peri hermêneias] 23b25–27 )
Boethius: Illa vero quae est “quoniam malum est quod est bonum” implicata est: et enim quoniam non bonum est necesse est idem ipsum opinari.
( Aristoteles latinus, 2.1–2, p. 36, 4–6 )
Jules Tricot: Quant au jugement “le bon est mal,” ce n’est en réalité qu’une combinaison de jugements, cars sans doute est-il nécessaire de sous-entendre en même temps “le bon n’est pas le bon.”
( Trans. Tricot, 141 )
J. L. Ackrill: The belief that the good is bad is complex, for the same person must perhaps suppose also that it is not good.
( Trans. Ackrill, 66; cf. his perplexed commentary, 154–55 )
Aristotle wishes here to define the contrariety between two statements or opinions. Starting from the principle that a maximally false proposition set in opposition to a maximally true proposition deserves the name “contrary,” Aristotle demonstrates in successive stages that “the good is good” is a maximally true proposition, since it applies to the essence of good, and predicates the same of the same ( which the proposition “the good is the not-bad” does not do, since it is only true by accident ); and that the maximally false proposition is one that entails the negation of the same attribute, namely, “the good is not good.” The question then is one of knowing whether “the good is bad” also deserves to be called contrary. Aristotle replies that this proposition is not the maximally false proposition opposed to the maximally true proposition. Indeed, “the good is bad” is sumpeplegmenê. This term condenses all of the moments of the transition from the simple idea of a container, to the “modern” idea of implication or of presupposition. For Boethius, the proposition is duplex, or equivocal: it has a double meaning, “because it contains within itself [continet in se, intra se]: bonum non est”; and Boethius concludes that only two “simple” propositions can be said to be contrary ( Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermêneais, 1st ed., 219 ). This latter thesis is consistent with Aristotle’s, for whom only “the good is not good” ( simple proposition ) is the opposite of “the good is good” ( simple proposition ). However, the respective analyses of “the good is bad,” a proposition that Boethius calls implicita, are manifestly not the same: indeed, for Aristotle, the “doxa hoti kakon to agathon [δόξα ὅτι ϰαϰὸν τὸ ἀγαθόν],” the opinion according to which the good is bad, is only contrary to “the good is good” to the extent that it “contains” ( in Boethius’s terms ) “the good is not good”; whereas for Boethius, it is to the extent that it contains bonum non est—a remarkably ambiguous expression in Latin ( it can mean “the good is not,” “there is nothing good,” and even, in the appropriate context, “the good is not good” ). Abelard goes in the same direction as Aristotle: “the good is bad” is “implicit” with respect to “the good is not good.” He explains clearly the meaning of the term implicita: “That is to say, implying ‘the good is not good’ within itself, and in a certain sense containing it [implicans eam in se, et quodammodo continens]” ( Glossa super Periermeneias, 99–100 ). But he adds, as Aristotle did not: “Because whoever thinks that ‘the good is bad’ also thinks that ‘the good is not good,’ whereas the reverse does not hold true [sed non convertitur].” This explanation is decisive for the history of implication, since one can certainly express in terms of “implication” in the modern sense what Abelard expresses when he notes the nonreciprocity of the two propositions ( one can say that “the good is bad” implies or presupposes “the good is not good,” whereas “the good is not good” does not imply “the good is bad” ). Modern translations of Aristotle inherit these difficulties. Boethius and Abelard bequeath to posterity an interpretation of the passage in Aristotle according to which “the good is bad” can only be considered the opposite of “the good is good” insofar as, an “implicit” proposition, it contains the contradictory meaning of “the good is good,” namely, “the good is not good.” It is the meaning of “to contain a contradiction” that, in a still rather obscure way, takes up this analysis by specifying the meaning of impliquer. In any case, the first attested use in French of the verb is in 1377 in Oresme, in the syntagm impliquer contradiction ( RT: DHLF, 1793 ).
These same texts give rise to another analysis in the second half of the twelfth century: a propositio implicita is a proposition that “implies,” that is, that contains two propositions called explicitae, and that are its equivalent when paraphrased. Thus, “homo qui est albus est animal quod currit” ( A man who is white is an animal who runs ) contains the two explicits, “homo est albus” and “animal currit.” Only by “exposing” or “resolving” ( expositio, resolutio ) such an implicita proposition can one assign it a truth-value:
Omnis implicito habet duas explicitas. . . . Verbi gratia: Socrates est id quod est homo, haec implicita aequivalet huic copulativae constanti ex explicitis: Socrates est aliquid est illud est homo, haec est vera, quare et implicita vera.
Every “implicit” has two “explicits.” . . . For example: “Socrates is that which is a man,” this “implicit” is equivalent to the following conjunctive proposition made up of two “explicits”: “Socrates is something and that is a man”; this latter proposition is true, so the “implicit” is also true.
( Tractatus implicitarum, in Giusberti, “Materials for a Study,” 43 )
The “contained” propositions are usually relative propositions, which are called implicationes, and this term remains, even though the name propositio implicita becomes increasingly rare, perhaps because they are subsequently classified within the larger category of “exponible” propositions, which need precisely to be “exposed” or paraphrased for their logical structure to be highlighted. In the treatises of Terminist logic, one chapter is devoted to the phenomenon of restrictio, a restriction in the denotation or the suppositio of the noun ( see SUPPOSITION ). Relative expressions ( implicationes ), along with others, have a restrictive function ( vis, officium implicandi ), just like adjectives and participles: in “a man who argues runs,” the term “man,” because of the relative expression “who runs,” is restricted to denoting the present—moreover, according to grammarians, there is an equivalence between the relative expression “qui currit” and the participle currens ( Summe metenses, ed. De Rijk, in Logica modernorum, 2.1:464 ). In the case in which a relative expression is restrictive, its function is to “leave something that is constant [aliquid pro constanti relinquere],” that is, to produce, in modern terms, a preassertion that conditions the truth of the main assertion without being its primary object. This is expressed very clearly in the following passage from a thirteenth-century logical treatise:
Implicare est pro constanti et involute aliquid significare. Ut cum dicitur homo qui est albus currit. “Pro constanti” dico, quia praeter hoc quod assertitur ibi cursus de homine, aliquid datur intelligi, scilicet hominem album; “involute” dico quia praeter hoc quod ibi proprie et principaliter significatur hominem currere, aliquid intus intelligitur, scilicet hominem esse album. Per hoc patet quod implicare est intus plicare. Id enim quod intus plicamus sive ponimus, pro constanti relinquimus. Unde implicare nil aliud est quam subiectum sub aliqua dispositione pro constanti relinquere et de illo sic disposito aliquid affirmare.
“To imply” is to signify something by stating it as constant, and in a hidden manner. For example, when we say “the man who is white runs.” I say “stating it as constant” because, beyond the assertion that predicates the running of the man, we are given to understand something else, namely that the man is white; I say “in a hidden manner” because, beyond what is signified primarily and literally, namely that the man is running, we are given to understand something else within ( intus ), namely that the man is white. It follows from this that implicare is nothing other than intus plicare ( “folded within” ). What we fold or state within, we leave as a constant. It follows from this that “to imply” is nothing other than leaving something as a constant in the subject, such that the subject is under a certain disposition, and that it is under this disposition that something about it is affirmed.
( De implicationibus, ed. De Rijk, in “Some Notes,” 100 )
N.B. Giusberti ( “Materials for a Study,” 31 ) always reads pro constanti, whereas the manuscript edited by De Rijk sometimes has pro contenti, and sometimes precontenti, this latter term attested nowhere else.
This is truly an example of what the 1662 Logic of Port-Royal will describe as an “incidental assertion.”
The situation is even more complex, however, insofar as this operation only relates to one usage of a relative proposition, when it is restrictive. A restriction can sometimes be blocked, and the logical reinscriptions are then different for restrictive and nonrestrictive relative propositions. One such case of a blockage is that of “false implications,” as in “a [or the] man who is a donkey runs,” where there is a conflict ( repugnantia ) between what the determinate term itself denotes ( man ) and the determination ( donkey ). The truth-values of the propositions containing relatives thus differ according to whether they are restrictive, and of composite meaning—( a ) “homo qui est albus currit” ( A man who is white runs )—or nonrestrictive, and of divided meaning—( b ) “homo currit qui est albus” ( A man, who is white, is running ). When the relative is restrictive, as in ( a ), the implicit only produces one single assertion, as we saw ( since the relative corresponds to a preassertion ), and is thus the equivalent of a hypothetical. Only in the second case can there be a “resolution” of the implicit into two explicits—( c ) “homo currit,” ( d ) “homo est albus”—and a logical equivalence between the implicit and the conjunction of the two explicits—( e ) “homo currit et ille est albus”; so it is only in this instance that one can say, in the modern sense, that ( b ) implies ( c ) and ( d ), and therefore ( e ).
■ See Box 1.
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The Greek vocabulary of implication: Disparity and systematicity The word implication in French covers and translates an extremely varied Greek vocabulary that bears the mark of heterogeneous logical and systematic operations, depending on whether one is dealing with Aristotle or the Stoics. The passage through medieval Latin allows us to understand retrospectively the connection in Aristotelian logic between the implicatio of the implicits ( sumpeplegmenê, as an interweaving or interlacing ) and conclusive or consequential implication, sumperasma [συμπέϱασμα] in Greek ( or sumpeperasmenon [συμπεπεϱασμένον], sumpeperasmenê [συμπεπεϱασμένη], from perainô [πεϱαίνω], “to limit” ), which is the terminology used in the Organon to denote the conclusion of a syllogism ( Prior Analytics 1.15.34a21–24: if one designates as A the premise [tas protaseis ( τὰς πϱοτάσεις )] and as B the conclusion [to sumperasma ( συμπέϱασμα )] ). When Tricot translates Aristotle’s famous definition of the syllogism at Prior Analytics 1.1.24b18–21, he chooses to render as the French noun consequence Aristotle’s verbal form sumbainei [συμϐαίνει], that which “goes with” the premise and results from it. A syllogism is a discourse [logos ( λόγος )] in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated necessarily results simply from the fact of what is stated. Simply from the fact of what is stated, I mean that it is because of this that the consequence is obtained [legô de tôi tauta einai to dia tauta sumbainei ( λέγω δὲ τῷ ταῦτα εἶναι τὸ διὰ ταῦτα συμϐαίνει )]. ( Ibid., 1.1, 24b18–21; italics J. Tricot, bold B. Cassin ) To make the connection with the modern sense of implication, though, we also have to take into account, as is most often the case, the Stoics’ use of the same terms. What the Stoics call sumpeplegmenon [συμπεπλεγμένον] is a “conjunctive” proposition; for example: “And it is daytime, and it is light” ( it is true both that A and that B ). The conjunctive is the third type of nonsimple proposition, after the “conditional” ( sunêmmenon [συνημμένον]; for example: “If it is daytime, then it is light” ) and the “subconditional” ( parasunêmmenon [παϱασυνημμένον]; for example: “Since it is daytime, it is light” ), and before the “disjunctive” ( diezeugmenon [διεζευγμένον]; for example: “Either it is daytime, or it is night” ) ( Diogenes Laertius 7.71–72; cf. RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, A35, 2:209 and 1:208 ). One can see that there is no implication in the conjunctive, whereas there is one in the sunêmmenon in “if . . . then . . . ,” which constitutes the Stoic expression par excellence ( and as distinct from the Aristotelian syllogism ). Indeed, it is around the conditional that the question and the vocabulary of implication opens out again. The Aristotelian sumbainein [συμϐαίνειν], which denotes the accidental nature of a result, however clearly it has been demonstrated ( and we should not forget that sumbebêkos [συμϐεϐηϰός] denotes accident; see SUBJECT, I ), is replaced by akolouthein [ἀϰολουθεῖν] ( from the copulative a- and keleuthos [ϰέλευθος], “path” [RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. ἀϰόλουθος] ), which denotes instead being accompanied by a consequent conformity: This connector ( that is, the “if” ) indicates that the second proposition ( “it is light” ) follows ( akolouthei [ἀϰολουθεῖ] ) from the first ( “it is daytime” ) ( Diogenes Laertius, 7.71 ). Attempts, beginning with Philo or Diodorus Cronus and continuing to the present day, to determine the criteria of a “valid” conditional ( to hugies sunêmmenon [τὸ ὑγιὲς συνημμένον] offer, among other possibilities, the notion of emphasis [ἔμφασις], which Long and Sedley translate as “entailment” and Brunschwig and Pellegrin as “implication” ( Sextus Empiricus, The Skeptic Way, in RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 35B, 2:211 and 1:209 ), a term that is normally used to refer to a reflected image and to the force, including rhetorical force, of an impression. Elsewhere, “emphasis” is explained in terms of dunamis [δύναμις], of “virtual” content ( “When we have the premise which results in a certain conclusion, we also have this conclusion virtually [dunamei ( δυνάμει )] in the premise, even if it is not explicitly indicated [kan kat’ ekphoran mê legetai ( ϰἂν ϰατ̕ ἐϰφοϱὰν μὴ λέγεται )], Sextus Empiricus, Against the Grammarians 8.229ff., trans. D. L. Blank, 49 = RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, G36 ( 4 ), 2:219 and 1:209 )—where connecting the different meanings of “implication” creates new problems. One has to understand that the type of logical implication represented by the conditional implies, in the double sense of “contains implicitly” and “has as its consequence,” the entire logical, physical, and moral Stoic system. It is a matter of to akolouthon en zôêi [τὸ ἀϰόλουθον ἐν ζωῇ], “consequentiality in life,” as Long and Sedley translate it ( Stobeus 2.85.13 = RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 59B, 2:356; Cicero prefers congruere, De finibus 3.17 = RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 59D, 2:356 ). It is the same word, akolouthia [ἀϰολουθία], that refers to the conduct consequent upon itself that is the conduct of the wise man, the chain of causes defining will or fate, and finally the relationship that joins the antecedent to the consequent in a true proposition. Victor Goldschmidt, having cited Émile Bréhier ( in Le système stoïcien, 53 n. 6 ), puts the emphasis on antakolouthia [ἀνταϰολουθία], the neologism coined by the Stoics that one could translate as “reciprocal implication,” and that refers specifically to the solidarity of virtues ( antakolouthia tôn aretôn [ἀνταϰολουθία τῶν ἀϱετῶν], Diogenes Laertius 7.125; Goldschmidt, Le système stoïcien, 65–66 ) as a group that would be encompassed by dialectical virtue, immobilizing akolouthia in the absolute present of the wise man. “Implication” is, in the final analysis, from then on, the most literal name of the system as such. Barbara Cassin BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Prior Analytics. Translated by H. Tredennick. Vol. 1 in Organon. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938. Goldschmidt, Victor. Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps. Paris: Vrin, 1953. Sextus Empiricus. Against the Grammarians. Translated with a commentary by D. L. Blank. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. |
II. “Implication”/“Implicature”
The term “implicature” was introduced in 1967 by H. P. Grice in the William James Lectures ( Harvard ), which he delivered under the title “Logic and Conversation.” These lectures set out the basis of a logical approach to communication, that is, logical relations in conversational contexts. The need was felt for a term that is distinct from “implication,” insofar as “implication” is a relation between propositions ( in the logical sense ), whereas “implicature” is a relation between statements, within a given context. “Implication” is a relation bearing on the truth or falsity of propositions, whereas “implicature” brings an extra meaning to the statements it governs. Whenever “implicature” is determined according to its context, it enters the field of pragmatics, and therefore has to be distinguished from presupposition.
Logical implication is a relation between two propositions, one of which is the logical consequence of the other. The English equivalent of “logical implication” is “entailment.” This word is derived from “tail” ( Old French taille; Middle English entaill or entailen = en + tail ), and prior to its logical use, the meaning of “entailment” is “restriction,” “tail” having the sense of “limitation.” An entailment was originally a limitation on the transfer or handing down of a property or an inheritance. The two senses of entailment have two elements in common: ( a ) the handing down of a property; and ( b ) the limitation on one of the poles of this transfer. In logical “entailment,” a property is transferred from the antecedent to the consequent, and normally in semantics, the limitation on the antecedent is stressed. One might thus advance the hypothesis that the mutation from the juridical sense to the logical sense occurred by analogy on the basis of these common elements.
In logic, one makes a distinction between material implication and formal implication. Material implication ( “if . . . then . . . ,” symbolized by ⊃ ), also called Philonian implication ( because it was formalized by Philo of Megara ), is only false when the antecedent is true and the consequent false. In terms of a formalization of communication, this has the flaw of bringing with it a counterintuitive semantics, since a false proposition implies materially any proposition: “If the moon is made of green cheese, then 2 + 2 = 4!” The “ex falso quodlibet sequitur,” which is how this fact is expressed, has a long history going back to antiquity ( for the Stoics and the Megarian philosophers, it is the difference between Philonian implication and Diodorean implication ): it traverses the theory of consequences in the Middle Ages, and is one of the paradoxes of material implication that is perfectly summed up in these two rules of Jean Buridan: ( 1 ) if P is false, Q follows from P; ( 2 ) if P is true, P follows from Q ( Bochenski, History of Formal Logic, 208 ). Formal implication ( see Russell, Principles of Mathematics, 36–41 ) is a universal conditional implication: {Ɐx ( Ax ⊃ Bx )} ( for any x, if Ax, then Bx ).
Different means of resolving the paradoxes of implication have been used. Lewis’s “strict implication” ( Lewis and Langford, Symbolic Logic ) is defined as an implication that is reinforced such that it is impossible for the antecedent to be true and the consequent false, yet it has the same flaw as material implication ( an impossible—that is, necessarily false—proposition strictly implies any proposition ). The relation of entailment introduced by Moore in 1923 is a relation that avoids these paradoxes by requiring a logical derivation of the antecedent from the consequent ( in this case, “if 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 3 = 5” is false, since the consequent cannot be logically derived from the antecedent ). Occasionally, one has to call upon the pair “entailment”/“implication” in order to distinguish between an implication in the sense of material implication and an implication in George Moore’s sense, which is also sometimes called “relevant implication” ( Anderson and Belnap, Entailment ), to ensure that the entire network of terms is covered.
Along with this first series of terms in which “entailment” and “implication” alternate with one another, there is a second series of terms that contrasts two kinds of “implicature.” The word “implicature” ( French implicature, German Implikatur ) is formed from “implication” and the suffix –ture, which expresses a resultant aspect ( for example, “signature”; cf. Latin temperatura, from temperare ). “Implication” is derived from “to imply” and “implicature” from “to implicate” ( from the Latin in + plicare, from plex; cf. the Indo-European plek ), which has the same meaning.
The Gricean concept of “implicature” is an extension and modification of the concept of presupposition, which differs from material implication in that the negation of the antecedent implies the consequent ( the question “Have you stopped beating your wife?” presupposes the existence of a wife in both cases ). In this sense, implicature escapes the paradoxes of material implication from the outset. Grice distinguishes two kinds of implicature, conventional and conversational. Conventional implicature is practically equivalent to presupposition, since it refers to the presuppositions attached by linguistic convention to lexical items or expressions. For example, “Mary even loves Peter” has a relation of conventional implicature to “Mary loves other entities than Peter.” This is equivalent to: “ ‘Mary even loves Peter’ presupposes ‘Mary loves other entities than Peter.’ ” With this kind of implicature, we remain within the lexical, and thus the semantic, field. Conventional implicature, however, is different from material implication, since it is relative to a language ( in the example, the English for the word “even” ). With conversational implicature, we are no longer dependent on a linguistic expression, but move into pragmatics ( the theory of the relation between statements and contexts ). Grice gives the following example: If, in answer to someone’s question about how X is getting on in his new job, I reply, “Well, he likes his colleagues, and he’s not in prison yet,” what is implied pragmatically by this assertion depends on the context ( and not on a linguistic expression ). It is, for example, compatible with two very different contexts: one in which X has been trapped by unscrupulous colleagues in some shady deal, and one in which X is dishonest and well known for his irascible nature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abelard, Peter. Dialectica. Edited by L. M. De Rijk. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1956. 2nd rev. ed., 1970.
. Glossae super Periermeneias. Edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. In Twelfth-Century Logic: Texts and Studies, vol. 2, Abelaerdiana inedita. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1958.
Anderson, Allan Ross, and Nuel Belnap. Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Aristotle. De interpretatione. English translation by J. L. Ackrill: Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione. Notes by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. French translation by J. Tricot: Organon. Paris: Vrin, 1966.
Auroux, Sylvain, and Irène Rosier. “Les sources historiques de la conception des deux types de relatives.” Langages 88 ( 1987 ): 9–29.
Bochenski, Joseph M. A History of Formal Logic. Translated by Ivo Thomas. New York: Chelsea, 1961.
Boethius. Aristoteles latinus. Edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Paris: Descleé de Brouwer, 1965. Translation by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello: The Latin Aristotle. Toronto: Hakkert, 1972.
. Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermêneias. Edited by K. Meiser. Leipzig: Teubner, 1877. 2nd ed., 1880.
De Rijk, Lambertus Marie. Logica modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic. 2 vols. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1962–67.
. “Some Notes on the Mediaeval Tract De insolubilibus, with the Edition of a Tract Dating from the End of the Twelfth-Century.” Vivarium 4 ( 1966 ): 100–103.
Giusberti, Franco. Materials for a Study on Twelfth-Century Scholasticism. Naples, It.: Bibliopolis, 1982.
Grice, Henry Paul. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, edited by P. Cole and J. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press, 1975. ( Also in The Logic of Grammar, edited by D. Davidson and G. Harman, 64–74. Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975. )
Lewis, Clarence Irving, and Cooper Harold Langford. Symbolic Logic. New York: New York Century, 1932.
Meggle, Georg. Grundbegriffe der Kommunikation. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997.
Meggle, Georg, and Christian Plunze, eds. Saying, Meaning, Implicating. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003.
Moore, George Edward. Philosophical Studies. London: Kegan Paul, 1923.
Rosier, Irène. “Relatifs et relatives dans les traits terministes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: ( 2 ) Propositions relatives ( implicationes ), distinction entre restrictives et non restrictives.” Vivarium 24: 1 ( 1986 ): 1–21.
Russell, Bertrand. The Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903.
Strawson, Peter Frederick. “On Referring.” Mind 59 ( 1950 ): 320–44.
IN SITU ( LATIN )
| ENGLISH | site-specific, in place | ||
| FRENCH | sur place, dans son site, in situ |
LIEU and ART, CONCETTO, MOMENT, WORK
In common usage in archeology, the Latin phrase in situ was adopted at the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s by critics and artists to refer to a basic trait of a large number of works that were not only produced for a particular site but also designed with the physical, institutional, and symbolic characteristics of the place in mind—galleries, museums, public spaces, or even natural spaces, sometimes very remote, as was often the case for the American earthworks ( the creators of which also used the expression “site-specific” ), or in the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Understood in this sense, in situ has since become part of the vocabulary of aesthetics and criticism.
For archeologists, in situ applies to two distinct levels of reality: ( 1 ) To an object when it is discovered in the supposed site of its original use. If this is the case, its situation, especially the object’s physical relation to the other traces of the past that accompany it, is crucial in clarifying its function and its meaning. ( 2 ) To the mode of presentation of the vestiges of the past on the very site of their discovery, in other words, a museographical organization that facilitates the visitors’ understanding.
In its aesthetic sense, in situ combines the two meanings of its use in archeology. The work in situ, constructed in function of the place, has to be viewed on site, and it acquires its full significance in the dialectical relation that it enters into with the place where it is installed. Thus the notion of in situ is an assault on one of the fundamental principles of traditional aesthetics, the notion of the autonomy of the work of art. This autonomy, once considered as a sign of freedom that allowed the cultural object or the commemorative monument, for example, to acquire a properly aesthetic dignity, legitimated the existence of the museum as a place where a miscellany of objects torn from their original context were gathered together. It is no coincidence, then, that the term in situ became more widely used in the 1970s, when many artists developed a range of strategies for contesting the logic of the museum. Ever since Daniel Buren’s projects and those of Land Art popularized the term, it has been used by artists of all kinds.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buren, Daniel. Au sujet de . . . : Entretien avec Jérôme Sans. Paris: Flammarion, 1998.
. The Eye of the Storm: Works In Situ by Daniel Buren. 8 vols. New York: Guggenheim Museum-D.A.P., 2005.
Poinsot, Jean-Marc. “L’ in situ et la circonstance de sa mise en oeuvre.” In Quand l’oeuvre a lieu: L’art exposé et ses récits autorisés. Geneva: MAMCO, 1999.
Watson, Stephen H. “In Situ: Beyond the Architectonics of the Modern.” In Postmodernism-Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Hugh J. Silverman, 83–100. New York: Routledge, 1990.
| ARABIC | ḥads [الحدس] | ||
| ENGLISH | wit, humor | ||
| FRENCH | esprit | ||
| GERMAN | Witz | ||
| GREEK | euphuia [εὐφυΐα] | ||
| ITALIAN | ingegno | ||
| SPANISH | ingenio |
REASON, SOUL, WITTICISM, and ARGUTEZZA, BAROQUE, COMPARISON, CONCETTO, GEMÜT, GENIUS, INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, INTENTION, NONSENSE, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SOPHISM, TALENT
The word ingenium, commonly used in Latin during antiquity and in philosophical Latin up to the early modern period, is rich in meaning. Of the Romance languages, only the words ingegno in Italian and ingenio in Spanish have preserved the essence of this richness. In French the numerous derivations of ingenium have retained only a partial or more or less distant relation to its source word, and the term esprit, often used as an equivalent, has very particular connotations. The English “wit,” and the German Witz, both have different etymologies and reproduce only in a rather restricted way the semantic constellation expressed by the Latin word, which thus presents modern translators with literally insurmountable difficulties.
I. Ingenium, Euphuia
Ingenium ( in-geno, gigno ) is associated with a large Indo-European family of words relating to procreation and birth. Its usage in Latin is spread around four distinct but nonetheless clearly interlinked semantic themes, which are enumerated in Egidio Forcellini’s Totius latinitatis lexicon ( 1865 ). Ingenium designates first of all the innate qualities of a thing ( vis, natura, indoles, insita facultas ). Secondly, it is applied to human beings and their natural dispositions, their temperament, the way they are ( natura, indoles, mores ). Then it expresses, among man’s natural dispositions, intelligence, skill, inventiveness ( vis animi, facultas insita excogitandi, percipiendi, sloertia, inventio ). Finally it designates, metonymically, persons who are particularly endowed with this faculty ( ingenia is a synonym for homines ingeniosi ).
In all of these different uses, ingenium expresses, whenever it refers to humans, the innate element within human beings of productivity, of creativity, of the capacity of going beyond and transforming the given, whether it is a matter of intellectual speculation, poetic and artistic creation, persuasive speech, technical innovations, or social and political practices. “It calls,” writes Cicero, “for great intelligence [ingenium] to separate the mind [mentem] from the senses [a sensibus] and to sever thought [cogitationem] from mere habit” ( Tusculan Disputations 1: XVI, 41 ). He elsewhere talks about the divinum ingenium that allies men with the gods, but it is in the field of rhetoric that he is most careful to show the importance of ingenium as a factor in oratorical invention:
Since, then, in speaking, three things are requisite for finding argument; genius [acumen], method, ( which, if we please, we may call art, ) and diligence, I cannot but assign the chief place to ingenium.
( Cicero, On Oratory and Orators, II, 35, 147–48 )
One can see that ingenium is assimilated here to its primary quality, acumen, a word that designates the acute ( acutus ), penetrating, fine character of something ( acutezza in Italian and agudeza in Spanish are derived from acutus, the French equivalent of which is pointe, see ARGUTEZZA ). What does the action of ingenium consist of? Of “leaping over what is at our feet” ( ingenii specimen est quodam transilire ente pedes positum ) in order to grasp the relations, the similarities between things that may be very far from one another. One can understand why the ability to form metaphors, that is, to work with transfers of meanings of words to bring them closer together, is for Cicero one of the privileged manifestations of ingenium in the field of persuasive oratory and of poetry.
On this point he is only repeating what Aristotle says about euphuia [εὐφυΐα], the “good natural disposition,” close to the first meaning of ingenium, that is, necessary for finding resemblances and making metaphors:
But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius [εὐφυΐα], since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilar: for to make good metaphors is to be good at perceiving resemblances.
( Aristotle, Poetics, 22, 1459a 7 )
See COMPARISON, Box 1.
■ See Box 1.
|
Intuition, Arabic ḥads ( ARABIC [الحدس] ) Aristotle, in discussing scientific knowledge, mentions a capacity he calls “readiness of mind” ( agchinoia [ἀγχίνοια] ), to which he also devotes several lines in his discussion of intellectual virtues ( dianoétiques ) ( Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 10, 1142b 5; ed., Barnes, vol.2 ). He defines it as “a talent for hitting upon ( eustokia [εὐστοχία] ) the middle term in an imperceptible time” ( Posterior Analytics, I, 34, 89b 10ff; ed., Barnes, vol 1 ). The first Latin translation mistakenly reads eustochia, which Thomas Aquinas paraphrases as bona conjecturatio ( Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 8, § 1219 ). Arabic translators of the Analytics have translated this term as dakā [الذكاء] ( “finesse, intelligence” ), but explain εὐστοχία by “goodness of the ḥads [الحدس]” ( Mantiq Aristu [منطق أرسطو], ed. Badawi, p. 426, 5 ). The passage in the Nicomachean Ethics is translated as “wisdom of the intellect” ( lawda’īya ’l’aql [ﻠوذﻋية العقل] [Aristu, al-Akhlaq, 222, 15] ). Avicenna discusses ḥads on several occasions ( cf. Goichon, Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sina, § 140, p. 65ff ) and gives it a major place in his epistemology ( cf. Gutas, Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works, 161–66 ). He gives a precise definition of the term: all scientific knowledge is acquired by syllogisms, whose pivot is the middle term. This term can be arrived at through teaching or through “the ḥads, [which] is an action of the mind by which [the mind] deduces for itself the middle term.” Its teaching, moreover, is itself based in the final analysis on intuitions ( al-Šifā, Avicenna’s De Anima, Being the Psychological Part of Kitab al-Shifa, ( vol. 1, part 6 ). The ḥads is thus, on the one hand, the intuition of principles, but it is also the capacity of taking in simultaneously all of the stages of a discursive argumentation. Avicenna thus offers the concept of a knowledge that is neither simply intuitive nor simply discursive but like a discursiveness condensed into a single act of intuition, thereby anticipating Descartes’s program ( Regulae, VII: AT, 10: 387ff )—except that what for Descartes is acquired methodically is for Avicenna an innate gift. For him, whoever possesses ḥads has no need of a master and can reinvent all the sciences for himself—which, in fact, is what Avicenna in his autobiography boasts that he has done. This allows him among other things to offer a philosophical theory of prophetic knowledge. The Latin translators render the term ḥads on occasion as subtilitas but in most cases as ingenium ( Avicenna Latinus, Liber sextus de naturalibus, 152 ff ). To describe someone who is very intelligent as a “genius,” and to say that a “genius” is like a prophet, is to place oneself within the tradition of Avicenna. BIBLIOGRAPHY al-Šifā, Avicenna’s De Anima, Being the Psychological Part of Kitab al-Shifa. Translated by F. Rohman. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen Series 71.2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Aristu [Aristotle]. al-Akhlaq. Edited by A. Badawi. Kuwait City: Wakâlat al-Matbû’ât, 1979. Avicenna Latinus. Liber sextus de naturalibus. Edited by S. Van Riet. Louvain, Belg.: Brill, 1968. Badawi, A. Man .tiq Aris .tū, 3 vols. Cairo: 1948–1952. Golchon, A.-M. Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sina. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1938. Gutas, Dimitri. Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1988. |
II. The Humanistic and Baroque Ingenio and Ingegno
The technical significance that the term ingenium took on in the field of rhetoric and poetics continues on down the centuries, to the detriment of the richness and depth of the philosophical meaning of this word. Renaissance humanism, however, still attributes to ingenium a specific faculty an incomparable power in the field of knowledge and action. The Spaniard Juan Luis Vives wrote, in his Introductio ad sapientiam ( 1524 ), that ingenium, a prerogative of humans, is the “force of intelligence by which our mind examines things one by one, knows what is good to do and what is not.” It “is cultivated and refined by means of many arts: it is taught through a broad and admirable knowledge of things, by which it grasps more precisely the natures and values of things one by one.”
It has been said that ingenium, at the end of the sixteenth century and in the first half of the seventeenth century, had become a mannerist or baroque concept par excellence, with specific reference to authors such as Huarte de San Juan, with his Examen de ingenios, para las sciencias ( 1575 ); Pellegrini, with Delle acutezza, che altrimenti spirite, vivezze e concetti, volparmente si appellano ( 1630 ) and I fonti dell’ingegno ridotti ad arte ( 1650 ); Tesauro, with Il Canocchiale aristotelico, o sia Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione, che serve a tutta l’arte oratoria, lapidaria et simbolica ( 1648 ). For a long time these texts were studied from a purely aesthetic point of view, in relation to the literary trends of Gongorism, Marinism, Concettism, or Preciosity. Looking at them more closely, one can see that the ingegno of the Italians and the ingenio of the Spanish not only have stylistic and ornamental effects, but also have, first and foremost, a richness in terms of the order of knowledge and of moral and social existence. Cervantes’s titles are characteristically subtle: in El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha ( 1605 ) and El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha ( 1615 ), ingenio is attributed ironically, as if it were an absurd characterization, to the mad knight, who is nevertheless revealed to embody many of the most prized characteristics of humanist intelligence. Gracián, in El discreto ( 1646 ), which paints a portrait of the “man of discernment,” emphasizes the fact that ingenio belongs to the “domain of understanding,” and he defines it precisely as the “courage of understanding,” his work being the concepto that immediately establishes a correlation between phenomena that are distant from one another. Because it spreads a “divine light,” ingenio thus permits man to “decipher the world,” which would otherwise remain mute and unknown.
The last and no doubt greatest representative of the ancient humanist tradition for whom ingenium is the human faculty par excellence is Vico, who in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione ( 1709 ) and De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ( 1710 ) revives the Ciceronian theory of ingenium, contrasting its “topical” fertility to the sterility of Descartes’s analytic and deductive method. Finally, in Scienza nuova ( 1725, 1730, 1744 ), Vico notes first that ingegno as a power of the imagination rich in metaphors is what characterizes youth; he then proceeds to give it a central place in the life of nations, especially in the first stages of their development, when men are “poetically” creating their world.
III. The French Esprit
In De ratione, Vico remarks that “the French, when they wish to give a name to the faculty of the mind that allows one to join together quickly, appropriately and felicitously separate things, which we call ingegno, use the word esprit ( spiritus ), and they turn this power of the mind that is manifest in synthesis into something quite simple, because their excessively subtle intelligence excels in the finer points of reasoning rather than in synthesis.” Whatever the value of this explanation may be, the fact is that the French language, however rich its vocabulary is in words derived from ingenium ( ingénieux, ingéniosité, engin, ingénieur, s’ingénier, génie ), has no equivalent of the Latin word, unlike Italian and Spanish. The term esprit, whose range of meanings is vast, was used quite early on to translate it, at the cost of a great deal of equivocation, given the vagueness of the French word. The chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de l’esprit ( 1677 ), for example, writes, “It seems to me that esprit consists of understanding things, in being able to consider them from all sorts of perspectives, in judging clearly what they are, and their precise value, in discerning what one thing has in common with, and what distinguishes it from, another, and in knowing the right paths to take in order to discover those that are hidden.” He adds that “it is a great sign of esprit to invent Arts and Sciences.” And it is clear that the esprit de finesse that Pascal, a friend of Méré, contrasts to the Cartesian esprit de géométrie has many points in common with the baroque ingenium. In the eighteenth century ingenium again crops up in the definition that Voltaire gives of esprit in the article “Esprit” of the RT: Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert:
Ce mot, en tant qu’il signifie une qualité de l’âme, est un de ces termes vagues, auxquels tous ceux qui les prononcent attachent presque toujours des sens différents. Il exprime autre chose que jugement, génie, goût, talent, pénétration, étendue, grâce, finesse; et il doit tenir de tous ces mérites: on pourrait le définir, raison ingénieuse.
( This word, insofar as it signifies a quality of the soul, is one of those vague terms to which everyone who uses it almost always attaches different meanings. It expresses something other than judgment, genius, taste, talent, penetration, expanse, grace, finesse; and it has all of these merits: one could define it as ingenious reason. )
IV. “Wit” and Witz
In English “wit” is generally considered to be the closest equivalent of the Latin ingenium ( it is important to remember, however, that “wit,” like Witz in German, comes from a different root than ingenium and refers to the notion of knowledge and not “natural talent” ). Shaftesbury, writing in a tradition different from rationalist intellectualism, understands “wit” to preserve something of the power of metaphorical invention that the ingenium so dear to humanist rhetoric contains.
■ See Box 2.
In fact, there can be no real equivalence of meaning between “wit” and ingenium, as demonstrated by the difficulties experienced by Vico’s English translators, who propose the terms “ingenuity,” “invention,” “inventiveness,” “genius,” “perception,” and “wit” to try to get close to the semantic richness of ingegno in Vico’s texts.
The situation is identical in German. It is interesting to see how Kant, in two different contexts, gives two different equivalent terms for the same word, ingenium. In the Critique of Judgment ( “Analytic of the Sublime” ), he defines genius ( Genie ) as the “talent ( natural gift ) [of the mind: Gemüt, ingenium] that gives the rule to art” ( Critique of Judgment, § 46 ). In the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, after having said that “the faculty of discovering the particular for the universal ( the rule ) is the power of judgment,” he adds that, in the same way, “the faculty of thinking up the universal for the particular is wit ( Witz [ingenium] ). . . . The outstanding talent in both is noticing even the smallest similarity or dissimilarity. The faculty to do this is acumen ( Scharfsinn [acumen] )” ( § 44 ). In order to define what he means by Witz, Kant therefore has recourse to the vocabulary of classical rhetoric—ingenium and its acumen. At the same time, while he acknowledges the “richness” of Witz, he limits its scope to the anthropological realm of worldly life and assimilates it to “a sort of intellectual luxury,” which he contrasts to “the common and healthy form of understanding.” French translations of Kant reflect the difficulty of rendering the word Witz in this text. Among the recent editions of the Anthropology, Michel Foucault’s translation of the passage just cited proposes the classic word esprit ( Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, Fr. trans. by M. Foucault, 1970, 71 ). Another translation, in order to mark the relationship to ingenium that Kant himself indicates, prefers ingéniosité ( Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, Fr. trans. by A. Renault, 1993, 149 ), while a third gives combinaison spirituelle ( Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, Fr. trans. by P. Jalabert, 1986, 1019 ).
■ See Box 3.
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Witz according to Freud and his translators The importance that Freud accorded to the psychic mechanisms of Witz belongs manifestly to the semantic field of the ingenium of antiquity, organized by the ideas of creativity, acuity, and convention. But since the appearance of the work entitled Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten ( 1905 )—which Lacan considered, along with the Interpretation of Dreams and the Psychology of Everyday Life, as one of the three “canonical” texts of Freud—the translation of Witz has caused no end of problems for psychoanalysts. The most recent translation into Castilian Spanish renders Witz as chiste, “joke.” The first French translators of Freud’s work, Marie Bonaparte and Marcel Nathan, opted for mot d’esprit ( Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’inconscient, 1930 ); Italian similarly translates Witz as motto di spirito ( Il motto di spirito e la sua relazione con l’inconscio, trans. S. Daniele and E. Sagittario, 1975 ). Bonaparte and Nathan’s choice was retained by Denis Messier in an excellent new edition in 1988 ( Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’inconscient, with a prefatory note by Jean-Bernard Pontalis, in which he discusses the term ). This gave rise, it seems, to good deal of hesitation, since Lacan for his part proposed translating Witz as trait d’esprit ( Écrits, 1966; see also Le Séminaire, bk. 5 ( 1957–1958 ), Les Formations de l’inconscient, 1998 ), bringing it closer to another German term, Blitz, which refers to a flash of lightning. Moreover, in 1989 the editors of the Oeuvres complètes de Freud ( Presses Universitaires de France ) published the translation of the work on Witz in their volume 7 under the title Le Trait d’esprit, arguing from the premise that there is supposedly a “Freudian language” that different foreign-language versions have to take into account, especially where Witz is concerned. The meaning of Witz, they claim, is not mot d’esprit but “a characteristic trait of the ‘esprit freudien’ [Freudian Witz].” Confronted by these oppositions and perplexities, certain psychoanalysts have even asked whether it would not be better to give up trying to translate Freud’s Witz altogether, just as some have become resigned to doing for the typically British term nonsense ( see J.-B. Pontalis, foreword to Freud, Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’inconscient, 34 ). The question of Witz also arose among English-language Freudians, occasionally generating a degree of controversy. In 1916 the Austro-Hungarian–born American psychoanalyst Abraham A. Brill published, along with several other projects of this kind, all adjudged to be equally bad, the first translation of Freud’s work on Witz, a term Brill chose to translate as “wit,” without seeing that this would privilege the meaning of “intellectual witticism,” as when one says of someone that he is a “man of wit.” James Strachey, who set about revising Brill’s translations, made clear at the outset his preference for “joke,” which by contrast risked extending the intellectual meaning of the Freudian Witz to the entire range of comic expressions ( plays on words, witticisms, puns, all kinds of jokes, funny stories—particularly Jewish—sallies in the manner of the Italian scherzo, etc. ). In a preface to his English translation, ( Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works [1960], 8: 7 ) Strachey explains as follows why he decided to choose “joke” ( and even “jokes,” in the plural ): To translate it “Wit” opens the door to unfortunate misapprehensions. In ordinary English usage “wit” and “witty” have a highly restricted meaning and are applied only to the most refined and intellectual kind of jokes. The briefest inspection of the examples in these pages will show that “Witz” and “witzig” have a far wider connotation. “Joke,” on the other hand seems itself to be too wide and to cover the German “Scherz” as well. The only solution in this and similar dilemmas has seemed to be to adopt one English word for some corresponding German one, and to keep to it quite consistently and invariably even if in some particular context it seems the wrong one. In this debate one needs to understand moreover that “wit” ( which has the same etymology as Witz, that of knowing—wissen ) can mean both witticisms ( mots d’esprit ), as well as the faculty of inventing them, in the same way that the German Phantasie means both a particular fantasy and the general power of the imagination ( see PHANTASIA, Box 3 ). The dilemmas surrounding these different ways of translating the Freudian Witz are in part due to the fact that it is considered in its relation to the unconscious. Like the “Freudianslip,” the failed act, or condensation in a dream, it has the sense of something jutting out, of a sudden idea ( Einfall in German ), that is, an idea that suddenly appears without one’s expecting it to, and that can surprise even the person uttering it. According to Freud, the Witz is a successful slip that comes unexpectedly from the unconscious, like the term famillionaire—a kind of crasis between “familiar” [as an attitude] and “millionaire”—which so interested Lacan ( and Freud himself, more than anyone ), and by means of which some poor devil accidentally let it be known that he had been treated kindly by the nonetheless very wealthy Baron de Rothschild. Freud explains and glosses as follows the thought contained in this Witz, or this “joke” of the mind ( gestreicher Einfall ): “we had to add to the sentence ‘Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal—quite “famillionairely” ’ a supplementary proposition that, abbreviated to its maximum degree, was expressed as: ‘as much as a millionaire is capable of treating anyone’ ” ( Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Strachey, 12–13 ). The source of the pleasure deriving from these games of the mind ( jeux de l’esprit ), or more precisely, of the unconscious, is just such a mechanism of condensation. |
Ingenium is thus a notion that in itself is clear, in spite of its complexity and richness, but that certain national languages—and not minor ones from a philosophical point of view—do not succeed in translating satisfactorily.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Edited and translated by Ingram Bywater, notes by Gilbert Murray. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920.
Cicero. De Oratore. In Cicero, On Oratory and Orators; with His Letters to Quintus and Brutus. Translated by J. S. Watson. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855.
. De Oratore. Translated by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948.
. Tusculan Disputations. Edited and translated by A. E. Douglas. Warminster, Eng.: Aris and Phillips, 1985.
Gracián, Baltasar. Agudeza y arte de ingenio. Edited and with notes by Ceferino Peralta, Jorge M. Ayala, and José Ma. Andreu. 2 vols. Zaragoza, Sp.: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004. First published in 1648.
. El Discreto. Edited by Miguel Romera-Navarro and Jorge M. Furt. Buenos Aires: Academia Argentina de Letras, 1960. Translation by T. Saldkeld: The Compleat Gentleman. London, 1730.
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.
. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. 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.
Vico, Giambattista. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language: Including the Disputation with the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia [De antiquissima Italorum sapientia]. Translated, with introduction and notes by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
. On the Study Methods of Our Time [De nostri temporis studiorum ratione]. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Elio Gianturco. Preface by Donald Phillip Verene. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
. Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni. 3rd ed. 2 vols. Napoli, 1744. Translation by David Marsh: New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Introduction by Anthony Grafton. London: Penguin, 2001.
“Instant,” from the Latin in-stare, “to stand on, hold close,” is one of the possible designations of the atom of time: it is the commonly accepted translation of the Aristotelian to nun [τὸ νῦν], literally, “the now,” of which physical time is made up; see AIÔN.
It is also, this time paying attention to the insistence ( which one can hear in “instant” ) of that which is presently going to happen, a way of naming the pressure of the present at the heart of subjective duration; see MOMENT for a discussion of the Greek kairos [ϰαιϱός] ( opportunity ), the German Augenblick ( blink of an eye ), and Kierkegaard’s Danish øjeblik ( to be complemented by PLUDSELIGHED, “suddenness,” which emphasizes the discontinuity of irruption ); JETZTZEIT, which in Benjamin’s vocabulary refers to the messianic effectiveness of an “at-present” in history. See, more generally, PRESENT and TIME.
On the way in which an instant can bring together or condense time, see ETERNITY [AIÔN], INTUITION [ANSCHAULICHKEIT, UNDERSTANDING]; cf. ACT, GOD, WISDOM.
On the way in which instantaneity is expressed verbally, see ASPECT.
EVENT, GLÜCK, HISTORY, MEMORY, PROGRESS
INSTINCT
Derived from the classical Latin instinctus, which means “instigation, impulse, excitation” ( from the Indo-European root *stig-, “to prick” ), the French word instinct nowadays means “an innate and powerful tendency, common to all living beings and all individuals of the same species,” and in the sciences “an innate tendency of actions that are determined according to species, performed perfectly without any prior experience, and subordinated to the conditions of the environment” ( RT: Le nouveau petit Robert, s.v. ). One finds the word in German as Instinkt, in English as “instinct,” and in Italian as istinto. The difference between animal and man traditionally overlaps with the difference between instinct and intelligence: see ANIMAL, and DISPOSITION, UNDERSTANDING, Box 1 ( on the Greek nous [νоῦς], the meaning of which ranges from the inbred tenacity or the “sense of smell” of a dog, to the divine spirit, to divine intuition ); cf. LOGOS, REASON.
A particular, major problem regarding the translation of instinct has taken shape around the use of the German term Instinkt in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, with some authors assimilating it to Trieb, a term of German origin that is the biological equivalent of instinct, and that one also finds in Freud, but with a very different meaning. Indeed, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, “When Freud does use the word Instinkt it is in the classical sense: he speaks of Instinkt in animals confronted by danger . . . when Freud asks whether ‘inherited mental formations exist in the human being—something analogous to instinct in animals’ he does not look for such a counterpart in what he calls Trieb, but instead in that ‘hereditary, genetically acquired factor in mental life’ ” ( RT: Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, trans. Nicholson-Smith, 214 ). This is why in France, after a period of time when instinct was more prevalent, Trieb is now normally translated as pulsion ( impulse ), in the sense of an instinctual movement toward an object that is not predetermined. English translators render Trieb as “instinct,” or more judiciously as “drive,” a term that does not have the same origin as Trieb, but that nonetheless has some of the biological connotations of Freud’s theory. See DRIVE, WUNSCH; see also ES, UNCONSCIOUS.
ERLEBEN, INGENIUM, INTUITION, NATURE
INTELLECT, INTELLIGER ( FRENCH )
| LATIN | intellectus, intelligere; concipere, comprehendere | ||
| ITALIAN | intelletto |
INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING, and CONCETTO, CONSCIOUSNESS, GEMÜT, I/ME/MYSELF, INTUITION, REASON, SOUL
In the seventeenth century, a period of translation of Latin philosophical language into French philosophical language, most notably through the translation of the major works of Descartes ( Meditationes, Principia philosophiae ), the Latin word intellectus appears to be almost untranslatable, at least insofar as it is practically never translated into French by the word that corresponds to it, intellect, but by a word belonging to an entirely different semantic field, entendement ( understanding ). Yet the word intellect has been part of the French language for centuries. In fact, as early as the thirteenth century we can find it in the Livres dou Trésor, by Brunetto Latini ( 1260 ), even though it seems that it remains a technical term that has not really passed into common use. The French language has lacked an author comparable to Dante, who contributed greatly to popularizing the word intelletto in Italian from the fourteenth century onward. The word entendement, by contrast, which first appeared in the Oxford Psalter ( 1120 ), very soon came into common use. We find it especially in the fourteenth century when Nicole Oresme, associating entendement with the word raison, uses it in his French translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ( to render the Greek nous [νοῦς] ), and in the sixteenth century the term is used frequently by Montaigne in his Essays, but to refer to a quality rather than a faculty—the quality of the gens d’entendement ( men of understanding ). Furthermore, while Montaigne uses the word intelligence, he never uses the word intellect.
The term intellect did not really become widespread in French until the nineteenth century, following Renan, and in the context of the translation of the Averroist lexicon. The influence of Italian on French also perhaps played some role. In any case, it is striking to see that the term that the otherwise very “Cartesian” Valéry most often uses in his Notebooks is not entendement but intellect.
I. Intellectus in the Renaissance: The Example of Bovelles
The key question is knowing whether—aside from a few rare occurrences, most notably in Guez de Balzac or in Malebranche—the near-impossibility of translating intellectus into French literally as intellect, or even of using the word intellect in an original text in the Renaissance and into the early eighteenth century, simply reflects the limits of the vocabulary in use at the time, or whether there is not, linked to this semantic displacement toward entendement, a philosophical transformation that is every bit as determining. For at the beginning of the Renaissance, to talk about intellectus was not simply to study the workings of human entendement, but was above all to invoke the mode of existence and of knowledge of a separate intellectus, that of the angels. The 1511 Liber de intellectu of Charles de Bovelles is a good example: Bovelles treats human intellectus entirely by contrasting it to the pure intellectus of angels. According to Renaissance philosophy, human thought could be studied only by comparison with the pure intellectus of a separate intelligence. There was a vertical hierarchy of modes of thought: sensus, ratio, intellectus, mens, which were prefigured in the De conjecturis of Nicolas of Cusa ( 1440 ). Sensus was a mode of apprehension belonging to the body, ratio belonging to humans, intellectus to a pure intelligence ( intelligentia ), and mens to God. A manuscript note written by Beatus Rhenanus, an Alsatian student of Lefèvre d’Étaples and of Bovelles, identifies four distinct modes of philosophizing, according to these four modes of knowing, with intellectual philosophy thus falling halfway between rational philosophy and the philosophy of the mind. How we can or should conceive of the capacity of knowing proper to humans is played out across this spectrum. If humans are distinguished by reason alone, their knowledge is limited to the abstractive mode of knowing on the basis of sensible types, whereas the intuitive mode is reserved for the pure intellectus of angels. As far as humans are concerned, however, Bovelles rejects precisely this originally Scotist separation between abstractive knowledge and intuitive knowledge, the former being the only knowledge available to humans in their life. For Bovelles, by contrast, man is not only reason, but also intellectus: he is able to reach a state of fulfillment that raises him to the level of the intellectus of angels when his knowledge, originally abstractive, is capable of an intuitive force. Bovelles then talks of a vis intuitiva for the intellectus of man himself. For Bovelles, the spectrum of ratio, intellectus, mens is no longer a limiting principle, but a dynamic schema.
II. The Cartesian Distinction of the Different Modes of Thought: Intelligere, Concipere, Comprehendere
A radical shift in the world of the mind obviously occurs between Bovelles and Descartes. The vertical gradation of intellectual beings is no longer the measure of the capacity of fulfillment of the human mind. The enumeration in the “Second Meditation” is well known, in which the terms that are carefully differentiated by medieval and Renaissance Noetics are presented by Descartes as equivalent: “res cogitans, id est, mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio” ( Meditationes de Prima Philosophia in Œuvres [AT], 7:27 ). Now, there is a direct, immediate contrast between man’s finite intellectus and God’s infinite one. The distinctions that Descartes’s philosophy sets in place no longer operate among nouns—ratio, intellectus, mens—designating both distinct faculties and ontologically different beings; rather, they work among verbal forms that signal the different ways of thinking and knowing proper to man: intelligere, concipere, comprehendere ( the distinction is made particularly clear in Descartes’s Entretien avec Burman, in Œuvres [AT] 5:154 ). Contemporary translators of Descartes, such as the duc de Luynes, seem curiously unaware of the distinction between intelligere and concipere, and they often translate intelligere as “’to conceive.” Yet, as Jean-Marie Beyssade suggests, following Descartes’s detailed analysis, the gap between intelligere and concipere is the very gap between the idea and the concept. As for the difference between intelligere and comprehendere, this is a distinction of principle for the entirety of Cartesian metaphysics. The distinction is drawn in relation to our knowledge of the infinite being: we are capable of “knowing” it ( intelligere )—or of apprehending it with our intellect ( intelliger in French, even though this word was not yet in current usage at the time )—without for all that “understanding” it ( comprehendere ).
Descartes was not the first to apply this distinction or these terms to our knowledge of God. The distinction between mente attingere and comprehendere formulated by Descartes in a letter to Mersenne ( January 21, 1641, in Œuvres [AT], 3:284 ), referring to a passage in Saint Augustine, turns out to follow precisely this distinction, as presented in Augustine’s text:
Attingere aliquantum mente Deum, magna beatitudo est: comprehendere autem, omnino impossibile.
( To reach God in some way with our mind is a great happiness, but to understand Him is impossible. )
( Sermo 117, chap. 3, 5, PL, vol. 38, col. 663; Sermons, trans. E. Hill )
It is therefore plausible that Descartes knew of this text by Augustine, which is not however, cited by Zbigniew Janowski in his Index augustino-cartésien ( 83–85 ). On the other hand, and since the focus of this entry is the transition from the Renaissance to the classical age, we should mention Nicholas of Cusa, who, two centuries before Descartes, had written in book 1 of his Docte ignorance that God is intelligé de manière incompréhensible ( incomprehensibiliter intelligitur, “apprehended or ‘intellected’ without comprehension” ). Cusanus’s near-oxymoron has not been rendered faithfully by the French translators of the twentieth-century: Abel Rey in 1930 translated it the other way around as compris sans être saisi ( understood without being grasped ), while Maurice de Gandillac in 1942 translated the two words using the same term: compris de façon incompréhensible ( comprehended incomprehensibly ), thereby eliding the distinction between intelligere and comprehendere, possibly with a view to making the effect of the contrast more radical. The differentiated usage of the two terms is equally present in Cusanus’s Latin. Does Cartesian metaphysics, then, simply take up Cusanus’s distinction? This is certainly not the case. The Meditations do not adapt Cusanus’s docte ignorance ( learned ignorance ) for the classical age. Book 1 of the Docte ignorance ended by stating the primacy of negative theology; Descartes, by contrast, emphasizes the fact that man is naturally capable of a “positive” knowledge or intellection of the infinite being. It is this capacity itself that characterizes the metaphysical way of thinking.
A tradition of interpretation that emerged in France in the second half of the twentieth century, however, has downplayed the importance of the Cartesian distinction between intelligere and comprehendere. To take an example: when Ferdinand Alquié wanted to justify the absence of the “Conversation with Burman” from his edition of Descartes’s Œuvres philosophiques, he translated as nous comprenons ( we understand ) the verb intelligimus used by the philosopher in relation to our knowledge of God’s perfections ( see Œuvres philosophiques, 3:766 ). What is more, in his concern to promote the image of a pre-Kantian Descartes, he spoke in 1950 of an “unknowable transcendence” and of a “metaphysics of an inaccessible being” in relation to the God of the Meditations ( La Découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes, 113 [p. 109 in 1987 ed.] ). More recently, Jean-Luc Marion has developed a similar interpretation by invoking the “unknowability” of an “inaccessible” God in Descartes ( Questions cartésiennes 2:233, 240 ). Both conclude by referring to the presence of a “negative theology,” or via negativa in Descartes ( Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique, 88; Marion, Questions cartésiennes, 246 ).
These interpretations tend toward replacing the Cartesian metaphysics of the positively known infinite with a theology of an incomprehensible omnipotence. Descartes, however, tells us something very different: in the “Third Meditation” ( in Œuvres [AT], 7:45 ), the supremely knowing character ( summe intelligentem ) of the divine substance is affirmed before its omnipotence. From this one may then conclude that the name of the supremely “intelligent” being is intelligible to us only to the degree that the supreme being is indeed understood ( intelligo ) to be “supremely intelligent”: “Dei nomine intelligo . . . ,” writes Descartes in the same sentence. One cannot emphasize enough, then, the importance of the Cartesian distinction between intelligere and comprehendere. At stake here, no doubt, is our perception of modern metaphysics, since we find in the Meditations a metaphysical thinking that does not subscribe to the Scholastic thesis ( taken up by Kant in the modern age ) of the impossibility for man to have any “intellectual intuition.” An attentive rereading of Descartes’s Latin texts might then contribute to a reevaluation of the intellective capacities of man, which should continue to inform our use of the word “intellect.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alquié, Ferdinand. La Découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. 1st reprint, 1987; 2nd reprint, 2000.
Augustine. Sermo CXVII: De Verbis Evangelii Joannis. Patrologia Latina. Vol. 38. Col. 661–71. Translation by Edmund Hill: “Sermon 117: On the Words of the Gospel of John.” Pp. 209–33 in Sermons. Vol. 4. Edited by John E. Rotelle. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990.
Bovelles, Charles de. Quae hoc volumine continentur: Liber de intellectu; Liber de sensu; Liber de nihilo; Ars oppositorum; Liber de generatione; Liber de sapiente; Liber de duodecim numeris; Epistolae complures. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Ger.: Friedrich Fromann, 1970. First published in 1511.
Cusanus, Nicolas [Nicolas of Cusa]. “De Coniecturis.” In Mutmaßungen. Edited and translated by Josef Koch and Winfried Happ. Hamburg: Meiner, 1988. English translation by Jasper Hopkins: “On Surmises.” Pp. 163–297 in Metaphysical Speculations, vol. 2. Minneapolis: Banning, 2000.
. De docta ignorantia [Die belehrte Unwissenheit]. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Edited by Hans Gerhard Senger and Paul Wilpert. Translated by Paul Wilpert. Hamburg: Meiner, 1970–77. English translation by Germain Heron: Of Learned Ignorance. Introduction by D.J.B. Hawkins. 1954. Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1979. Heron’s translation first published in 1954.
Descartes, René. L’Entretien avec Burman. Edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981. Latin version ( AT ) edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery: pp. 154–79 in Correspondance, volume 5 of Œuvres de Descartes ( AT ). Paris: Vrin 1983. Volume 5 first published in 1903. English translation by John Cottingham: Descartes’ Conversation with Burman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
. Meditationes de prima philosophia. Volume 7 of Œuvres de Descartes ( AT ), edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1983. Volume 7 first published in 1904. Translation by John Cottingham: Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited by J. Cottingham. Rev. ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
. Œuvres de Descartes. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. 12 volumes. Paris: Vrin, 1983–. First published 1896–1913.
. Œuvres philosophiques. 3 vols. Edited by Ferdinand Alquié. Paris: Garnier: 1963–73. Translation by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
. “Responsiones Renati Des Cartes ad quasdam diffultates ex Meditationibus ejus, etc., ab ipso haustae.” Pp. 146–79 in volume 5 of Œuvres de Descartes ( AT ), edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1983. Volume 5 first published in 1903.
Faye, Emmanuel. “Beatus Rhenanus lecteur et étudiant de Charles de Bovelles.” Annuaire des Amis de la Bibliothéque humaniste de Sélestat ( 1995 ): 115–36.
Gouhier, Henri Gaston. “Intelligere et comprehendere.” Pp. 208–14 in La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes. 4th. ed. Paris: Vrin, 2000.
. Philosophie et perfection de l’homme: De la Renaissance à Descartes. Paris: Vrin, 1998.
Janowski, Zbigniew. Index augustino-cartésien. Paris: Vrin, 2000.
Marion, Jean-Luc. Questions cartésiennes. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.
Renan, Ernest. Averroès et l’averroïsme [1852]. Edited by Alain de Libera. Paris: Maisonneuve et Laros - Dédale, 1997.
Valéry, Paul. Cahiers. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1973–74. Translation by Paul Gifford et al.: Notebooks. 3 vols. Edited by Brian Stimpson et al. New York: Peter Lang, 2000–2007.
INTELLECTUS ( LATIN )
| ARABIC | ‘aql [العقل] | ||
| ENGLISH | mind, intellect, understanding, meaning, thought | ||
| FRENCH | intellect, entendement, sens, signification, pensée | ||
| GERMAN | Vernunft, Intellekt, Verstand, Sinn | ||
| GREEK | nous [νοῦς], epinoia [ἐπίνοια], logistikon [λογιστιϰόν] | ||
| ITALIAN | intelletto, significato |
INTELLECT, INTUITION, REASON, UNDERSTANDING and CONSCIOUSNESS, GEMÜT, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION, SENSE, SOUL
Intellectus is one of the most polysemic terms in medieval Latin. It applies as much to “the meaning of” something ( we talk about the intellectus of a sentence or of a judgment, Ger. Sinn, Fr. sens, It. significato ), as to the verb “to mean” ( in the sense of vouloir-dire in French, that is, a speaker or writer’s intention or “meaning-to-say” ), or to the “meaning understood” ( that is, the “meaning,” “intentional” or not, as it is “received” in the mind of the listener ), and more broadly to “signification” or “significance,” in the sense of “full of meaning,” as is the case in the programmatic expression of theology and of exegesis: intellectus fideli, the “intellection” or “understanding” of faith. To mean, to understand, to comprehend: these different meanings do not pose a problem for the translator since vernacular language has often separated them out into terms that have evolved in different ways, to the exclusion of other uses. The word intellectus covers, in addition to the spheres of meaning and of understanding, almost all of the notions relating to thought, its activity, and its conditions of possibility. This is where the difficulties lie. As a fundamental term of ancient and medieval psychology, intellectus and the series of terms that are derived from or related to it ( intelligere, intellectualis, intelligibilis ) pose particular, if not insoluble, problems for the translator. The most delicate problem comes from the fact that words such as the English “understanding,” or the French entendement, or the German Verstand, which, at various times, have become accepted equivalents of the Latin intellectus, do not correspond to the field that it covers in the Peripatetic and Scholastic lexicon. The transformation of intellectus into “understanding” ( entendement ) marks a break in the history of theories of the soul. Indeed, the post-Lockean notion of “understanding” used by Leibniz to discuss the Averroist theory of the “unity of the intellect” no more overlaps with that of intellectus than the pair of terms intellectus/ratio overlaps with the pair Verstand/Vernunft that are Kant’s legacy to modernity. Neither an empiricist psychology of understanding nor a theory of the transcendental are possible frameworks within which the Aristotelian nous [νοῦς] can be accommodated. The medieval intellectus, like the nous it harbors, is pulled not only between understanding and reason but also between different meanings of a ( supposedly ) identical faculty named entendement, Verstand, “understanding,” assigned to it by different philosophers of language, theories, and often incommensurable assumptions. It is, then, an example of an untranslatable term, whose untranslatability flows from a certain undertranslation ( its original dimension is only apparent in expressions like “intellectual intuition,” the intellektuelle Anschauung that Kant rejected for understanding ), as well as from a certain overtranslation. This latter has no better example than the case of Ernest Renan, who, because he interpreted intellectus as “reason” in the Kantian sense of the term, denounced in the noetics of Averroës an obscure and inadequate affirmation of the “universality of the principles of pure reason” and the no less confused affirmation of a “unity of psychological constitution in all of humankind” ( Cf. E. Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme, Maisonneuve et Larose, “Dédale,” 1997, 109 ). Similarly, modern interpretations of the medieval theory of the intellect that replace the concepts of poietic intellect ( or agent ) and material ( or possible ) intellect with those of productive and of receptive mind bring to bear on the theory of intellectus models of reading that are as foreign to it as they are to the Peripatetic theory of nous, which is its source. To understand clearly why the intellectus-nous is neither Lockean understanding nor Kantian reason ( Vernunft ), one has to be clear about the inaugural distinction between nous and dianoia [διανοία] and to distinguish between the Peripatetic and non-Peripatetic uses of the term intellectus. Before the Latin translations of De anima, intellectus did not in fact refer to the nous of Aristotle and his Greek commentators but usually to the deeply Stoicist notion of color: epinoia [ἐπίνοια]. These two oppositions—nous vs dianoia and nous vs epinoia—mark two historical periods of intellectus: the one pre-Socratic, when it is synonymous with opinio, and the other Scholastic, when it refers to the intellect-nous of De anima 3.4–5, distinguishing it from ratio. We will focus in this entry on the Peripatetic usages, which are the most poorly served by modern translations.
I. The Intellectus between Nous and Epinoia
In the Scholastic vocabulary, intellectus has at least ten meanings that are more or less interconnected: ( 1 ) the Peripatetic nous, understood in the sense of “substance”; ( 2 ) the same, in the sense of “faculty” ( Ger. Vermögen ) or “faculty of knowledge” ( Ger. Erkenntnisvermögen ); ( 3 ) the nonsensible or suprasensible faculty of knowledge, but not distinct from ratio ( that is, without taking into account the distinction between intuitive knowledge and discursive knowledge ); ( 4 ) a cognitive activity, an act of knowledge, intellection or intelligence ( synonym: intellegentia ); ( 5 ) the nonsensible intuitive faculty of knowledge, which penetrates the intimate essence of things ( according to the medieval etymology bringing together intelligere and legere intus, see Box 1 ); ( 6 ) the “habitus of principles,” as distinct from prudentia, sapientia, and scientia, but also from ratio and synteresis ( see CONSCIOUSNESS ), the Greek nous tôn archôn [νοῦς τῶν ἀϱχῶν], and the Latin habitus principiorum ( for example, “intellectus dicitur habitus primum principiorum,” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, I, q. 58, 3c, “quendam specialem habitum, qui dicitur intellectus principiorum, ibid., q. 799, 12c ); ( 7 ) intellectual inspection ( Ger. Einsicht ), synonymous with intellegentia, and the antonym of which is ratio; ( 8 ) conception, comprehension, interpretation, understanding, or meaning ( Ger. Verständnis, intellektuelle Auffassung, for example “verbum illud Philosophi universaliter verum est in omni intellectu [this sentence of Aristotle’s is absolutely true, whichever way one takes it],” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, 1, q. 87, 1 ad 3m, “secundum intellectum Augustini [according to the sense in which St. Augustine understands it],” ibid. q. 58, 7 ad 1m ); ( 9 ) a nonsensible representation ( Vernunftsvorstellung ) or a notion, synomous with ratio, in the sense of a definitional formula ( for example, “voces sunt signa intellectuum,” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, q. 13, 1c, “composito intellectum est in intellectu,” ibid., q. 17, 3a ); ( 10 ) significance or meaning ( Ger. Bedeutung, Sinn ), synonymous with ratio ( in the sense of the definitional formula, logos-formula, sensus, significatio, virtus, vis [“expressive force or impact”] of a word ).
■ See Box 1.
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On the etymology of intellectus The word intellectus is formed by joining together inter and legere, where legere has the meaning of “to bind,” “to bring together,” “to collect,” which is one of the meanings of the Greek legô [λέγω], and of the German lesen ( see LOGOS ). In the Middle Ages intelligere, sometimes attested as intellegere, is sometimes associated with intra- or intus- legere, legere here having the banal sense of “to read,” and not to bind. Several good examples of this “etymology” are provided by Thomas Aquinas: “Nomen intellectus sumitur ex hoc, quod intima rei cognoscit, est enim intellegere quasi intus legere [The name ‘intellect’ is derived from the fact that it knows the intimate nature of a thing: indeed, intelliger is tantamount to saying ‘to read inside’],” Quaestiones disputate De veritate, q. 1, 12c ); “Dicitur autem intellectus ex eo quo intus legit intuendo essentiam rei; intellectus et ratio differunt quantum ad modum cognoscendi, quia scilicet intellectus cognoscit simplici intuitu, ratio vero discurrendo de uno in aliud [it is called ‘intellect’ because it reads inside, that is, has an intuition of the essence of a thing; intellect and reason differ as to the mode of knowledge, since intellect is an act of simple intuition, whereas reason moves discursively from one thing to another],” Summa theologica, I, q. 59, a. 1, ad. 1m ) |
As we can see, certain Scholastic usages of intellectus refer to the nóêsis [νόησις] of Aristotle, understood at times as thought in general, and at other times as so-called “intuitive” thinking ( contrasted to dianoia [διανοία] or “discursive” thinking ). Other usages refer to the nous properly speaking, or the intellect, itself understood by some interpreters as “intuitive reason” and contrasted in this sense to to dianoètikon [τὸ διανοητιϰόν] or “discursive reason.” Still others, finally, refer to that which is intelligible or thinkable ( = noêton [νοητόν] ), or even to the concept or the notion of something ( = noêma [νόημα] ). This polysemy, which means that the same term refers at once to a faculty, its operation, and its object, is one of the main difficulties in reading medieval texts, as well as Greek texts ( see aisthêsis under the entry SENSE ).
If in the Scholastic and “Arabo-Latin” tradition intellectus has the primary meaning of intellect, in the original “Greco-Latin” tradition ( that of Boethius ) it sometimes has the meaning of epinoia [ἐπίνοια] ( “that which comes to mind,” “reflection,” “imagination,” “thought,” rather than, by extension, “intelligence” in general, or even “common sense” ), which is usually translated as opinio. This usage is still attested in the thirteenth century, mainly in William of Moerbeke’s translations ( De Anima, in the Version of William of Moerbeke: and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated into English by Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959 ). It is the word intellectus, and not opinio, that appears in the translation of the mute citation of Isagoge, through which Simplicius, in his Commentary on the Categories, dismisses the problem of universals from the field of logic: “si enim sunt universalia sive intellectu solo esse habeant, alterius utique erit negotii inquirere [to know if universals exist or only have their existence in thought, would in fact be an entirely different kind of study]” ( cf. Simplicius, In praedicamenta Aristotelis, trans. William of Moerbeke, ed. A. Pattin, Louvain: Publications universitaires–Paris; Béatrice Nauwelaerts, Corpus Latinum Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum, V/1, 1971, 71, 44–45. The use of intellectus to translate epinoia, interpreted this time in the sense of a concept that is “posterior in the order of being,” is also attested in Moerbeke’s translation of Simplicius’s Commentary:
aut quia aliqui perimebant universalia et intellectualia et ea quae qualitercumque intelliguntur aut quia etsi haec essent in natura, intellectus ipsorum posterius accepimus
( either because some reject universals, intelligibles, and everything that is the object of some form of intellection, or because, even though they actually exist [in nature], we only get their concept [thought] afterwards )
( Ibid., 261, 83–86 )
We might also note in this passage the use of the word intellectualia in the sense of “intelligibles.” We might finally point out that, in its pre-Socratic usage, intellectus is often contrasted both to “reason” and to “intelligence.” This distinction, probably borrowed from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, disappears after the reception of Aristotle.
■ See Box 2.
II. Intellectus and the Vocabulary of the Peripatetic Noetics
The difficulty of the medieval lexicon of intellect derives first and foremost from the difficulty of Aristotle’s vocabulary in De anima, and because of the continuous superimposition of translations and commentaries, from Greek to Latin, or from Greek to Arabic. As we read in De anima 3.5, the distinction between the different sorts of intellect is quite obscure. It merely touches on the ideas of dynamic intellect ( through the phrase touto de ho panta dunamei eikeina [τοῦτο δὲ ὅ πάντα δυνάμει ἐϰεῖνα] ), of poietic intellect or intellect as agent ( of the kind, τὸ αἴτιον ϰαὶ ποιητιϰόν ), and of passive intellect ( ho de pathêtikos nous [ὁ δὲ παθητιϰὸς νοῦς] )”, without proposing any systematic construction between them. Indeed, it was the commentators of Aristotle, first among them being Alexander of Aphrodisias, who provided in advance the medieval notions of intellectus.
A. Agent intellect, hylic ( material, possible ) intellect
In De intellectu, Alexander of Aphrodisias attributes to Aristotle a distinction among three sorts of intellect: material intellect ( nous hulikos [νοῦς ὑλιϰός] ), the intellect “according to the habitus” ( nous kath’hexin [νοῦς ϰαθ’ ἕξιν] ), and the poietic intellect ( nous poiêtikos [νοῦς ποιητϰός]—“nous esti kata Aristotelê trittos [νοῦς ἐστι ϰατὰ ’Aϱιστοτέλη τϱιττός]” ( the intellect is threefold according to Aristotle ) ( cf. P. Moraux, Alexandre exégète de la noétique d’Aristote, Liège, Faculté de philosophie-Paris, E. Droz, “Bibliothèque de la faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’Université de Liège,” Fasc. XCIX, 1942, 185; ed. Bruns, 106, 19 ). This tripartite distinction was adopted by all of the commentators and became so widely accepted as Aristotelian that the Arabic translation on which Averroës based his Long Commenary of De anima incorporated Alexander’s division into Aristotle’s text itself.
■ See Box 3.
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A translation by Alexander incorporated into Aristotle’s original text The Textus 17 = De anima 3.5, 430a10–14 on which Averroës comments is the following: Et quia, quemadmodum in Natura, est aliquid in unoquoque genere quod est materia ( et est illud quod est illa omnia in potentia ), et aliud quod est causa et agens ( et hoc est illud propter quod agit quidlibet, sicut dispositio artificii apud materiam ), necesse est ut in anima existant hee differentie. ( And since, just as in Nature, there is in each kind something that is matter [and is that which is potential in all of these things], and another thing that is cause and agent [and is that by virtue of which everything acts, as is the case with art in relation to matter], these differences also necessarily exist in the soul too. ) ( Crawford ed., 436, 1–7 ) The original in Tricot’s French translation, is as follows: Mais puisque, dans la nature toute entière, on distingue d’abord quelque chose qui sert de matière à chaque genre ( et c’est ce qui est en puissance tous les êtres du genre ), et ensuite une autre chose qui est la cause et l’agent parce qu’elle les produit tous, situation dont celle de l’art par rapport à sa matière est un exemple, il est nécessaire que, dans l’âme aussi, on retrouve ces différences. ( Vrin, 1992, p. 181 ) ( But since, in all of nature, we distinguish first of all something that is matter in each genus [and it is that which is potential in all of the beings of a genus], and then another thing which is that cause and agent because it produces them all, a situation of which the relationship of art to its matter is an example, we also necessarily find these differences in the soul. ) The decisive change ( Alexander’s incorporation ) occurs in the Textus 18 = De anima 3.5, 430a14–17, where three differences are mentioned, contrary to the binary division maintained in Textus 17: Oportet igitur ut in ea sit intellectus qui est intellectus secundum quod efficitur omne, et intellectus qui est intellectus secundum quod facit ipsum intelligere omne, et intellectus secundum quod intelligit omne, quasi habitus, qui est quasi lux. Lux enimquoquo modo etiam facit colores qui sunt in potentia colores in actu. ( So within it there is also necessarily [1] an intellect that is intellect to the extent that it becomes all, and [2] an intellect that is an intellect to the extent that it allows it to conceive of all, and [3] an intellect to the extent that it conceives of everything as a habitus does—that is, in a manner resembling the action of light. For in a certain way, light also makes potential colors into actual colors. ) ( Crawford ed., 437, 1–7 ) To be compared with Tricot’s French: Et, en fait, on y distingue, d’une part, l’intellect qui est analogue à la matière, par le fait qu’il devient tous les intelligibles, et d’autre part, l’intellect [qui est analogue à la cause efficiente], parce qu’il les produit tous, attendu qu’il est une sorte d’état analogue à la lumière: car, en un certain sens, la lumière, elle aussi, convertit les couleurs en puissance, en couleurs en acte. ( Vrin, 1992, 181–82 ) ( And indeed, we can distinguish in it, on the one hand, the intellect that is analogous to matter, by the fact that it becomes all of the intelligibles, and on the other hand, the intellect [that is analogous to the efficient cause], because it produces all, considering that it is in a sort of analogous state to light: for, in a certain sense, light too converts potential colors into actual colors. ) |
In fact, not only does Aristotle not talk of nous kath’ hexin, but the very distinction between agent intellect and hylic or possible intellect is far from being as clearly formulated in De anima as Alexander leads us to think. Besides the few lines in De anima 3.4 and 5, devoted to the intellect as “analogous to matter,” similar to a “tabula rasa,” which also mention the “possible” intellect, and besides the extremely enigmatic passage in 3.5, referring to the intellect that “produces” intelligibles, one would be hard pressed to cite any text by Aristotle that offered an actual “theory of the intellect.” We have to turn instead to the noetic works of Alexander that have come down to us, that is, the Peri psuchês [Πεϱὶ ψυχῆς] ( De anima ), edited by I. Bruns in 1887 ( Supplementum Aristotelicum, II, 1, Berlin, 1892, 1–100 ) and the De anima liber alter, also called Mantissa ( Bruns, ibid., 101–86 ), which is a collection of twenty-five treatises comprising notably, in number one, a second and short version of Peri psuchês ( Bruns, 101, 1–106, 17 ) and in number two ( Bruns, ibid., 106, 18–113, 24 ) the famous Peri nou [Πεϱὶ νοῦ] ( On the intellect ), in order to look for an exposition of the Peripatetic theory of the intellect, which, through its Greek and Arabic commentators, has permeated medieval Scholastics.
B. Speculative intellect, theoretical intellect
Scholastic philosophers often used the expression intellectus speculativus, which modern translations often render with a calque ( “speculative intellect,” Fr. intellect spéculatif, It. intelletto speculativo, etc. ). While this is not wrong, the literal translation masks its homonymy. The expression derives from the Latin translation of the Long Commentary of Averroës on De anima; the analysis of different passages of the Aristotelian De anima and its adoption by Averroës demonstrate that the “speculative” intellect in fact refers to three sorts of entities: ( 1 ) the faculty referred to by Aristotle as “theoretical intellect” in De anima 3.6, 42925ff. ( Arabic ‘aql naẓarī [العقل النظﺮي] ), as opposed to the “practical intellect” of De anima 3.7, 421a1ff. ( Arabic ‘aql ‘amali [العقل العملي] ); ( 2 ) the “composite” of the material intellect and the agent intellect, which Averroës calls “produced intellect” ( factus ), in other words, not a faculty, but an act or activity ( that is, the “intellection of indivisibles,” according to Aristotle, ta adiaireta [τὰ ἀδιαίϱετα], ta hapla [τὰ ἁπλᾶ], and the intellection of the “composites,” or objects of judgment ); ( 3 ) the agent intellect insofar as it is joined to the material intellect and is for man the essential “form.” This is a meaning that originated with Themistius and which he extrapolated from a passage in De anima 2. 2, 413b24–25 ( Tricot, 76-77 ), where in speaking of the “intellect and of the theoretical faculty,” Aristotle indicates that “it seems indeed that this is an entirely different type of soul, and that on its own it can be separated, as the eternal, from the corruptible” ( cf. Themistius, in III De anima, ad 430a 20–25; Verbeke, 232, 44–46 and 233, 80–82 ). These three senses obviously cannot work concurrently. The immediate context allows one in theory to determine the meaning. The Latin res speculativae generally refers to the objects of the activity of the theoretical intellect in the second sense of the term, that is, first and foremost, the indivisibles invoked in De anima 3.6, 430a26–31. It is worth pointing out that this activity in Averroës is called “representation” ( taṣawwur [التصوّﺮ], Latin formatio, “forming,” which survives in “to form a plan,” in the sense of “to conceive of a plan” ), in that it applies to intelligibles envisaged in themselves, outside of any predication, while the consideration of the “noêmes” ( ma‘nā [المعنى], “intention” ), the combination of which in predications “contains truth or falsity,” is called “consent” ( taṣdīq [التصديق], Lat. fides, “faith” ). In the Arabo-Latin translations of Aristotle ( as well as in those of Avicenna and of Averrroës ), the expression corresponding most often to noein [νοεῖν] is formare per intellectum ( the substantive being formatio per intellectum = “representation by the intellect,” Arabic al-taṣawwur bi-al-‘aql [التصوّﺮ بالعقل] ).
C. Habitual intellect, acquired intellect, common intellect
The expression “intellect in habitus” or “habitual intellect” ( intellectus in habitu ) corresponds to the nous kath’ hexin of Alexander of Aphrodisias. The notion of habitus as the power of the intellect to accomplish its own action—intellection—is illustrated in Alexander by the metaphor of the artisan: “The intellect has another degree, namely when it thinks and possesses the habitus to conceive, and is able to assume the forms of the intelligibles through its own power, a power one might compare to the power of those who have the habitus within them to make things, and who are capable of producing their own works” ( cf. Théry, 76 ). The expression intellectus in habitu appears frequently in Avicenna’s Latin texts, in the Latin translation of al-Ghazālī, and from there in most of the Scholastics. Generally speaking, what we call “acquired intellect” or “actual intellect” ( in effectu ) is the intellect that “considers, in act, the conclusions drawn from propositions which are self-evident,” while “habitual intellect” refers to those same conclusions insofar as the intellect “possesses them without actually thinking of them.” The intellectus in habitu, however, is often assimilated to the habitus principiorum discussed in the Second Analytics. It is in this sense that it appears, for example, in Albert the Great, when, in the Summa de creaturis, IIa paragraphs, q. 54, he contrasts the “habitual” intellect, in the sense of the “possession of principles that have not been received from a master,” which we know “by simply knowing the terms that compose it,” with the “acquired” ( acquisitus ) intellect, meaning the possession of “principles that one acquires in contact with a master through teaching and studying.” Since the “acquired” intellect can also refer to the intellect “acquired externally” ( adeptus, Greek thurathen [θύϱαθεν] ), in the more or less mystical sense, extrapolated by Alexander ( see Box 4 ) from a passage in the Parva naturalia ( De generatione animalium, 736b20–29 ), there is a considerable amount of terminological confusion. The main source of confusion comes from the fact that underneath apparently similar Latin expressions we find notions that are sometimes Greek, sometimes Arabic, and sometimes Greco-Arabic in origin, whose meaning varies from the union or “conjunction” ( Lat. conjunctio, copulatio, connexio, Ar. ittiṣāl [الاتصال] ) of the human soul and the separate agent intellect, to the simple acquisition, through teaching or through reason, of a stock of intelligibles.
■ See Box 4.
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The “acquired” intellect: A misinterpretation that became a technical term Alexander interpreted the Aristotelian notion of intellect “from outside” in a very particular sense: for him, it was a question of the agent intellect, acquired by the soul at each contemplation of the separate intelligible. Cf. Alexander of Aphrodisia, De anima: When the intelligible is by its own nature exactly as it is thought [ = intelligible] . . . it remains incorruptible when it ceases to be thought; so the intellect which thought it is also incorruptible: not the material intellect which serves as its support ( for it is corrupted at the same time as the soul is corrupted, since it is a power of the soul, and at the same time as it is corrupted, its habitus, its capacity and its perfection are also corrupted ), but the intellect which, when it was thinking it, had become identical to it in its act ( for, given that it becomes similar to each content of thought when this content is thought, what it thinks becomes exactly what it is thinking. And this intellect is the one that comes to us from outside and which is incorruptible. . . . So all those who are intent on having something of the divine within themselves will have to endeavor to succeed in thinking something of this kind. ( Bruns ed., 90, 11–91, 7 ) It is worth noting that in the fragments of Theophrastus that have survived we find, by contrast, the question of knowing in what sense the intellect that is “from outside” ( exôthen [ἔξωθεν] ) or “added on” ( epithetos [ἐπίθετος] ) can be said to be “congenital” ( sumphuês [συμφυής] ). |
The notions of intellectus adeptus ( Ar. al-‘ aql mustafād [المستفاد العقل] and of intellectus adeptus agens ( “acquired intellect agent,” Ar. al-‘aql al-mustafād al-fā‘il [العقل المستفاد الفاعل] ), expressing the state of connexio, are among the most obscure in medieval psychology. While he may not be able to determine the exact meaning of the doctrines he is confronted with ( and which vary considerably from one author to the next, from Alexander to al-Fārābī, and from Avicenna to Averroës ), the reader of the noetic texts must always, going back to the Greek, and following Alexander, distinguish between at least two incompatible meanings of the “acquired” intellect: ( 1 ) the agent intellect acquired “from outside,” that is the nous ho thurathen [νοῦς ὁ θύϱαθεν] ( Lat. adeptus ), and ( 2 ) scientific knowledge acquired from the first intelligibles, with or without the help of a master, that is nous epiktêtos [νοῦς ἐπίϰτητος] ( Lat. acquisitus, possessus, possessivus].
Although the notion of “common intellect” is sometimes seen as identical to that of the “habitual” intellect, it has an original content. Grafted on to the Aristotelian doctrine of the patient ( passivus, passibilis ) intellect, this creation by Themistius in fact carries a clearly Platonic content, bearing no relation to the pair in habitu vs in effectu.
■ See Box 5.
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The common intellect according to Themistius The expression “common intellect,” coined by Themistius and widely adopted in medieval literature under the name intellectus communis, was the source of a great deal of confusion. Despite what the Latin suggests, the intellectus communis was not a “common” or “general” concept, as opposed to a “singular” or “particular” concept. The “common intellect” ( koinos nous [ϰοινὸς νοῦς] ) was the name Themistius gave to Aristotle’s passible intellect. Cf. Themistius, In III De anima, ad 430a 25, and Verbeke, 239, 1–241, 34, who discusses the “so-called ‘common’ intellect in the way that man is composed of a soul and a body in which anger and desire ( Latin concupiscentia ) reside, which Plato considers corruptible.” The “common” or “passible” intellect of Themistius illustrates the Platonic thesis according to which “the intellect alone is immortal, whereas the passions, and the ‘reason inherent in them,’ which Aristotle calls the passive intellect, are corruptible.” Themistius also supports the thesis according to which “human passions are not entirely irrational, since they listen to reason, and are susceptible to education and instruction.” BIBLIOGRAPHY Verbeke, Gérard. Moral Education in Aristotle. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990. |
D. Intellectus passibilis vs. intellectus possibilis
De anima 3.5, 430a20–25 alludes to a so-called “patient” or “passive” intellect ( nous pathêtikos [νοῦς παθητιϰός] ), which is often confused with the “hylic” or material intellect ( nous hulikos [νοῦς ὑλιϰός] ) of Alexander, that is, the “possible” intellect of the Scholastics. Because it was easy to confuse passibilis and possibilis in medieval manuscripts, a theory of the corruptibility of the passive ( possible ) part of the intellective soul was often attributed to Aristotle, when there was nothing to really justify this. Cf. Aristotle, De anima:
Actual knowledge is identical with its object: in the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but absolutely it is not prior even in time. It does not sometimes think and sometimes not think. When separated it is alone just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal ( we do not remember because, while this is impossible, passive thought is perishable ); and without this nothing thinks.
( Aristotle, De anima, 3.5, 430a, Barnes, On the Soul, 1: 684 )
For ancient and medieval interpreters the intellect that Tricot’s French translation presents as “patient intellect” is not the possible or material intellect but either ( 1 ) the “speculative” or “theoretical” intellect ( Ar. ‘aql naẓarī [العقل النظﺮي] ), which, as we saw, refers both to an actual theoretical intelligible ( what Alexander calls “habitual intellect” or the intellect in habitus ) and to the very act of “speculating” ( Lat. considerare ), which, like any physical act or act of the mind, can be engendered and corrupted; or ( 2 ) the intellect that Themistius calls “common intellect” ( see Box 5 ); or ( 3 ) as Averroës maintains, “the forms of the imagination as the cogitative faculty proper to man acts upon them.” In none of these three cases is it the material or possible intellect itself. The confusion between possible intellect and passible intellect has determined the modern interpretation of Averroism. This is well testified by Leibniz’s summary of the noetics of Averroës, in the course of which the transformation of intellectus into “understanding” ( entendement ) takes place, and which attests to the paradigm shift between medieval psychology and modern psychology mentioned earlier ( see UNDERSTANDING ).
■ See Box 6.
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Leibniz and Averroës: Medieval psychology and modern psychology By analogy to the theological expression “monophysite,” referring to the thesis of the one nature of Christ ( and not Christ’s double nature, as divine and human ), Leibniz coins the word “monopsychite” to refer to the Averroist thesis of the one intellect, which he presents as a return to the pristine nature of the Soul of the Stoic world: Plato’s soul of the world has been taken in this sense by some, but there is more indication that the Stoics succumbed to the universal soul which swallows all the rest. Those who are of this opinion might be called “Monopsychites,” since according to them there is in reality only one soul that subsists. ( G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard, LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985, 79 ) This single intellectus is, however, baptized “Mind,” and even then not so much “single” as “universal.” Leibniz sometimes coordinates “Mind” with intellectus, translated as “understanding” ( entendement ), with intellectus agens becoming “active understanding,” as opposed to “passive understanding,” an expression translating an intellectus patiens that has no real equivalent in medieval texts, which talk of either intellectus possibilis ( possible or “material” intellect ), or intellectus passibilis ( imagination ), thereby giving rise to much confusion: Some discerning people have believed and still believe today, that there is only one single spirit, which is universal and animates the whole universe and all its parts, each according to its structure and the organs which it finds there, just as the same wind current causes different organ pipes to give off different sounds. Thus they also hold that when an animal has sound organs, the spirit produces the effect of a particular soul in it but that when the organs are corrupted, this particular soul reduces to nothing or returns, so to speak, to the ocean of the universal spirit. Aristotle has seemed to some to have had an opinion approaching this, which was later revived by Averroës, a celebrated Arabian philosopher. He believed that there is an intellectus agens, or “active understanding,” and that the former, coming from without, is eternal and universal for all, while the passive understanding, being particular for each, disappears at man’s death. This was the doctrine of certain Peripatetics two or three centuries ago, such as Pomponatius, Contarini, and others, and one recognizes traces of it in the late Mr. Naudé. ( Leibniz’s “Considérations sur la doctrine d’un Espirit universal unique” [1702], in Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances et autres textes ( 1690–1703 ), Eng. trans. Leroy E. Loemker, “Reflections on the Doctrine of a Single Universal Spirit” [1702], in Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. 2, Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1989, 554 ) Leibniz’s interpretation of De anima 3.5, 430a20–25, and his reading of Averroës’s interpretation of Aristotle, are without foundation. For Averroës, the intellectus passibilis is nothing but the images that are subject to the activity of the vis cogitativa, a condition sine qua non of the activity of the material or possible intellect ( see INTENTION, Box 2 ): Now [Aristotle] understands here by passible intellect the forms of the imagination as the cogitative faculty proper to man acts upon them. Indeed, this faculty has a rational character, and its activity consists either in leaving the “intention” of the imagined form with the individual, in his memory, or in distinguishing it from him in the “formative” faculty [ = al-muṣawwira ( المصوّﺮة )] and the imagination. Now, it is clear that the intellect we call “material” receives the imagined entities after this distinction. Consequently, the passible intellect is necessary for the conception by the [material] intellect. Aristotle thus said quite rightly: And we do not remember, for it is not passible, while the passible intellect is corruptible: and without that, it conceives nothing. That is to say: without the imaginative and cogitative faculty, the intellect we call “material” conceives nothing. ( Averroës, In III De anima, commentary 20 ) |
III. “Intellectus” and Its Derived Terms
Several adjectives are formed from intellectus. The adjective intellectivus, -a, -um ( antonym: sensitivus, sensibilis ) is the most widespread. It is used in the most diverse contexts: one talks of cognitio, of apprehensio, of operatio, of potentia, of intentio, and of visio i., but also of memoria i., and of habitus i., as well as of anima and of substantia i. If the ancient German translations render intellectivus by übersinnlich, “suprasensible,” nowadays one talks more readily of “intellective,” or “intellectual,” and even “noetic” knowledge. The term “intellectual” is normally reserved for intellectualis, -e, the semantic spectrum of which is almost identical to that of intellectivus: one talks of conceptio, cognitio, apprehensio, existimatio, operatio, intentio, visio i., but also of desiderium, appetitus, amor, delectatio i. and even of species i. ( synonymous with intelligibilis ). Understood broadly, intellectualis, -e, characterizes the cognitive function of the intellect, whether it is intuitive or discursive ( synonym: intellectivus, rationalis ); strictly speaking, intellectualis applies only to the intuitive cognitive function of the intellect, as distinct from reason ( antonym: rationalis ). It is in this sense that Thomas Aquinas describes angels as “intellectual beings”:
Therefore they [angels] are called intellectual beings ( intellectuales ), because even with ourselves the things which are instantly [statim = nondiscursive, sudden, in a single act of intuition] apprehended are said to be “intellected” ( intelligi ); hence intellect is defined as the habit of first principles ( habitus primorum principiorum ). But human souls which acquire knowledge of truth by the discursive method are called rational ( animae ver humane, quae veritatis notitiam per quendam discursum adquirunt, dicuntur rationales ).
( The Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. Daniel J. Sullivan, 2 vol., London: William Benton, 1952. Vol. 1, q. 58, Art. 3, [Thomas Aquinas’s Answer], 302 )
The noun intellectualitas ( antonym: sensibilitas ) usually refers to the state of being intelligible—intellectualitas thus has the meaning more of intelligibility than of intellectuality ( Summa theologica III, q. 23, 2c: “no autem secundum intellectualitatem, quia forma domus in materia non est intelligibilis,” where intellectualitas refers to a mode of cognizability, Ger. Erkennbarkeit ). The word can however also refer to the fact of being endowed with thought ( for example “intellectualitas consequitur immaterialitatem,” Summa theologica I, q. 105, 3c ). The neuter plural noun intellectualia denotes either the universals ( intelligibles ) or the separate substances, as objects of philosophical theology ( intelligent intelligibles ). The context generally allows one to determine the meaning. The verb intelligere/intellegere, whose meaning is apparent ( = Gr. noein [νοεῖν] ), remains difficult to translate. The main translations suggested range from “conceptualize” or “think ( noetically )” in English, to penser, concevoir par l’intellect, or intelliger in French ( the latter a neologism enabling the series intellect, intelligible, intelliger to be preserved ). None of these is entirely satisfactory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adamson, Peter, and P. E. Pormann, trans. The Philosophical Works of al-Kindi. Karachi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Averroës. Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros. Edited by F. Stuart Crawford. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. Translation, introduction, and notes by Richard C. Taylor with Thérèse-Anne Druart: Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Translation, introduction, and notes by Alain de Libera: L’intelligence et la pensée: Grand commentaire du De anima: Livre 3 ( 429 a 10–435 b 25 ). Paris: Flammarion, 1998.
Avicenna. Liber De anima, seu Sextus De Naturalibus: Édition critique de la traduction latine médiévale. Edited by S. van Riet. 2 vols. Louvain, Belg.: Éditions orientalistes, 1968. Avicenna’s De anima ( Arabic text ): Being the Psychological part of Kitāb al-Shifā’. Edited by F. Rahman. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Translation by Edward Abbott Van Dyck: A Compendium on the Soul. Verona, It.: Paderno, 1906. “Avicenna on Common Nature.” In Medieval Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary, edited by Gyula Klima, with Fritz Allhoff and Anand Jayprakash Vaidya. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Bakker, Paul J.J.M, and Johannes M.M.H. Thijssen, eds. Mind, Cognition and Representation: The Tradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
Blumenthal, H. J. Soul and Intellect: Studies in Plotinus and Later Neoplatonism. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1993.
Davidson, Herbert A. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Endress, Gerhard, and Jan Aertsen, with Klaus Braun, eds. Averroes and the Aristotelian Tradition: Sources, Constitution, and Reception of the Philosophy of Ibn Rushd ( 1126–1198 ): Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium Averroicum, Cologne, 1996. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1999.
al-Fārābī. “De Intellectu et Intellecto.” Edited and translated by Étienne Gilson. “Les sources gréco-arabes de l’Augustinisme avicennisant.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 4 ( 1929–1930 ): 108–41. Rpt. Paris: Vrin, 1981.
. “On the Intellect.” In Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources. Edited and translated by Jon McGinnis and David C. Reisman, 68–78. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.
Giele, Maurice, Fernand Van Steenberghen, and Bernard Bazán, eds. Trois commentaires anonymes sur le Traité de l’âme d’Aristote. Philosophes médiévaux. Vol. 11. Louvain, Belg.: Publications universitaires, 1971.
Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300. London: Warburg Institute, 2000.
Jolivet, Jean, ed. and trans. L’intellect selon Kindī. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1971.
Kelly, Brendan R. “On the Nature of the Human Intellect in Aristotle’s De anima: An Investigation into the Controversy Surrounding Thomas Aquinas’ De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1995.
Libera, Alain de. Albert le Grand et la philosophie. Paris, Vrin, 1990.
. “Existe-t-il une noétique avveroïste? Note sur la réception latine d’Averroès au XIIIe siècle.” In Averroismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, edited by F. Niewöhner and L. Sturlese, 51–80. Zurich: Spur, 1994.
. L’unité de l’intellect: Commentaire du De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas de Thomas d’Aquin. Paris: Vrin, 2004.
Libera, Alain de, Abdelali Elamrani-Jamal, and Alain Galonnier, eds. Langages et philosophie: Hommage à Jean Jolivet. Paris: Vrin, 1997.
McCarthy, R., trans. “Al-Kindi’s Treatise on the Intellect.” Islamic Studies 3 ( 1964 ): 119–49.
McInerny, Ralph M. Aquinas against the Averroists: On There Being Only One Intellect. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993.
Perler, Dominik, ed. Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2001.
Schroeder, Frederic M., and Robert B. Todd, eds. and trans. Two Greek Aristotelian Commentators on the Intellect: The “De intellectu” Attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius’ Paraphrase of Aristotle “De Anima” 3.4–8. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990.
Siger de Brabant. Quaestiones in tertium De anima. De anima intellectiva. De aeternitate mundi: Édition critique. Edited by Bernardo Bazán. Louvain, Belg.: Publications universitaires, 1972. Translation and introduction by Cyril Vollert, Lottie H. Kendzierski, and Paul M. Byrne: On the Eternity of the World ( De aeternitate mundi ). Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1964. “Siger of Brabant on the Intellective Soul.” In Medieval philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary, edited by Gyula Klima, with Fritz Allhoff and Anand Jayprakash Vaidya. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Thomas Aquinas. The Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle’s Treatise on the soul. Translated by R. A. Kocourek. St. Paul, MN: College of St. Thomas, 1946.
. On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists [De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas]. Translated and with introduction by Beatrice H. Zedler. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1968. Translation, introduction, bibliography, and notes by Alain de Libera: L’unité de l’intellect contre les averroïstes: Suivi des textes contre Averroès antérieurs à 1270. Paris: Flammarion, 1994.
INTENTION
| ARABIC | ma’nā [المعنى] ma’qūl [معقول] | ||
| FRENCH | intention | ||
| GERMAN | Intention, übersinnliches Erkenntnisbild, Vorstellung der Vernunft, Begriff | ||
| GREEK | noêma [νόημα] | ||
| ITALIAN | intenzione | ||
| LATIN | intentio |
CONCEPT, CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, EPOCHÊ, ERLEBEN, FORM, IMAGE, LOGOS, OBJECT, PHÉNOMÈNE, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, RES, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SOUL, UNIVERSALS, WILL
“Intention” is a doubly polysemic term. As well as the equivocation that exists in French or Italian between the accepted meaning of the term—that of intention as in “to intend to” or as in “moral intention”—and the psycho-phenomenological meaning ( which does not exist in German, where the first meaning is expressed as Absicht ), the term presents, in this second, psycho-phenomenological register, a radical ambiguity, and is deeply divided between divergent philosophical paradigms. Indeed, the semantic field of “intention” covers a series of distinct phenomena, whose progressive coordination in the history of philosophy partly explains how saturated the modern notion of intentionality has become, torn as it is between the Husserlian phenomenological model, and that of the philosophy of mind. Thus, as Hilary Putnam has shown, the term “intentionality” has, in actual usage, widely diverse senses, namely, ( 1 ) for words, sentences, and other representations to have a meaning; ( 2 ) for representations to be able to designate ( that is, to be true for ) an actually existing thing, or, when there are several things, to designate each one of these; ( 3 ) for representations to be able to apply to something that does not exist; and ( 4 ) for a “state of mind” to be able to apply to a “state of affairs” ( Putnam, Representation and Reality, 1 ). We will attempt to show here how the same word has come to mean, in German and thereafter in the other languages of philosophy, “the intentionality of linguistic expressions [die Intentionalität von sprachlichen Äußerungen],” the intentionality of acts of the mind or of thought ( die Intentionalität von Denktaten ), or that of acts of perception ( die Intentionalität von Wahrnehmungen ).
I. Intention and Meaning
The relation between intention and meaning, or sense, is attested in several theses in Edmund Husserl’s Ideen, especially when he defines the “fundamental element of intentionality” by equating the “intentional object [Objekt]” with “objective sense or meaning,” and posits that “to have a meaning, to aim at some meaning,” is the fundamental character of all consciousness, which as a consequence is not only lived experience, but a lived experience that has a “noetic” meaning ( “Sinn zu haben, bzw. etwas ‘im Sinne zu haben’ ist der Grundcharakter alles Bewußtseins, das darum nicht nur überhaupt Erlebnis, sondern sinnhabendes, ‘noetisches’ ist,” Ideen 1, §90, p. 185 [206], trans. Kersten ). In fact, the distortions or gaps that Putnam points out are in part due to the fact that the Husserlian intentional lived experience is assigned two aspects, a “noetic” aspect and a “noematic” aspect; the latter includes precisely the sense “separated out from this lived experience, insofar as it casts its look appropriately.” The “sense” in question is not, however, “significance” or “meaning” as it is commonly understood, but concerns existence and nonexistence.
The “situation” that, according to Husserl, defines “sense” is the fact that “the non-existence ( or the conviction of non-existence ) of the objectivated or thought of Object pure and simple pertaining to the objectivation in question ( and therefore to any particular intentive mental process whatever ) cannot steal its something objectivated as objectivated, that therefore the distinction between both must be made” ( Ideen 1, §90, p. 185 [206], trans. Kersten ). The fact that “sense” is indifferent to the existence or nonexistence of the object is therefore the salient phenomenon indicated by the word “sense” in the analysis of intentionality. Husserl says, in this regard, that “the Scholastic distinction between the mental [mentalem], intentional or immanental Object on the one hand, and the actual [wirklichem] Object on the other hand,” refers to the distinction between the object and the existence of the object. Yet he radically contests the assimilation of the intentional object to an immanental object in the sense of an object “actually present in phenomenological purity” ( Ideen 1, §90, p. 186 [206], trans. Kersten ): sense is not a real component of lived experience, like hulê [ὕλη] ( that is, for example, the data of sensation, Empfindungsdaten, and what is more, “not every really inherent moment in the concrete unity of an intentive mental process itself has the fundamental characteristic, intentionality,” Ideen 2, §36, trans. Kersten ). Nor is it a psychic reality, or even a portrait or a sign. To attribute a “copy function” to intentional lived experience would lead to an “infinite regress”: “A second immanental tree, or even an ‘internal image’ of the actual tree standing out there before me, is in no way given, and to suppose that hypothetically leads to an absurdity” ( ibid. ). Husserlian “sense” is thus not to be understood as simply borrowing the notion of “immanent object,” but as a “correlate belonging to the essence of phenomenologically reduced perception [das zum Wesen phänomenologisch reduzierten Wahrnehmungen gehörige Korrelat]” ( Ideen 1, §90, p. 187 [209], trans. Kersten ). Insofar as it is limited to the vague notion of representation, the connection Putnam makes between intentionality and nonexistence does not fully capture the Husserlian notion of “sense” ( nor, a fortiori, that of a “complete noema” distinguished from a “core of meaning” ). Nonetheless, the sense of “intention” or “intentionality” is marked by a series of oscillations that Putnam’s taxonomy translates very well.
II. Intention and Intentionality
The conception of intentionality that has for a long time been predominant in French-language literature comes principally from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. According to this conception, ( a ) “without exception, every conscious process is, in itself, consciousness of such and such, regardless of what the rightful actuality-status of this objective such-and-such may be, and regardless of the circumstance that I, as standing in the transcendental attitude, abstain from acceptance of this object as well as from all my other natural acceptances” ( Cartesian Meditations, trans. Cairns ); and ( b ) every state of consciousness “aims at” something, and carries within itself, as that which is “aimed at” ( as the object of an intention ), its “respective cogitatum”—what Husserl summarizes as follows in the famous formula of §14 of the Second Meditation:
Wobei das Wort Intentionalität dann nichts anderes als diese allgemeine Grundeigenschaft des Bewußtseins, Bewußtsein von etwas zu sein, als cogito sein cogitatum in sich zu tragen, bedeutet.
The word intentionality signifies nothing else than this universal fundamental property of consciousness: to be conscious of something; as a cogito, to bear within itself its cogitatum.
( Cartesian Meditations, §14, ed. Ströcker, 35; trans. Cairns )
( N.B.: It is worth pointing out how closely this resembles the formulas introducing the cogito in §14, ed. Ströcker, 34: “Der Transzendentale Titel ego cogito muß also um ein Glied erweitert werden: Jedes cogito, jedes Bewußtseinserlebnis . . . meint irgend etwas und trägt in dieser Weise der Gemeinten in sich selbst sein jeweiliges cogitatum, und jedes tut das in seiner Weise.” )
Several francophone and anglophone interpreters tend nowadays to forget, however, the “fundamental property” of consciousness, “to be conscious of something,” for Husserl refers neither to “a relation between some psychological occurrence—called a mental process—and another real factual existence [realen Dasein]—called an object,” nor to “a psychological connection taking place in Objective [objektiven] actuality between the one and the other,” but rather to “mental processes purely with respect to their essence,” that is to say, to “pure essences and . . . that which is ‘a priori’ included in the essences with unconditional necessity” ( “Vielmehr ist von Erlebnissen rein ihrem Wesen nach, bzw. von reinen Wesen die Rede und von dem, was in den Wesen, ‘a priori,’ in unbedingter Notwendigkeit beschlossen ist”: Ideen 1, §34, p. 64 [74], trans. Kersten ). Intentionality is not a connection between a physical fact and a psychic fact.
When we are caught in the contemporary, post-Wittgensteinian opposition between “empiricism” and “intentionalism,” we tend to forget that we often invoke intentionality over and against a conception of mental acts that states that no mental act can have an extra-mental entity as its content. So “intentionalism” consists in maintaining the “intentionality of the mind,” which means that our acts orient us toward things outside ourselves. This is, however, a weak ( even trivial ) characterization of phenomenological intentionality, which does not greatly value the Husserlian distinction between a “thing pure and simple” ( Sache ) and a “complete intentional object [Objekt]” ( Ideen 1, §34, pp. 66–67, trans. Kersten ). Similarly, the discussions generated by the behaviorist proposition according to which we can and must eliminate all intentional entities ( the “mentalist expressions” of natural language ) gives “intentional” a meaning that is so reduced or so metaphorical that we might wonder whether “intention” here had anything whatsoever to do with phenomenology. Even more complex debates have developed beyond the field of basic Husserlian studies, particularly in anglophone philosophy. One example of this is the discussion between Wilfrid Sellars and Roderick Chisholm on the relationship between thoughts and the semantic properties of language. Sellars states that “thoughts as intentional entities are derived from the semantic properties of language,” which means that “intentionality resides in the metalinguistic utterances that express the semantic properties of an object language” ( the so-called weak irreducibility thesis ), whereas Chisholm maintains, on the contrary, that “the semantic properties of language, and thus the metalinguistic utterances that express them, are derived from the properties of thoughts, which are the fundamental support of intentionality” ( the so-called strong irreducibility thesis; cf. Cayla, Routes et déroutes de l’intentionnalité ).
III. Intention and Intentio
As fragmented as it might at first appear, the plurality of meanings of “intention” can be seen as relatively coherent if it is considered as the continuation, or as another version, of the original polysemy of the Latin intentio. Indeed, in this term we find not only the effects wrought by successive translations, but also the shadow cast over the modern philosophical lexicon by the different stages of the genesis of the medieval notion. Certain contemporary debates about intentionality might, then, appear to some extent to rearticulate—by simplifying or complicating them—problems that were tackled in the Middle Ages within a more unitary framework.
The Scholastic Latin intentio presents an extraordinarily rich array of meanings. The term can in fact be translated as ( 1 ) attention ( German Aufmerksamkeit ); ( 2 ) aim, objective, purpose ( German Anstrebung, Absicht, Vorhaben ); ( 3 ) relationship, rapport ( synonym habitudo, German Beziehung, cf. Thomas Aquinas, In Sent. I, d. 25, qu. 1.3c ); ( 4 ) meaning, in the sense of a speaker’s intention to mean something ( intentio loquentis, intentio proferentis ); ( 5 ) image, copy, resemblance, similarity ( synonym similitudo, German Ähnlichkeit, Abbild ); ( 6 ) representation, notion, concept ( synonyms conceptio intelligibilis, ratio, conceptus, repraesentatio, German übersinnliches Erkenntnisbild, Vorstellung der Vernunft, Begriff ); ( 7 ) intelligible form ( synonym species ); or ( 8 ) extra-mental resemblance. The polysemy of intentio is mentioned by Duns Scotus ( Reportata Parisiensa 2, d. 13, art. un., trans. McCarthy, 39; Ordinatio, trans. McCarthy, 26 ), who reduces it to four primary meanings:
Notandum est quod hoc nomen “intentio” est equivocum. Uno modo dicitur actus voluntatis “intentio.” Alio modo: ratio formalis in re, sicut intentio rei a qua accipitir genus differt ab intentione a qua accipitur differentia. Tertio modo dicitur conceptus. Quarto modo, dicitur ratio tendendi in obiectum, sicut similitudo dicitur ratio tendendi in illus cuius est. Et isto modo dicitur lumen “intentio” vel “species” lucis.
We have to note that the noun “intention” is equivocal. The first meaning of “intention” is an act of will. A second is: a formal reason present in a thing, in the sense that in a thing, the intention from which the generic type is derived is different from the intention from which the ( specific ) difference is derived. A third meaning of “intention” refers to a concept. And a fourth meaning [of intention] refers to the way in which one reaches out or extends towards an object, in the sense that a resemblance is one way of extending towards the thing which it resembles. And it is in this sense that the light emitted is the “intention” or the [intentional] “species” of the source of a light.
A. Intentio as actus voluntatis: Intention and attention
The ethical meaning of intentio, the first one that is historically attested, is closely related to the contemporary meaning of voluntary intention. However, since St. Augustine, the dimension of active orientation immanent to the notion of intentio has been presented as a characteristic not only of the will, but also, by extension, of any cognitive process. Understood in this sense, intentio becomes synonymous with attention. The proximity of intention to attention is well known to phenomenologists. Husserl gives a unified discussion of this ( from the noetic and noematic point view ) in his analysis of “mutations” or “attentional modifications,” when he attempts to describe, for the “complete noema,” the variations of the correlative appearance of the noetic modifications ( Ideen 1, §92, pp. 189–190, trans. Kersten ). He stresses, moreover, that
nicht einmal des Wesenzusammenhang zwischen Aufmerksamkeit und Intentionalität—diese fundamentale Tatsache, daß Aufmerksamkeit überhaupt nichts anderes ist also eine Grundart intentionaler Modifikationen—ist meines Wissens früher je hervorgehoben worden.
not even the essential connection between attention and intentionality—this fundamental fact: that attention of every sort is nothing else than a fundamental species of intentive modifications—has ever, to my knowledge, been emphasized before.
( Ideen 1, §92, p. 192 [215] n. 1, trans. Kersten )
The couple “intention”/“attention” ( which corresponds also to the English “directedness” ) was attested, in exemplary fashion, in St. Augustine’s analysis of visual sensation:
Itemque illa animi intentio, quae in ea re quam videmus tenet sensum, atque utrumque coniungit, non tantum ab ea re visibili natura differt: quandoquidem iste animus, illud corpus est: sed ab ipso quoque sensui atque visione: quoniam solius animi est haec intentio.
Further also, that attention of the mind which keeps the sense in that thing which we see, and connects both, not only differs from that visible thing in its nature; in that the one is mind, and the other body; but also from the sense and the vision itself: since this attention is the act of the mind alone.
( De Trinitate, 11.2.2, ed. Haddan and Knight )
Intentio and attendere, “to pay attention to,” “to intend” ( German Aufmerksamkeit ), are often combined. This is true of Abelard, in his theory of abstraction as selective attention ( which prefigures the theories of John Stuart Mill and of William Hamilton ):
Dum in homine hoc solum quod ad humanitatis naturam attinet intelligere nitimur, utpote animal rationale mortale, circumscriptis scilicet omnibus aliis que ad substantiam humanitatis non attinent, profecto multa se per imaginationem nolenti animo obiiciunt que omnino ab intentione abiecimus. . . . Adeo . . . ut . . ., dum aliquid tamquam incorporeum per intellectum attendo, sensum usu tamquam corporeum imaginari cogor.
While we try only to conceive in man that which concerns the nature of his humanity—that is, as a mortal, rational animal—, after having eliminated everything else that does not concern the substance of humanity, many things that we had completely rejected from our purview become ob-jects of the mind through the imagination. . . . While I attend to a thing as incorporeal in an act of intellection, I am forced through the use of my senses to imagine it as corporeal.
( Abelard, De intellectibus §19 )
The ad-tension ( the “tension-toward” or “tending-toward” ) or the attention in the expression “directedness toward” is thus the first meaning of intentio in the field of cognition, whether this “tending-toward” is provoked by the thing itself ( that is, the ob-ject present ), or whether it is spontaneous ( that is, as the aim of a distant or absent term ). The etymology of intentio as tendere in aliud suggests a limited distinction between attention, and aim or purpose strictly speaking ( lexicalized in German as Aufmerksamkeit, and Absicht, Anstrebung, and Vorhaben ). It is in the first sense that Thomas Aquinas writes that attention is the “condition required for the activity of any cognitive faculty” ( “ad actum cuiuslibet cognoscitivae potentiae requiritur intentio,” De veritate, quarto 13.3c ). In the second sense, he stresses that intentio refers to the activity of the faculty of thought insofar as it “directs what it apprehends to the knowledge of something else, or to some operation [id, quod apprehendit, ordinat ad aliquid aliud cognoscendum vel operandum]” ( Summa theologiae 1, q. 79, a. 10 ad 3m ). As Duns Scotus writes, however, precisely insofar as intendere means “in aliud tendere,” and if it is true that every cognitive power is said to aim or extend toward an object, solely by virtue of the fact that an object is ob-jected with respect to this power: to this degree and under these circumstances, intendere is to be understood more precisely as that which is voluntarily oriented toward an object, whether it is absent or present ( Reportata Parisiensa 2, d. 38, q. 1 ). Voluntary attention is thus a fundamental and inextricable aspect of intentio. This sense is undoubtedly inherited from St. Augustine, for whom it played a central role in his theory of perception and memory. He used this sense of intentio almost identically in both his tripartite corporeal vision ( that is, [a] the form the body perceived, [b] the image that is formed of it in the intention of the person discerning it, and [c] the attention of the will that joins these two together ) and his description of the operation of memory ( which also has a tripartite structure: [1] the imaginary vestige that remains in one’s memory; [2] the impression of this vestige in the mind’s intention, when one recalls it; and [3] the attention of the will that, once again, joins the two together. The original Latin is as follows: “[a] forma corporis, [b] conformatio que fit in cernentis aspectu, [c] intentio voluntatis utrumque coniungens” [De Trinitate, 14.3.5, pp. 354–56], and “1. imaginatio corporis que in memoria est, 2. informatio, cum ad eam convertitur acies cogitantis, 3. intentio voluntatis utrumque coniungens” [De Trinitate, 15.3.5, pp. 430–33] ).
B. Intentio as form ( ratio formalis in re )
Intentio can often mean “form.” This form has nothing to do with the “form of the body perceived,” as described in St. Augustine’s theory of vision, but is rather the Aristotelian idea of form. This is to be understood as both the form and the definition ( or the definitional form ) realized in extra-mental things, according to one of the characteristic ambiguities of the term logos [λόγοϛ]. ( On the distinction between the two meanings of logos—logos-definition and logos-form—see Cassin, Aristote et le logos, 107–10, as well as 257–93, in particular 260–63. ) As ratio formalis in re ( Scotus, “a formal reason present in a thing” ), intentio thus refers to what Alexander of Aphrodisias called the logos koinos [λόγοϛ ϰοινόϛ], both a common notion ( logos-formula ) and a common form ( logos-form ), or, if one prefers, the “common definition” and “common nature” fully present in each thing, and equally, which is to say entirely, predicated of all things that are fully what they are by virtue of this common notion and form. The use of the word intentio as ratio formalis in re continues, then, the idiosyncrasy of Alexander’s vocabulary. When, for example, he states that “the definition of man” ( “a bipedal terrestrial animal” ) is common because it applies to “all” men, and is “fully in each one,” he substitutes the definition itself for the “common quality named in this definition,” thereby combining an expression and what it refers to. This understanding of intentio is the one determining what Lloyd calls, with respect to Alexander, the “conventional picture of forms as universals in re” ( cf. Lloyd, Form and Universal, 51 ), a thesis based on a “confusion of the universal with the form.”
C. Intentio as conceptus ( concept )
“Concept” is one of the most frequently attested meanings of intentio. It is very clear in the following description by Thomas Aquinas of the process of conceptualization, which includes all of the implied terms:
Intellectus per speciem rei formatus intellegendo format in seipso quandam intentionem rei intellectae, quae est ratio ipsius, quam significat definitio.
Formed from a species [form] of a thing, whenever the intellect conceives, it forms within itself an intention of the thing conceived, this intention being the notion of the thing as signified by its definition [or: “by the term ‘definition’ ( when applied to that notion )”].
( Summa contra Gentiles 1, q. 53 )
Intentio is thus obviously linked to conceptio, conceptus, and ratio, without ever being exactly synonymous with them. In the above passage from the Summa contra Gentiles, intention appears as the content of a notion ( = ratio ), expressed/signified by its definition. But not all texts define it so decisively. In many discussions, intentio and conceptus are considered to be equivalent. In others, intentiones replaces the awkward expression passiones animae, which constitutes the top of the semiotic triangle of De interpretatione ( see SIGN ). In this case, it is the tripartite nature of the phônai [φωναί]—that is, as “vocal sounds,” as noêmata [νοήματα] ( noemata or concepts ), and as onta [ὄντα] ( beings, also called “things,” ta pragmata [τὰ πϱάγματα] )—inherited from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Categories that, when superimposed on the triangle “vocal sounds, affects or passions of the soul, and things,” explains the appearance in this context of intentio as noema, or concept. Intentiones in the sense of noêmata is thus part of a history that goes back a long way, with the earliest attested reference perhaps the distinction mentioned by Clement of Alexandria ( Stromates, 8.8.23.1, ed. Stählin, 3:94.5–12 ) between onomata [ὀνόματα] ( names ), noêmata ( concepts, whose names are symbols ), and hupokeimena [ὑποϰείμενα] ( “actual substrata, of which concepts are the impressions made within us”; cf. on this point Pépin, “Clément d’Alexandrie,” in particular 271–79 ).
D. Intentio as ratio tendendi in obiectum, the angle of the aim or intention
The fourth sense of intentio, which at first glance is close to what Franz Brentano calls “die Richtung auf ein Objekt” ( the orientation toward an object ), is in fact the most enigmatic. In some ways, it is bound up with the third sense, if ratio tendendi refers to what serves as a formal principle in the act of intention by which a cognitive power is oriented toward its object ( “illud per quod tamquam per principium formale in obiectum tendit sensus” ). In this case, ratio tendendi indeed refers to a conceptual similitudo that constitutes the angle of the aim or intention. But the analysis becomes complicated when Duns Scotus includes in this fourth sense a resemblance that is both extra-mental and nonconceptual, stating that “ipso modo dicitur lumen ‘intentio’ vel ‘specio’ lucis” ( It is in this sense that the light emitted [or luminosity] is said to be the “intention” or the “species” of the source of the light ). There is something quite puzzling about this thesis. First, it assumes that we can treat luminosity ( lumen ) as a conceptum produced by an extra-mental thing ( lux ), independent of any activity or act of the intellect. Yet this statement corresponds to a precise theory of intentionality that stipulates that “every concept is [the concept] of a first intention which [the concept] is naturally producible immediately by the thing itself, without any operation or act of the intellect” ( Duns Scotus, Ordinatio 1.23, ed. Balić, 5:360: “omnis conceptus est intentionis primae qui natus est fieri immediate a re, sine opere vel actu intellectus negociantis” ). Here, the term intentio is used to express an intuition that would be directly opposed to that of modern “intentionalism,” insofar as it suggests that objects themselves engender the concepts that represent them to the mind ( a thesis that is compatible with the statement by which the noêmata are the impressions made within us by the hupokeimena [ὑποϰείμενα] ). This intuition is also in contrast to the theory one assumes to be standard, according to which all intentions, in the sense of concepts, are produced by the intellect, or are the species formed by the intellect, and are existing within the intellect. The example Duns Scotus gives is not, however, a neutral one.
The classical distinction in the medieval theory of light between lumen, as the light emitted or radiating in a transparent or diaphanous milieu, and lux, as the source of light, assumes that there is an engendering relation between lux and lumen, which paradoxically recalls one of the oldest meanings of the concept: the fruit ( proles ) of conception in the literal sense of the term. It is indeed this register that underlies the use of intentio when the example of light is discussed: the source of light “engenders” luminosity. “Lux,” writes Scotus, “gignat lumen tamquam propriam speciem sensibilem sui” ( Ordinatio 2.13, trans. McCarthy, 276 ). This vocabulary, which one could readily term “Augustinian,” is even more pronounced among theorists of optics or perspectiva, particularly when they discuss the theme of the “multiplication of species.” One of the founding fathers of the theory, Robert Grosseteste, writes literally that the generic term lux has to be broken down into light that engenders ( generans ) or gives birth ( gignens ), and light that is engendered ( generata ) or given birth to ( gignata ): “The light that is in the sun engenders from its substance the light that is in the air [lux quae est in sole gignit ex sua substantia lumen in aere]” ( Grosseteste, Commentarius in Posteriorum analyticorum libros 1.17, ed. Rossi, 244–45 ). This engendering relation, which preserves both the alterity and a certain essential unity between what engenders and what is engendered, undoubtedly explains why one can discuss, on the shoulders of a further play on the word “species,” the theme of the propagation of light, and then the theme of the perception of colors, and beyond that of perception itself, by resorting to the language of propagation, and of the multiplication of natural species. Matthieu of Aquasparta explains in these terms that “every corporeal or spiritual form, real or intentional, has an engendering and self-disseminating force, either actually, as in the case of forms subjected to generation and corruption, or intentionally” ( Quaestiones disputate de gratia, q. 8, ed. Doucet, 214 ).
As surprising as it might seem, intentio is thus both a rival of conceptus, coming from another network and another interlinguistic field ( Arabo-Latin, as we shall see, and no longer Greco-Latin ), and an equivalent of conceptus, as far as the semantic aspect of generation and conception is concerned. Duns Scotus, who was among the first to articulate an authentic theory of intentionality as an orientation toward an object, also played a major role in naturalizing intentionality. He was well aware that intentio understood as conceptus derived from Arabic theories of optics, and that as similitudo or species, lumen that is multiplied according to three different types of ray ( rectus, fractus, reflexus ) denotes the “sensible species of lux, immediately engendered by it.” But he consciously used this perspectivisit theory to explain that the formal reason of a given intellection, the species genita ( engendered form ), which is nothing other than that of the imago gignentis ( the image of what engenders it ), requires a “real presence” of the object to the cognitive power, that is, a “sufficient proximity to enable engendering” of the said species by the object itself, an engendering that places the present object “sub ratione cognoscibilis vel repraesentati,” in short, makes it knowable or representable ( Ordinatio 1.3.3.1, ed. Balić, 6:232 ). Briefly, then: the word intentio serves here to express the process by means of which objects directly engender their image in the intellect. A movement whose directionality is exactly opposite that of an orientation toward the object troubles any understanding of intentio as “ratio tendendi in obiectum.”
This tension is only relieved once the perspectivist theory of intentio is rejected as an epistemological model, and as a framework for a theory of perception based on a direct gnoseological realism—that is, once intentionality no longer functions as a characteristic or a mode of being of similitudo or species engendered by an object, independent of any perceiving subject. We are now able to trace this decision back to Pierre d’Auriole, who opened up the space for a new reflection on the phenomenality of appearing. Indeed, it was against the idea that once could admit every extra-mental intentional existence that Pierre d’Auriole established his theory, reducing the intentional being of lumen to a real being, and reformulating the notion of intentional being in terms of apparent or phenomenal being ( esse apparens ), with intentional being reserved, in the strictest sense, for the mode of being of color in a rainbow. Esse intentionale became, on this basis, a synonym of esse obiectivum or fictitium sive apparens ( “objective or fictive or apparent being,” that is, phenomenal ), and was contrasted to “esse reale et fixum in rerum naturae absque omni apprehensione” ( real being remaining stable in natural reality outside of any perception ). Anything accorded intentional being could not exist outside of perception: it is merely a conceptus objectivus ( objective concept ), or, to put it more accurately, an apparitio objectiva ( objective phenomenon: Scriptum, 1.23, ed. Pinborg, 133–34 ).
IV. The Geneses of Intentionality
A. In-existence
It was Brentano, consciously borrowing from the Scholastics, who introduced the term “intentionality” ( Intentionalität ) into the vocabulary of psychology. This initiative was directly responsible for the adoption of the term and the concept in intentional psychology and phenomenology. Brentanian intentionality is supposed to define the specificity of mental phenomena, by a kind of relation that is named, rather unfortunately, “intentional in-existence”:
Jedes psychisches Phänomen ist durch das charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker der Mittelalters die intentionale ( auch wohl mentale ) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt haben, und was wir, obwohl wir nicht ganz unzweideutigen Ausdrücken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein Objekt ( worunter hier nicht eine Realität zu verstehen is ), oder die immanente Gegenständlichkeit nennen würden.
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional ( or mental ) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object ( which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing ), or immanent objectivity.
( Brentano, Psychologie- vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1:124–25 ; trans. Rancurello et al., 88 )
One might wonder about the translation of “die immanente Gegenständlichkeit” by “an immanent objectivity.” The definite article ( die ) could suggest that it is rather a question of “immanent objective existence,” of the opening of the object as immanent to the psychic. Gegenständlichkeit is, however, an expression that is as equivocal as Intentionalität. One might also assume that Brentano is using it in the same sense as Bernard Bolzano when, in discussing the influence of “things that make no claim to existence [Dinge, die keinen Anspruch auf Wirklichkeit machen],” he wonders about the Gegenständlichkeit ( objective existence ) of the concept “which we quite rightly associate with the word infinite.” “The next question to be asked,” Bolzano writes, “is that concerning its objective existence—that is, whether there exist objects to which it can be applied, whether there exist sets which we may judge to be infinite in the sense here” ( cf. Bolzano, Paradoxien des Unendlichen, §13, p. 13, trans. Prejonsky, 84 ). “In-existence,” which has nothing to do with nonexistence ( German Nicht-Existenz ), denotes a type of presentification that has to do with inherence, in the sense of “being present,” “existing in,” “residing in” ( German Innewohnen ): in all psychic phenomena, there is an object.
In this sense, intentionality expresses the fact that, as Aristotle writes in De anima ( 8.431b30–432a1 ), “it is not the stone itself that is in the soul, but the form of the stone” ( “ou gar ho lithos en têi psuchêi, alla to eidos [οὐ γὰϱ ὁ λίθοϛ ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ, ἀλλὰ τὸ εἶδοϛ]” ). To speak about intentionality here amounts to saying that the mode of presence of a stone in the soul is intentional and not real, that the extra-mental thing is not “really” but only “intentionally” inherent in the soul. This lexical choice has a history, and its reasons. The notion of “intentional being” must not be confused with that of esse obiectivum or “objective.” The mention of the “direction toward an object” nonetheless places emphasis on a dimension of mental in-existence—that is, the orientation or direction toward an object—that has caused many problems for readers of Brentano. According to Putnam, Brentano, in contrast to Husserl, did not maintain that “the intentionality of the mental . . . provided a way of understanding how mind and world are related and how it is that in acts of consciousness we come to be directed to an object” ( cf. Putnam, Representation and Reality, 88 ); rather, he merely wished to indicate that “mental phenomena were characterized by being directed toward contents” ( ibid. ). Whether or not Putnam’s interpretation is well founded, it remains the case that the “tending toward an object” suggested by the currently accepted Latin etymology of the verb intendere ( tendere in ) was very early on considered as a characteristic aspect of the kind of mental presentation envisaged by Aristotle in De anima ( 8.431b30–432a1 ). Radulphus Brito defines intentionality on the basis of this “tending toward”: intentio is “that by which an intellect tends toward a thing [tendit in rem]” ( Pinborg, “Radulphus Brito’s Sophism,” 141 n. 49 ). In medieval texts, the directionality of intentio competes explicitly with the very notion of a mental content. In fact, the same term refers both to the movement by which the intellect is directed toward an object or apprehends a mental content, and to the intrapsychic mode of presentation of this same object and content. This overlap is not without consequences for the status of intentionality in modern philosophy. The nature of this polysemy is fundamentally linked to the history of its translations. Indeed, the word intentio only appears in its different usages, at the end of the twelfth century, in the Arabo-Latin translations of Aristotle and of the Peripatetic corpus as a translation of the Arabic ma‘na [المعنى]. Its ambiguity is at its origin, the same as that of the term it translates. The word ma’na [المعنى] corresponds to the Greek logos [λόγοϛ], noêma [νόημα], dianoia [διάνοια], ennoia [ἔννοια], theôrêma [θεώϱημα], and pragma [πϱᾶγμα], among others ( Endress, “Du grec au latin à travers l’arabe,” 151–57 ). The Arabo-Latin intentio has just as many meanings, since it is equivalent to at least three kinds of term: ( a ) a thought, concept, idea, notion; ( b ) a signification ( in which we find the dimension of the English “to mean,” or the French vouloir dire ); and ( c ) an entity. That the same term refers at the same time to a mental act, a content, a cognitive state, and an object is clearly apparent in the fact that, from the thirteenth century on, intentio has equally meant either the concept of a thing, or the thing itself as it is conceived, or both at once. So the notion of “relational intention” is thus from the outset, in the Middle Ages, programmatically inscribed within the idea of an originary shared belonging of intentio rei and res intenta. In the same register, there is a further ambiguity in the pair logos-ma‘na [المعنى], which progressively colors the term intentio with the double nuances of “form” ( as in the expression “the intention of a thing,” intentio rei—that is, the “form of a thing” ) and “formulation” ( as in the expression “the intention of man,” intentio hominis—in other words, “the definitional formulation characterizing the concept of man,” that is, “rational, mortal, bipedal animal” ).
■ See Box 1.
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Intentio and ma’nā [المعنى] The Arabic ma’nan ( with the article: al-ma’nā [المعنى] ) means what is on one’s mind, what one is referring to, what one means ( German meinen—no etymological link to English “mean”; French vouloir dire ) by a word, or a notion. The Arabic root ‘NY [ى ن ع] indeed means “to aim.” Ninth-century translations chose the word to translate several meanings of the Greek logos [λόγοϛ]. So in Aristotle’s treatise De anima, we read that sensation is affected by color, or flavor, or sound, not insofar as each of these is said, but to the extent that it is such and such a quality, and “according to logos” ( 2.12, 424a24, trans. Barnes ). Commentators have sought to define more precisely the status of this being which affects sensations in this way. Themistius ( Paraphrase of De anima, ed. Heinze, p. 78, 3.10.13 ) also uses logos [λόγοϛ]. The Arabic translates the term in Themistius’s paraphrase of Aristotle as ma’nā [المعنى] ( 1.7.11, trans. Lyons ), as it does for Aristotle’s original ( Averroës, Magnum commentarium in De anima, §121, ed. Crawford; cf. Bos, Aristotle’s De anima Translated into Hebrew, 107.658 ). Avicenna uses the term in a number of different senses ( cf. RT: Goichon, Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sînâ, §469, pp. 253–55 ), including one meaning, very close to our own, that was close to the lekton [λεϰτόν] of the Stoics ( Avicenna’s De anima, 287 ). In the twelfth century, the word was translated from the Arabic of Avicenna and Averroës by the Latin word intentio. Likewise, Jewish translators from the Ibn Tibbo ( or Ibn Tibbon ) family translated it as ‘inyan [עִנְיָן]. Latin translations popularized this meaning, which thus has little in common with our “intention,” in the sense of “to intend to do something.” It is in this sense that we talk of “intentional species” ( Roger Marston was the first to use the term ) as what our perceptive organs receive, stripping concrete things of their matter to retain only their form. Avicenna defined the object of logic as being “the second intellected concepts [ma’ani ( معانى )] which are based on the first intellected concepts, [and which are based on them] from the point of view of [the fact of their having] the quality of [being] that by which we attain the unknown from the known, not from the point of view of the fact of their being intellected: they have an intellectual existence that depends on absolutely no matter, or that depends on noncorporeal matter ( Shifa’: Métaphysique, 1.2, 10.17–11.2 ). The Scholastics followed him by distinguishing intentio prima and intentio secunda ( starting with Godefroid de Fontaines ), and this usage became so common that it enabled François Rabelais to joke: “comedere secunda intentiones” ( to eat second intentions: Pantagruel 1.7 ), that is to say, pure abstractions ( see Box 2 below ). This mode of existence in the intellect alone was sometimes called intentionalitas ( Pierre d’Auriole, Étienne de Rieti ), and the phenomenological usage of “intentionality,” borrowed by Husserl from Brentano, is the most recent part of this history. Rémi Brague BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Bollingen series, 71.1–2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Averroës. Magnum commentarium in De anima. Edited by F. Stuart Crawford. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Avicenna. Al-Shifa’: La Métaphysique. Edited by G. C. Anawati. Cairo, Egypt: Organisation générale des imprimeries gouvernementales, 1960. . Avicenna’s De anima. Edited by F. Rahman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Bos, Gerrit. Aristotle’s De anima Translated into Hebrew by Zerahyah b. Isaac b. Shealtiel Hen. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1994. Themistius. Paraphrase of De anima. 4th ed. Edited by R. Heinze. In RT: CAG, 5-3. Translation by Robert B. Todd: On Aristotle On the Soul. London: Duckworth, 1996. Arabic translation by M. C. Lyons: An Arabic Translation of Themistius’s Commentary on Aristoteles, De anima. Oxford: Cassirer, 1973. |
B. Intentio as an optical term
If intentio is often a synonym both for a concept and for the thing conceived, the notion itself of presentation / presentification / intentional presence covers several other lexical networks. A first set is linked to the technical vocabulary of optics, and to the dissemination of the theories and the work of Alhazen, for whom intentio was the name of the form affecting the apparatus of sight, and then by extension its mode of being in the physical medium of transmission: one speaks, in this sense, of the esse intentionale of the thing in medio. This is the sense in which the Latin translation of the Averroës Magnum commentarium on Aristotle’s De anima discusses the “spiritual being” of the extra-mental things affecting sight: in the medium of transmission, the res has an esse spirituale, not an esse materiale. The equivalence between spirtuale and intentionale is a characteristic of the Latin lexicon of Averroës ( cf. Averroës, Magnum commentarium in De anima 2, comm. 97, ed. Crawford, 277.28–30 ): “Color habet duplex esse, scilicet esse in corpore colorato [et hoc est esse corporale] et esse in diaffono [et hoc est esse spirituale],” which Albertus Magnus translated as, “In matter, form has material being, in the diaphanous, on the contrary, color does not have a material being, but a spiritual being” ( Albertus Magnus, De intellectu et intelligibili, 1.3.1 ).
C. Intentio as the form of the inner senses
A second lexical network is provided by the terminology particular to the Avicenna latinus, which uses the word intentio to refer to a representation whose origin is nonsensible, formed in the inner senses, and associated with a sensible apprehension effected by the outer senses. In this network, intentio refers in its literal sense to the vis aestimationis or estimative faculty, the role of which is to apprehend “unsensed intentions residing in singular sensibles.” Understood in this way, “intentions” are what the inner senses perceive of a sensible reality without the “intermediary of the outer senses.” The “unsensed intentions of the sensibles” are thus contrasted with the “forms of the sensibles” that are at first perceived by the outer senses, and only subsequently by the inner senses ( and because of them ). A characteristic example of an “intention” in this sense is the property or character of “dangerousness” of a wolf, which a sheep perceives in a nonsensible way, and which causes it to run away at the sight of a wolf, that is, when its “form” is presented to its outer senses ( see Box 2 here, and SENSUS COMMUNIS ). In Averroës, the opposition between intention and image acquires a new, almost “iconic” aspect. Indeed, for him, an image only “depicts” certain external characterisitics of a real object, or certain of its particular or common sensible properties ( color, “‘form” in the sense of “figure,” etc. ), but it does not “represent” them. Intentio, by contrast, represents certain elements of the “individual this” that are not given in an image, and that correspond to what this individual is insofar as it is “this individual.” To speak of the iconic aspect of intentio thus means that intentio alone makes present a given individual as the individual he or she is, whereas an image only presents a set of sensible characteristics. For Averroës, it is a specialized faculty, the cogitative faculty, that is capable of separating out intentio ( ma‘nā al-khayāl [معنى الخيال] from the image ( al-khayāl [الخيال] ).
■ See Box 2.
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“Cogitative” and its Greek, Arabic, and Latin equivalents In the vocabulary of medieval philosophical psychology, the distinction between nous [νοῦϛ], to noêtikon [τὸ νοητιϰόν], and to dianoêtikon [τὸ διανοητιϰόν] ( literally “intellect,” “intellective or noetic faculty,” and “dianoetic faculty” ) was usually reduced to an opposition between the Arabic or Latin equivalents of nous and to dianoêtikon. This reduction corresponds to the fact, noted by Bodéüs ( Aristotle, Catégories, ed. Bodéüs, 146 n. 6 ), that De anima does not strictly delineate between the faculty called to dianoêtikon in 413b13, 414b18, or 431a14, and the faculty is elsewhere referred to as to noêtikon. The French translations of the Greek, which range from faculté discursive ( discursive faculty: Tricot ) to réflexion ( reflection: Bodéüs ), show that for them, the basic opposition was between dianoia [διάνοια]—so-called discursive thought—and noêsis [νόησιϛ]—so-called intuitive thought. This same division commands how the field was organized in medieval times, when it was structured around the pair vis cogitativa and intellectus. In the tradition of Arabic Peripateticism, to dianoêtikon appears at the center of a three-term system, corresponding to the so-called passible or material “faculties of perception”: the imaginative, the cogitative, and the rememorative. These terms need to be clarified, however. In Avicenna, for whom there are five inner senses ( see SENSUS COMMUNIS ), the cogitative refers to the same faculty as the imaginative. It is the third inner sense, the vis cogitativa ( al-quwwat al-mufakkira [القوة المفكّرة] ) in man, or imaginativa in animals, whose function is to divide and compose the images retained by the imagination, the second of the inner senses. In Averroës, on the other hand, for whom the division of the inner senses is tripartite, the cogitative assumes part of the functions that Avicenna reserves for the estimative: perceiving intentions ( see Box 1 ). In his commentary on De sensu et sensato, Averroës describes as follows the functioning of the three faculties relating to the “inner senses”: “The sense perceives the extra-mental thing, then the formative faculty [i.e., the imaginative faculty] forms [an image] of it; then the distinctive faculty [i.e., the cogitative faculty] distinguishes the intention of this form from its description; then the retensive faculty receives what the distinctive faculty has distinguished” ( cf. Black, “Memory, Individuals, and the Past,” 168–69 ). In the Latin translation of Averroës’s Magnum commentarium on Aristotle’s De anima, these three faculties are designated using the triad ( virtus ) imaginativa-cogitativa-rememorativa—three faculties whose function is to “make present the form of the thing imagined in the absence of the corresponding sensation.” The five faculties distinguished by Avicenna—( a ) common sense ( banṭāsiā [بنطاسيا] ), ( b ) imagination, ( c ) imaginative ( for animals ) or cogitative ( for man ), ( d ) estimative, ( e ) memory—are thus reconfigured by Averroës: ( 1 ) imaginativa = ( a ), ( b ); ( 2 ) cogitativa = ( c ), ( d ); ( 3 ) rememorativa = ( e ). In fact, the particular role of the “cogitative” faculty endowed with a “rational character” consists of either ( 1 ) depositing or registering in memory the “intention” of the imagined form taken with the individual, which serves as the substrate of that form, or ( 2 ) distinguishing memory from this individual substrate in the “imaginative” ( al-mutakhayyila [المتخيّلة] ) or “formative” ( al-muṣawwira [المصوّﺮة] ) faculty and in the “imagination.” The cogitative is thus in a median position relative to these two other faculties: in relation to imagination, because of its abstractive activity, which works with images; and in relation to memory, because of its activity of depositing, which consists of transmitting abstract individual intentions to a receptacle ( a faculty of the mind conceived as the “receiving faculty” or instance ). It is from this deposit, receptacle, or store that one draws the “imagined intentions” necessary for the noetic process of abstraction: the cooperation among the faculties of the inner sense enables the “presentation of the image of a sensible thing” upon which the activity of the “virtus rationalis abstracta” is exerted. This activity, as the agent intellect, “extracts a universal intention” and then, as the material intellect, “receives” it and “apprehends” it ( or “comprehends” or “thinks” it ). For Averroës, the distinction between “cogitative faculty” and “intellect” ( cf. Magnum commentarium in De anima 2.29, ed. Crawford, 172.25–173.32, in relation to 414b18: “Deinde dixit: Et in aliis distinguens et intellectus. Idest, et ponamus etiam pro manifesto quod virtus cogitativa et intellectus existunt in aliis modis animalium que non sunt homines” ) is misinterpreted in the Galenic tradition. It is also misinterpreted by all those who attribute to Aristotle a doctrine of the intellect as a “faculty existing in a body.” In the Scholastic tradition, “cogitative” generally retains this meaning. Certain authors, however, stress the aspect of “individual abstraction.” If the cogitative does not produce universal concepts, it at least presents or delivers the individual form of a thing insofar as it is such-and-such a “thing” ( for example, a “man” or a “line” ). This individual “form” is not reduced to the collection of particular or common accidents that characterize each individual as an “individual” ( this man, this line ). Ipsa [= virtus cogitativa] cognoscit intentiones, id est formas individuales omnium decem praedicamentorum, ut formam individualem huius hominis, secundum quod hic homo, et hanc lineam . . . et huiusmodi plura ita quod non tantum cognoscit accidentia sensibilia communia et propria, sed intentionem non sensatam, et exspoliat eam ab eis, quae fuerunt ei coniuncta de sensibilibus communibus et propriis. It is this [virtus cogitativa] which knows intentions, that is, the individual forms of what falls into one of the ten categories, like the individual form of this man inasmuch as he is this man, or like this line . . . and many other things of this same kind, such that it does not only know the common and particular sensible accidents, but also the nonsensible intention, which it extracts and separates out from the common and particular sensibles that are connected to it. ( Jean de Jandun, Super libros BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Catégories. Edited by R. Bodéüs. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002. Averroës. Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima: A Critical Edition of the Arabic Text. Edited, translated, with introduction and notes by Alfred L. Ivry. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002. Translation by F. Stuart Crawford: Magnum commentarium in De anima. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Black, Deborah L. “Memory, Individuals, and the Past in Averroes’s Psychology.” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 5 ( 1996 ): 161–87. Davidson, Herbert A. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Elamrani-Jamal, Abdelali. “Averroès: La doctrine de l’intellect matériel dans le Commentaire moyen au De anima d’Aristote. Présentation et traduction, suivie d’un lexique-index du chapitre 3, livre III: De la faculté rationnelle.” In Langages et Philosophie, Hommage à Jean Jolivet, edited by A. de Libera, A. Elamrani-Jamal, and A. Gallonnier. Études de Philosophie Médiévale 84 ( 1997 ): 281–307. Jandun, Jean de. Super libros Aristotelis De anima. Venice, 1587. Reprinted Frankfurt: Minerva, 1966. |
The distinction Porphyry makes between first imposition ( prôtê thesis [πϱώτη θέσιϛ] ) and second imposition ( deutera thesis [δευτέϱα θέσιϛ] ) of names is partly what forms the basis for the medieval analysis of intentiones as first intentions and second intentions. According to Porphyry, names are first applied ( “first imposition” ) to sensibles, and only subsequently to intelligibles, considered as things that are “anterior in themselves” ( that is, naturally ), but posterior in the order of perception ( Porphyry, In Categoria Aristotelis, ed. Busse, 90.20ff. and 91.20–27 ). Being perceived first ( i.e., before the “commons” ), sensibles or individuals are the first objects of signification ( ibid., 91.6–12 ). Intelligibles are thereby the object of a “secondary” linguistic imposition. In the Middle Ages, the distinction between the two types of imposition was used as a tool for differentiating between the ways in which thought is oriented toward an object. For Pierre d’Auvergne, “the intellect has two ways of being oriented towards things [supra res ipsas intellectus duplicem habet motum].” A first movement orients it directly or immediately toward things themselves. Through this movement, it obtains knowledge of the nature of the things on which it imposes a name. This “nature” is the quiddity of a thing, and the name imposed is a name of first intention ( “man,” “animal,” “Socrates” ), because it signifies “the concept of the intellect that is first oriented toward the thing itself [in rem ipsam primo intellectus intendentis].” The second movement is the one whereby the intellect is oriented toward a thing that is “already apprehended,” in order to attach to it the “conditions” of consideration upon which depends the attribution of a second-intention name, or “universal name.” Starting out from the same premises, the Modists developed an actual theory of intentions.
The modista Radulphus Brito ( Raoul le Breton ) defined intentio as “that by which the intellect is oriented towards a thing [tendit in rem].” He articulated the contemporary distinctions ( those of Simon of Faversham or Pierre d’Auvergne ) into an actual combined system where we find both the Aristotelian and Thomist topos of the “three operations of the intellect” ( apprehension, judgment, reasoning ) and the Modist semantic theory of paronyms. He was thus able to bring into play a single distinction between the abstract and the concrete at the three levels of operation, allowing him to conflate the trivial opposition between the intention and the thing. At the level of the first operation ( the apprehension of a reality according to its own particular mode of being ), Brito made the distinction between a first abstract intention, or “knowledge of the thing” ( cognitio rei ), and a first concrete intention, or “the thing as it is known” ( res sic cognita ). He thus returned to the theme of paronymy ( the abstract/concrete relation ), which had provided his predecessors with the general framework for the intelligibility needed to elucidate the status of second intentions. For Brito, however, the correspondence between the paronymic meaning and the semantic status of intentions could be generalized into an actual theory of intentional objectness, since he maintained that every kind of knowledge “names its object” in the same way that “abstract accidents name their subject,” which is to say, concretely: “Et ita semper cognitio denominant suum obiectum, sicut accidentia abstracta denominant suum subiectum” ( cf. Pinborg, “Radulph Brito’s Sophism,” 141 ). From this basis, an entire taxonomy was established, encompassing prima intentio in concreto ( joining together res intenta, “the thing intended,” and prima intentio in abstracta, “first abstract intention” ), intentio secunda in abstracta, and intentio secunda in concreto, these last two assigned once again to the second and then the third operations of the intellect. This ponderous architecture was brutally shaken up by the Nominalists, particularly William of Ockham, who reconfigured the theory of impositions and the theory of intentions into an entirely different doctrine.
Taking into account what was for him a cardinal difference separating words in spoken and written languages from the concepts and terms of the language of the mind, William of Ockham redefined the relationship between “impositions” and “intentions.”
■ See Box 3.
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Intentions and imposition according to William of Ockham William of Ockham calls categorematic signs “first-imposition names,” that is, oral or written words that conventionally signify individual extra-mental things. He calls the natural conceptual signs of the individual things to which they are subordinate “first intentions”; the categorematic oral or written words conventionally signifying other conventional signs he refers to as “second-imposition names”; and the mental categorematic conceptual signs that signify naturally other mental signs he calls “second intentions.” This general grid proves to be remarkably complex in its concrete applications. The expression “second-imposition name” can be understood, in fact, in two ways. ( 1a ) In the broad sense, any name that signifies conventionally instituted sounds as conventionally instituted sounds is a second-imposition name, that is, insofar as it signifies, whether or not it is applicable to the intentions of the soul ( which are natural signs ). This is the case for expressions such as “noun,” “pronoun,” “conjunction,” “verb,” “case,” “number,” “mood,” “tense,” and so on, “understood in the way a grammarian uses them,” that is, “to signify the parts of speech while they signify” ( nouns that are predicable of vocal sounds both when they do not signify and when they do signify are thus not second-imposition names ). ( 1b ) In the strict sense, any name that signifies conventionally instituted signs without being able to be applied to the intentions of the soul ( which are natural signs ) is a second-imposition name. This is the case for expressions such as “conjugation” or “figure,” which cannot signify an intention of the soul ( and this is the only reason to exclude them from second-imposition names in the strict sense ), since there are no distinctions of conjugations or of figures for “mental” verbs. First-imposition names are all names that are neither names in the sense of ( 1a ) nor names in the sense of ( 1b ). However, the expression “first-imposition name” can be understood in two ways. ( 2a ) In the broad sense, everything that is not a second-imposition name is a first-imposition name: in this sense, syncategorematic terms are first-imposition names. ( 2b ) In the strict sense, only categorematic names that are not second-imposition names are first-imposition names. First-imposition names in the strict sense of ( 2b ) are themselves of two sorts, that is, certain among them ( 3a ) are second-intention names, others ( 3b ) are first-intention names. Second-intention names are those which are “precisely” imposed in order to signify both intentions of the soul that are natural signs, and other signs that are instituted conventionally ( or however such signs are characterized ). There is thus ( 3a1 ) a broad sense and ( 3a2 ) a strict sense of the expression “second-imposition names.” In the broad sense ( 3a1 ), a second-intention name is a name that signifies intentions of the soul ( which are natural signs ), and that can also signify or not “conventionally instituted signs, only when they are signs,” that is, second-imposition names in the sense ( 1a ). In the sense ( 3a1 ), a second-intention name can also be at the same time a second-imposition name. This is the case for names used in relation to what are called “universals.” The names “genus,” “species,” and so on, like the names “universal” and “predicable,” are second-intention names because they signify “nothing other” than intentions of the soul ( which are natural signs ), or arbitrarily instituted signs. In the strict sense ( 3a2 ), a second-intention name is a name that only signifies intentions of the soul ( which are natural signs ). In the sense ( 3a2 ), “no second-intention name is a second-imposition name.” First-imposition names are all other names, that is, all those that signify things that are neither signs, nor what characterizes these signs. But here again, we can distinguish between ( 3b1 ) names that signify “precisely” things that are not signs intended to substitute for other things, and ( 3b2 ) names that simultaneously signify such things and signify signs, such as the names “thing,” “being,” “something” ( aliquid ), and so on, that is, what the Scholastics termed “transcendentals.” There are thus signs that signify both conventional signs and mental signs: these are second-imposition names in the broad sense ( 1a ), which are either oral words or written words, and second-intention names in the broad sense ( 3a1 ), which are concepts. There are also names that are both first imposition and second intention: first imposition, because they do not signify a conventional sign; but second intention, because they signify a mental concept: the case par excellence is the oral word “concept.” |
This complex classification—which allows us to foreground a metalinguistic aspect by identifying the possibility of a reciprocal application at the two levels of mental language and conventional language ( since a second-imposition name can be applied to a mental concept, and a second-intention name can be applied to a conventional sign )—is, if we forget the “particularist” ontological thesis that supports the whole thesis, one of the three pillars of the doctrine of universals.
V. Intentionality as an Anti-Aristotelian Theory
A. Action of things or of the intellect?
The medieval theory of intentionality, even if it is based on a rereading of De anima 3.8, 431b30–432a1, is to some extent anti-Aristotelian. To be more exact, it opposes the naturalist dimension of the notion of psychic impression elaborated by commentators on the basis of the opening lines of De interpretatione. Indeed, the principal function of the idea of an intentional presence of the thing to the intellect is to break with a strictly empiricist ( or, as one might say, “inscriptionist” ) reading of the passio animae, attributing to Aristotle a reduction of concepts to simple impressions or inscriptions ( or resemblances ) of things “in” the soul. Because intentionality is here understood as an orientation of the intellect toward the object, the explanation of thought as the impression of a species in the soul by the thing itself—a causal model that poses the problem of how one passes from a sensible impression to an intelligible concept, and makes it necessary to distinguish between two types of species: a species that is “imprinted in the senses” ( species impressa ) and a species that is “expressed in thought” ( species expressa )—gives way to the description of the process by which a cognitive power is actively oriented toward an object, where its act terminates. In Aristotelian terms, there is thus a shift in the problematics of the theory of intentionality. It is no longer a matter of explaining what action exterior things exert on the soul through the intermediary of sensible species, but rather of describing the way in which the intellect, understood as a power of apprehension ( potentia apprehensiva ), moves to act ( perficitur ) and ends ( terminatur ) as an apprehension “of something” ( see SENSE, Box 1 ).
Duns Scotus gives the theory its canonical formulation when he posits that “in an apprehensive power, the motor principle does not have to be the proper object of this power from the angle where it is a motor, but the object from the angle where it terminates the given power,” that is to say, its endpoint, its pole of actualization, its “ending”—which is tantamount to saying that “cognitive power does not so much have to receive the species of an object [recipere speciem obiecti], as to be oriented by its activity toward it [tendere per actum suum in obiectum].”
B. Intention, representation, and aim
The Brentanian thesis of “intentional in-existence,” which defines psychic phenomena by the fact that they “contain an object within them intentionally,” goes hand in hand with a second thesis, equally popular, that affirms that every mental act is either a representation ( Vorstellung ) or “based on a representation” ( this is the case, for example, with judgments and affections ). For the school of thought around Brentano, then, the question of intentionality develops spontaneously out of the notion of representation, which is understood as essentially “oriented” toward an object ( Gegenstand ). The notion of intentional object is therefore explored from the point of view of representation, against the background of a distinction between the ob-ject itself, the ob-stant or Gegenstand ( “the object taken independent of thought” or the object “as it stands before” thought, and is “that toward which representation is directed”; Twardowski, Zur Lehre von Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, 4 ), and the “immanent object” ( immanentes Objekt ) or “content” ( Inhalt ) of representation, which alone deserves the name of “intentional object,” literally speaking. Now, however, the case of “representations without objects” ( gegenstandslose Vorstellungen ), following the terminology previously introduced by Bolzano, will stand in need of redefinition. It is not enough to say that every representation has a content, but that each representation does not for all that have its corresponding ob-ject. It is false, from the point of view of terminological rigor, to talk about “inobjective” representations. According to Twardowski, there are no representations “which would not represent something as an object” ( ibid., 25 ), or representations “to which would correspond no object.” There are, however, a number of representations “for which an object does not exist” ( ibid., 29 ). Even if these comments fall far short of the “broadening of the sphere of the object even beyond being and non-being” ( which only Alexius Meinong’s “theory of objects” will provide ), the idea of “representations for which an object does not exist” exposes one of the fundamental problematics conveyed by the notion of intentionality ( see RES ).
The medieval theory of objectual intention ( aspectus ) is, in this sense, part of the proto-history of the gegenstandslose Vorstellungen ( representations without objects ). According to this theory, particularly elaborated by Pierre-Jean Olieu ( Olivi ) around 1280, every cognitive act ( sensible or intelligible ) requires an aspectus “having as its actual term an object” or, more literally, “ending in actuality on an object [super obiectum actualiter terminatus].” This does not mean that the principle of the cognitive act must in all cases be a real object, functioning as a cause of perception: in many cases, on the contrary, it is a substitutive, purely “terminative and representative” object that is the principle of the cognitive act—for example, a memorial species ( if it is a question of a “thought of absent objects” )—and that “presents itself in place of the external thing,” when “this thing is not itself the object of an aim or intention” ( Olieu, Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, q. 74, ed. Jensen, 3:113 ). A representation, an image, a species, or a “presential object” ( praesentialis ) thus provides a substitutive presence, which “is the object of an aim or intention, and terminates it,” whenever there is no object ( really ) present. The distinction between a terminative object and a causal object gives a more interesting range of meaning to intentionality understood as orientation toward an object.
C. “Intention”/ “in-tension”/ “pro-tention”
If the triad “in, tention”-“pro, tention”-“re, tention” has enjoyed a particular fortune in the phenomenological analysis of the intimate consciousness of time, the intentional structure of thought itself was presented in the Middle Ages in terms of “pro-tention.” The vocabulary of “tending” ( in/pro ) immanent to intentionality was established more permanently in the fourteenth century. During this time, it combined with the vocabulary of “aiming” expressed with and around St. Augustine’s and Boethius’s notion of the “highest pointing of the mind” ( acies mentis; see ARGUTEZZA ). For medieval philosophers, to say that the “intentional power,” the vis inventiva of a cognitive faculty ( potentia cognitiva ), “tends toward an object [in obiectum intendit]” was to say that it “extends toward it within itself [intra se protenditur]” and that, “in this pro-tention” itself, “it points toward that which is ob-jected” ( “et protendendo acuitur quod est acute ad aliquod sibi obiectum intenta” ). “Acuity” does not refer, then, to a circumstantial modality of thought that is subject to variation: it is a constitutive trait of its intentionality. Intention, as an “actual aim” ( aspectus actualis ), is fundamentally pro-tentive. It is a movement of tending toward, of opening out or unfolding, by which a cognitive faculty “is sharpened” and “points” in the direction of the object ( Olieu, Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, ed. Jensen, 3:64 ).
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INTUITION
BEAUTY, BILD, COMPARISON, IMAGINATION, INSTANT, INTENTION, MEMORY, MERKMAL, SIGN
“Intuition” comes from the Latin intuitio, which in Chalcidius’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus refers to an image reflected in a mirror. The term is derived from the verb intueri, which means “to see,” “to look upon” ( tueri means “to see” and “to look over,” “to protect” ), with a connotation of intensity—attentively, fixedly, admiringly, immediately, and all at once—and applies as much to sight in the literal sense, that of the eyes of the body, as to metaphorical sight, through the eyes of the soul. Intuition is thus a direct vision of something given that presents itself immediately as real and true. In modern philosophy, the term brings together a Cartesian source ( what is clear and evident ) and a Kantian source ( the objectivity of the object ).
I. Intuition and the Evident
A. Intuition, sensation, intellect
The first network is that of sensible intuition, which is connected to the immediacy of perception and thus to its truth ( see PERCEPTION, Box 3; SENSE, I.A and Box 1; cf. TO SENSE, TRUTH ). The second is connected to intelligible intuition, which has to do with ideas ( see IDEA ). The English and French intuition covers a wide range of terms denoting, even before Plato, this kind of instantaneous intellection; it is frequently used to translate the Greek nous [νоῦς], “mind,” or noêsis [νόησις], “thought,” and even noêma [νόημα], “object of thought,” whenever they are being contrasted with more discursive procedures, such as dianoia [διάνоια], but it is equally often used to translate epibolê [ἐπιϐоλή] ( from epiballô [ἐπιϐάλλω], “to throw onto,” from which we get the standard meanings of “imposition,” “apposition,” “superimposition,” “an imposed tax,” “project” ), a terminology that, from Epicurus to Plotinus and beyond, refers to the direct application of the mind. The various Latin translations are just as complex: intellectus is one of the translations of nous ( but only one, since nous is also translated as sensus; see SENSE ), and yet it is not translated into French by intuition, but rather by intellect or entendement ( understanding ); and we find the Latin intuitus in the philosophical texts of the European classical age, in Descartes, for example ( the Scholastics had coined notitia or cognitio intuitiva, which were taken up by Spinoza and Leibniz ). ( On this cluster of terms linked to the names of the faculties, see INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING; cf. CONCEPT, REASON. )
B. Intuition and the relation to the divine
“Intuition,” via nous and intellectus, is one of the ways of characterizing God ( see INTELLECTUS, TERM, Box 2; cf. GOD, LOGOS ).
The theological importance of intuition relates to the problem of “beatific vision” or “transparency,” which was later on transposed in the metaphysics of Malebranche as a question of the “vision in God”; intuition is also both closely connected and opposed to the thematics of truth as “light” or “suddenly seeing clearly” ( see LIGHT, SVET, TRUTH; cf. OIKONOMIA ).
C. Intuition and subjectivity
Apperception, properly speaking, which is connected to the consciousness that a subject has of itself, constitutes a particular case of intuition ( see COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, ERLEBEN, I/ME/MYSELF, PERCEPTION, SELF, SENSE, SOUL, SUBJECT, TATSACHE ( and below, §III ); cf. ACT, CERTITUDE, DASEIN ).
A constituting relation-to-self opens out on to the singularity of the individual ( see GENIUS, INGENIUM, PERSON ). Intuition is characterized in this context by an intelligent, but always spontaneous or sudden behavior, perhaps even a prephilosophical one, based in a certain analogy of noêsis with “flair” ( see UNDERSTANDING, Box 1 ); it can be understood in terms of the connotations of ḥads [الحدس] in Avicenna’s Arabic ( see INGENIUM, Box 1 ), and it is found in the opposition English speakers make between semantic intuition and pragmatic insight ( the “sight” that illuminates or clarifies a difficulty ).
More generally, the position of the subject determines a Weltanschauung, an “intuition of the world,” whose meaning ranges from the cosmological to the romantic, and even ideological ( see WELTANSCHAUUNG ).
II. Intuition and the Object of Intuition
A. The various usages of Anschauung
The Kantian revolution split the history of the different usages of Anschauung ( and of “intuition” ) in two, insofar as it set up in opposition to the intellectual intuition ( we already find intuitio intellectualis in Nicholas of Cusa ) inherited from noêsis, which is contrasted with the empirical and the sensible world, the paradoxical concept of a sensible intuition ( sinnliche Anschauung ) that is nonetheless susceptible of being “pure” and that constitutes the foundation of the given of phenomena or of the diversity of experience. For Kant, the former is deeply illusory, and the latter forms a system with the concept ( Begriff ) and constitutes the field of representation. ( On the singularity of Kant’s vocabulary, see BEGRIFF and CONCEPT, ERSCHEINUNG, GEGENSTAND, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, SEIN: cf. OMNITUDO REALITATIS. ) Kant’s revolution is correlative with the broadening of the meaning of “aesthetics” to cover the general science of sensibility ( see AESTHETICS; cf. GEFÜHL, SENSE ).
In French, comprendre and penser correspond to some extent to the activity of Begriff, but the language lacks a technical term for anschauen and so has coined the verb intuitionner ( see BEGRIFF, GEMÜT, Box 1, and GERMAN ).
Since Kant, transcendental idealism has explored the possibility of separating out the pure intuition of the sensible, but without reference to a noumenal “thing in itself,” so conferring upon it the meaning of a constitutive activity ( see TATSACHE ). Conversely, the epistemology of quantum physics has explored a problem of visualization that is not connected to a sensible given, but instead to the theoretical possibility of representation ( see ANSCHAULICHKEIT and the particularly significant evolution of the meaning of this term ).
B. The “given”
Intuition implies a certain mode of access to an object. Its character of being immediately obvious culminates in the problematic of the given and of the “donation without a donor” ( see ES GIBT, HÁ, and more generally, IL Y A ).
Contemporary philosophy has been divided between a devalorization of intuition in favor of praxis in the Marxist tradition ( see PRAXIS ) and the reconstitution of a doctrine of the intuition of essences on the far side of the Kantian critique of the intelligible world, in Husserl and some of the phenomenological tradition, with the thematics of Wesenschau or Wesenanschauung ( see GEGENSTAND ).
III. Intuition and Intuitionism
Intuitionism can be understood in several ways, all of which refer to a valorization of the immediacy of a type of knowledge.
On its usage in moral philosophy, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon world, see FAIR and compare MORAL SENSE, UTILITY, WERT. On its usage in the epistemology of mathematics, and more generally in the field of analytical philosophy, where “intuitionism” ( Poincaré, Brouwer ) is opposed to “formalism” and “logicism,” see EPISTEMOLOGY and PRINCIPLE, and compare ANSCHAULICHKEIT.
| ENGLISH | truth | ||
| FRENCH | vérité | ||
| GREEK | alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] | ||
| HEBREW | ’emet [אֱמֶת] | ||
| LATIN | veritas |
TRUTH, and DASEIN, MIR, POSTUPOK, PRAVDA, REALITY, RUSSIAN, SOBORNOST’, SVOBODA, TO BE, WORLD
The Russian word istina [истина], unlike its French translation vérité, has a primarily ontological sense: it means: “what is, what truly exists.” The epistemological sense of “a statement conforming to reality, a true judgment,” is secondary and derived in relation to this ontological sense. The logical sense of “veracity” is, moreover, translated by a different Russian noun, istinnost’ [истинность], so that istina and istinnost’ are translated into English using the same word, “truth.” In Russian philosophy there is a fundamental opposition between istina as true existence and istina as true judgment. Considered separately from its epistemological meaning, the term istina can then be understood in two contrasting ways. In the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, it has an objective and impersonal character: istina is the objective self-identity of reality; but for the existentialists, istina takes on a dynamic meaning: “what is” is nothing other than the identity of the act and the event.
I. Istina: Truth as the Reality and Self-Identity of Being
The modern Russian word istina [истина], like the Slavonic istina, corresponds to the Greek alêtheia. It comes from the Slavonic ist, istov, “true,” “real” ( RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka, 144; Preobazhenskij, Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka, 1:275–76 ). Dictionaries propose three versions of the etymology of ist: according to the oldest thesis this term is derived from the Indo-European es- ( to be ); according to another it is formed from the prefix iz- and from the form sto- ( “that which is upright,” “which is upright” ), as in the Latin ex-sistere, ex-stare; finally, according to Vasmer, the most likely version links ist and istina to the pronominal form is-to ( “the same” ), analogous to the Latin iste. Ist means “the same” in modern Bugarian, like the Slovenian îsti, and the Serbian and Croatian ïstî ( Vasmer, Ètimologičeskij slovar’, 144 ).
Pavel Florensky, in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, undertakes a comparative study of the notion of truth among the Slavs, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews. For him the Greek alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] has a gnoseological meaning of “that which resists forgetting,” while the Latin veritas has a primarily cultural and juridical sense ( it is “the real state of the thing judged” ), and the Hebrew ’emet [אֱמֶת] “comes from the history of the holy word, from theocracy” ( ’emet meaning “faithful word,” “reliable promise” ). Florensky writes the following about the Russian word:
Our Russian word for “truth,” istina, is linguistically close to the verb “to be”: istina—estina. Istina in Russian has thus come to mean, by itself, the notion of absolute reality: istina is what is ( sušče [сущее] ), what truly exists ( podlinno suščestvujuščee [подлинно существующее] ), to ontôs on or ho ontôs on; as opposed to what is illusory, apparent, not real, impermanent. The Russian language marks the ontological aspect of this idea in the word istina. Istina thus means an absolute self-identity, or being equal to oneself, absolute exactness and authenticity ( podlinnost’ [подлинность] ).
( Florensky, Pillar and Ground )
The term sušče ( in Greek, to ontôs on [τὸ ὄντως ὄν] ) has been translated into French as ce qui est ( what is ) or l’être ( being ) ( Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 195 ), as existant concret ( concrete existent ) ( Berdyayev, Essai de métaphysique eschatologique, for example, 111 ), and more rarely, as étant ( being ) ( Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 196 ). If in French étant is opposed to existant, in Russian suščestvujuščee ( that which exists ) and sušče are considered as synonyms, as are bytie [бытие] ( being ) and suščestvovanie [существование] ( existence ); their opposition normally requires a reference to the French existence or the German Existenz. So by situating istina within this ontological field, Florensky is relating it to the identity of being in itself.
It is this ontological concept of truth that has often led Russian philosophers to stress the fundamental opposition between truth as authentic being ( bytie ) and truth as true judgment. Nicolas Berdyayev acknowledges this:
Russians do not accept that truth ( istina ) can be discovered by purely intellectual means, by reasoning. They do not accept that truth ( istina ) is merely judgment. And no theory of knowledge, no methodology is evidently capable of shaking this pre-rational conviction of the Russians, namely that apprehending what is, can only be given in terms of the complete life of the mind [esprit], the fullness of life.
( Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 81–82 )
Istina, understood then as being and the identity of the real, is not accessible to the purely logical or intellectual subject but is always related to the act of a person, to a choice one makes.
II. Istina and the Supra-personal Subject ( Solovyov )
There are, however, two ways of conceiving of the relation to istina. The first, in Vladimir Solovyov, associates the objectivity of being ( istina as ousia, substance and quiddity ) with going beyond subjectivity. In reaction to this, the second one, that of the Russian existentialists, interprets istina as energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], an act or exercise rooted in the person. In his Teoretičeskaja filosofija ( Theoretical philosophy ), Solovyov makes a distinction between the truth of an isolated fact, or a formally universal logical truth, and truth properly speaking, that is, truth as bezuslovno-suščee [безусловно-сущее] ( what exists absolutely ). Bezuslovno-suščee is a noun made up of the substantivized participle corresponding to the Greek to on [τὸ ὄν] ( being ), and the adverb bezuslovo ( unconditionally ), analogous to the Greek anupothetôs [ἀνυποθέτως]. Truth in this latter sense constitutes the ( possibly inaccessible ) object of the risky enterprise that is philosophy. Although philosophy is a personal matter, it requires going beyond the limits of a particular existence. Solovyov writes:
True philosophy begins when the empirical subject rises up through supra-personal inspiration to the realm of truth ( istina ). For even if one cannot define in advance what truth ( istina ) is, one must at least say what it is not. It is not in the realm of the separate and isolated self.
( Solovyov, Teoretičeskaja filosofija, 213 )
In short, truth, namely “what truly exists,” is objective. This is why it is only revealed to the “mind” ( esprit ), that is, to the supra-personal or properly philosophical ( dux [дух], “mind” ) subject, insofar as it is distinguished from the empirical ( duša [душа], “soul” ) and the logical ( um [ум], “intellect” ) subject. For Solovyov, a classical thinker of the nineteenth century in the tradition of Hegel and of rationalism, istina is thus the self-identify of the supra-personal objective world; it is revealed to the mind that thinks itself.
III. Istina and Existentialism
In contrast to Solovyov’s objectivism, we find three distinct interpretations of istina in Russian existentialism: the term forms part of an individualist problematics with Shestov, a creationist problematics with Berdyayev, and an ethical problematics with Bakhtin.
A. Lev Shestov: Istina and the singularity of a person ( ličnost’ )
In the fourth chapter of Athens and Jerusalem ( 1951 ), Shestov contrasts truth ( istina ) to truths ( istiny [истины], the plural of truth ):
In searching for the origins of being, metaphysics has not been able to find universal and necessary truth ( istina ), whereas in studying what comes from these origins, the positive sciences have discovered a number of “truths” ( istiny ). Does this not mean that the “truths” ( istiny ) of the positive sciences are false truths ( istiny ložnye [истины ложные] ), or at least fleeting truths, which last no more than an instant?
( Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, 334 )
“Universal and necessary truth,” like Solovyov’s “logical truth,” is revealed to the “logical subject,” designated by the pronoun vse [все] ( “all,” often in quotation marks ), analogous to the German man ( one ). The fact that philosophy has been incapable of reaching this “universal and necessary truth” is far from being an objection against metaphysics. On the contrary, “metaphysics does not want to, and must not, give us truths ( istiny ) that are compulsory for all” ( ibid. ), since they would then merely lead to “constraining truths,” likes those that the positive sciences offer us. In order to discover authentic truth, metaphysics has precisely to give up the “sword of necessity,” that is, its claims to a valid universal truth.
However, if the logical subject in Shestov and Solovyov is incapable of discovering authentic truth, from an existential point of view, Solovyov’s supra-personal subject does not exist. On the contrary, “the truth ( istina ) is revealed to an empirical person ( ličnost’ [личность] ), and only to an empirical person” ( ibid., 336 ). Contrasting the empirical person to the vse [все] ( all ), Shestov compares the empirical/transcendental distinction with that of living/dead: “Someone who is alive, what this school of thought calls an empirical person, was the main obstacle for Solovyov” ( ibid. ). Istina thus acquires an existential character: like, for example, Socrates’s demon or Saint Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, it cannot be recognized by “all.” Unlike istina, which necessarily applies to “all” ( istina as judgment ), istina as “what is” is one particular and personal truth, “what truly exists for an empirical person, when this person is alone with him or herself”:
It is only when we are alone with ourselves, under the impenetrable veil of the mystery of individual being, of an empirical personality ( ličnost’ ), that we sometimes decide to renounce these real or illusory rights, these prerogatives that we enjoy by virtue of our participation in a world that is common to all. It is then that the final, or near-final truths ( istiny ) suddenly burn brightly before our eyes.
( Ibid., 335 )
Unspeakable, incommunicable, these ultimate truths die by being expressed in the words and structures of language that attempt to transform them into rational, necessary, comprehensible, and obvious judgments “for ever and for all.”
B. Nicolas Berdyayev: Istina, communion ( soobščenie ), and creative freedom ( svoboda )
Berdyayev also opposes truth as judgment and truth as existence:
I am the way, the truth ( istina ) and the life. What does this phrase mean? It means that truth ( istina ) is not intellectual or exclusively gnoseological in character, but that it has to be understood comprehensively: it is existential.
( Berdyayev, Truth and Revelation, 21 )
However for Berdyayev, unlike Shestov, existential istina is a matter not of the individual, but of intersubjectivity: “Truth is communitarian ( istina kommjunotarna [истина коммюнотарна] ); in other words, it assumes contact ( soobščenie [сообщение] and fraternity between men” ( ibid., p. 24 ). The best translation of soobščenie in French is communion; indeed, Berdyayev often uses two words, soobščenie and the transliteration of the French word “communion,” as synonyms ( Berdyayev, Ja i mir objektov, 165 ). Communion is the fruit of love ( ljubov’ [любовь] ) and of friendship ( družba [дружба] ). The adjective kommjunotarnyj, often used as a secular equivalent of sobornyj [соборный] ( catholic, universal ), is also borrowed from the French. That which is communitarian, as opposed to collective, is based on the freedom ( svoboda [свобода] ) of each person. The idea of “original freedom” as a source of creation, whether divine or human, is central to Berdyayev’s metaphysics, which are developed out of Jakob Böhme’s doctrine of Ungrund. This freedom, svoboda, gives an absolute character to human subjectivity. But human creation always implies a departure from self, an elimination of self, and is only realized in the communion with others.
Reality as an “objective given ( ob’ektivnaja dannost’ [объективная данность]” that is imposed from “outside ( izvne [извне] )” the person ( ličnost’ ) is at the opposite extreme of creative human existence. Berdyayev sees it as the source of slavery and of the submission of man: “It is completely wrong to attribute a purely theoretical meaning to truth ( istina ), and to only see it as a kind of intellectual submission of the knowing subject to a reality which is given to it from the outside” ( Truth and Revelation, 22–23 ). Istina, as “what truly exists,” has nothing in common with given reality; but this reality can be transformed or transfigured by the creative energy of the original freedom present in the creative act. It is in this sense, then, that we should understand the following sentence: “Truth ( istina ) is not a reality, nor a corollary of the real: it is the very sense of the real, its Logos, its supreme quality and value” ( ibid., p. 22 ). Istina, which is thus dynamic in nature, is “what truly exists in reality: subjectivation, the transfiguration of the real.” Truth as transfiguration ultimately has a theological and eschatological meaning: it leads, through communion and the creative act of a person, to the “definitive victory” over our “fallen state of objectivation” ( Berdyayev, Essai de métaphysique eschatologique, p. 63 ), or in other words, toward the end of being ( bytie ).
C. Mikhail Bakhtin: Istina and pravda
Bakhtin, for his part, contrasts logical istina not to ontological istina, but to pravda [правда] ( truth in justice ), a term that translates the Greek dikaiosunê [διϰαιοσύνη], but understood within an entirely different set of oppositions, such that it is usually translated into French, for want of anything better, as vérité ( truth ). This opposition needs to be read in the context of Bakhtin’s critique of the “abstraction” of scientific philosophy, as presented in his theory entitled Toward a Philosophy of the Act ( written at the start of the 1920s and never completed ). For him, the theoretical world with its “abstract truth ( otvlečënnaja istina [отвлечённая истина] ),” is incapable of containing postupok [поступок] ( an ethical act ). Contrasting “theoretical abstraction” to what he termed “participating thought,” one that considers the being “inside the act ( postupok ),” he proposed an original version of existentialism: ethical existentialism. His “subject” is no longer the knowing subject, but the acting subject.
Pravda does not exclude theoretical istina. On the contrary, it assumes and completes it through a personal responsibility: “The entire infinite context of possible human theoretical knowledge—science—must become something answerably known [uznanie]. . . . This does not in the least diminish and distort the autonomous truth ( istina ) of theoretical knowledge, but, on the contrary, completes it to the point where it becomes compellingly valid truth-justice ( pravda ).” ( Toward a Philosophy, 49 ) The absolute nature of istina is preserved, since a responsible action does not imply any relativity:
When considered from our standpoint, the autonomy of truth ( istina ), its purity and self-determination from the standpoint of method are completely preserved. It is precisely on the condition that it is pure that truth can participate answerably in Being-as-event ( bytie-sobytie [бытие событие] ); life-as-event does not need a truth that is relative from within itself ( otnositel’naja istina [относительная истина] ). The validity of truth ( istina ) is sufficient unto itself, absolute, and eternal, and an answerable act or deed of cognition takes into account this peculiarity of it; that is what constitutes its essence.
( Ibid., 9–10 )
So istina retains its epistemological meaning, “what is, from the objective or scientific point of view,” but it is relieved of its ontological meaning: it can no longer refer to “what truly exists,” nor to what French translators have sometimes rendered ( for example, Berdyayev ) as vérité philosophique ( philosophical truth ) ( Khomiakov, 7 ). For Bakhtin metaphysics ( for which he uses the expression prima philosophia, or doctrine of “being as being” ) has to go beyond the limits of the theoretical world: “It is only from within the actually performed act ( postupok ), which is once-occurrent, integral, and unitary in its answerability, that we can find an approach to unitary and once-occurrent Being in its concrete actuality. A first philosophy can orient itself only with respect to that actually performed act ( postupok )” ( ibid., 28 ). “What truly exists” is not istina, but postupok, an act invested with pravda. The world of “what is,” within which postupok takes place, is the being-event ( bytie-sobytie ). With this term Bakhtin introduces an etymological metaphor: sobytie means “event,” but literally so-bytie signifies “co-being,” “co-existence,” that is, a shared world. Bytie-sobytie, analogous to the German Mitwelt, is the antonym of the world of theoretical istina: it implies authentic existence and participation.
■ See Box 1.
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Podnogotnaja, truth, and the practice of the question There is a synonym of istina that is also translated as “truth”: this is the term podnogotnaja [подноготная], which refers to “a truth hidden by someone, circumstances or details carefully concealed.” It is encountered in situations where there is a question of “throwing light on” an affair, of trying to “uncover” the truth, for example, in a trial: it is an adjectival noun formed from the group of words podnogotnaja istina. Originally, podnogot-naja referred to a sort of torture, or an interrogation, as when pointed objects are thrust “under the fingernails”—pod nogti [под ногти], or in the singular pod nogot’ [под ноготь] ( cf. RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka, 352 ). Similarly, the term podlinnyi [подлинный] ( authentic ) is etymologically linked to the ancient practice that consists, in a trial ( pravëž [правёж] ), of beating a suspect with a “long stick ( podlinnik [подлинник] )” to force him to tell the truth ( RT: Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language, 2:186 ). The Russian term isolates a part of the meaning of the Greek alêtheia [ἀλήθεια], which also comes from a judicial trial. Alêtheia, which etymologically means “un-veiling,” “dis-covering,” was uncovered quite normally during a trial through the use of torture ( basanizein [βασανίζειν] ) on slaves called to testify, who were freed in this way from allegiance to their masters. But alêtheia as “un-veiling” embraces all of the senses of truth, from authenticity to justness; and the Greek system of justice opens out onto judgment and the faculty of discriminating ( krisis [ϰϱίσις], krinein [ϰϱίνειν] ). Conceived as alêtheia, the truth extends its semantic orbit to the questioning of philosophy itself, as attested by the way in which Plato calls as a witness the verses by Parmenides in order for them to confess under torture that the false presupposes the existence of non-being ( The Sophist, 237a–237b; Eng. ed. N. White ( Hackett ), 25 ): “ ‘Never shall this force itself on us, that that which is not may be; While you search, keep your thought far away from this path.’ So we have his testimony to this. And our own way of speaking itself would make the point especially obvious if we examined it a little ( basanistheis [βασανισθείς] ).” |
Since istina, like pravda, is normally translated as “truth,” the precise meaning of these two terms is thereby lost. This is why, in contexts where istina is set in opposition to pravda, the least incorrect solution is to explain the first term in terms of “philosophical truth,” or “theoretical truth,” or even “abstract truth,” which marks a clear distinction with pravda, whose meaning is “truth in justice” ( see, for example, Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 7 ). Whereas istina expresses the authenticity of “what is,” pravda emphasizes the fact that the thing has the character of being right or just.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “K filosofii postupka.” Filosofija i sociologija nauki i texniki. Moscow: Nauka, 1986. Translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov: Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Berdyayev, Nicolas. Alekseĭ Stepanovich Khomiakov. Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Vodoleĭ, 1996. First published in 1912. Translation by V. and J.-C. Marcadé, with E. Sebald: Khomiakov. Lausanne, Switz.: L’Âge d’Homme, 1988.
. Istina i otkrovenie: prolegomeny k kritike otkroveniia. St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo in-ta, 1996. Translation by R. M. French: Truth and Revelation. London: Bles, 1953.
. Ja i mir objektov. Paris: YMCA, 1934. Translation by Irène Vildé-Lot: Cinq méditations sur l’existence: Solitude, société et communauté. Paris: Aubier, 1936.
. Opyt ėskhatologicheskoĭ metafiziki: tvorchestvo i ob’ektivatsiia. Paris: YMCA, 1947. Essai de métaphysique eschatologique. Paris: Aubier, 1946. Translation by R. M. French: The Beginning and the End. New York: Harper, 1952.
Florensky, Pavel. Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: opyt pravoslavnoĭ teoditsei v dvenadtsati pis’makh. Moscow: Lepta, 2002. First published in 1914. Translation and annotation by Boris Jakim: The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Introduction by Richard F. Gustafson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Shestov, Lev. Afiny i Ierusalim. Paris: YMCA, 1951. Translation and introduction by Bernard Martin: Athens and Jerusalem. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966.
Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich. “Foundations of Theoretical Philosophy.” Translated by Vlada Tolley and James P. Scanlan. In Russian Philosophy, edited by James M. Edie et al., 99–134. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
. Sobranie sochinenij. St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911–14.
ITALIAN
A Philosophy for Nonphilosophers Too
ART, ATTUALITÀ, BEAUTY, CIVILTÀ, EUROPE, FRENCH, GOÛT, LEGGIADRIA, MÊTIS, PRAXIS, SPREZZATURA, VIRTÙ
The public of nonphilosophers are privileged interlocutors of Italian philosophers, who consider all humans not only as animals endowed with reason, but also as animals who nurture desires and formulate projects. What characterizes Italian philosophy, and what is reflected in its network of concepts, the styles of its research, and its language, is—to quote Machiavelli—the fact that it does not simply search for logical truth, but rather “the effective truth of the thing” in all its complexity. The fundamental terms of the Italian philosophical lexicon are common to the European tradition: where they are distinctive is in the expressive quality each singular author brings to them. The margin of untranslatability of these terms is thus not because of the “spirit of the language” but of the particular poetic or artistic “stamp” of the individual writers who create or reinterpret them. They are born of language that is cultivated but not specialized, clear but not technical, intuitive but not mystical: language in which the greatest mathematical rigor exists alongside the most intense pathos. In this sense, its register is characterized by an interweaving of reason and imagination, of concept and metaphor.
I. A Civil Philosophy
In the West, philosophy is for the most part transnational. If one were, as a hypothetical experiment, to trace contour lines and isobars to connect theories belonging to the same genre, but dispersed across different geographical areas, one would plainly see that these would lead us to draw maps whose borders do not coincide at all with those of existing states or national languages. Despite this, it is undeniable that Italian philosophy—like other philosophies—has acquired and retained a distinctive set of features of its own, and possesses a personal repertory of recurring themes, and of references to a particular expressive and conceptual register.
From a broad historical perspective, and taking into account the limits imposed by its irreducible complexity, the Italian language has been characterized by a constant and predominant civil vocation. By “civil” I mean a philosophy that is not immediately tied to the sphere of the state, nor to that of religion, nor to that of interiority. In fact, ever since its humanist and Renaissance origins, its privileged interlocutors have not been the specialists, clerics, or students attending university, but a wider public, a civil society one has sought to orient, to influence, to mold.
The first circle of interlocutors was made up of compatriots, fallen heirs of a great past, citizens of a community that in the beginning was simply a linguistic community, politically divided into a plurality of fragile religious states and, from a spiritual point of view, conditioned by a Catholic church that was too powerful ( Italian philosophy has consequently developed a number of supplementary functions in the face of weak political institutions, and a certain contentiousness in the face of the massive presence of the Catholic church ). The second circle—with the emphasis here on “universalist” traits—is made up of all people.
The most representative Italian philosophers, then, have not closed themselves off in narrow local circles, any more than they have devoted themselves to questions having to do with a particular logical, metaphysical, or theological sublime, as was the case in other nations—England, Germany, and Spain—where the weight of Scholastic or academic philosophy was felt for a much longer time, precisely because the caesura that humanism and the Renaissance represented was not so strong in these countries. These Italian philosophers took as their object of investigation questions that implicated virtually all of the population ( the “nonphilosophers,” as Benedetto Croce called them ), knowing full well that they were dealing with animals who not only were endowed with reason but who also nurtured desires and formulated projects, animals whose thoughts, acts, and expectations were not bound by already established forms of argumentation, or even by defined—rigorously, of course—methods and languages, but shaped in an abstract and general way.
II. “The Effective Truth of the Thing”
Italian philosophy has consequently been at its best in its attempts to find solutions to problems where the relations between the universal and the particular are at stake, where logic comes up against empiricism. These problems ( and the vocabulary to express them ) are born of the overlapping of social relations and the variables that have mixed with them. This has produced an individual conscience divided between an awareness of the limits imposed by reality and the projection of desires, between tradition and innovation, between the opacity of historical experience and its transcription in images and concepts, between the powerlessness of moral laws and the implacable nature of the world, between thought and lived experience. Whence the many—often successful—attempts to carve out spaces of rationality in territories that seem deprived of it, to give meaning to forms of knowledge and practices that often appear to be dominated by the imponderable nature of power, taste, and chance: political philosophy, the theory of history, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy ( these all being fields, moreover, where the weight of subjectivity and of individuality prove to be decisive ).
It is important to emphasize that in rejecting the predominant philosophical perspectives, it is not a matter of “weakening” claims to the intelligibility of the real, but on the contrary of the effort to highlight spaces that were all too often hastily abandoned ( and left to lie fallow ) by a reason that had identified itself excessively with the sometimes triumphant paradigms of the physical sciences and of mathematics, to the extent that it modeled itself on them. Italian philosophers are consequently philosophers more of “impure reason,” who take into account the conditioning, the imperfections, and the possibilities of the world, than philosophers of pure reason and of abstraction. In other words, they tend toward the concrete, in the etymological sense of the Latin concretus, the past participle of the verb concrescere, which refers precisely to what grows by aggregation, in a dense and bushy way ( corresponding to the English “thick,” as opposed to “thin,” in the terms first introduced several decades ago by Bernard Williams, in relation to a moral discourse that is irreducible to formulas and precepts ).
Although these philosophies are not interested in the knowledge of the absolute, of the immutable, or of norms that have no exception, they certainly do not abandon the search for truth, and are absolutely not given over to skepticism and relativism. On the contrary, the great tradition of Italian philosophy has never given up hope of the existence of a truth, or of the possibility of attaining it. This has been true since the time of Dante, who expresses it as follows:
Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia |
( I now see well : we cannot satisfy |
nostro intelletto, se ‘l ver non lo illustra |
our mind unless it is enlightened by |
di fuor dal qual nessun verso si spazia. |
the truth beyond whose boundary no truth lies. |
Posasi in esso come fera in lustra |
Mind, reaching that truth, rests within it a |
tosto che giunto l’ha : e giunger pòllo, |
a beast within its lair; mind can attain |
se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra. |
that truth—if not, all our desires were vain. ) |
( Paradiso, IV.124–29, in La divina commedia, ed. A. Lanza; trans. A. Mandelbaum in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri )
What characterizes Italian philosophy, and what is reflected in its network of concepts, the styles of its research, and its language, is—to quote Machiavelli—the fact that it does not simply search for logical truth, but rather the “verità effettuale della cosa” ( effective truth of the thing ), which often contradicts what appears in the first instance, and proves, without this being its cause, to be lacking an intrinsic rationality juxta propria principia ( according to its own principles ). But this truth is not reached through simple reasoning. That is, Italian philosophy has always maintained the tension between epistêmê and praxis, between the knowledge of what cannot be other than what it is, and the knowledge of what can be different to what it is, between the a priori and the a posteriori—not in order to stay midstream, but to cross from one bank to the other.
Although this philosophy distinguishes between the two terms, the world of thought seeks never to lose contact completely with the world of life, in the same way that it seeks not to isolate the public sphere from the private sphere. Despite the importance of the Catholic church and widespread religious practices, or perhaps because of these, a philosophy of interiority, of the dramatic or intimate dialogue with oneself, like the one that developed in France, from Pascal to Maine de Biran, or in Denmark with Kierkegaard, has essentially been absent in Italy. This is not only because of the externalizing tendency and the theatricality of the Roman Catholic rite, or the mental blocks caused by the fear of the Inquisition and the “tribunals of conscience” of the Counter-Reformation, but also because of the highly hierarchized institutionalization of the relations between the faithful and God. Unlike Lutheranism or Calvinism, Roman Catholicism is the guardian of a juridical culture, formalized over the centuries, which meticulously and knowingly regulates the behavior of the faithful. In the Italian philosophical tradition, one can consequently see, in opposition to the Protestant belief according to which sola fides justificat ( faith alone justifies ), the traces of the “religion by good works,” of the existence in the world, that are proper to Catholicism—in other words, what is not shown to be effective has no value.
The fundamental terms of the Italian philosophical lexicon ( which we will see adopted by a constellation of authors such as Machiavelli, Bruno, Galileo, Vico, Leopardi, Croce, and Gramsci ) are generally those common to the European tradition, which has its deepest roots in the trinity “Athens, Rome, Jerusalem.” Where these terms are distinctive is in the expressive quality that each singular author brings to them. In other words, the untranslatability of these terms is not the fruit of the “spirit of the language,” but derives rather from the particular poetic or artistic “stamp” of the individual writers who create or reinterpret them ( and this pertains as much to their lexicon as to their syntax ). Conversely, the apparent ease with which they can be translated is not because they have their source, as is the case for English, in everyday language, but rather because they are born of a language that is cultivated, but not specialized; clear, but not technical; intuitive, but not mystical—a language that, to paraphrase the title of a well-known work by Jean Starobinski, tends rather toward transparency than toward obstacles ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, 1971 ). This is why one needs, more than in other cultures, to know the intellectual history of Italy to understand the terms well. The degree of abstraction of concepts, or more precisely their comprehensibility, is typically higher in Italian than in English ( which is lexically far richer, with four or five times the number of words—around seven hundred and fifty thousand words, as opposed to one hundred and fifty thousand ) and not as high as in German, such that Italian concepts have to “cover” connotations that, in other languages, are distributed among several subconcepts. The syntax, in addition, does not present any particular irregularities or traps: it is generally less complex, and constructed of clauses that are shorter than the German written by Luther from Latin, but more articulated than the short, dry sentences in English. As a result, the turns of phrase and the punctuation sometimes have to be reworked to match the rhythms of the language into which Italian is translated.
The constant reference, whether implicit or explicit, to the universe defined by the idea of an effective reality proves to be fundamental from a conceptual point of view. It is, of course, close to the Aristotelian tradition of auto to pragma, of which the Sache selbst ( the fundamental matter for thought, the thing itself, the matter itself ) and the Wirklichkeit ( reality ) are what, in Hegelian terms, we would mark as the goal or the end point. However, the Italian version of this concept implies something concrete which distances it from other philosophical cultures ( for that matter, the young Hegel developed the meaning of Wirklichkeit from Machiavelli, whom he studied in order to write his uncompleted work, The German Constitution ).
■ See Box 1.
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Machiavelli: Verità effettuale della cosa and knowledge of detail Machiavelli himself might serve as the primary example, in the field of politics: the understanding of the verità effettuale della cosa ( effective truth of the thing ) is implied by the knowledge of particular things in their specificity. This does not exclude, but on the contrary presupposes, a movement of knowledge toward the universal: this also implies the overcoming ( and not the abandonment ) of the confused and distorting vision of the imagination and of opinion, as much as that ( transparent and well articulated depending on the genre ) of norms and laws that are governed by reason, without relying on the experience of concrete situations. In a chapter of the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius entitled “That though Men deceive themselves in Generalities, in Particulars they judge truly,” Machiavelli analyzes the situation in Florence after the Medici were banished from there in 1494. In the absence of a constituted government, and because of the daily worsening of the political situation, many people tended at that time to attribute responsibility for this to the ambition of the seignory. But as soon as one of them in turn managed to occupy a position of high public office, his ideas regarding the real situation of the city came closer and closer to the reality, and he abandoned both the opinions that circulated among his friends, as well as the precepts and abstract rules by which he had to begin his apprenticeship of public affairs: From time to time it happened that one or another of those who used this language rose to be of the chief magistracy, and so soon as he obtained this advancement, and saw things nearer, became aware whence the disorders I have spoken of really came, the dangers attending them, and the difficulty in dealing with them; and recognizing that they were the growth of the times, and not occasioned by particular men, suddenly altered his views and conduct; a nearer knowledge of facts freeing him from the false impressions he had been led into on a general view of affairs. But those who had heard him speak as a private citizen, when they saw him remain inactive after he was made a magistrate, believed that this arose not from his having obtained any better knowledge of things, but from his having been cajoled or corrupted by the great. ( trans. Ninian Thompson, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, 1:47 ) Whence Machiavelli’s explicit intention to remain attached to reality, without following the drifting movement of his imagination and his desires: But, it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. ( trans. W. K. Marriott, The Prince, chap. 15 ) |
III. Volgare and Poetic Logic
In its use of the volgare ( vulgar ), Italian philosophical vocabulary does not make a clean break with the scholarly language by definition, with Latin, since the relationship of the latter to the former is seen as a direct one. Latin remains, in its exemplary and “classical” simplicity, the skeleton beneath the flesh of Italian, which is linked to the spoken language of different regions. The fundamental categories of the classical and medieval philosophical tradition ( res, natura, causa, substantia, ratio, conscientia [thing, nature, cause, substance, reason, conscience] ) are not seen to require any particular interpretative effort. Unlike German ( where a philosophical term is added to that of ordinary language—for example, there is Differenz and Unterschied [difference] )—the concepts used in philosophy in Italy are the same as those used in ordinary language. In order to enrich their meaning, or acquire a greater determination, they only have to go through the “thickness” of reasoning and exempla [examples], and travel from the convent cells and university classrooms to the public squares and offices of the most cultivated citizens, and in the process, they are retranslated into spoken language. Bilingualism ( Latin/Italian ) in philosophy was very early on limited to scholars of other nations or, as was the case with Giambattista Vico, to the inaugural theses read out in an academic context ( e.g., his De nostri temporis studiorum ratione of 1708 and De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda of 1710 ). The widespread practice of using the vulgar language was helped by the fact that Italian, at least from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, was recognized as a language of culture ( a language, it is true, that was generally carried along more by melodrama, theater, and literature, than by philosophy ).
■ See Box 2.
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The “illustrious vulgar tongue”: A language for philosophy Conscious of the fact that many people had not had any philosophical training, and convinced that “all men want to know” and were thus seeking philosophical knowledge, Dante made a plan to organize a philosophical banquet that the greatest possible number of people could attend. Not only was the Convivio ( around 1304 ) conceived as a sort of summary of philosophical knowledge for the illiterate ( the non litterati ), but also it contained an explicit reflection on the transmission of knowledge, and consequently, on philosophical language. Although Dante was certainly not the first to write philosophy in the vulgar tongue, he was the person who articulated most clearly the problem of the relation between language and philosophy, and worked out all of its consequences, thereby transforming both the mode of expression and the content of philosophy. The Divine Comedy ( 1307–20 ) realized fully the ideal of such a philosophico-moral pedagogy addressed to all, and dedicated to a vast reform of the social and political world “for the good of the world which lives badly” ( in pro del mondo che mal vive ). Dante’s treatise De vulgari eloquentia ( On vernacular eloquence ), written around the same time as the Convivio, attempts to lay the theoretical foundation of a new use of the vulgar. Drawing on an analysis of the different modes of expression, the “vulgar tongue” ( locutio vulgaris ) and the “secondary tongue” ( locutio secundaria, grammatica ) ( of which the first is natural, common to all, corruptible and variable, and the second artificial, reserved for the literate, eternal and invariable with regard to place and time ), and following a historico-biblical itinerary going from the unity of the Adamic idiom to the infinite division of idioms after Babel, Dante postulates the need for an “illustrious vulgar tongue” that would avoid the disadvantages of the two spoken languages, while retaining their essential qualities ( see LANGUAGE ). This illustrious vulgar tongue, which he says should be common to all Italian city-states without belonging to any of them, is comparable to the first elements of each genre, which become their measure: The noblest signs which characterize the actions of Italians do not belong to any city state of Italy and are common to all of them; and we can put among them the vulgar tongue we banished earlier, and which breathes its perfume in each city without staying in any of them. Yet it may breathe its perfume more intensely in one city state than in another, just as the simplest of perfumes who is God breathes His perfume in men more than in beasts, in animals more than in plants, in plants more than in minerals, and in minerals more than in fire, in fire more than in the earth. ( trans. S. Botterill, De vulgari eloquentia, I, chap. 16 ) This vulgar tongue that the poet-philosopher sought—a few examples of which he recognized in several inspired contemporaries—would make it possible for the existing local vulgar tongues to be measured, evaluated, and compared. The aim of Dante’s uncompleted work was to establish the rules, as much from a grammatical as poetic or rhetorical point of view, of this vulgar tongue, which could lay claim to the universalism of Latin without having its rigidity, and to the expressiveness of the vulgar without the irregularities of fragmentation. By writing his “sacred poem,” Dante simultaneously produced a model and an exemplum. The language and the form of the Divine Comedy were the means he gave himself to create a new philosophy for a new audience: the secular public. Ruedi Imbach BIBLIOGRAPHY Alighieri, Dante. De vulgari eloquentia. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. The unfinished Latin text was composed ca. 1302–5 and published in Vicenza, Italy, as early as 1529. |
Whereas German philosophers from Hegel to Heidegger considered their eminently speculative language as the most appropriate to express philosophical thought, it never crossed the minds of Italian philosophers to make such a claim for their own language. Neither did they intentionally seek a specific technical vocabulary, relating to the philosophical koinê coming out of the European tradition. Italian philosophy aimed instead for the expressive power of concepts and of argumentation: its ideal was closer to that of music, in which the greatest mathematical rigor exists alongside the most intense pathos. As Giacomo Leopardi ( 1798–1837 ) observed of Galileo ( Zibaldone, ed. Solmi, 2:285 ), he was guided by “the association of precision with elegance.” In this sense, its register is characterized by an interweaving of reason and imagination, of concept and metaphor. Or rather, in Vico’s terms, by marrying together the logic of reason and what he refers to in the Scienza Nuova as “poetic logic.”
Because it is a question of understanding the logic of transformations, of finding a meaning to the continual becoming of things, of confronting this mutazione ( mutation ) so often mentioned by Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century as the essence of things and the source of delettazione ( delectation ) rather than of sadness and melancholy ( see his Spaccio della bestia trionfante ), the language of Italian philosophy tries to be incisive and enlightening in a familiar mode. It works far better in the form of a dialogue ( from Alberti to Galileo and Leopardi ), or in statements that are rich in figurative expressions created by the imagination, than in the dry form of a systematic treatise or a metaphysical meditation. But as with Bruno, there is always some order in the swirl of mutations, and at their heart any changes take place around a fixed pivot:
Time takes away everything and gives everything: all things change, nothing is annihilated; one alone is immutable, one alone is eternal and can remain eternally one and the same. . . . With this philosophy, my spirit takes on another dimension, and my intellect is magnified.
( Candelaio, vol. 1; trans. G. Moliterno, Candlebearer )
The fact that there is no hierarchy in the infinite universe, and as a consequence there are no absolute center and periphery, is also reflected in the syntax: given that every element of the sentence, even the commas, could become the center of the discourse, Bruno rejected—as Yves Hersant, one of his French translators, has observed—hierarchical constructions based on subordinate clauses, and his reasoning was almost always expressed using coordinated clauses ( which are typically a series of relative clauses ). In addition, he mixed together, following the whims of his imagination, the three styles ( low, middle, high ) of the Aristotelian tradition, and introduced trivial language. The vulgar and the sublime, reason and “heroic fury,” logic and the imagination, could thus exist alongside one another and fuse together.
And it was precisely this “poetic logic” of the imagination that Vico called for to show the roots of the “pure mind,” which humans attain when they are at the highest point of the development of a civilization. Through the idea of a poetic logic, Vico takes myths, religion, passions, and art out of the sterile space of the irrational and shows that they have a specific and fecund legitimacy, a logic to be exact, with rules that, while not coinciding with those of the “mind opened out” ( mente dispiegata ), illuminate the meaning of what we achieve without intending to, or unreflectively:
So that while rational metaphysics teaches us that homo intelligendo fit omnia, this imaginative metaphysics [metafisica fantastica] show that homo non intelligendo fit omnia; and perhaps there is more truth in the second statement than in the first, for man, when he understands, opens up his mind and apprehends things, but when he does not understand, he does things from himself and, transforming himself in them, he becomes these very things.
( trans. L. Pompa, The First New Science [translation modified] )
We are indebted to Vico for the discovery that the internal logic of events is not only revealed through reason but also through the imagination, which obeys laws that are in fact more constricting and more demanding than the laws of reason. And this involves a legacy from the past that we cannot suppress. In the ingens sylva ( the great forest ), where he locates the primitive relations that humans have between themselves and with nature, promiscuity reigns. Marriages do not exist, because the considered and solemn choice of a woman with whom to have one’s own children has not yet happened. Mating between bestioni ( wild animals ) is thus a matter of force and chance; dead bodies putrefy with no tombs; conflicts are resolved by force, or by cunning. The historical period that follows, however, equally obeys poetic logic—though it is now the birth of a civic order that this logic imposes. The monogamous family and religion appear, and with them, humanity leaves behind its state of savagery. The gentes majores ( those who claim to be able to interpret the visible order in the skies contemplated from the clearings in the forest [see Box 3] ) feel the need to impose from on high laws reflecting a similar order onto those who are living in anarchy. The political imagination of the gentes majores—which draws upon myths and supernatural powers, on fears and hopes—is thus at the origin of a fictional order, but in which men believe, thanks to the power of the imagination ( fingunt simul creduntque ). It regulates and gives meaning to the moments that mark the solemn emergence of a life that will from that point on be lived together: it establishes tombs for the dead, the celebration of marriage, the worship of gods. If human history has a meaning, it is not because it derives from a rational logical that is internal to events, but because an order has been imposed on these events that has come forth from the imagination, and that is little by little rationalized through myths, rites, juridical concepts, and moral obligations, all of which appear subsequently. In an effort to express the genesis of the reason that is deployed within imagination, the linear language of the Latin works by Vico becomes, in The New Science, complex and overloaded; from a syntactical point of view, parenthetical comments and digressions proliferate. But it is always powerfully expressive.
■ See Box 3.
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Illuminismo Illuminismo has nothing in common with what in French is referred to as illuminisme, whether one is talking about the doctrine of certain mystics such as Swedenborg or Böhme, or in psychiatry, “a pathological exaltation accompanied by visions of supernatural phenomena” ( Le Petit Robert ). But illuminismo, the Italian Enlightenment, is also distinct from the French Lumières, the English Enlightenment, and the German Aufklärung in its determination not to lose sight of the psychic faculties and the social conditions out of which reason emerges. Although Vico did not, strictly speaking, belong to the Enlightenment movement, we already find in him, well before Heidegger, the idea that a “clearing” has a philosophical importance, as a place where light and shadow, order and disorder meet, as well as the site of emergence of rationality and poetic fantasy. Indeed, for Vico, the first men contrasted the disorder of their existence in the ingens sylva—the great forest of their origins—with the order of the sky, to which their imagination attributes a name: So a few giants, who had to be the strongest of them, and who were spread out in the woods at the tops of the mountains, where the fiercest beasts have their lairs, terrified and astonished by the great effect of which they did not know the cause, raised their eyes and noticed the sky. . . . Then they imagined that the sky was an immense living body which, seeing it thus, they called Jupiter, the first god of the so-called gentes majores, who by the flash of lightning, and the rumble of thunder, wanted to tell them something. ( trans. L. Pompa, The First New Science, Book 1 [translation modified] ) In this way, the “opened mind” has an origin, which it is impossible to abstract, and a consistency that is continually limited by historical givens, which one cannot deduce rationally ( the “certain” and the “blind labyrinth of man’s heart” ). This “opened mind” is threatened by a return to the stages he had gone through previously, by virtue of which it can happen that those who have attained a high level of civilization “turn cities into forests, and forests into men’s lairs” ( ibid. ). A shadow of new barbarism is thus projected onto the cleared space of civilization. The figures of the Italian Enlightenment—in its two main centers, Naples and Milan—retain a close contact with civil society and practical life. The explicit refusal of metaphysics and of abstraction is exemplified by Antonio Genovesi ( 1712–69 ), the first person in Europe to be appointed to a chair in political economy ( in 1754 ), and whose thought focused on the interwoven interests and aspirations of humankind, and on the struggle against privilege. The Enlightenment philosophy of Lombardy was more oriented toward law; it also found expression in the dynamic review Il caffè ( 1764–66 ), and its major representatives were Pietro Verri ( 1728–97 ) and Cesare Beccaria ( 1738–94 ). The Enlightenment project for them, on the one hand, developed in the direction of a modernization of society, facilitating the individual search for happiness, and, on the other, aimed at making the correctional system more humane through the abolition of torture, by humanizing punishment, and by making judgments more clear-cut and quicker. The light of a human reason ( and no longer that of Providence ) that tried hard to become more just, thus struggled to break through the darkness of social life. |
IV. “Ultraphilosophy”
It was Giacomo Leopardi, however, who really attempted to establish a lasting alliance between philosophy and reason, reason and imagination, clarity and distinctness of concepts and indetermination. He challenged their reciprocal isolation to show how they were complementary in their antagonism. For Leopardi, only someone who is at the same time a philosopher and a poet can understand reality. If he does not want to be only “half a philosopher,” a thinker in effect has a duty to experience passions and illusions:
Anyone who does not have, or has never had, any imagination or feelings, anyone who is unaware of the possibilities of enthusiasm, of heroism, of vivid and great illusions, of strong and varied passions, anyone who does not know the vast system of beauty, who does not read or feel, or has never read or felt, the poets, cannot by any means be a great, true and perfect philosopher . . . it is absolutely indispensable that a man such as this be a sovereign and perfect poet. Not in order to reason like a poet, but to examine like the coldest and most calculating rationalist [ragionatore] what only the most ardent poet can know. . . . Reason needs the imagination and the illusions it destroys; the true needs the false, substance needs appearance, the most perfect insensibility needs the most vivid sensibility, ice needs fire, patience needs impatience, powerlessness needs sovereign power, the smallest needs the largest, geometry and algebra need poetry, etc.
( Zibaldone [4 October 1821] )
Leopardi is here stating a more general tendency of Italian philosophy, already present most explicitly in Vico: the determination to break down the walls separating reason from imagination, and philosophy from poetry, without, however, being responsible for confusing these roles. Each, in effect, feeds off the other, while remaining firmly in its place: philosophy occupies the space of the real, and poetry that of the imagination, which is complementary, and each recognizes the demands of the other. Because of this, the philosopher has to take into account not only truth ( this is his principal aim ) but also illusions, which are essential ingredients of human nature, and which intervene to a great degree in the existence of individuals. And it is not enough to recognize them as such, and then put them aside, since they have “very strong roots” so that even if one cuts them down and understands their vanity, “they grow back again.” However, human “noble nature,” as we read in Leopardi’s poem La Ginestra ( vv. 111–17 ), is heroically opposed to illusions and it sacrifices no part of truth, but has, on the contrary, the courage to confront these illusions ( “The noble nature is the one / who dares to lift his mortal eyes / to confront our common destiny / and, with honest words / that subtract nothing from the truth, / admits the pain that is our destiny, / and our poor and feeble state” [Leopardi, Canti, trans. J. Galassi] ).
Since it recognizes the power of illusions, philosophy consequently must, according to Leopardi, be bound to the experience of the senses, and remain close to the effective truth of the thing. This is different from what happens in the context of German culture, which, in fusing together poetry and philosophy, ends up producing hybrid philosophical poems, chimerical constructions that reach their apogee, Leopardi writes, in the self-celebration of Germany:
Che non provan sistemi et congetture
E teorie dell’alemanna gente ?
Per lor, non tanto nelle cose oscure
L’un dì tutto sappiam, l’altro niente,
Ma nelle chiare ancor dubbi e paure
E caligin si crea continuamente:
Pur manifesto si conosce in tutto.
Che di seme tedesco il mondo è frutto.
( Is there something that the systems and conjectures
And theories of the German people do not prove?
For them, they are not so many obscure things
So that one day we know everything, the next nothing.
But they are clear things that are endlessly clouded by fog
And continual doubts and fears are born;
All in all, we see manifestly
That the world is the fruit of a Germanic seed. )
( Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, l.17; trans. G. Caserta, The War of the Mice and the Crabs, 6 )
Yet the Germans ( whose philosophical culture Leopardi did not know well ) have no reason for self-celebration:
The German men of letters’ lack of a social life, and their ceaseless life of study and isolation in their offices not only divorces their thoughts from men ( and from the opinions of others ), but also from things. This is why their theories, their systems, their philosophies are for the most part poems of reason, whatever the genre they examine: politics, literature, metaphysics, morality, and even physics, etc. Indeed, the English ( such as Bacon, Newton, Locke ), the French ( such as Rousseau and Cabanis ), and even some Italians ( Galileo, Filangieri, etc. ) have made great, true and concrete, discoveries about nature and the theory of man, of governments, and so on, but the Germans have made none.
( Zibaldone [30 August 1822] )
Leopardi attempts to complete and go beyond rationalism and the Enlightenment, which the cultures of his “superb and foolish” century have blocked. He seeks to do this by elaborating an “ultraphilosophy” that is closely linked with poetry, and that is able to offer an exact assessment of the nature of man as a desiring being, but a being also incapable of realizing the infinity of its desire, and of attaining a lasting pleasure. Paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz, one might say that “ultraphilosophy” is nothing but the continuation of philosophy through other means, namely, those of poetry—means which, once they are known and used, ought nevertheless not trouble or overly excite “very cold reason.”
Philosophy should use the indeterminate beauty of poetry to reject any conception of form as pure, fixed, rigid, and innate form ( Platonic in its origin, but taken up by Christianity, and identified with God ). Since all knowledge comes from the senses, and is fueled by the imagination and by reason, beginning with a ceaseless working on the materials that are transmitted to them, humans affirm that all things are given and cannot be deduced—which contrasts with any idea of innateness:
The destruction of innate ideas destroys the principle of goodness, of beauty, of absolute perfection, as well as their opposites, that is, of a perfection which would be founded on reason, a superior form to the existence of the subjects which contain it, and thus eternal, immutable, necessary, primordial, existing before such subjects, and independently of them.
( Zibaldone [17 July 1821] )
It thus becomes absurd to speak of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, of order and disorder, as absolutes. Indeed, once innate ideas have been eliminated,
There is no other reason possible why things should be absolutely and necessarily such and such a way—some good, others bad—independently of each will, each event, each fact. The only reason that is for all, in reality, resides in these facts, and consequently this reason is always and only ever relative. So nothing is good, true, bad, ugly, false, except relatively; and the conventional relationships between things is also relative, and this, if we can put it this way, is absolutely so.
( Zibaldone [17 July 1821] )
In the metaphysical tradition, what is bad, false, or ugly has an eminently negative connotation: they are deprived, respectively, of what is good, true, and beautiful. Leopardi roots out the very assumptions of such a conception. Demonstrating that what is bad is not an accidental, voluntary, human disruption of a divine or natural order that would, if it were not for this, be perfect, he dismisses both the substantialist conception of the plenitude of being, and the thesis of the existence of a kosmos, that is, a harmonious and divine structure ( synonymous with both beauty and order ). The pillars of the architectonics of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which have been present almost continuously from Plato through to Leibniz, thus collapse. The principle of an independent ( absolutus ) order at the root of all things, a source—moral, logical, or aesthetic—of justification of the world and of human actions—this principle now ceases to exist:
For no one thing is absolutely necessary: that is, there is no absolute reason preventing it from not being, or from not being such and such a way, etc. . . . This is tantamount to saying that there is not, or there has never been, a first and universal principle of things, or that if it exists, or has existed, we cannot in any way know it, since we do not and cannot have the slightest evidence to judge things prior to things, and to know them beyond pure, real facts. . . . There is no doubt that if we destroy the pre-existing Platonic forms of things, we destroy God.
( Zibaldone )
The Summum malum falls along with the Summum bonum, Satan falls along with God. Men and their histories remain consequently alone in a cosmos that knows nothing of them, and that conceals no finality for them.
V. Historicism and the Nonphilosopher
Italian historicism ( from Croce to Gramsci ) has contested Jacobin abstractions, which Leopardi had already denounced, by highlighting the obstacles, the blocks, and the specificity—or rather the concrete nature—of each historical situation and the consequent necessity of making reality the measure of thought. Leopardi was inspired more by Vincenzo Cuoco’s Saggio sulla rivoluzione napoletana ( Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 ) than by Marx. That is, he reflected more on failed revolutions and the lessons to be drawn from sudden defeats, than on radical innovations and on preparing for new insurrections. Italian historicism is characterized precisely by the encounter between history and utopia: a history energized, structured, innervated by a utopian goal ( that of emancipation ) and a utopia held in check and weighed down, forced to take into account certain obligations and the limits of what was possible, the obstacles that lay in the way, and how one navigated one’s way through them. In the ethical and political, but also aesthetic domains, the attachment to the real, to the effective truth of the thing, the fidelity to the world and the ability to communicate, are once again valued, by Croce, for example, in opposition to empty interiority and its claims. Beauty, consequently, is nothing other than the effective expression in a singular and unique work of art, of an intuition that would otherwise remain indeterminate and without content in our feelings and in our mind, and of which we are fully conscious only because someone was able to express it. Indeed, beauty is, for Croce, when he writes his Aesthetic, “a successful expression, or better, simply expression, since when expression is not successful it is not an expression” ( trans. Colin Lyas, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General ). The proof afforded by reality, together with its communicability, shatters the prejudice hidden within the belief that the confused interiority of intention is enough to create a work of art:
One sometimes hears people say they have many great thoughts in their mind, but they cannot manage to express them. In truth, if they had them, they would have transformed them into fine, ringing words, and thus expressed them. If, when they express them, these thoughts seem to evaporate, or appear to be rare and poor, it is because they did not exist, or because they were rare or poor.
( Ibid. )
Like those who nurture illusions about the value of their own wealth, who are then harshly contradicted by mathematics, we usually tend to overestimate the intensity of our intuitive gifts. Expression—that damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t trap-that-is-also-a-bridge that Croce builds for us here—shows us our limits and, at the same time, makes us more aware of the fact that a painter “is a painter because he sees what others only feel, or glimpse, but do not see” ( ibid. ).
For Croce, the love of the concrete goes as far as a defense of “nonphilosophy,” which he declares as philosophy’s legitimate son, and which disseminates a culture, and contributes to the layering of philosophical ideas in the unreflective form of good sense:
I despise philosophy that is nasty, presumptuous and dilettante: presumptuous when it discusses difficult things as if they were not difficult, and dilettante with respect to sacred things. By contrast, I very much like the nonphilosopher, who does not get upset and remains indifferent to philosophical arguments, distinctions, and dialectics, who possesses truth by stating it in a few simple principles, and in clear sentences, which are a reliable guide for his judgment and action: the man of good sense and of wisdom.
( “Il non-filosofo,” in Frammenti di etica )
This man is, precisely, the philosopher’s son, because “good sense is in fact nothing other than the legacy of previous philosophies, which have been continually enriched by their capacity to welcome the clear results of the new kind of philosophizing. This is not a gift of nature, but the fruit of history, a product distilled by the historical labor of thought; and since he welcomes the results, and only the results, unconcerned by how they were obtained, he welcomes them without debate or subtle arguments, and without any doctrinal methods” ( ibid. ).
For Gramsci, this concern—allied to more political intentions—to build this narrow, treacherous bridge between the philosophical high-mindedness of the elite and the spontaneous philosophy of nonphilosophers, between reason and common sense, is almost obsessive:
It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all men are “philosophers,” by defining the limits and characteristics of the “spontaneous philosophy” which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; 2. “common sense” and “good sense”; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which surface collectively under the name of “folklore.”
( Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith )
The only difference between the philosophy of philosophers and that of nonphilosophers comes from the level of critical awareness and of active conceptual elaboration that each manifests or claims. Whence, the following rhetorical question:
[I]s it better to “think,” without having a critical awareness, in a disjointed and episodic way? In other words, is it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the conscious world ( and this can be one’s village or province; it can have its origins in the parish and the “intellectual activity” of the local priest or ageing patriarch whose wisdom is law, or in the little old woman who has inherited the lore of the witches or the minor intellectual soured by his own stupidity and inability to act )? Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s personality?
( Ibid. )
■ See Box 4.
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Storicismo Although Italian historicism owes its origins in part to the German Historismus of a Ranke or a Dilthey, it quickly acquired its own set of features and its originality, especially with Croce and Gramsci. It is based on the thesis of the absolute historicity and immanence of every human life and expression. History is the product of the objectification and the determinate incorporation of our actions in this unique and incredible world, or rather of the fact that the actions of everyone are inevitably caught up in the great deluge of collective events. Whence the rejection of all teleological thinking, the respect for the implacable nature of facts, and the emphasis on individual responsibility. This position, however, does not imply the acceptance of the ineluctable necessity of the course of history. On the contrary, individuals question the past and thus bring it alive and make it present, pressured by needs that are endlessly renewed and manifest, spurred on by the desire to eliminate the obscurities and phantasms that interfere with action, and to escape servitude and the weight of the past. It is thanks to reflection and philosophy—which is a metodologia della storiografia, “methodology of historiography” ( “historiography” signifying here, as Croce explains, historia rerum gestarum or “historical account of the past,” that is, not events but their interpretation in history books ), the knowledge of this “concrete universal” present in each event—that we succeed in understanding the meaning of what has been. The historical investigations of historians—and those that each of us undertakes to reconstruct the meaning of our behavior and our past—ease the route to freedom, which is understood as an awareness of necessity and a knowledge of the real possibilities of action. Historicism consequently excludes both the passive acceptance of events as well as the desire to go beyond the determining factor and limits of the real without confronting them. By converting the past into knowledge, and by understanding everything that stirs dimly within us and within the world, we are ready to realize who we are, we become creators of history. Only that which is objectified, and which enters into a relation with the activity of others, leaving behind some sign, has any permanent value—and not the feeble attempts, nor the boasts, nor the paralyses of the will that destroy our minds, nor the endless chatter. The life of the mind consists precisely in this realization of the movement of the whole in the works of the individual, which are merely functions that are subordinate to this totality. For Croce they become immortal, in a secular sense, and only have value if they consciously accept being the construction materials of a history that is unfolding above their heads, beyond their intentions, and in which they nonetheless believe: [N]o sooner is each one of our acts completed than it is separated from us and lives an immortal life, and we ourselves ( who are merely the process of our acts ) are immortals, because we have lived and are still living. ( “Religione e serenità,” Frammenti di etica, 23 ) In this one, unique world we maybe suffer, but this world alone contains the objects of our desire, of our passion, of our interest, and of our knowledge. We would not, in fact, want any other, for example, the one promised by religions: we are inextricably tied to this immanence ( this is the meaning of the expression storicismo assoluto [absolute historicism] ). We have to immerse ourselves courageously in it, accept the risk, the possibility of suffering, of disappointments, and of sadness: [I]s it worth living when we are forced to take our pulse at every moment, and to surround ourselves with useless remedies, avoiding the slightest draft because we are afraid of falling ill? Is it worth loving, when we are constantly thinking about and accommodating love’s hygiene, measuring its doses, taking it in moderation, trying from time to time to abstain from it in order to get better at abstinence, out of a fear of the overwhelming shocks and heartbreaks in the future? ( “Amore per le cose,” in Frammenti di etica, 19 ) What the Gramscian conception of history aims to do, for its part, is to provide an appropriate theoretical framework for confronting a determinate historical situation of struggle and transition, which is marked by numerous imbalances and tensions, and in which bridgeheads and delays coexist alongside one another. Such a history should in Italy, for example, play a mediating role between the industrial North and the agricultural South, between the high culture of bourgeois tradition and the superstitions or the folklore of the subaltern classes, between philosophy and myth, between the development of productive forces—understood even in the context of a Taylorist system—and the obstacles that come from outmoded or archaic relations of production. By the effort brought about to eliminate the divisions between dominant and dominated, history should be transformed on the basis of a project of collective emancipation, and not contemplated and admired like some unfathomable mystery, rendered cruel by its incomprehensible and eternal essence. Historicism is so radical and immanent that what today is true in this precise situation of historical constraint could well become false, and what is false could, at least to some extent, become true: We might even go as far as stating that, while the entire system of the philosophy of praxis could become obsolete in a unified world, many idealist conceptions, or at least certain aspects of these, which are utopian during the period of necessity, could become “truths” after this has passed, etc. ( Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith ) |
The almost neorealist value of concrete lived experience, of the link between determinate historical and economic situations, is also central to Italian historicism in general, including after Croce and Gramsci. It is manifest in the recognition of rights and of the implacable nature of time itself, and by the refusal to take refuge in the corrupt shelter of consciousness, in the comforting but sterile isolation of private space, or to seek a way to escape into glorious but illusory utopias that promise immediate regeneration. According to historians, we should accentuate the link between philosophy and the effective history of men, or the “real roots of ideal choices,” since philosophy consists of “recovering the humanity of thought, of rekindling the humanity of thought, the human flesh without which these thoughts would not be in the world” ( E. Garin, La filosofia come sapere storico ). Each philosophy thus relies on the fact that men change, as do the intellectual tools used to understand reality. The historian of philosophy from now on discovers “in place and instead of philosophy understood as the autonomous development of a self-sufficient knowledge, a plurality of fields of investigation, of positions, of visions, in relation to which the unity of the act of philosophizing is conceived as a certain level of critical awareness, or at the very most, as the need to unify the different fields of research” ( V. Verra, La filosofia dal’45 ad oggi ). Once again, in historicism, philosophy is conceived as being itself directed toward the concrete, and aims ultimately to become the point of liaison between what is experienced and what is thought.
VI. Mechanê and Machines
When we again consider, from the point of view of the sciences, the basic characteristics of Italian philosophy, whether translatable or untranslatable, we note the fundamental contribution made by Italy, from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo, from Volta to Pacinotti, from Marconi to Fermi. Oddly, we might also observe that there has never been any indigenous reflection on the philosophy of science or on logic—if we exclude Galileo himself and the figures ( who for a long time remained rather isolated ) of Peano, Vailati, and Enriques. As a consequence, no technical or specialized language has been disseminated, and in general it has recently been imported from the Anglo-Saxon world.
However, Galileo is an excellent example of the particular attitude of the Italian tradition that seeks, on the one hand, to position itself from the point of view of nonphilosophers and nonspecialists alike, and on the other, to show that behind general and abstract formulae lie hidden unexpected situations, but ones that have their own logic, which we understand by respecting the specificity of the object. Thus, through his crystalline prose, Galileo constantly puts himself in these dialogues in the position of an interlocutor, Simplicio, designed to represent in exemplary fashion the way of thinking that was dominant at the time in the scientific community, the one that drew on the well-established authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Galileo sought to refute this authority by means of “experiments undertaken and demonstrations that were certain,” but certainly not to ignore it. On the contrary, he kept it as a constant point of reference, and as an indicator of a common sense that had to be raised patiently to the level of a new scientific knowledge. As a representative of the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1604 by Federico Cesi, Galileo’s ideal was precisely to have the eye of a lynx in searching for the truth where it was the most difficult to reach, and where appearances could often be deceptive.
In his research, Galileo advocates starting out from simple elements that, when combined together, offer the meaning of what is more complex:
I have a little book, shorter than Aristotle’s or Ovid’s, which contains every science and does not demand lengthy study: it is the alphabet; anyone able to assemble vowels and consonants in an ordered way will find in it a source of the truest answers to all questions, and will draw from it teachings of all the sciences and all the arts; this is exactly the way in which a painter, with the different plain colors next to one another on his palette, knows how, in mixing a little bit of one to another, and even adding a little bit of a third, to represent men, plants, buildings, birds, fish, in short, to imitate all visible objects; and yet on his palette there are no eyes, feathers, scales, leaves or stones.
( trans. S. Drake, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems )
This is the route by which abstractions are incarnated in reality, that is, the letters of the alphabet transformed into terms that have meaning, colors into eyes and feathers, numbers and geometrical figures into physical beings. But Galileo also ventured down an opposing path. According to this latter method, he proceeded by excarnation, as Yves Bonnefoy would say, in order to extract the general rules of the living flesh of particular cases, knowing full well that this could then lead to dead ends. This is why he wrote in praise of the progressive discovery of reality, in its specific and distinct traits, a discovery that has to go beyond false analogies in order to privilege the faculty of discrimination and that also has to sometimes conclude with a declaration of provisional ignorance. This is well illustrated by the parable of the “man gifted by nature with a perceptive mind and an extraordinary curiosity” ( Galileo, “Il Saggiatore: The Assayer,” in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618. trans. S. Drake and C. D. O’Malley ), who at first confuses the song of a bird with the sound of a bird whistle, and then slowly begins to distinguish this latter sound from the music played by a stringed instrument, and from the sound made by rubbing a finger around the edge of a glass, or by the buzzing of the wings of a fly. Finally, when he tries to understand where the shrill sound of a cicada comes from, “having pulled off the front of its chest and seeing below it a few hard but fine cartilages, and thinking that the chirping came from their vibration” ( ibid. ), he kills it by dissecting it, so that “he removed both its voice and its life . . . he reached from this such a point of mistrust vis-à-vis his own knowledge, that if anyone asked him how sounds are made, he replied honestly that he knew a few ways, but felt certain that there could be a hundred other unknown and undreamed of” ( ibid. ).
In this sense, the logic of discovery for Galileo was open to what was new, and was not yet reducible to the compact unity of a theory:
I do not want our poem to be restricted to unity to the point where we can no longer give free rein to circumstantial episodes: all they need is to have some link to what we are saying; it is as if we had gathered to tell stories, and I said allow me to say the one that comes to my mind after hearing yours.
( trans. S. Drake, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems )
The famous statement about the world being written in mathematical characters does not allow us to deduce from these a priori forms any similarly certain knowledge regarding physical space. Let us look at this text again:
Philosophy is written in this immense book which is always open before our eyes, I mean the Universe, but we cannot understand it if we do no apply ourselves to understanding first of all its language, and to knowing the characters with which it is written. It is written in a mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it would be humanly impossible to understand a single word. Without these, we would just be wandering vainly in a dark labyrinth.
( “Il Saggiatore: The Assayer,” in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, trans. S. Drake and C. D. O’Malley )
Galileo was well aware that there is a clear difference between mathematical models and physical reality, even though this reality could and had to be read, ultimately, using these very instruments. The engineers, artisans, and workers at the arsenal in Venice, when they built their ships, for example, learned that there was no correspondence between scale models and real models, between abstract theory and the practice dictated by lived experience. Indeed when Salviati, at the beginning of the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, recommends that philosophers and theoreticians of nature go to visit the world of those who know how to build machines, he is certainly not arguing in favor of practice over theory: “The constant activity which you Venetians display in your famous arsenal suggests to the studious mind a large field for investigation, especially that part of the work which involves mechanics; for in this department all types of instruments and machines are constantly being constructed by many artisans, among whom there must be some who, partly by inherited experience and partly by their own observations, have become highly expert and clever in explanation” ( trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences ). As the character Sagredo observes, the fact that in the construction of ships, scale models are not equivalent to real models implies that “in speaking of these and other similar machines one cannot argue from the small to the large, because many devices which succeed on a small scale do not work on a large scale” ( ibid. ). So geometry is not applicable sic et simpliciter ( purely and simply ) to physical reality. When one goes from a small-scale model of a ship to the real ship, the same elements of the wooden structure that at first resisted and bore the weight and the strains of the materials that rested on them, could then break because of the change in scale. Consequently, the unchanging nature of properties belonging to geometrical figures does not always apply in physics: “Now, since mechanics has its foundation in geometry, where mere size cuts no figure, I do not see that the properties of circles, triangles, cylinders, cones and other solid figures will change with their size” ( ibid. ).
The case of Galileo, who wondered why abstract mathematical reason could not have the effects on reality that we might intuitively assume it would have, did not lead to the surrender of rationality in its confrontations with aconceptual practices, but on the contrary, to the birth of a new form of knowledge, as is the ( exemplary ) case with modern mechanics. In order to grasp the innovative nature of Galileo’s propositions in this domain, we need to measure the distance with respect to the long tradition that began in ancient Greece, and continued up until his time. The term mekhanê originally meant “ruse,” “deception,” “artifice,” and it had already appeared in the Iliad ( VIII.177 ) in this sense of the term. It was only later that it referred to machines in general ( in a sense that is close to the connotations of the “appropriate use of an instrument” and of “theatrical machine,” from which the expression theos epi mekanêi ( deus ex machina ) is derived, and in particular to simple machines—levers, pulleys, wedges for cutting, inclined planes, screws, and then to war machines, and to automatons.
Mechanics, the knowledge concerned with machines, was thus born with this distinctive trait: it was assigned to the construction of artificial entities, of traps fabricated against nature in order to capture its energy and to channel it to the advantage of humans, and according to their whims. But why do machines have a semantic legacy having to do with ruse and deception? We do not understand, for example, how a lever can lift enormous weights with the minimum of effort, nor how a cutting wedge manages to split stones or gigantic tree trunks. The Quaestiones mechanichae, for a long time attributed to Aristotle, provide a testimony to this astonishment when they state clearly that “many marvelous things, whose cause is unknown, happen according to the order of nature, while others happen against this order, produced by technê for men’s benefit” ( 847a ). When nature is contrary to our own usefulness, we succeed in mastering it by means of artifice ( mechanê ). In this way, technique allows us to conquer nature in circumstances where it would otherwise conquer us. On this strange ( atopos ) genre, the treatise again adds that “these are things by which the least triumphs over the greatest,” as in the case of the lever, precisely, which enables great weights to be lifted with little effort.
The mechanical arts, because they belong to the realm of the ruse and of that which is “against nature,” are not part of physics, which concerns what belongs to the order of nature. What is more, for the Greeks only mathematics and astronomy are sciences in the true sense of the term, in that they are not concerned with things that can be other than what they are, and that therefore do not have the character of being necessary—this is the case of those things linked to praxis ( Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.5.1140a and VI.6.1140b ). These sciences thus enjoy the privileges of necessity and of a priori knowledge, since they are true independently of experience. In the vast debate on the relation between phusis and nomos, mechanics has been resolutely defined, since its mythical origins with Daedalus and Icarus, as antinature, whereas medicine, which appears, for example, in the treatises De arte ( On Art ) and De victu ( On Diet ) from the Hippocratic corpus, is presented instead as a science that supplements and imitates nature.
With Galileo, we begin to realize that we command nature by obeying it, that it cannot simply be mistreated and that the main responsibility of mechanics is not to astonish us. In order to master nature, we have to serve it, yield to its laws and its injunctions, taking advantage of its knowledge. The concept of ruse, in the sense in which the weakest gets the better of the strongest, and where a man such as Ulysses deceives the obtuse Polyphemus that is nature, loses its pertinence. For Galileo, there is no longer any need to divert nature from its course, to torture it, to put it on the rack so as to force it to reveal its secrets, as Francis Bacon wanted to do, opposing not the ruse to the force of nature, but a counterviolence. Man, “vicar of the Most-High,” can and must, according to Bacon, exert violence upon nature, for the surest method when faced with matter, which, like Proteus undergoes continual metamorphoses, is to stop it, to block the process of its changes: “And that method of binding, torturing, or detaining, will prove the most effectual and expeditious, which makes use of manacles and fetters; that is, lays hold and works upon matter in the extremest degrees” ( Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients ).
For Galileo, this kind of violence disappears, precisely because mechanics ceases to be against nature. The formula PxFxDxV indicates the conquest of rationality by means of product of four “things” that have to be considered in their reciprocal relations: “namely the burden that one wishes to transport from one place to another; the force which has to move it; the distance it has to be moved; and the time of the said movement, because it is used to determine the speed, since it is all the greater if the moving body, or the burden, travels a larger distance in the same time” ( trans. S. Drake, On Mechanics, 23–24 ). If we examine the weight necessary to move a body from one place to another, the force necessary for this operation, the distance this body travels, and the time this movement takes ( speed ), we can clearly see that one parameter gains what another loses. So using a lesser force is compensated by a longer traction time, as in the case of the lever that lifts great weights with little effort.
Galileo showed, by means of true and necessary demonstrations, that mechanics were disappointed when they wanted to use machines in a number of operations that are by nature impossible. We should not give in to the dream of catching nature out ( or with its guard down, so to speak ), of getting it to bend to our will:
It has seemed well worthwhile to me, before we descend to the theory of mechanical instruments, to consider in general and to place before our eyes, as it were, just what the advantages are that are drawn from those instruments. This I have judged the more necessary to be done, the more I have seen ( unless I am much mistaken ) the general run of mechanicians deceived in trying to apply machines to many operations impossible by their nature, with the result that they have remained in error while others have likewise been defrauded of the hope conceived from their promises. These deceptions appear to me to have their principal cause in the belief which these craftsmen have, and continue to hold, in being able to raise very great weights with a small force, as if with their machines they could cheat nature, whose instinct—nay, whose most firm constitution—is that no resistance may be overcome by a force that is not more powerful than it. How false such a belief is, I hope to make most evident with true and rigorous demonstrations that we shall have as we go along.
( trans. S. Drake, On Mechanics, 147 )
From this perspective, it is precisely machines—which will after Galileo be built according to fully rational criteria and calculations, going beyond the “approximate” empirical system, in the sense in which Alexandre Koyré understands it ( From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe )—that take away from slavery its advantages of efficiency and low cost, and enable it to be virtually abolished. The force of human labor, in the form of a pure expenditure of energy, is no longer indispensable, whereas—and this is one of Galileo’s other great intuitions—machines will henceforth substitute for the lack of intelligence of natural forces, and of animals that expend energy. By means of “artifices and inventions,” they will be capable of saving people their energy and money, by transferring to inanimate and animate nature the burden of providing the energy that had previously been oriented toward the “desired effect.” What is important here, as often in the whole of the Italian tradition, is the idea of a conscious control over partially spontaneous processes ( natural or historical ). We sometimes intervene in these latter forces by directing them toward the future on the basis of present mutations, following the principle stated in chapter 2 of Machiavelli’s Il Principe: “sempre una mutazione lascia l’addentellato per la edificazione dell’altra” ( for any change always leaves a toothing-stone for further building” [trans. Q. Skinner and R. Price, The Prince, 6] ).
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