L

LANGUAGE

CATALAN			llengua, lenguatge, parla
ENGLISH			language, tongue, speech
FRENCH			langue, langage, parole
GERMAN			Sprache, Rede
GREEK			logos [λόγος], glôssa [γλῶσσα], idiôma [ἰδίωμα]
ITALIAN			lingua, linguaggio, favella, parlare
LATIN			eloquium, lingua, loquela, idioma, locutio, sermo, oratio
PORTUGUESE			língua, linguagem, falar
ROMANIAN			limba, limbaj, vorbire
RUSSIAN			jazyk [язьɪκ], reč’ [pеɥь]
SPANISH			lengua, lenguaje, favella, habla( r )

  DISCOURSE, LOGOS, MANIERA, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPEECH ACT, TERM, TO TRANSLATE, WORD

From the unity of logos to the multiplicity of Latin terms, by way of the overt binary ( for example, the German Sprache/Rede ), or ternary oppositions ( for example, the French langue/langage/parole ), history shows us that, when referring to relatively circumscribed realities ( the speech organ, the faculty of speech, the means of expression particular to a group, the set of terms, the particularity of style, usage ) or precise oppositions ( individual/common, etc. ), the same terms have sometimes been used with opposite meanings, and these shifts of meaning are clear and identifiable. The different theories of language have opted, within the multiplicity, even profusion, that each language offers, for a set of terms that in each case is quite limited. They have defined them in contrastive fashion in order to posit the oppositions they required, and in order thereby to specify the subject of the discipline. There is nothing, moreover, preventing a later theory that starts out with the same set of terms from giving different definitions of these terms.

I. The Emergence of the Differentiation of Langue/Langage/Parole

A. From language to the language sciences

The first attested meaning of lingua, lingue ( ca. 980 ) was an “organ situated in the mouth,” from the Latin lingua ( which accounts for the metonymy of the French expression mauvaise langue, “malicious gossip,” from 1260 on, in the sense of “malicious words,” then of “malicious person” ). The meaning of a “system of expression particular to a group” is attested at the same period, but more in the sense of “shared language,” except when the noun is qualified or determined in some way. The French word idiome ( idiom ), a gallicization of idiomat, borrowed from the Low Latin idioma, also had the meaning of a “language or way of speaking particular to a region,” and then much later of a “particularity of style.” Langage in French, first noted as lentguage ( ca. 980 ), designated the properly human faculty of expressing oneself and communicating. But from the twelfth century on, the word meant “speaking” or “speech,” sometimes with pejorative connotations ( bavardage, “gossip” ), with parole later taking on this sense. Langage in the sense of a “way of speaking particular to a people” would give way to langue, but would subsist as a “way of speaking particular to an individual or a group” ( cf. “diplomatic language” ). Its definition as an organized system of signs used to communicate would enable it to be extended to nonlinguistic systems ( “the language of art, of colors” ) ( RT: DHLF ). The English term “language” was borrowed from the Old French lenguage around 1280, in the sense of a “way of speaking,” then, of a “national language.”

In 1765, Diderot, in the RT: Encyclopédie, criticized the common definition of langue as a “succession or accumulation of words and expressions” ( cf. RT: Dictionnaire universel ),
saying that it in fact described a “vocabulary” rather than a “language,” a term that covered not only words and their meanings, but also all the figurative turns of phrase, the connotations of words, the way the language was constructed, and so on. Langue would need to be defined more precisely, as the “totality of the usages of the voice belonging to a nation,” insofar as one should consider “the expression and communication of thoughts, according to the most universal views of the mind, and the views most common to all men,” and not the particularities specific to a nation and the ways it speaks, for which the term idiome would be used, with
parole referring to language in general ( “La parole is a sort of painting of which thought is the original” ). This division allowed for a distinction to be made between Grammaire
générale ( Standard Grammar ) considered as a “science” concerned with the “immutable and general principles of the spoken and written word,” and “particular grammars” understood as “arts” that study the ways the practical usages of a language are applied to these general principles of spoken language ( see Auroux, L’encyclopédie: “Grammaire” et “langue” au XVIIIe siècle ).

The distinction between langue and parole drawn in Ferdinand de Saussure’s RT: Cours de linguistique générale ( Course in General Linguistics ) allows one to distinguish the code from its use, the social from the individual, the essential from the accidental, and thereby enables the science of language to become a stable object, with langage referring to the faculty ( see section B, below ). The same epistemological necessity would lead Chomsky to distinguish between “competence” and “performance,” though we cannot superimpose these two conceptual pairs, especially since, if the Saussurean langue is envisaged as a “treasure trove,” a passive container full of isolated “signs,” Chomskean “competence” is in contrast a set of “rules” allowing one to generate an infinite set of possible combinations of a given language, from a universal and innate linguistic faculty. For other linguists, such as Antoine Culioli, langage does not fall outside of the field of linguistics, nor is it the concern of physiology, psychology, or even philosophy ( cf. the “philosophy of language” ), but it is precisely linguistics’ own ultimate object, insofar as it is apprehended on the basis of the diversity of langues ( whence the plural expression in French, sciences du langage “sciences of language,” often preferred nowadays to linguistique, “linguistics,” to describe the discipline ).

B. The Saussurean pair langue/parole and its translations

1. Langue/parole

The terminological pair langue/parole has become widely accepted on the basis of the importance Ferdinand de Saussure conferred on it. Indeed, in chapter 3 of the Course in General Linguistics we read:

By distinguishing between the language itself [la langue] and speech [la parole], we distinguish at the same time: ( 1 ) what is social from what is individual, and ( 2 ) what is essential from what is ancillary and more or less accidental.

The language itself is not a function of the speaker. It is the product passively registered by the individual.  . . . 

Speech, on the contrary, is an individual act of will and the intelligence, in which one must distinguish: ( 1 ) the combinations through which the speaker uses the code provided by the language in order to express his own thought, and ( 2 ) the psycho-physical mechanism which enables him to externalize these combinations.

In fact, Saussure’s chapter is marked by a torrent of distinctions. Upstream, we find an initial split being made between langage and langue ( langage has to be discarded because this term is too “heterogeneous” ). But the presumed “homogeneity” of langue requires a new demarcation ( or “separation” ), one that distances it precisely from parole, to the extent that it produces two clearly opposable “linguistics,” in the same way the “social” is opposed to the “individual,” and even more so, the “essential” to the “accidental.” This distinction is reinforced by the term “subordination”—that is, of parole to langue—such that:

It would be possible to keep the name linguistics for each of these two disciplines. We would then have a linguistics of speech. But it would be essential not to confuse the linguistics of speech with linguistics properly so called. The latter has linguistic structure as its sole object of study.

It is obvious that we have now left the realm of methodology and are entering that of ontology, which raises a formidable problem. Should the lived experience of a language be the deciding factor here, or should it be the conceptual imposition of the theorist? Is the latter not setting him- or herself up as a supreme judge, who is in danger of forcing the summoned “object” to submit to his decisions as an interpreter and organizer? And a theorist consolidates her authority even more through the power of an undisputed conclusion—indeed, as history will go on to confirm, this distinction between langue and parole has for a long time now been accepted as an indisputable axiom of any linguistics worthy of the name.

2. Binary or ternary, depending on the language

Saussure’s Course, however, manifests a certain reticence in this regard:

[T]he distinctions established are not affected by the fact that certain ambiguous terms have no exact equivalents in other languages. Thus in German the word Sprache covers individual languages [langue] as well as language in general [langage], while Rede answers more or less to “speech” [parole], but also has the special sense of “discourse.” . . . No word corresponds precisely to any of the notions we have tried to specify above. That is why all definitions based on words are vain. It is an error of method to proceed from words in order to give definitions of things.

This is a strange statement for a linguist to make, even more so for one who is an avowed partisan of the “arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign” ( unless we hold the editors of the Course responsible on this point, and not Saussure himself ). Whatever the case may be, if we turn our attention back to words, we have to admit that they do float around without any secure points of anchorage. This is confirmed by Eugen Coseriu who, while stating that this duality works in most languages, is forced to accept that it is displaced and complicated by a second distinction between two varieties of language, that is, those that have only a binary distinction, and those that present a ternary distinction. So we have:

a. Binary type ( langage-langue/parole )

b. Ternary type ( essentially the Romance languages )

The elements provided by Tullio de Mauro ( critical edition of the Cours de linguistique générale ), however, give a ternary structure also for Polish ( jezyk / mowa / mowa jednostkowa ) and for Magyar ( nyelvezet/nyelv/beszéd ), which relativizes the exclusive privilege accorded to Romance languages. What is more, he stresses the specific complexities of German, English, and Italian, and we can already see a blurring of terms in the table above ( there are sometimes several words on the same line, and one could add govorenie [говорениe] to the Russian reč’ ). We can assume, therefore, that the premise of an orderly distribution ( between languages, and within each language ) has to be significantly qualified. So it is reasonable to formulate the hypothesis that if one looks hard enough, one will always find a way to expand or reduce the desired number of categories. The lists of categories thus end up confirming the theory of the “arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign”: signifiers ( signifiants ) have no fixed meaning, and attempting to distribute them leads to their dispersion, which is consequently followed by a dispersion of signifieds ( signifiés ). Should the distinction between langue and parole be described, then, as “factitious,” in Descartes’s sense ( factae; in Meditatio, 3a  )?

3. The dynamics of oppositions

We should begin by challenging the rather casual opposition between “factitious” and “innate” ( or between “accidental” and “essential” ). The concept presented to us in this terminological pair is precisely duality itself, that is, a dynamic relation with no separation or merging of the terms—or, even more radically, with no “subordination” of one term to the other. Such subordination remains the strongest temptation when the schematization of aspects of language is attempted, with the most perverse of effects ( we have to put everything into one of the terms—langue—so as not to leave a merely insignificant residue in the other, at the expense of their mutual disqualification ). We can find a clue if we go further upstream from Saussure, to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is perhaps his hidden counterpart. The aspect of language that holds and stimulates his interest most keenly is the fact that it appears as both object and subject, in a paradoxical coincidence of opposites ( or of terms judged as such by abstract understanding ):

Language is as much an object and independent as it is a subject and dependent. For nowhere does it have . . . any permanent foundation, but it must always be produced anew in one’s thought, and consequently come down entirely on the side of the subject: but the characteristic property of the act of this production is to convert it immediately into an object; in so doing it involves at every moment the action of an individual, an action that is already linked in itself by all of its present and past operations.

( Die Sprache ist gerade insofern Object und selbständig, also sie Subject und abhängig ist. Denn sie hat nirgends . . . eine bleibende Stätte, sondern muß immer im Denken aufs neue erzeugt werden; es liegt aber in dem Act dieser Erzeugung sie gerade zum Object zu machen: sie erfährt auf diesem Wege jedesmal die ganze Erwirkung des Individuums, aber dieser Einwirkung ist schon in sich durch das, was sie wirkt und gewirkt hat, gebunder. )

( Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie
[Writings on the Philosophy of Language] )

Humboldt was endlessly fascinated by this interweaving of opposite and complementary poles, and it led him in the end to a famous and obscure pair, which moreover he expressed in Greek: ergon/energeia. These, however, could be replaced with other terms, for example, Macht ( the sheer power of the elements memorized ) as opposed to Gewalt ( the enthusiastic initiative of an individual ). Humboldt’s investigation of this string of terminological couples led him finally to what is perhaps the most striking and provocative statement in his work:

[I]t is just as correct to say that the human race only speaks one language as it is to say that every man possesses his own language.

( [D]aß man ebenso richtig sagen kann, daß das ganze Menschengeschlecht nur Eine Sprahce, als daß jeder Mensch eine besondere besitzt. )

( ibid. )

The power of language does not allow itself to be distributed into moments ( increasing or decreasing, widespread or restricted, essential or ancillary ). The universal and the singular exist side by side, or to put it more precisely, they only appear in their reciprocal tension, or their productive interaction ( a coordination without subordination ).

In the tradition that flows from Humboldt, then, coordination inevitably prevails, even at the expense of more or less happy or loose compromises, which accept the agreement of the reconciled dualities. This is true of the now classic pair modus/dictum ( see DICTUM ). Thus Charles Bally:

An explicit sentence comprises . . . two parts: one correlates to the process that constitutes representation ( for example, rain, a cure ); we will call this, following the example of logicians, the dictum.

The other contains the key element of the sentence, namely, the expression of modality, correlative to the operation of the thinking subject. The logical and analytical expression of modality is a modal verb: both constitute the modus, which complements the dictum.

Modality is the soul of the sentence, it is constituted essentially by the active operation of the speaking subject. . . . 

. . . the modus is the theme, and the dictum the substance of what is said in an explicit statement.  . . . The modus and the dictum complement one another.

( Bally, Linguistique générale et linguistique française, §§28 and 32 )

This is equally true of the pair “type/token” ( see PROPOSITION, Box 4 ). Here, for example, is C. S. Peirce:

A common mode of estimating the amount of matter in a MS or printed book is to count the number of words. There will ordinarily be about twenty the’s on a page, and of course they count as twenty words. In another sense of the word “word”, however, there is but one word the in the English language; and it is impossible that this word should lie visibly on a page or be heard in any voice, for the reason that it is not a Single thing or Single event. It does not exist; it only determines things that do exist. Such a definitely significant Form, I propose to term a Type. A Single event which happens once and whose identity is limited to that one happening or a Single object or thing which is in some single place at any one instant of time . . . such as this or that word on a single line of a single page of a single copy of a book, I will venture to call a Token.

( Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 4, §537 )

The same classic distinction informs Chomsky’s duality of “competence” and “performance,” which the author himself compares to the Saussurean pair:

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors ( random or characteristic ).  . . . To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker-hearer is only one. . . . We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence ( the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language ) and performance ( the actual use of language in concrete situations ). Only under the idealization set forth in the preceding paragraph is performance a direct reflection of competence. In actual fact, it obviously could not directly reflect competence.  . . . The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. . . . The distinction I am noting here is related to the langue-parole distinction of Saussure.

( Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax )

Chomsky’s distinction has the merit of being highly manipulable, and it is strengthened by its assumed close fidelity to its object. One might suspect, however, that this overly harmonious symmetry erases the interactive complexity of the problem that needs to be resolved.

This is why, downstream from Saussure, one of the most interesting studies appears to be the one proposed by Ludwig Jäger, which Thomas Scheerer summarizes as follows: what we are dealing with is a chiasmic classification based on the four concepts “actual/virtual” and “individual/social.” So we have:

1. As far as the virtual ( in absentia ) is concerned, the distinction between, on one hand, an “individual” concept of a language ( in the sense of subjective, internalized processes ), corresponding to the Saussurean concepts of “treasure trove,” “repository,” “memory,” and on the other hand, a social concept of language ( in the sense of a social, semiological institution, whose value is intersubjective ), corresponding to the Saussurean concepts of “social crystallization,” “social secretion,” “social product.”

2. As far as the actual ( in praesentia ) is concerned, the distinction between, on one hand, an “individual” concept of speech ( in the sense of subjective realizations of the possibilities given by the internalized and intersubjective potentials of language ), and on the other hand, a “social” concept of speech ( in the sense of an intersubjective—dialogical—production endowed with a new meaning, corresponding to the Saussurean concepts of “analogy” and of “parasemic creation” ).

The interesting aspect of this proposition is the concern to find a middle way, though not a reductive one, between the Saussurean duality proper, with its distinctions and its blind alleys, and the need for an order that does not sacrifice the complexity of the problem. This problem, once it has come to light, remains forever a source of torment, which from time to time generates illuminating conjectures.

II. From the Oneness of Logos to the Complexity of the Medieval Semantic Field

The difficulty of translating ancient texts into modern languages is dramatically illustrated by the terminological network that concerns us. On the one hand, we have the almost absolute oneness of logos in Greek, which by itself covers all the modern terms referring to the linguistic field, and even beyond, leaving just a small place for glôssa. In classical Latin, on the other hand, logos scatters into ten or more terms, whose meanings are more or less set. Medieval Latin inherits this diversity, with no real possibility of putting these terms into any order: indeed, it has to deal with a number of real legacies, via the transmission of texts, which come into conflict with specific and new terminological choices. These new choices are linked both to choices of translation in philosophical and religious texts ( so, for example, it is lingua that appears in the Vulgate Latin as the expression used to talk about the confusio linguarum, but it is locutio that is retained for translating the famous passage from De anima, see section II.B.2, below ), to theoretical choices in the elaboration of a particular doctrine ( the opposition between lingua and idiomata in Roger Bacon ), and to different uses of terms’ former connotations, notably with the aid of some celebrated etymologies ( see the one for idioma ).

A. Glôssa/logos: Langue/langage, parole, and so forth

In ancient Greek, logos [λόγος] was a catchall word covering everything: it referred to a particular language or tongue, language in general, speech, and more generally discourse, but also the faculty of thinking and of speaking, and more generally relation ( see LOGOS )—everything, that is, except for the tongue as an organ, for which the term was glôssa [γλῶσσα] ( in Aristotle’s biological treatises, for example ). Glôssa, however, has the same kind of metonymic extension as langue in French: the tongue as an organ that is common to humans and animals ( Homer, Iliad, 1.249, Odysseus, 1.332 ), and the tongue as an organ of speech ( Hesiod, Works and Days, 707 ). So it can mean speaking as opposed to acting ( Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 813 ), or feeling or thinking ( Euripides, Hippolytus, 612; Lucien, Pro lapsu inter salutendum [On a Mistake in Greeting], 18 ). Since Homer, the term glôssa has also referred to the tongue we speak—understood generically to designate all language when the language spoken is Greek, or restrictively, when it is a foreign or barbarian tongue that is being alluded to, as idiom ( Iliad, 2.804, 4.438; Herodotus, 1.57 ). “To speak a language” can be rendered as glôssan nomizein [γλῶσσαν νομίζειν], to have it in practice ( Herodotus, 1.142 ), or chrêsthai [χϱῆσθαι], to use it ( 4.109 ); and dialects are seen as “derivations” or “alterations” of a language, tropous paragôgeôn [τϱόπουςπαϱαγωγέων] ( 1.142.8 ) ( see TO TRANSLATE, section I ). In rhetoric and poetics, particularly in Aristotle, glôssai are archaic or dialectal terms ( “signal words” for Hardy, “borrowed names” for Dupont-Roc and Lallot; see WORD, II.B.1 ), as opposed to the “word” properly speaking ( kurion [ϰύϱιον] ), which can at times elevate the logos, and sometimes make it incomprehensible ( Poetics, chaps. 21 and 22; in particular, 1458a 22–26 ). Finally, glôssai would later refer to the tongues of fire of the Pentecost.

It is worth noting that in Greek glôssai and logoi, in the plural, do not usually or primarily refer to the same reality as in the singular ( logos: thought-speech, etc.; logoi, propositions, definitions; glôssa: tongue as an organ, and one language as distinct from another; glôssai: archaisms or obscurities ).

Glôssa in the sense of “tongue” is distinct from the universality of the logos defining the humanity of humankind, in that it is linked to the differences between languages, and to human diversity. We tend therefore to reserve “language” ( langage ) for logos, and “tongue” ( langue ) for glôssa. In addition, we might be tempted to say that parole, in the Saussurean sense of an individual act, has no equivalent in ancient Greek, but this would be to forget that logos is first and foremost discursiveness, act, performance, and thus quite appropriate to designate a speech-act—but only insofar as it is a universally singular act defining the human ( see SPEECH ACT ).

■ See Box 1.

1

Sprache/Rede, langue/parole? Heidegger as a reader of the Greeks

Heidegger states, in §34 of Being and Time, in the course of an analysis of speech as existential: “The Greeks had no word for langue ( Sprache ), they understood this phenomenon ‘from the beginning’ as parole ( Rede ).” The difference established between Sprache and Rede is by no means self-evident, however—added to this initial difficulty is that of its translations into French, which vary considerably: translations either stress the opposition langue/parole, as in the version above by François Vezin, or, on the contrary, they join the terms together, as twin sisters opposed to Rede, as in the translation by Emmanuel Martineau: “The Greeks have no word for Sprache ( parole, langue ), they understood this phenomenon ‘from the very first’ in the sense of parler [act of speaking].”

The distinction Sprache/Rede is a classic one in German, and we find it notably in Goethe ( Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth], pt. 2, bk. 10 ): “Schreiben ist ein Mißbrauch der Sprache, still für sich lesen ein trauriges Surrogat der Rede” ( Writing is a misuse of language, reading quietly to oneself is a sad substitute for live conversation ). It is to the ancient tradition, still prevalent in the Middle Ages, of reading out loud that Goethe contrasts the stille für sich lesen = legere in silentio ( Saint Augustine ), tacite legere, or legere sibi ( Saint Benedict ).

For Heidegger, however, the distinction between Sprache and Rede only takes on its full meaning after accounting for both ( 1 ) the interpretation of logos [λόγος] he proposes in the same text ( §7 ) as apophantic, and ( 2 ) the existential structure of Mitsein ( being-with ). He is concerned with returning to the conditions of the ontological, and thus existential, possibility of speaking [la parole] as an ontological structure of Dasein. Rede still leaves open the possibility of Gerede ( §35 ); of parlerie, “gossip” ( Montaigne ); of bavardage, “idle chatter” ( Martineau’s translation ); or of the on-dit, “hearsay” ( F. Vezin’s translation ).

The opposition between Sprache and Rede is so indecisive that the following paragraph ( §35 ) can say: “Die Rede . . . ist Sprache” ( La parole . . . est langage parlé [Speech . . . is spoken language], Vezin; or, Le parler . . . est parole [Speaking . . . is speech], Martineau ). Other statements from the same period move in a similar direction and join together rather than oppose Sprache and Rede, as, for example, in the Gesamtausgabe ( GA; vol. 27 ), where we read:

The Greeks, like all peoples of Southern Europe, lived far more intensely within the realm of public speech and conversation [in der öffentlichen Sprache und Rede] than we are used to. For them, thinking is discussing openly and publicly. Books were of no interest, and even less so newspapers.

For the Greeks, logos was not thought of independently from “dialogue” within a space we might call “rhetorical” ( §29 of Being and Time describes Aristotle’s Rhetoric as “the first systematic hermeneutics of the everydayness of being-together” ) and “political,” in the sense of the Aristotelian definition of the polis [πόλις], in the Nicomachean Ethics ( 2.7 ), defined as a “community of words and actions.” In short, Rede lends itself better than Sprache to underlining the existential character of speech, insofar as it is experienced in the exchange of spoken words.

What Heidegger emphasizes in his own way is that “language” is not understood in an original, but rather, a derived mode when it is envisaged independently of what one is talking about, as well as of those “with whom” one is talking. In other words, the existential structures of being-in-the-world ( In-der-Welt-sein ) and being-with ( Mitsein ) constitute the sole originary ground within which a langage, understood as “use of the language to express thoughts and feelings” ( RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française ), can be rooted.

We need to add to this the fact that Heidegger, going against a long tradition, reads in the Peri hermeneias of Aristotle something entirely different from a mention of “sounds produced by the voice”—the Latin translation ( ae quae sunt in voce ) is in this case more faithful to the words of the Stagirite ( see SIGN, Box 1 ). The decisive element in the voice, for Heidegger, is not its sonorousness, as in “vocal production”; rather, “the humanity of the voice is primary in relation to the fact that it can convey a message” ( Fédier, Interprétations ).

In Unterwegs zur Sprache ( On the Way to Language ), Heidegger expresses wonder at the fact that the Japanese have no word for Sprache and are not bound to the “brilliant history of sonority in the human adventure of language” ( Hagège, L’homme de paroles ), or in other words, to phonetics. This is what is expressed by koto ba ( spoken word ): “flower petals of the koto—the appropriation that controls all that for which responsibility must be assumed over what grows and blossoms into flowers” ), which “names something other than the meaning conveyed by the names which come to us from metaphysics: γλῶσσα, lingua, langue and language” ( GA, vol. 12 ).

Pascal David

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fédier, François. Interprétations. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985.

Figal, Günter. “Heidegger’s Philosophy of Language in an Aristotelian Context: Dynamis Meta Logou.” Translated by Drew A. Hyland and Erik M. Vogt. In Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, edited by Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 83–92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Dichtung und Wahrheit. In vol. 22 of Gesamtausgabe. Munich: Boerner, 1973. Translation by Robert Heitner: From My Life. Edited by Jeffrey L. Sammons and Thomas P. Saine. 2 vols. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987.

Hagège, Claude. L’homme de paroles: Contribution linguistique aux sciences humaines. Paris: Fayard, 1985. Translation by Sharon L. Shelly: The Dialogic Species: A Linguistic Contribution to the Social Sciences. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Heidegger, Martin. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Edited by Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel. In vol. 27 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996.

   . Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

   . Sein und Zeit. French translation by E. Martineau: Être et temps. Paris: Authentica, 1985.

   . Sein und Zeit. French translation by F. Vezin: Être et temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.

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

Weigelt, Charlotta. The Logic of Life: Heidegger’s Retrieval of Aristotle’s Concept of “Logos.” Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2002.

B. The proliferation of terms for “language” in medieval Latin

■ For classical Latin, see Box 2.

2

Lingua and sermo in classical Latin

Two words were used to mean “language” in classical Latin: lingua and sermo. Lingua, which originally applied to the organ of speech, referred to the linguistic material of a people, the communication tool everyone possessed because he or she belonged to such and such a community. Sermo, which originally applied to meeting and talking, to conversation, to discussion, to exchanging opinions, was used to refer to the perfected, mastered language:

cum audisset Latronem declamentem, dixit: sua lingua disertus est; ingenium illi concessit, sermonem objecit.

( after having heard Latronus orate: he speaks, he said, with an eloquent tongue: he agreed he had talent, he objected to his fine language. )

( Seneca the Elder, Controversiarum, 2.12 )

There is, however, another opposition between these two terms, which we can at least speculate is present in Varro. The author of, among other texts, two works with similar titles, the De lingua latina and the De sermone latino, Varro apparently had a bipartite conception of the description of Latin ( though it is difficult to assess, insofar as we only have one small part of De lingua latina, and just a few slight fragments of De sermone latino ). If, as the most detailed analyses of the plan of De lingua latina show, this treatise was a study of language as meaning, it is tempting to think that De sermone latino was, by contrast, a study of the material aspects of language. The rare testimonies we do have of De sermone latino do not contradict this hypothesis: they deal with questions of spelling, of accent, of archaic forms, even of meter. Are the two types of opposition compatible? What they have in common is perhaps the fact that language in its most immediate manifestation ( lingua ) essentially aims at meaning, while language in the aspects that can be mastered ( sermo ) implies an awareness of its form. This hypothesis is, however, entirely conjectural.

Marc Baratin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baratin, Marc. La naissance de la syntaxe à Rome. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. The Elder Seneca Declamations. Translated by M. Winterbottom. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Varro, Marcus Terentius. On the Latin Language. Translated by Roland G. Kent. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938.

“Fiebat autem res non materno sermone, sed literis” ( The conversation took place not in our mother tongue [materno sermone] but in Latin [literis] ). This sentence from Guibert de Nogent’s ( d. ca. 1125 ) autobiography, Monodiae, allows us to understand at the outset the complexity of this semantic field in medieval Latin.

The notions collectively associated with the term “language” are at the confluence of ten or so words—elocutio, eloquium, famen, idioma, lingua, linguagium, locutio, loquela, sermo, verbum, vox—whose various meanings are generally wider than “language.” This semantic field was of little interest to medieval lexicologists: it did not give rise to any of those differential verses so highly valued by the masters, nor to any substantial dictionary entries. Of these words, we will focus our attention on the most commonly represented in the medieval corpus.

1. Idiom ( eloquium, lingua, loquela, idioma, locutio, sermo )

The terms in question share the meaning of “language of a group, idiom”: the four privileged words having this meaning are lingua ( anglica, arabica, gallica, graeca, latina, romana, etc. ), sermo ( anglicus, hebraeus, latinus, maternus, sclavonicus ), eloquium ( arabicum, graecum, hebraeum, latinum ), and idioma ( arabicum, graecum, teutonicum ), while it is rarer to find loquela ( hebraica, latina, saxonica ) and locutio ( barbarica, latina ). The specific sense of idioma, “distinctive character,” comes through in the expressions idioma linguae, idioma linguae graecae, hebraeae, teutonicae, and is retained after it acquires the more simplified meaning of “language,” even if Robert of Melun ( d. 1167 ) speaks, for emphasis, of proprietas idiomatis hebraeae linguae. So too the distinction in Peter Comestor ( d. 1178; RT: PL, 198, col. 1653B ) between linguae and idiomata linguarum: the apostles get their message across not only because of their mastery of languages, but also because of the dialects that are derived from them. Idioma is used especially when one wishes to stress the difficulty of translating, whether it involves one of the three sacred languages or a vernacular language.

There is a wide consensus about the synonymy between several of these terms: Pierre Hélie ( ca. 1150 ) uses genus loquelae and genus linguae indiscriminately, before qualifying them as graeca, latina, etc.; Boethius of Dacia ( ca. 1270 ) posits an equivalence between lingua and idioma ( grammatica in una lingua vel in uno idiomate [the grammar of one language or tongue]” ) but also posits the universality of grammar as a science, when he explains that “all languages are one single grammar [omnia idiomata sunt una grammatica]”; Peter Comestor ( RT: PL, 198, col. 1623D ) asserts an equivalence between loquela and idioma ( “loquela tua id est idioma Galilaeae [and your speech of Galilee, that is to say]” ) in his commentary on Matthew 26:73. Lingua also signifies, by extension, but more rarely, the community formed by those who speak the same language ( cf. Revelation 13:7 ): so Raoul of Caen refers to Tancredo, celebrated by all people ( populos ) in all languages ( linguas ).

2. Language, speech ( sermo, locutio, loquela )

The meaning of “language” as the human ability to use vocal signs to communicate can be found in sermo, which thus translates logos—cf. the translation by Chalcidius of Plato’s Timaeus, 47c: “Propter hoc enim nobis datus est sermo ut praesto nobis fiant mutuae voluntatis indicia” ( Language has been given to us so we have a way to conveniently indicate our wishes to others ). We also find it in locutio, for example, in the answer given by Boethius of Dacia to the question of knowing whether “grammar” is possessed naturally by men ( “utrum grammatica sit naturaliter ab homine habita” ): men who have never heard a human word spoken ( loquela ) are still naturally able to speak ( locutio vel grammatica ). He makes reference to Psammetichus’s famous experiment, reported by Herodotus ( for a more detailed history, see Launay, “Un roi, deux enfants et des chèvres,” which unfortunately cites only very few texts in the original ):

Si homines aliqui in deserto nutrirentur, ita quod numquam aliorum hominum loquelam audirent nec aliquam instructionem de modo loquendi acciperent, ipsi suos affectus naturaliter sibi mutuo exprimerent et eodem modo. Locutio enim est una de operibus naturalibus, cujus signum est, quod instrumentum, per quod fit locutio, natura in nobis ordinavit.

( If men were raised in a desert such that they never heard a word spoken by other men, and received no instruction as to how to speak, they would still naturally express their feelings, and in the same way. Language is indeed one of the natural faculties, and the sign of this is that the instrument by which language is produced is given to us by nature. )

( Herodotus, Histories )

There is one universal modus loquendi ( idem apud omnes, an expression that Aristotle applied to mental affects [pathêmata tês psuchês ( πάθηματα τῆς ψυχῆς )]; see SIGN ), here attributed to language, with the accidental differences explaining the diversity of languages ( idiomata ).

Abbon de Saint-German discusses the power of speech in his commentary on Proverbs 18:21 ( “mors et vita sunt in manibus linguae” ) and explicitly breaks with the biblical metaphor on lingua, translating this expression as “id est in potestate loquele.” Lingua never in fact appears in this context in the sense of “language”; when it is present in association with locutio or loquela, it is always confined to the sense of “physical organ.” So it is said that the tongue ( lingua ) is the instrument of taste and of speech ( gustum et locutionem, according to the Latin translation of De anima, 420b 5ff.; see WORD, III.B.1 ).

These three terms—locutio, sermo, and loquela—are also used by extension to designate the human ability to pronounce language distinctly, a faculty of which mutes are deprived ( in Bede, Aldheim, Thietmar, Peter the Venerable, and Pierre Riga, among others ). Lingua, with its double meaning of a physical organ of articulating sounds and of a system of vocal signs, clearly cannot be used in this type of context without misinterpretation or ambivalence.

3. The language of an author,
style ( sermo, eloquium, locutio, lingua )

The meaning of “a way of speaking, style, expression, language” is assumed by sermo, eloquium, but also lingua. So Remigius of Auxerre gives sermo as a synonym for facundia, while Hugh of Saint Victor puts it between vox and intellectus. We also find sermo vulgaris ( in the sense of an informal language ), while Giraud de Barri ( Expugnatio Hibernica ) states that he is renouncing his previous way of writing in favor of a “presentis idioma sermonis,” assimilated to a “novus modus eloquentiae.” In addition, the style, expression, or “language” of a writer is referred to as, for example, “sermo clarus, sermo nitidu, sermo exquisitus, sermo blandus; eloquium fluens, eloquium luculentissimum.” Both sermo and locutio are used to characterize verse and prose forms of expression: so one would say sermo metricus, sermo prosaicus, and Raban Maur, transposing a verse text into prose, claims he is translating not another language, but another mode of expression ( vol. 5 [dated 814] ): “interpres . . . non alterius linguae sed alterius locutionis.” So it is particularly interesting to find lingua in this context, in the sense of “style,” “language”: Vulfin, the author of the Life of Saint Martin ( ca. 800 ), contrasts an expert and erudite language ( “diserti eruditique sermonis eloquium” ) with the poverty of an arid style ( “paupertas sterilis linguae” ). In the twelfth century, Geoffroy of Saint Victor congratulates Saint Augustine on having used a refined language in expressing himself ( “ad eloquentiam linguam das urbanam” ).

C. The mother tongue ( lingua materna ):
From lost unity to multiplicity/diversity

1. Nos Latini

The men and women of letters in the Middle Ages spoke Latin so much that they referred to themselves as “Latins” ( nos Latini ). Latin was felt as such a factor of identity or identification by clerics and scholars that any other language was a foreign language ( lingua aliena ), whether it was one of the erudite languages ( Hebrew, Greek, Arabic ), or a vernacular language. For this reason, one refers to words transferred or translated ( translata ) into Latin as foreign words, whether they had been assimilated or not, that is, whether they had taken on a Latin ending ( nota ), or not ( peregrina ). Latin, according to Gilles of Rome, was thus an invention of philosophers, who wanted to create for themselves their “own idiom” ( proprium idioma ) as a way of compensating for the deficiencies of the vulgar language ( De regimine principium, 2.2.c.7 ). For some, the divide was clearly located between clerics and lay people: clerics had a language ( ydioma ) that was “the same for all” ( idem apud omnes—the term ydioma, like modus loquendi earlier, indicating the specificity of, on the one hand, the social group, and on the other, of the human race ), and that one learned at school, whereas lay people had languages made up of words whose meaning was established conventionally ( ydiomata vocum impositarum ad placitum ), and that one learned from one’s mother and family. Latin enabled one to return to the unity that was lost with Babel, and this unity was necessary for knowledge, whether profane or sacred. Even though Roger Bacon went as far as to say that he spoke Latin as his mother tongue ( lingua materna ), as he did English or French, the former would generally be set in opposition to the two latter. The mother tongue is, according to Bacon, devalued as a cultural language for the “Latins,” because he judges it unable to express particular kinds of knowledge, like logic. But it assumes a surprisingly far higher status for other peoples, when he says, for example, that they turn away from Christianity because it is not preached in their mother tongues, and is thus not able to persuade them convincingly ( “quia persuasionem sinceram non recipiunt in lingua materna”; Opus Majus, vol. 3 ). For Bacon, a substantially unified lingua is diversified accidentally into different idiomata ( for example, Greek splits into Attic Greek, Aeolian, Doric, Ionian ); if Latin is the same “from the furthest reaches of Puglia to the outer limits of Spain,” each idiom has its own distinct traits ( proprietas ), which is precisely why it is called idioma, from idion ( proper ), from which the word idiota is derived, describing someone who is content with the properties of his idiom. Idios [ἴδιος], in Greek, is opposed to koinos [ϰοινός]: anything private is considered “idiot”; or to put it another way, idiom and the idiomatic are different from logos, in that the latter opens up human beings to the political ( Aristotle, Politics, 1.1.1253a 1–18: see PROPERTY, and cf. LOGOS and POLIS ). This proprietas, this genius that is proper to each idiom, and that includes not just its vocabulary but also its rhythmic and musical properties, makes any literal translation impossible. In certain passages the idiomata are seen as dialects, in relation to the mother tongue ( and Thomas Aquinas refers in a similar way to locutiones ), but elsewhere it is simply a matter of different usages, or ways of pronouncing the same language, with the identity of a language being guaranteed by a “substance” that precisely remains independent of its usages.

For Dante, materna locutio, which he also calls vulgaris locutio, is opposed to Latin ( still referred to as grammatica ), precisely because materna locutio has been learned naturally, without rules, by imitating the nurse, whereas Latin has been learned “artificially,” that is, according to the rules of art ( cf. Republic, 1.13 ). Because it is so difficult to learn, only a few acquire the knowledge of second/secondary means of expression ( locutio secundaria ), and these are only available to a few peoples, such as the Greeks ( see ITALIAN, Box 2 ):

[V]ulgarem locutionem [Italian: lingua volgare] appellamus eam qua infantes assuefiunt ab assistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus. Est es inde alia locutio secundaria nobis, quam Romani gramaticam vocaverunt. . . . Harum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris: tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata; tum quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur, licet in diversas prolationes et vocabula sit divisa; tum quia naturalis est nobis, cum illa potius artificialis existat.

( I call “vernacular language” that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds; or, to put it more succinctly, I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses. There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica. . . . Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third, because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial. )

( De vulgari eloquentia, 1.2–4 )

This passage poses many questions: Since Latin was in fact the mother tongue of the Romans, an argument Dante will return to precisely in order to legitimize the use of the vulgar tongue, why is Latin a grammatica, and more artificial ( that is, the product of art ) than the vulgar tongue for clerics in the Middle Ages? Moreover, the fact that he asserts here that the “vulgar” is the noblest tongue, whereas he said the opposite in the Convivio, 1.5.7–15, has led to extensive commentary, particularly when one needs to remember that the De vulgari was written in Latin and the Convivio in volgare ( for a summary of these discussions, see V. Coletti, Dante-Alighieri ). In the Convivio, three reasons are adduced in support of Latin’s superiority. The first of these is its “nobility”: Latin is perpetual and incorruptible, and this is what allows ancient writings still to be read today. Then, its “virtue”: anything that achieves what it sets out to do to the highest degree possible is considered virtuous, and Latin is the vehicle that best allows human thought to become manifest, while the vulgar is unable to convey certain things. And finally, its “beauty”: Latin is more harmonious than the vulgar, in that it is a product of art, and not of nature. Latin, or the grammatica, is in any case a human creation, thanks to its inventors ( inventores grammatice facultatis ), which is regulated ( regulata ) by a “common consensus” and is therefore impervious to any “individual arbitrary” intervention. This is why it is defined, recalling Bacon’s idea of a substantial unity, as “a certain identity of language which does not change according to time and place” ( quaedam inalterabilis locutionis idemptitas diversis temporibus et locis; De vulgari, 1.9.11 ). We see, then, how ordinary and everyday variations of different individual ways of speaking ( sermo ) are unable to affect Latin, which remains the same through the ages, this being a necessary condition of the transmission of ancient knowledge.

2. The vulgaris locutio

As far as the question of origins is concerned, God, says Dante, created a “certa forma locutionis”—Pézard translates Dante’s phrase into French as “certaine forme de langage” ( certain form of language ); Coletti’s Italian version is “data forma di linguaggio” ( given form of language ); Imbach, again into French: “forme détérminée du langage” ( determinate form of language )—at the same time that he created the first soul. “Form” here covers both the terms for things, the construction of these terms, and the pronunciation of these constructions ( “Dico autem ‘formam’ et quantum ad rerum vocabula et quantum ad vocabulorum constructionem et quantam ad constructionis prolationem” ). This original “certa forma locutionis” has been variously interpreted, either as the first language ( Hebrew, which Dante also refers to as ydioma: “The Hebrew idiom was the one produced by the lips of the first speaker”; De vulgari, 6.6 ), or as a universal prelinguistic structure enabling the first languages to be generated, or as a type ( form ) of which concrete languages would have been species. If, according to De vulgari, this form of language was the one Adam used, in his Paradiso Dante says, on the contrary, that Adam spoke a language that died out before Babel ( Paradiso, 26 ). This pre-Babelian form of language would have been used by “all languages of all speakers” ( qua quidem forma omnis lingua loquentium uteretur ) if there had been no Babel, the “tower of confusion,” whereas it was only preserved by the sons of Heber: “After the confusion, it remained with them alone, so that our Redeemer . . . could use not the language of confusion, but the language of grace.” After Babel, humans had to invent languages, or rather ways of speaking ( loquelae ) as it pleased them ( ad placitum ) ( De vulgari, 1.9.6 ). It is worth noting, however, that in other passages, Adam seemed already to be using a language invented ad placitum ( Paradiso, 26 ), and that for other writers of the time, this same ad placitum characteristic of language happened not after Babel, but after the Fall, as a punishment for man’s original sin, and that deprived humans of the ability to use a language that would express naturally the quiddity of things ( Henri de Gand ).

The many different interpretations of De vulgari depend ultimately on the way the different terms of the linguistic semantic field are interpreted. Contrary to the traditional approach ( as defended, for instance, by P. V. Mengaldo ), which simply attributes this variation in vocabulary to a mere “stylistic variation” on Dante’s part, thereby authorizing an analogous “stylistic variation” on the part of the translator, we think, along with M. Tavoni ( “Ancora su De vulgari” ), that Dante’s choice of vocabulary is deliberate and plays a crucial role in the treatise, a role that is, moreover, confirmed by its statistical distribution. It is impossible to ignore the fact that locutio dominates chapters 1–5, idioma chapters 6–9, and vulgare chapters 10–19; that lingua appears only in the narration of Babel, in the coded syntagmas ( 8.1: confusio linguarum, 6.6: lingua confusionis ) referring back to those of the Vulgate ( Genesis 10 and 11 ) and those of several exegetes; and that loquela in turn is present only in this episode, in order to designate human speech, which starts out unified and is subsequently divided into so many tasks. The first chapters thus seem to be intent on defining the different modes of expression or of speech ( locutiones ), both vulgar and artificial, proper to human expression—what is “proper” to human expression being to manifest one’s thoughts to another, according to the common definition ( borrowed here ) in Plato’s Timaeus. Dante then proceeds, with the term idioma, to embody historical modes of expression “proper” to an individual or a community, passing from the Hebrew idiom of Adam to the first idioms after Babel. We enter after Babel into the realm of vulgar, attested and contemporary historical languages, which are diverse and imperfect, variable and dispersed, and which necessitate two different modes of return to unity. The first is a scholastic mode: unity is regained through the invention, to be determined by scholars, of one, stable language of knowledge, the grammatica, or Latin. The second is the “illustrious” mode, through the establishment of the volgare latium that Dante first of all promoted in De vulgari, and then acted out in the Commedia. The different linguistic terms are not to be seen as applying to disconnected realities but as manifesting different points of view about one identical reality: thus Latin is envisaged first of all as an example of a regulated mode of expression ( locutio regulata ); then as an idioma, as the proper language of the Romans; and finally as grammatica, an artificial invention that comes after the scattering of Latin into the vernacular. Naturally, this tripartite arrangement does not imply any equivalence among these three terms. The difficulty, which the divergent readings of Dante’s treatise illustrate remarkably well, is a methodological one: should we understand the vocabulary regarding “language” with reference to other terminological networks of the time, or give it a certain autonomy by weighing the value of each term within the text—or within his work as a whole? In the first case, which terminological networks would we make reference to, assuming we can even determine a coherence for each one: a theological, scriptural network? A Scholastic, philosophical network? A literary, grammatical, or rhetorical network? Such questions have to be considered by every interpreter and every translator, especially when one is dealing ( as is the case with Bacon ) with authors who are marginal or whose works fall outside conventional, established institutional circuits, and thus languages. What is at stake here is the very understanding of their project itself.

To conclude, we have a constellation of three terms, to return to Saussure’s schema, in which one of the terms ( langage ) is charged with a negative role, a pure abstract generality that has to be excluded so as to allow for a free play between the two other terms ( langue/parole ). This play is open, complex, intense, and it works by continuous interaction, without any reduction or exclusion. We might describe this, then, as a complementarity, or even better, a polarity; a richly productive and powerful system, with multiple implications, and which has no need for explicit recollection to reproduce itself.

Irène Rosier-Catach
Barbara Cassin ( II.A )
Pierre Caussat ( I.B )
Anne Grondeux ( I.A )

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Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with Albert Riedlinger. Critical ed. by Tullio de Mauro. Paris: Payot, 1985.

Scheerer, Thomas M. Ferdinand de Saussure: Rezeption und Kritik. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980.

Tavoni, Mirko. “Ancora su De vulgari eloquentia I 1–9.” Rivista di letteratura italiana 7 ( 1989 ): 469–96.

   .“The 15th-Century Controversy on the Language Spoken by the Ancient Romans: An Inquiry into Italian Humanist Concepts of ‘Latin,’ ‘Grammar,’ and ‘Vernacular.’ ” In The History of Linguistics in Italy, edited by Paolo Ramat, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and Konrad Koerner, 23–50. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1986.

   . “On the Renaissance Idea that Latin Derives from Greek.” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, ser. 3, vol. 16 ( 1986 ): 205–38.

   . “Renaissance Linguistics.” In Italian Studies in Linguistic Historiography. Edited by Tullio de Mauro and Lia Formigari, 149–66. Münster, Ger.: Nodus, 1994.

   . “ ‘Ydioma Tripharium’ ( Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, I 8–9 ).” In History and Historiography of Linguistics, edited by Hans-Josef Niederehe and Konrad Koerner, 233–47. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990.

Vulfin. Life of Saint Martin. Edited by F. Dolbeau. In Francia: Forschungen zur westseuropäischen Geschichte. Ostfildern, Ger.: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1984.

LAW, RIGHT

FRENCH			loi, droit
GERMAN			Gesetz, Recht
LATIN			lex, jus
SPANISH			ley, derecho

  DROIT, LEX, and CIVIL RIGHTS, FAIR, LIBERAL, POLITICS, RIGHT, RULE OF LAW, STANDARD, THEMIS

Most of the legal notions used in modern political philosophy come from a transcription in vernacular languages of terms originating in Roman law, and from its reception in medieval Europe. This transmission of Roman concepts was accompanied by a significant inflection of their meaning, but the translation conventions have nonetheless been stable enough that basic terms such as lex and jus have found equivalent terms in every language of continental Europe, and the distinction between loi and droit in French, for example ( or Gesetz and Recht in German ) has remained constant. The situation, however, is fundamentally different for the English language, in which, or in relation to which, translation problems have meant constant difficulties, both in the philosophical vocabulary as well as in legal texts. In schematic terms, the problem takes the form of a double ambivalence. English distinguishes between “law” and “right,” with each corresponding to some of the aspects of loi ( Gesestz ) or droit ( Recht ), but the extension of the concepts is not the same. “Law” has a wider extension than loi, and even if “right” partly overlaps with the polysemy of jus or of droit, the use of the term “right,” in the singular and the plural, refers more often to the specific dimension of droit that the French would term droits subjectifs ( subjective rights; that is, freedom, property, etc. ) attached to individual or collective subjects.

I. The Particularities of English Political Right( s )

A. The legal vocabulary of English

In the continental tradition, law ( or la loi in French ) is both a rule and a command given by an authority empowered to enact it; more specifically, la loi refers to a certain kind of norm, established by a particular power ( legislative power ), and regarded as higher than that of other sources of droit ( regulations, jurisprudence, and so on ), in accordance with criteria that can be material or formal. In this context, the basic problem is knowing what founds the higher authority of the law, and what can stem from its intrinsic characteristics ( rationality, generality, publicness, and so forth ), and from the identity of the founder of the law ( the sovereign ). The history of law is thus bound up with the parallel history of modern political rationalism and of state sovereignty. The dominant tendency today, particularly clear in France, is to qualify the reverence for the law, because of the threefold effect of the weakening of legislative power, the proliferation of legislative texts, and, above all, the progressive acceptance of the contrôle de constitutionnalité des lois ( the constitutional review of laws; in other words, for the French Conseil constitutionnel, the “law as an expression of the general will” is only a law when it is in accordance with the Constitution, as it is interpreted by the Conseil ). It is important to note, however, that this evolution is not in itself enough to transform the entire logic of the juridico-philosophical categories. It simply means that the characteristics previously attributed to the law as an “expression of the general will” are transferred to a certain type of law ( the Constitution ), enacted by a specific legislative power ( the “constituent” power or lawmaker ), while all of the difficulties associated with the modern doctrine of sovereignty simply take a different form ( O. Beaud, La puissance de l’état ). On the other hand, the extension of the concept of loi in French is limited at the outset by its relation to the concept of droit, which refers both to the legal order as a whole, and to the right of a subject, which may be defended in a court case; so whatever its position in the hierarchy of norms, la loi is only a source of le droit. In the English tradition, however, “law” refers to the legal order as a whole ( like le droit, in other words ), but it also retains some of the main connotations associated with la loi. Conversely, if “right” can sometimes also be understood in a general sense ( if only because the adjective “right” means “just” ), it more often has a far narrower sense, when used in the plural or singular, and in consequence it tends to be confused with “subjective” rights ( R. Dworkin, Law’s Empire and Taking Rights Seriously ).

These difficulties are quite well known and have generated a number of conventional translations, most of which are easy to understand and apply. Philosophie du droit, or Rechtsphilosophie, is normally translated as “philosophy of law,” even if it refuses to make law ( ordinary or even constitutional ) the primary source of right ( but Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie is nonetheless sometimes translated as “philosophy of right” out of faithfulness to the German ). A law enacted by a lawmaker authorized to rule on such questions becomes “statute law” ( which already leads to several oddities: in order to explain the original meaning of article 6 of the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” [“Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”] of 1789, for example, we would have to say that in “French law,” “statute law” is the expression of the general will ). The shortcoming of “statute law,” however, is that it suggests too clear a distinction between a legislative power and other authorities, which is not always relevant, either because one is referring to periods in the past when such a distinction did not always have the same importance that it has in the modern age, or because the legal-philosophical reasoning itself leads us to bracket it. This leads to a common and long-standing expedient that consists of reverting to the plural of the word, which almost always refers to the legislative, or nomothetic, dimension of the “law”: “the laws” will be one possible translation of la loi, of lex, or of nomos, and the title of Cicero’s De legibus ( On the laws ), just as much as Plato’s Nomoi ( Laws ), do not pose any particular problems of translation.

These conventions are useful, but they do not overcome all the difficulties. As far as ancient notions are concerned, it is unfortunate that both the lex naturae of Cicero and the jus gentium of Roman law have to be translated as “law.” In the modern context, the dual meaning of “law” still poses several problems, as becomes apparent, for example, in reading Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. For Locke, the state of nature is not a state of lawlessness, because human beings are subjected to the “law of nature” ( §6 ), which in French could be translated either as droit naturel ( as Bernard Gilson does, in Locke, Deuxième traité du gouvernement civil ) or as loi naturelle: only civil government, however, enables the birth of a “legislative power,” which in turn allows the “Commonwealth” to be governed by an “establish’d, settled, known, Law” ( §124 ). The function of statute law, or “establish’d law,” will thus be to make “natural law” ( droit naturel ) sufficiently public for it to take on a force of obligation, and ignorance or partiality would deprive it of this force in the state of nature. But statute law cannot itself have any legitimate authority unless it conforms to the natural law instituted by God, which is thus imposed upon human lawmakers as a higher commandment ( English translators and authors encounter similar difficulties when, for example, they need to distinguish between lex naturae and jus naturae, which leads them at times to use “right” as a translation of jus so that “law” can be a better equivalent of lex ). These problems are ultimately encountered at every point in any translation into English or from English: the “history of law” will become “legal history,” and the “lawyers” in American cinema are both jurists and men of law, while being very different from Philippe the Fair’s légistes, the class of jurists charged with renewing Roman law in France and creating from it a uniform and centralized legal code.

So when we go from Latin or modern continental languages to English, we encounter difficulties that flow from a particular legal institution, and that have lasted to this day, as any jurist knows who has ever tried to translate into English a notion such as the German Rechststaat ( which the French état de droit captures perfectly ), or to find a continental equivalent of the English “rule of law.” To clarify these difficulties, we will begin with a genealogical analysis of the particularities of the English legal lexicon, and then go on to examine the way in which the first modern philosophers adopted or, on the contrary, subverted this tradition, before looking finally at the later transformations of English-language philosophie du droit.

B. The spirit of English law

English history is part of the wider history of western Europe, shaped by the development of the modern nation-state, which subordinated political ( royal ) power to the rationality of law. In England, as in France, this process led on the one hand to the institutionalization of royal power, by distinguishing it from patrimonial or imperial control, and on the other to an increase in the predictability of law, by privileging a law common to the whole kingdom. Generally speaking, then, what is particular to England in this context can be presented in the following way: the courts of the kingdom ( notably the Royal Court ) played a major role in the unification of English law, producing a law that was both customary and based on case law, and that provided royal power with the centralized structure that was needed in order to govern, but without having to make the positive law decreed by the king the primary source of law. The history of English freedom runs parallel to that of the history of the acquisition by the “barons,” and then by all British subjects, of “rights” that are opposable to royal authority, and that form the substance of the different English declarations, from the Magna Carta ( 1215 ) to the Bill of Rights ( 1689 ). The conceptual system of English law appears at first to be a process of giving form to this singular historical experience, according to a logic that is both very old and extremely durable. In this regard, Frederick Maitland notes that the use among the great English jurists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ( for instance, Glanvill and Bracton ) of Roman terms is itself somewhat uncertain, and that they do not differentiate clearly between jus and lex ( F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law, 1:175 ). The two senses of “law” refer to the duality of the common law of the courts, and the statute law imposed by the sovereign. Subjects can oppose their “rights” to the political power, but this power nonetheless exercises a legitimate authority over these subjects. So “law” refers to two concurrent conceptions of the formation of norm, with the English constitution ensuring they work together by an endlessly repeated miracle. “Common law” does not at first seem like a “judge-made law,” because it is supposed to be simply “revealed” by a judge, who in this sense is the “mouthpiece of the law.” This is what distinguishes it from statute law, which is “made” by an authority that is based on its own views concerning justice or the common good, and that requires no other justification than its political legitimacy. Common law is thus presented as a means of formalizing customs, whose long existence is a guarantee of their venerable nature, and it also favors continuity, since the first rule in making laws is that of the “precedent” ( stare decisis ).

Common law is thus a fundamental element of the Ancient Constitution, which was supposed to have governed the English since time immemorial ( and whose prestige would make it possible for the 1688 Revolution to be presented as a restoration of an originary and more authoritative set of laws ). The remarkable feat of English history is to have forged its path toward the rationalization of law on this traditional legitimacy. The centralization of judicial decisions allowed a homogenous order to emerge out of the different customs, and the primacy of the precedent encouraged legal security and the predictability of decisions, which constituted the basis of the development of modern society. The authority of the precedent was not always absolute; as the great jurist William Blackstone noted, “[T]he doctrine of the Law is the following: precedents and rules must be followed, unless they are clearly absurd or unjust,” which means that on the one hand, judgments must not depend on the opinions of judges but on the laws and customs of the country ( Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:69 ), and on the other hand, that the judge can and must reject “decisions that are contrary to reason ( absurd ), or to divine law ( unjust )” ( A. Tunc, “Coutume et ‘Common Law’,” 57 ).

The major effect of this type of elaboration of law, from the point of view of political philosophy, is to have inhibited the full affirmation of the doctrine of sovereignty, which, by contrast, characterized the development of politics in France. While French theorists of the monarchy, such as Bodin, tended to make the sovereign the ultimate, if not sole, source of the law, the English based the authority of political power on an original “common law,” while at the same time giving their political community the means for their law to make “progress” toward modernity. This original mechanism explains the political differences between England—where the Crown was unable to appear as the vehicle for progress, and where the 1688 Revolution confirmed the power of the courts—and France, where the actions of successive parliaments had long discredited the idea of judicial power ( A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution ). It also had important philosophical consequences: it limited the rise of modern legislative rationalism based on the idea of a natural affinity between reason and the “law” made by the sovereign, which would by contrast become fully developed within the culture of the French Enlightenment.

But we must also add that the primacy of common law is only one of the two main aspects of the English constitution: although it is based on the tradition of common law, the constitution also presumes “the sovereignty of Parliament” ( or of the “King in Parliament” ). This sovereignty needs to be understood in the strongest sense of the term: the sovereignty of Parliament is absolute in the sense that no rule of law can oppose an act or a statute of the English Parliament, if this act has been legitimately adopted ( cf., for example, W. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:156–57, and Dicey, Introduction ), and this will become established notably within the courts, where a statute has the power to repeal the rules of common law ( Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:89 ) under certain formal conditions. Similarly, “rights” are essentially subjective rights, which may have appeared within a custom before being integrated into common law or recognized by a statute, but which are as such opposable to political authority.

This paradox of English public law comes from the absence of a written constitution. It originally derived from the primacy of the customary or semicustomary arrangements of the Ancient Constitution ( whose spirit in this respect is the spirit of common law ), but it also evolved into the affirmation of the full sovereignty of Parliament, the natural counterpart of the flexibility of the constitution. The difficulties are moreover magnified by the fact that modern “constitutionalism” ( which implies the subordination of ordinary law to the constitution, through the control by the courts of the constitutionality of the laws ) evolved in the wake of the American experience, and in a legal world dominated by English concepts. Nevertheless, a study of the development of the English-language philosophy of law would reveal a permanent opposition between two approaches, whose duality is an expression of the ambivalence of the English tradition. The predominant approach, which goes from Edward Coke to a writer such as Ronald Dworkin, could be seen as a progressive idealization of the experience of common law. However, the very fact that it is a “law,” combined with the particular logic of the modern conception of sovereignty, also explains the stubborn persistence of a positivistic current of thought trend that always tends to subvert the dominant vocabulary of English legal philosophy. This positivistic approach, defended by Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, survives in Austin and Hart. It should be said, however, that these two traditions have certainly communicated with each other, especially through the affirmation of the liberal concept of freedom as an absence of constraint, a conception that was largely adopted by the advocates of the approach that emerged out of common law, but certain elements of which come from Hobbes. In order to understand this development, while explaining the enduring legacy of untranslatable concepts that English law has transmitted to philosophy, we would do well to begin with common law and the debates to which it gave rise in English political thought.

C. Common law

In its strictest sense, the expression “common law” refers to the first of the three main traditional branches of English law, the other two being equity and statute law. Common law here means a law common to the different regions of the kingdom, a law that, before the courts, must always prevail over particular usage or customs, and that is the indissoluble basis of the authority of the king over all his subjects, while providing these subjects with the advantages of a single system of justice. Common law is first and foremost a customary, unwritten law ( lex non scripta, as Blackstone puts it ), whose authority is tied to its immemorial nature. It is also a scholarly law, whose fundamental rules prohibit any arbitrary modification, and the knowledge of which is acquired through a long and patient study of precedents. But common law is not only an original “legal system”: it is also the foundation of the English political regime, insofar as it provides the basis for understanding the powers and domains of the different political institutions.

The prestige that common law enjoys has made it the foundation of what we might call the English political idiom—and this prestige flows in the first place from common law’s ability, over such a long period of time, to resolve in an original manner the main problems England has faced. Thanks to its law, this country with such a troubled history has been able to see itself as the product of a continuous and harmonious history, both profoundly different from that of other European monarchies and called upon ultimately to give lessons in freedom to other civilized nations. Indeed, in a now-classic work—The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law—J.G.A. Pocock showed how common law constituted the model from which the English elaborated the doctrine of the Ancient Constitution that was to become a point of reference in the seventeenth century for the adversaries of the Stuarts and thus contribute to the victory of a liberal interpretation of the English regime. By emphasizing the continuity of common law before and after the Norman conquest, the effects of this event were minimized, while limiting the rights imposed by force. By making common law the heart of English law, the authority of the empire, along with Roman civil law, was excluded, while the differences between the English monarchy ( a “mixed regime” ) and French absolutism were foregrounded. These ideas were to be more fully developed during the revolutionary period, when the adversaries of the Stuarts readily invoked the permanence of English law and the immemorial nature of the Ancient Constitution to challenge the idea that royal power would be the main source of law, or that this power could change the law in whatever way it wished.

The fundamental premises of the apologists of common law are themselves based on principles that go back a long way. We can already find them, for example, in the work of John Fortescue, who in the fifteenth century distinguished very clearly between the absolute monarchy of the French, and the “limited” monarchy of the English, for whom the royal prerogative was limited by the courts, the main one being Parliament, which was considered to be primarily a court of justice. But it was above all in the seventeenth century that the classic doctrine of common law was formulated, notably around the ideas of Edward Coke, the rival of Sir Francis Bacon and of Matthew Hale ( 1609–76 ).

■ See Box 1.

1

Edward Coke ( 1552–1664 )

Edward Coke was at the same time a judge, a parliamentarian, and a legal theorist. Several times a Member of the House of Commons, of which he was Speaker in 1592–93, he was also the attorney general in 1593–94, then chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas ( 1606 ) and lord chief justice of England. As a parliamentarian, he was opposed to the absolutist tendencies of James I ( for which he was imprisoned in 1621 ), and it was in this context that he was the author in 1628 of the Petition of Right, one of the basic documents of “English freedoms.”

Coke is generally considered the greatest representative of the common law tradition, which he interpreted as being halfway between the traditional doctrines of limitation of power and the principles of modern liberalism. In the conception of law that Coke advocates, the authority and the knowledge of the judge are simultaneously minimized and magnified. On the one hand, the judge is indeed not a legislator and he does not “make” laws (  judex est lex loquens ); his function is to “state the law” (  jus dicere ). In a sense, even if the identity of the legislator is problematic here, common law is certainly a law, which is acknowledged by the judges whose authority it founds, and which expresses a higher rationality. On the other hand, we can know this law, and the reason that inspires it, only through the succession of different generations, and this knowledge calls for an “artifical reason” based on accumulated experience, and not only on reasoning. Law is thus a specialized knowledge, which is not to be confused with “natural reason” ( nemo nascitur artifex ), and judges are its privileged guardians. This is why they, and they alone, are in a position to reveal the always identical and always new meaning that common law assumes over time.

The classic conception of common law implies a certain interpretation of the English constitution, according to which all political or legal institutions must be subject to the law, that is, to the order of the common law, as it is interpreted by the judges of the main courts. Even during Coke’s time, though, this orthodoxy met with several objections, drawn from political and legal practice, or from new political doctrine. First of all, there were in fact several elements within the English institutions that appeared to contradict Coke’s vision: the Court of Chancery could temper common law through equity; Parliament could change it radically through statutes that replaced the previous law, and the royal prerogative seemed to give the monarch a certain independence with respect to the statutes themselves. More generally, the traditional English conceptions were also confronted with the contemporary development of the doctrine of sovereignty, which had been familiar to French jurists since Bodin, but which was not entirely unheard of in England itself ( where it would be reclaimed by the partisans of the reinforcement of royal power, but also by certain defenders of the Parliament ). On this latter point, Coke, who was also a political actor, tended to reject the logic of sovereignty, which he saw as incompatible both with the logic of English law and with the rights acquired by the English since the Magna Carta. As for equity and the statutes, he presented them as complements of common law, revealed by the authorities constituted by common law itself. In this context, Parliament itself appears as a specific jurisdiction, made up of the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, whose supreme status authorizes it to change the law by proposing new statutes, by repealing previous statutes, and even by modifying the content of common law. So while he thereby reaffirmed the superiority of Parliament over the king ( the king only being fully legitimate as a “King in Parliament” ), Coke managed to reconcile the primacy of Parliament with the “Rule of Law,” and with his own antivoluntaristic conception of the making of laws. On the one hand, Parliament had the “power to abrogate, suspend, qualify, explain or make void [legislation that previous parliaments enacted], in the whole or in any part thereof, notwithstanding any words or restraint, prohibition or penalty [in previous legislation], for it is a maxim in the law of parliament, quod leges posteriores priores contrarias abrogate,” and this power is “so transcendent and absolute, as it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds” ( Institutes of the Laws of England, vol. 4 ). On the other hand, Parliament was simply acting here as a judge, who invoked ancient statutes, that is, “law, this universal law that the English have claimed as their heritage” ( ibid.; see also F. Lessay, “Common Law,” and J. W. Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History ).

■ See Box 2.

2

Equity

In English law, “equity” refers to one of the three fundamental sources of law ( along with common law and statute law ): the Court of Chancery can judge “in equity” and thereby protect rights that have not been recognized by ordinary courts ( which have to follow the common law rigorously ). The English term “equity” sometimes designates the classical philosophical notion ( Aristotle’s epieikeia [ἐπιείϰεια] ), and at other times a particular right, originally produced by a distinct court. In A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, Hobbes plays cleverly on the two senses of the word in order to suggest the superiority of royal justice ( against which there is no appeal, since it is directly inspired by natural reason ) over the justice of ordinary judges, whose action has to be able to be tempered by the action of the courts of equity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raynaud, Philippe. “L’equalité dans la philosophie politique.” Égalité et équité: Antagonisme ou complémentarité. Edited by Thierry Lambert et al. Paris: Economica, 1999.

Newman, Ralph A. Equity and Law: A Comparative Study. New York: Oceana Publications, 1961.

D. The philosophical consequences of the doctrine of common law

Beyond the English constitution, the doctrine of common law implies something akin to a general theory or a philosophy of law, which is a priori opposed to positivist theories ( which recognize as law only “positive law,” that is, a law made by the sovereign, or someone authorized by the sovereign ), without for all that having the same inflexibility as most theories of “natural law” because it is rooted within a legal tradition that valorizes the role of time and of history in the revelation of law.

As one contemporary historian notes ( G. L. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition ), the authority of precedent and of custom does not necessarily imply that all common law goes back to furthest antiquity. What is crucial, however, is that one can affirm continuity between the past and the present. Usage and custom have imposed rules by showing that these rules were both acceptable, because they were consonant with the public spirit, and reasonable because they were in accordance with common reason. This affirmation linking historical continuity and “reasonableness” is not without some ambiguity. One could, along with Coke, draw from it a particularist conception of legal reason, which emphasizes the internal coherence of jurisprudence built up patiently through “cases” resolved by judges, or through the law “stated” by judges. As we will see, this aspect of the theory ( which is obviously connected to the judicial “corporatism” of Coke, and to his defense of the “artificial reason” of the judge ) has been the favorite target of the great modern critics of common law since Hobbes. It is no doubt for this reason that subsequent authors emphasize on the contrary the affinity between common law and natural justice, in order to show that common law includes within it a certain number of the general principles that not only conform to custom, but also translate rational needs linked to the very nature of law. These two conceptions of reason at work within the law have in common the fact that they are a priori opposed to positivist theses, which place positive law, made by a legislator and not revealed by a judge, at the forefront of the creation of law. This is why common law, whatever its ambiguities, appears as a privileged adversary of legal positivism, and why critics of this approach are often still led, even today, to repeat and rediscover the typical modes of reasoning of common law.

Conversely, the traditional theory of the English constitution itself offered a foothold for a positivist interpretation, through the idea of the supremacy of Parliament—or of the “King in Parliament.” The argument made by Coke, who explained the power Parliament has to change the law by its statutes, and its power to modify these statutes indefinitely, as coming from the authority that it possesses in common law, can in fact quite easily be reversed. If there is an authority that is sufficiently powerful and legitimate to modify the rules of English law, it is difficult not to think that this authority is sovereign, and that its decisions are presumed to be more rational than those made by common judges, who are inspired by their “artificial reason.” In addition, if the Chancery Court has the power to correct the rules of common law, and if the king is not entirely subordinate to the statutes, then it does seem that the legal order has a number of holes in it, which common judges are not the only ones able to fill. This observation led certain authors, for different reasons, to develop a number of critiques of common law. These critiques, drawing on the royal prerogative or the sovereignty of Parliament or, even more profoundly, on the idea that some sovereign power is necessary if there is to be any law at all, have brought about a complete overhaul of the doctrine of law. A systematic examination of these discussions is beyond the scope of this entry. Referring readers to the works on this subject by F. Lessay, G. J. Postema, and J.G.A. Pocock , we will simply attempt to show briefly the influence of these critiques of common law on the development of English political philosophy and on the philosophy of contemporary law, where the vocabulary itself echoes these foundational debates.

II. “Law” and “Right” According to Hobbes: Legal Positivism versus Common Law

A. The foundational debate

Chapter 14 of Hobbes’s Leviathan ( 1651 ) opens with a distinction between the Right of Nature (  jus naturale ) and the Law of Nature ( lex naturalis ): whereas the right of nature “is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature,” a law of nature “is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” ( Leviathan, 1996 ). The object of this distinction is to show why people are necessarily led to “lay down the Right” they naturally have over all things in their natural condition, without also having to thereby contradict their nature. When they “lay down” their rights, they do not stop seeking to preserve nature and their life; however, taking account of the laws of nature that show us how to preserve ourselves in fact brings with it a radical change, since it marks the transition from freedom to obligation and obedience.

Hobbes is aware of being an innovator when he so clearly distinguishes right and law, as in the following passage:

For though they that speak of this subject use to confound jus and lex, right and law, yet they ought to be distinguished, because right consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbear; whereas law determineth and bindeth to one of them: so that law and right differ as much as obligation and liberty, which in one and the same matter are inconsistent.

( Leviathan )

As has often been pointed out, this transformation of the relationship between right and law places Hobbes at the precise intersection of two fundamental trends in modern politics, which are on the one hand liberalism, and on the other the absolutism expressed by the theory of sovereignty. Hobbes was one of the fathers of liberalism because he prioritized subjective rights and freedom, conceived as the absence of constraint, in his analysis of the constitution of the political bond, which set him in opposition both to the classical tradition and to modern republicanism. But he was also one of the thinkers of the absolute state, because he claimed to show that individuals can attain their primary objective ( the preservation of their life ) only by transferring almost all of their rights to the sovereign, against whom no resistance is allowed, besides escape or exile. These two aspects of Hobbes’s thought are moreover linked, since the absolute power of the sovereign and his laws goes hand in hand with a transformation of the status of the law, whose function is no longer to guide individuals toward virtue or the good life, but, more modestly, to create the conditions in which subjects will pursue their own ends in order to attain an essentially private, and no doubt worldly, happiness. The function of the absolutist state is to create the conditions of what Benjamin Constant will later call the “freedom of the Moderns” ( in “De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes,” 1819 ). Apart from defending the authority of the State against sedition and unrest, of which the first English revolution was a good example, Hobbes’s work aimed at a complete transformation of politics, which took the form of a profound change of the status of political philosophy, and a radical subversion of the tradition of common law.

Hobbes’s explicit project was to demonstrate the priority of the sovereign and the law in the definition of “right,” and this involved a certain devalorization of the role of the judge in favor of the lawmaker. No less remarkable, however, was that this devalorization was part of a larger effort to place the question of right and law within the proper domain of political philosophy. More than anything else, the political philosophy of the author of the Leviathan is primarily one of law and right, because it foregrounds the necessity of an impartial third party who is an outsider to the disputes between persons, and who can institute a legal bond between them, thanks to the capacity to impose decisions without contest. In this sense the sovereign, who determines the competence of the other authorities, is indeed a kind of supreme judge, whose function is first and foremost to ensure the reign of law. “The law” is simultaneously “law” and “right,” and the higher authorities are indissolubly “jurisdictional” and “legislative” ( as were Parliament or the “King in Parliament” in the English tradition ). This is what is demonstrated in the continual play between jus and lex that Hobbes engages in, and of which we find an admirable example in chapter 24 of Leviathan: “Of the Nutrition and Procreation of a Commonwealth,” that is, the production and distribution of raw materials, as well as the status of the colonies created by a republic in foreign countries. In this chapter, Hobbes defends the thesis that the law and its guarantee depend on the prior protection and authorization of the sovereign, and to support his theory he invokes the authority of Cicero who, although he was known as a “passionate defender of freedom,” had to recognize ( Pro caecina, XXV.70 and 73 ) that no property could be protected or even recognized without the authority of a “civil law” ( Leviathan, chap. 24 ). Now, what Hobbes is translating here is clearly jus civile, a “right” rather than a “law,” whose relationship to the “law of nature” is somewhat different in Cicero to how the author of the Leviathan interprets it. Conversely, this inflection of the classical terminology of jus civile to a meaning more favorable to the sovereign authority of the supreme lawmaker is accompanied by a symmetrical transformation of the status of the law, which Hobbes supports very cleverly by referring to the etymology of the Greek nomos ( law ), so as to give “law” back the meaning that jus had in Roman law, that is, the function of attributing to everyone what he or she is due ( suum cuique tribuere ), and of thereby guaranteeing justice ( justitia ) in these distributions:

Seeing therefore the introduction of propriety is an effect of Commonwealth, which can do nothing but by the person that represents it, it is the act only of the sovereign; and consisteth in the laws, which none can make that have not the sovereign power. And this they well knew of old, who called that Nomos ( that is to say, distribution ), which we call law; and defined justice by distributing to every man his own.

( Leviathan )

Significantly, this text is cited by Carl Schmitt, who sought to place Hobbes back into an imperial political tradition, foreign to both liberalism and “enlightened” absolutism ( Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum ).

B. Hobbes and the tradition of common law: The subversion of the English legacy

What are the consequences of this philosophy of right for the English legacy, and especially for the tradition of common law? The clearest text on this subject is without doubt the admirable Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, in which Hobbes stages the opposition between the tradition of Coke and the new “law-centered” and rationalist philosophy. In this text, Hobbes clearly attributes to Coke the confusion between “law” and “right” ( or between lex and jus ), which he had denounced in the Leviathan. He also develops a powerful internal critique of the juridical tradition of common law, in order to show that the modern conception of sovereignty ( attributed here to the king and not to Parliament ) is the only one able to lend true coherence to the English legal system. To support his argument, he quotes Bracton ( “the most authentic author of the common law” ) on several occasions, to show that the king is fully sovereign in the temporal order. He adds that, since England’s break from Rome, the spiritual power also lies with the king, and he interprets the expression “King in Parliament” in a way that proscribes any dualism in the civil authorities. The main target of the Dialogue is obviously the power of judges under common law, which the dominant tradition claimed was based on the wisdom produced by the “artifical reason” acquired over the course of legal studies, and which Hobbes attacks in the name both of “natural reason” and of the authority of the legislator. On the one hand, there is no other reason than natural reason ( Leviathan, 29 ), if it is true that “no man is born with the use of reason, yet all men may grow up to it as well as lawyers” ( ibid., 38 ), and the knowledge of judges is no different from that which is used in other arts. On the other hand, the wisdom of judges is not in itself sufficient to give the force of law to their decisions, since “it is not wisdom, but Authority that makes a law” ( ibid., 29 ). The laws of England were not made by law professionals, but “by the kings of England, consulting with the nobility and commons in parliament, of which not one of twenty was a learned lawyer” ( ibid., 29 ). Borrowing an expression from the Leviathan, “auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem,” Hobbes makes it clear that he considers doctrines that valorize laws produced or revealed by English jurisconsults as sophisms of the same kind as those of Platonic philosophers, religious fanatics, or defenders of papism: the claim to make truth or wisdom the source of the law is nothing other than the mask worn by all those attempting to usurp supreme power. In addition, as the Dialogue argues elsewhere, the reasoning of the philosopher appears in the eyes of the lawyer as the product of a privilege unduly conferred on statute law against common law, whereas the philosopher by contrast claims to “speak generally of law” ( 29 ) when he discusses the role of the kings of England in making English laws.

The Hobbesian reconstruction of the theory of law thus concludes by prioritizing legislation over any other source of law, and by strongly affirming the sovereignty of the king; the other constituent parts of Parliament are, for Hobbes, merely useful accessories without being in any way indispensable to the adoption of laws. This does not mean, however, that Hobbes abandons the entire former tradition, nor that he refuses judges any role in making laws, since his strategy always consists in starting from an internal critique of the contradictions of tradition in order to show that his own proposals are more likely to achieve the objectives that tradition claimed to be pursuing. First of all, as was noted earlier, the primacy of the legislator itself comes from its ability to state law, and to ensure its reign, by transcending the violent disputes that persist in the state of nature: Hobbes’s sovereign ( who is for him the king ) remains in some ways a judge, just as the English Parliament was in the traditional theories of common law lawyers, and his action is therefore still related to the two senses of law ( Dialogue, 46: “Since therefore the King is sole legislator, I think it also reason he should be sole supreme judge” ). Hobbes also adapts the equivalence of reason and the common law to his own ends, even if he ironically reverses its meaning: where Coke’s disciples would say that common law was “artificial” reason itself, Hobbes will say that natural reason was the true common law. As for the role of judges, it was certainly severely reduced, but not entirely denied. Hobbes grants the common law judge a certain normative power, which comes from the fact that the sovereign had affirmed from the outset that, “in the absence of any law to the contrary,” customary rules, or those based on cases, would have the force of law ( in the same way that “civil law,” that is, Roman law, could be incorporated into English law, if the king so desired ). Moreover, the judge is not necessarily more passive than in the traditional doctrine. In the Dialogue, the philosopher goes as far as to acknowledge, against his interlocutor, that the judge can without risk reject the letter of the law, as long as he does not reject its meaning and the intention of the legislator ( 30 ). And in Leviathan, Hobbes notes that the judge can complete civil law by the law of nature when positive law does not fully authorize a reasonable decision, even if he also has to refer, in the most difficult cases, to the higher authority of the legislator ( chap. 26 ).

III. Two Philosophical Traditions

The greatness of Hobbes comes from that fact that he was the first to grasp what it was in the common law legacy that prevented the modern state from becoming fully developed, at the same time as he understood admirably the indissolubly emancipatory, rationalist, and absolutist nature of the “modern” conception of sovereignty. This is why, in the subsequent history of English-language thought, one finds a “Hobbesian” logic at work in all the thinkers who want to break with the legacy of common law lawyers, or who want to highlight the similarities between the English system and other forms of the modern state. Conversely, the conceptual schemas of common law reemerge spontaneously in all those who, for different reasons, want to limit the claims of the sovereign and the legislator in order to reaffirm historical rights, or to give the judge a privileged role in the protection of these “rights.” This can be seen in the examples of Bentham and Hart, on the one hand, and of Hume, Burke, and Dworkin on the other.

A. Legal positivism in England

Jeremy Bentham ( 1748–1832 ) is without a doubt the main heir to Hobbes in England, even if his political opinions are clearly a long way from monarchic absolutism. Utilitarian anthropology is a continuation of the fundamental ideas of Hobbes, through the work of Helvetius and Holbach, and above all, Bentham, who shares the same critical perspective on the English tradition as the author of Leviathan. For Bentham, as for Hobbes, the objective is to rationalize English law by reducing the influence of judges in favor of the political authorities. Here again, this planned rationalization takes the form of an affirmation of the rights of natural reason against the judicial culture, by giving priority to the law understood as a commandment, and by a fundamental transformation of the principles of legitimation of the rules and usages of common law. Bentham’s attitude is thus similar, mutatis mutandis, to that of Hobbes, as is shown by the way in which he interprets the authority of custom, or the rule of stare decisis. For traditional lawyers, the historical continuity of custom in itself had authority, whereas for Bentham, custom only truly becomes law when it is legalized, that is to say, sanctioned by the so-called lawgiver: the reasoning is the same as the one that, in Hobbes’s Dialogue, founded the authority of the English courts on the authorization of the sovereign. Custom and the rule of the precedent have, in addition, a genuine advantage from a utilitarian point of view, which is that they guarantee, thanks to the continuity of law, the security that the citizen is looking for in the legal order. But for Bentham, this entails consequences that are the opposite of those drawn by traditional lawyers. For them, the continuity of custom created a presumption of rationality and of legality, but the judge, who would reason on the basis of the principles incorporated in common law, could sometimes break with precedents when it seemed that these precedents would lead to an “unreasonable” decision, which explains how the judge, without “making” a law ( since he only “reveals” it ), could play an innovative role ( for example, Blackstone, Commentaries, 1.69–71 ). For Bentham, however, the judge could not reject a precedent without becoming a legislator, and without thereby creating retrospective laws, which would endanger the security of citizens ( Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, 194–97 and 207–10 ). But the conflict between the letter of the law and the decisions of judges could also be seen as a symptom of the imperfection of the traditional English system, where the inflexibility of the rule of precedent increased the risk of the arbitrariness of judges, which led Bentham to propose a complete reform of English law, in which law-making and adjudication are each regulated by the principles of utility, in ways that borrow both from the Hobbesian tradition and, paradoxically, from certain elements of the common law tradition ( c.f. ibid., 339–464 ). The same problems will also be addressed by the great English theoreticians of legal positivism such as John Austin ( 1790–1859 ) and especially Herbert L. A. Hart ( 1907–92 ), whose work has notably paved the way for a “positivist” interpretation of the fundamental elements of English law. In contrast to the classical doctrine whereby the judge only “revealed” the law, common law now appears as a “judge-made law,” in which the judge could be led to institute new rules when the existing law does not allow a case to be resolved.

B. The legacy of common law

The main philosophical legacy of the traditional English lawyers is to be found in authors such as David Hume or Edmund Burke. These authors’ interpretations of politics can be seen as philosophical transpositions of the models of common law, as is shown by their use of English history, their emphasis on the limits of individual reason, and their search for an “artificial reason” that would be irreducible to the simple application of “metaphysical” rules based on “natural reason” ( Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, 81–143, and Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, 202–32 ). Alongside this tradition—which we might call “conservative”—it is also worth noting the very evident presence of modes of thought based on common law in an author such as Dworkin, whose critique of Hart’s positivism is clearly in the service of the great “liberal” causes of our time. Indeed, in Dworkin’s view, law cannot be reduced to rules, since it also contains a set of principles that underlie the legal system while expressing a common morality. These are the principles that judges use when they seem to reject precedent or, more generally, when they appear to “create” law, as the “liberal” judges on the Supreme Court of the United States do, and this reasoning is very similar to Blackstone’s. In the same way, Dworkin’s emphasis on the “continuity” of law above and beyond the “apparent” reversals of case-based law, or even his thesis that every difficult case has only one right response ( which assumes that bad decisions can only be “errors” ), quite clearly echo the ideas of the great English lawyers. And this work, which is entirely dedicated to the defense of modernity, also reminds us that the success of common law was due to its capacity to present the most radical innovations as the consequences of faithful adherence to tradition.

So there is, in English-language philosophy of law, something irreducible to the other modern trends, which comes from the way it incorporated within philosophy the schemas of reasoning that emerge directly out of the legal tradition of common law. It is almost as if the English experience and the English language carried with them a particular vision of law, irreducible both to positivism and to the most dogmatic versions of natural law. But this tradition is itself shot through by constant internal tensions and has been the object, beginning with Hobbes, of radical critiques based on a projected rationalization of the state and society, which have allowed English thought and the “continental” trends to be brought closer together: Hobbes sometimes appears as a successor to Bodin, and Bentham as a reader of Holbach and Helvetius. Conversely, the schemas that have emerged out of common law are very much alive in authors who are sensitive to the particular role of the judge, whose importance is obvious in the democratic politics and the constitutional law of our times.

Philippe Raynaud

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austin, John. The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. London, 1832.

Beaud, Olivier. La puissance de l’état. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994.

Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. First published in 1765–69.

Carrive, Paulette. “Hobbes et les juristes de la Common Law.” Pp. 149–71 in Thomas Hobbes: De la métaphysique à la politique. Edited by Martin Bertman and Michel Malherbe. Paris: Vrin, 1989.

Cormack, Bradin. A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Dicey, Albert Venn. Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. Reprint of 8th ed. [1915]. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982.

Dworkin, Ronald. Law’s Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1986.

   . Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Edlin, Douglas E. Common Law Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Gough, John Wiedofft. Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955.

Hart, Herbert Lionel Adelphus. The Concept of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Hobbes, Thomas. A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. Edited and with an introduction by Joseph Cropsey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

   . Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. First published in 1651.

Lessay, Frank. “Common Law,” in P. Raynaud et S. Rials ( éd ), Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, PUF, 1996.

Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government. 3rd ed. Edited, revised, and with an introduction by J. W. Gough. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. First published in 1690.

Pocock, John Greville Agard. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

   . Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

   . Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Pollock, Frederick, and Frederic William Maitland. The History of English Law. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. First published in 1895.

Postema, Gerald L. Bentham and the Common Law Tradition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Raynaud, Philippe. “Juge.” In RT: Dictionnaire de philosophie politique.

Saccone, Giuseppe Mario. “The Ambiguous Relation between Hobbes’ Rhetorical Appeal to English History and His Deductive Method in a Dialogue.” History of European Ideas 24 ( 1998 ): 1–17.

Schmitt, Carl. “Nehmen/Teilen/Weiden.” Pp. 489–504 in Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954: Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre. Berlin: Duncker and Humbolt, 1958. Translation by G. L. Ulmen: “Appropriation/ Distribution/ Production: An Attempt to Determine from Nomos the Basic Questions of Every Social and Economic Order.” Pp. 324–35 in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum. New York: Telos Press, 2003.

Tunc, André. “Coutume et ‘common law.’ ” Droits 3 ( 1986 ): 51–61.

LEGGIADRIA ( ITALIAN )

ENGLISH			grace, beauty
FRENCH			grâce, beauté, élégance, légèreté
GERMAN			Geschicklichkeit

  GRACE, and ART, BAROQUE, BEAUTY, DISEGNO, MIMÊSIS, SPREZZATURA

Leggiadria, a now obsolete term referring to an affected elegance, comes from the Latin levitus and from Provençal. During the Italian Renaissance leggiadria came to express an almost natural grace that was in no way divine but anchored in worldly reality, situated at the point of equilibrium in a tension between the natural and the artificial. It found cognates in other Romance languages ( cf. the Spanish ligereza and ligero, with the additional sense of “inconstant” or “unfaithful” ), and would also be translated as grâce, “grace,” grazie, élégance, beauté, “beauty.” Toward the end of the sixteenth century, however, during the time of the Counter-Reformation, and when Italy lost its autonomy, the meaning of the term shifted: leggiadria came to mean instead a beauty in which the artificial prevailed over the natural, and thus became one of the most important qualities of the courtier in treatises on how to comport oneself. Leggiadria would thereafter refer to the ability to create a social circle at a distance from actual political conflicts, and was presented as a feigned spontaneity whose most appropriate expression was sprezzatura ( an affected casualness ), as in Il Cortegiano ( Book of the Courtier ) by Baldassare Castiglione ( 1528 ), which was widely read in the courts of Europe. In this new sense, it could be translated as gaillardise ( high-spiritedness ) and Geschicklichkeit ( artfulness, skillfulness; formed from Geschick ).

I. The Education of Nature?

The term leggiadria had its origins and was used most frequently in love poetry. It referred to feminine beauty, or to the elegance of animals that one could in principle train, since leggiadria had to do, in fact, with educating nature—to the point of making what was acquired appear as natural. This nuance of meaning is found throughout poetry written in vulgar language, from Dante to the Baroque poets. In Poliziano, for example, leggiadria is the very particular grace of a doe and of a loved woman, who are both characterized by a spontaneous but precious elegance:

Ira dal volto suo trista s’arretra, e poco, avanti a lei, Superbia basta: ogni dolce virtù l’è in compagnia. Beltà la mostra a dito e Leggiadria.

( The fateful anger leaves his face, and Vanity resists a little more when he is before her; every sweet virtue accompanies him. Beauty points to her, and so does Leggiadria. )

( Le Stanze, I.45; The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, trans. D. Quint )

In the fifteenth century, the term expressed a rather vague oscillation between the natural and the artificial. In the sixteenth century, with the demand for systematizing and classifying literary genres as political systems, a number of treatises on love or poetics were keen to distinguish between beauty, grace, and leggiadria. The most striking example is the dialogue entitled Il Celso. Della bellezza delle donne. Here, Agnolo Firenzuola, in drawing up a taxonomy of terms used to describe beauty, uses a false etymology in making leggiadria derive not from lightness but from law ( legge ):

La leggiadria non è altro, come vogliono alcuni, e secondo che mostra la forza del vocabolo, che un’osservanza d’una tacita legge, fata e promulgata dalla natura a voi donne, nel muovere, portare e adoperare così tutta la persona insieme, come le membra particolari, con grazia, con modestia, con misura, con garbo, in guisa che nessun movimento, nessuna azione sia senza regola, senza modo, senza misura o senza disegno.

( As many people would have it, and as the very force of the word suggests, leggiadria is nothing but the observance of a tacit law, which is created and promulgated by you women, so that you can move, carry, and compose your whole body, as well as all the individual parts of your body, with grace, modesty, measure, and discretion, so that no movement is unregulated, nor without manners, measure or design. )

( Il Celso, Discourse I )

So leggiadria continued to refer to a more than graceful beauty, but it began to lose its lightness, so to speak: it needed to have rules, measure, and disegno. The balance between the natural and the artificial thus seemed to tip toward the artificial, or at the very least, toward the construction of a consistent and well-planned order. It was no coincidence that this requirement was particularly marked in the nascent genre of treatises on art, where the principle of the imitation of nature began to compete with the idea of something constructed according to the intentions of the author, and thanks to his artistic skill. Opinions were thus divided, with the emphasis sometimes on the natural, and at other times on the artificial, but humanists seemed to go more in the direction of the latter.

The balance between the natural and the artificial found in earlier uses of leggiadria was still retained in Cosimo Bartoli’s 1550 Italian translation of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria: wherever the humanist has used the Latin term venustas ( “from the goddess Venus,” hence the aesthetic quality bound with the pleasure derived from the observation of bodily beauty, and most famously translated into English by Henry Wotton, in the seventeenth century, as “delight” ) to refer to a certain order obtained by supplementing the inadequacies of nature itself, the translator chose the word leggiadria. Leggiadria conferred on beauty both its principle of order and harmony, and the power to complete the plans that nature had not been able to complete:

La bellezza è un certo consenso, e concordantia delle parti, in qual si voglia cosa che dette parti si ritrovino, la qual concordantia si sia avuta talmente con certo determinato numero, finimento, e collocatione, qualmente la leggiadria ciò è, il principale intento della natura ne ricercava.

( Beauty is a certain correspondence and harmony between parts, whatever the thing they are part of, this harmony being obtained by a determined measure, by an order, and an arrangement, in other words, leggiadria, which is the principal aim of nature. )

( Alberti, L’Architettura; It. trans. by C. Bartoli, VI.2 )

But if, in Bartoli’s translation, nature remains the main point of reference, in the same year Vasari clearly characterized the beauty of leggiadria as being, above all, free from any measure: according to him, it exceeds nature and the rules of proportional harmony. Its champions were thus Raphael, Parmigianino, and Pierino del Vaga; those who condemned it were Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, that is, the painters who were the most closely attuned to the “natural” universe.

II. The New Morality and the Virtue of Grace

The shift in leggiadria’s meaning toward the sense of “artificial” and even of “artifact” occurred more explicitly in the use of leggiadria in manuals for deportment from the second half of the sixteenth century. With Italy’s loss of its autonomy, and the Counter-Reformation, a new morality of behavior was evolving within the courts: men of letters elaborated a rhetoric based on the carefully managed distance between one’s inner-self and how one displayed oneself in public. Leggiadria therefore acquired a meaning close to that of sprezzatura, as illustrated by Baldassare Castiglione in Il Cortegiano ( 1528 ), which consisted of dissimulating the efforts of art behind an appearance of nonchalance. This morality would find its theoretical justification much later in Torquato Accetto’s La Dissimulazione onesta ( 1641 ); for him, disguising spontaneity and one’s own opinions was a means of survival. In many treatises during the Counter-Reformation, leggiadria in effect became what characterized the space between the private and the public, the innate and the acquired, sincerity and lying, which was also the realm of social savoir-faire, of the carefully negotiated distance where the particular sociability of leggiadria reigned, namely, in conversation. In his Galateo ( 1558 ), Giovanni della Casa thus placed leggiadria in the register of good manners. It was always at the heart of the activity of communicare e usare, or developing a relationship whereby two men became less of a stranger or enemy to one another. But it was also defined as attending to the imperfections of one’s own body: without the elegance of a carefully looked-after body, beauty and goodness become divorced from each other. Jean de Tournes ( 1598 ) translated into French the definition of leggiadria that figures in the Galateo:

L’élégance [leggiadria] n’est en quelque sorte rien d’autre qu’une certaine lumière qui se dégage de la convenance des choses qui sont bien composées et bien divisées les unes avec les autres et toutes ensemble: sans cette mesure, le bien n’est pas le beau, ni la beauté plaisante.

( Elegance [leggiadria] is in many ways nothing but a certain light which is given off by the perfection of things which are well arranged and well divided between one another, and as a whole: without this meaure, the good is not beautiful, and beauty is not agreeable. )

( Della Casa, Il Galateo; Fr. trans. J. de Tournes )

This was the sense in which leggiadria was translated and adapted in high society in the courts of Europe. However, its popularity was short-lived: Heinrich Wölflin ( Renaissance und Barok, 1888 ) saw the disappearance of the world of leggiadria ( die graziöse Leichtigkeit ) as one of the major elements of the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque period: the break with the Renaissance involved a taste for shapes, colors, and spiral forms supplanting the taste for contours, design, and lightness. In the eighteenth century, leggiadria was thus completely overshadowed by the distinction between grace and beauty in neoclassical artists such as Antonio Canova, Leopoldo Cicognara, and Ugo Foscolo: for them, art aspired to be almost godlike, and consequently could not be considered worldly. Schiller’s aesthetics, in which grace was a matter of beauty in movement, seemed to borrow certain aspects of leggiadria—though in fact his notion of grace was intended as a basis for the synthesis between nature and suprasensible freedom. Leggiadria, though, makes no claims at all to transcend the real. Anchored in worldly reality, it suspends certain of the world’s rules in order to create parallel words, caught within a fragile equilibrium between the artificial and the natural, and not in order to bring about the intervention of divine grace. Like Guido Cavalcanti, who in Boccaccio escapes from being chased by leaping “with great lightness” and landing on the other side of the Orto San Michele, leggiadria does not deny the necessity of the real, but merely looks for the supporting points from where it can perform an elegant, light leap, a saving little nothing. Italo Calvino adapts Boccaccio’s story in his Lezioni americane ( 1988 ) when he recommends lightness to writers of the next millennium, as one of the major yet forgotten touchstones of Western literature, heir to the humanism of the Renaissance.

Fosca Mariani-Zini

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alberti, Leon Battista. De re ædificatoria. Florence: Niccolò di Lorenzo Alamani, 1485. Translation by Cosimo Bartoli: L’Architettura. Florence, Torrentino, 1550. Translation by Giovanni Orlandi: L’architettura / De re aedificatoria. 2 vols. Edited by G. Orlandi. Introduction and notes by Paolo Portoghesi. Milan: Polifilo, 1966. Translation by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor: On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.

   .On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of “De pictura” and “De statua.” Edited and translated, with introduction and notes, by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon, 1972.

Castiglione, Baldassare. Il cortegiano con una scelta delle opere minori. Edited by Bruno Maier. Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1955. First published in 1528. Translation by Charles S. Singleton: The Book of the Courtier. Edited by Daniel Javitch. New York: Norton, 2002.

Della Casa, Giovanni. Il Galateo. In Prose di Giovanni della Casa e altri trattatisti cinquecenteschi del comportamento. Edited by Arnaldo Di Benedetto. Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1970. First published in 1558. Translation by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett: Galateo: A Renaissance Treatise on Manners. Introduction and notes by K. Eisenbichler and K. R. Bartlett. 3rd rev. ed. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1994. Translation by Jean de Tournes: Le Galatée. Lyon, 1598; revised as Galatée ou Des manières by Alain Pons. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1988.

Firenzuola, Agnolo. Celso. “Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne.” In Opere. Firenze: Sansoni, 1971. Translation by Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray: On the Beauty of Women. Edited by K. Eisenbichler and J. Murray. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

Poliziano, Angelo. Stanze per la giostra, Orfeo, Rime: Con un’ appendice di prose volgari. Novaro, It.: Istituto Geografico de Agostino, 1969.

   . The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano. Translated by David Quint. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.

Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de più eccelenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani. 9 vols. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Sansoni, 1878–85. First published in 1586. Translation by Gaston du C. de Vere: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 10 vols. London, 1912–15; reissued New York: AMS Press, 1976.

LEIB / KÖRPER / FLEISCH ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			lived-body/body/flesh
FRENCH			chair/corps
GREEK			sôma [σῶμα] / sarx [σάϱξ]
HEBREW			bāsār [בָּשָׂר]
ITALIAN			carne/corpo
LATIN			corpus/caro
SPANISH			carne/cuerpo

  FLESH, SOUL, and ANIMAL, CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, GESCHLECHT, LIFE/LEBEN, LOGOS, PATHOS, PERCEPTION, QUALE, SUBJECT

Leib has two meanings, which depend on its privileged correlative term: when paired with Seele ( soul ), it corresponds to the currently accepted sense of the body as the home of sensory experience and fits into the common opposition of soul/body. Understood in terms of its relation to its close neighbor, Körper, its meaning is inflected and revitalized through its etymological connection to Leben ( life ). Leben means the vital, fluid, living, and dynamic side of corporeity, whereas Körper refers to the structural aspect of the body, that is, its static dimension. One is thus tempted to translate Leib ( 1 ) as “flesh” ( chair in French, carne in Italian and Spanish ), in order to emphasize this aspect of vital fluidity, and Körper as “body,” when the two terms are being used together, especially in a Husserlian context; ( 2 ) as “body” whenever it is Seele that structures the meaning, in more classical contexts. But the problem one runs up against is the retranslation of chair—a key term in Merleau-Ponty—in the Germanic languages, where there is a more specific term: Fleisch ( German ), and flesh ( English ), which are usually translated into French as viande ( meat ). ( Spanish and Italian present no such difficulty. ) In addition, chair carries with it theological connotations, which leads one to question the way in which the concept took root in a Greco-Latin, or even Hebrew, context. Indeed, both Greek and Latin have two terms that one could comfortably retain as bi-univocal in translating chair/corps or Leib/Körper, namely, caro/corpus and sarx/sôma. But just as the transition from German to French does not allow for a simple transposition of one pair to the other, one is also faced with shifts of meaning in Latin and in Greek, or at any rate, inflections linked to the underlying axiology of each term, in ways that are moreover quite distinct in philosophy and in theology.

I. The Lexical and Etymological Dimensions

In present-day German, Leib refers to the stomach or the breast, as, for example, in expressions such as Nichts im Leibe haben ( to have an empty stomach ) and gesegneten Leibes sein or die Mutterleib ( to be pregnant ). More broadly, Leib corresponds to anything having to do with the intimacy of the body at its most vital: harten Leib haben ( to be constipated ); or sensorial: am ganzen Leibe zittern ( to tremble all over ). Leib is also used in expressions that mention the soul ( Seele ) or the heart ( Herz ): kein Herz im Leibe haben ( not to have a heart ), mit Leib und Seele ( wholeheartedly ), and jemandem mit Leib und Seele ergeben sein ( to be devoted body and soul to someone ). This suggests a proximity between Leib and the realm of “sensing” or “feeling,” whether affective or sensorial.

The etymology reveals a common root between Leib and leben on the one hand, and Leib and bleiben on the other, going back to Middle High German ( lîp, genitive lîbes ). In the first case, Leib conveys the idea of a vital flow, proper to all living beings, which animates an inert body. In the second, bleiben attests to the link between Leib and dwelling, residing, and the intimacy of a place. Leib is part of a specific Germanic context: lîp are those who have “stayed” ( die Gebleibenen ), who have not fallen on the battlefield, as opposed to wal, those who have fallen, that is, heaven’s chosen ones ( die Ausgewählten ), the heroes. The life/death polarization of the pair lîp/wal follows naturally ( the living and the dead ), even if it is not constitutive of the primary meaning.

One can therefore find this shared sense between Leib and leben in many almost tautological idiomatic expressions: bei lebendigen Leibe verbrannt werden ( to be burned alive ), Leib und Leben einsetzen ( to risk life and limb ), das ist er, wie er leibt und lebt ( that’s just like him ). In short, the Leib aspect of the body is vital and alive: the inert aspect is the becoming-inert of Leiche or of Leichnam ( “corpse” in English, cadavre in French ), or the inertia of Körper, a solid, physical, and material body. So one speaks of “bodies” in the physical sciences, celestial bodies ( Himmelskörper ) in Aristotelian cosmology, and corpuscles ( Körpchen ) in quantum physics. Whenever Körper is used in a human context, it signifies an organic structure or a complexion ( Körper-Anlage-Beschaffenheit ), a stature or conformation ( -bau ), comportment or bearing ( -haltung ), and in any case, a static, functional, or quantifiable configuration ( -gewicht, -größe, -kraft ).

■ See Box 1.

1

Lebenswelt and In-der-Welt-Sein: “Lifeworld” and “being in the world”

  DASEIN, MALAISE, WORLD

The emphasis on Lebenswelt, or “lifeworld,” in the later writing of Husserl corresponds to an internal exigency of Husserlian phenomenology: yet it also seems to correspond to the impact of a return of the writings of the disciple ( Heidegger ) on those of his master ( Husserl ), in particular the notion elaborated in Being and Time of In-der-Welt-Sein.

French translators have preferred to translate Heidegger’s expression as être-au-monde ( being-to-the-world ) rather than être-dans-le monde ( being-in-the-world ) ( Sartre ). It is indeed best understood with reference to the German In-sein ( être à [to be at/to] ), where what is at issue is not so much the localization or placement of being-in-relation-to, as the delocalization, or even “removal” or moving ( as in changing residence ) ( déménagement ) in the Baudelairean sense: “It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and this question of removal is one that I discuss incessantly with my soul.” “To be at/to” is also “to be exposed to,” and not being able not to be exposed to, so that the title of prose poem 48 in Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris captures perfectly both the centripetal and centrifugal tension of “being-in-the-world” ( and in a language ): “Anywhere out of the world.”

Pascal David

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

II. Leib and Its Entry into Philosophy

This was twofold: first, in terms of Leib’s paired relation to Seele ( soul ), and second, in terms of its quasi-oppositional relation to Körper, and thus its correlation with Geist ( spirit ) ( RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie ).

The ways in which Leib fits into a Kantian and post-Kantian context, within idealism more broadly, and then into its critical reassessment by Nietzsche, illustrate this pairing: here, Leib comes to be linked to subjectivity. Kant’s Opus postumum, for instance, makes Leib a formal a priori of the subject, and Fichte ( Die Tatsachen des Bewußtseins ) asserts that the materiality of the Leib is the absolute a priori of self-consciousness. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, however, insists on the fact that the body ( Leib ) is the expression of an individual, but that this expression is already mediated; it is a sign produced by the body, but the body is not at the origin of the sign. For Schopenhauer ( Werke ), the Leib represents an immediate object and expresses the will. Nietzsche describes it as a “great reason” and even sees it as the vital principle of theoretical reason ( Also sprach Zarathustra ). In short, Leib in the German nineteenth century was associated with transcendental subjectivity, or it was related to the individual, physiological, or instinctual subject.

III. Crux phaenomenologica: The Disintegration of Leib as an Effect of the Diversity of Its Translations

The psychology of the time, which Husserl inherited, also used the term Leib, but in the context of a psycho-physical parallelism ( as in the work of Fechner, Wundt, and Avenarius ), or more precisely, of the reciprocity of the psychic and the physical ( Stumpf ). Apart from these authors, Husserl borrowed from Theodor Lipps the notion of empathy as an immediate sharing of the feelings of others. Rejecting the analogical inference of Benno Erdmann, he conceived of empathy as the mediated ( corporeal ) manifestation of the lived experience of others.

Leib thus acquired the meaning of “body as it is lived,” leading Anglo-Americans to opt for the expression “lived-body.” But this translation has the disadvantage of placing corporeality in a reflexive framework ( my body, lived by myself ), when phenomenology aimed to short-circuit the distinction between inside and outside. We come across similar difficulties with the French expression corps animé ( animate body ), which considers Leib from a psycho-physical point of view. We have the reverse of the same difficulty with the translations corps organique ( organic body ) or corps vivant ( living body ), which are relevant for worldly, anthropological phenomenology, but that each time incline Leib in the direction of biology.

What are we to make, then, of the corps propre ( one’s own body ) that is a theme from Maine de Biran through to the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception, the “subject-body,” which is one’s own, as opposed to the “object-body,” which scientists deal with? This distinction would easily render Husserl’s distinction between Leib and Körper, but such a translation is almost tautological: in fact, a Leib is always “mine” ( mein Leib ), or “my own” ( Eigenleib ). Even with the expression fremder Leib, it is the other’s mode of a belonging to him- or herself that is in play. Likewise, whenever Husserl talks about Leibkörper ( literally, body of flesh ), or about körperlicher Leib or physischer Leib, or even Körperleib ( Husserliana, no. 13; Husserliana, no. 15 ), he does so in order to free subjectivation from the object-body ( Körper ). Although what is one’s own is just as much a component of Leib as what is quick or living, Leib cannot be reduced to this. When Husserl talks about Eigenleib, it is so as to specify Leib as one’s own, not to assimilate the one to the other. The translation of Leib by corps propre may confirm the links between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but it also opens the door to an improper linking of Leib with what is properly one’s life. The network of composite words we find in Husserl is supplemented by a series of derived terms ( leiblich/Leiblichkeit/Verleiblichung/körperlich/Körperlichkeit/Verkörperung ); the bi-univocal correspondence between Leib and Körper proves all the more uneasy, given that the Romance languages use a single term to refer to the everyday meaning and the theological meaning of incarnation, while German speaks, in the latter register, of Menschwerdung.

In Husserl, the sphere of “ownness” refers to the first experience in which the lived experiences of consciousness are constituted and engendered: it has a genetic status as the original matrix of our corporeality. In French, the notion of chair ( flesh ) attempts to express the sensible locus that is irreducible to objective spatiality But is this use of the term chair appropriate to refer to the way Leib is inflected? Merleau-Ponty first privileges this term in Le visible et l’invisible ( 1964 ) in referring not to the body of others, but to the being of the world. To emphasize the carnal dimension of experience is to affirm the world’s sensing ( of itself ). Thus, the French chair captures better than the English “being” a certain unity of experience ( there is a flesh of being ), whereas one’s “own” body is individual. The Husserlian Leib also contains this unity of the experience that, without appearing, is concretized in the form of everyone’s body.

This “non-appearing” or “non-apparent” ( in-apparaissant ) is not something that lies beyond. If chair does not appear, it is because we do not perceive it, we are not attentive to it—as happens with small perceptions in Leibniz. This emphasis on the labile, fluid, soft nature of chair, which downplays the structured-ness of the body, is unique to French, even though it takes as its point of reference the usual sense of the term ( in French, the bones and la chair connected to blood are opposed to la viande [meat], or the soft substance of the body ). Fleisch ( German ) and “flesh” ( English ) have this sense, and the German translators of Merleau-Ponty have, moreover, translated chair in this way, also using the word Leib. What is revealed here is the hypersensitive dimension of a human being ( chair is what can be wounded, or can flourish ), the intimate exchange between inside and outside, namely, the skin: only the skin can have la chair de poule ( goose bumps; literally, chicken skin ). What is more, whether we are talking about a fruit or about the skin’s appearance, la chair harbors a network that is both mobile and firm, plastic and structured, endlessly reconfigured: the vitality of the body resides in its chair.

Michel Henry can thus proclaim this carnal sense of Leib, which is a different name for what he calls “auto-affection.” And Didier Franck proposes, in his discussion of the analytic of la chair in Chair et corps, the idea of refusing to give this originary aspect any autonomous status, by articulating the invisible, or the inapparent, as that which constitutes visible appearing. So to translate Leib as chair brings out the tension between phenomenology and metaphysics, because of the originary non-appearing unity that the term conveys. This articulation that would become the horizon of Husserlian phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty’s thinking toward the end of his life, as well as Michel Henry’s perspective, are situated within this framework.

This tension becomes problematic when the metaphysics inherent in la chair doubles as instinctual immanence and theological transcendence. As early as the twelfth century, chair had a strong theological resonance that is certainly present in the notion of the living body as a glorious body. In addition, chair also had an instinctual, even sexual connotation: to speak about a carnal union was to speak in more elegant terms of a sexual union. From the ambivalence of the living body as biological or theological, to the ambiguity of la chair as instinctual or spiritual, we remain caught within the duality of immanence and transcendence.

IV. The Horizon of the Ancient World: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Roots

How are we to arrive at rational grounds for choosing a translation of Leib when faced with such a swarm of different decisions taken over the years? It would seem appropriate to reflect on the Greco-Latin roots of the notion. In each case we have a pair ( sarx/sôma [σάϱξ/σῶμα]; caro/corpus ) that modern languages have transposed into “flesh”/“body,” chair/corps, or carne/cuerpo-corpo. But do the theological or philosophical contexts that the classical sources reveal mitigate the difficulties in translating Leib?

A. The equivocality of the contexts of Paul and John: Sôma, sarx, pneuma

In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul wavers between flesh ( sarx ) and body ( sôma ): after having distinguished between the different kinds of flesh in the animal world and then having differentiated the bodies in the cosmology of the ancients, he separates the psychic, animal body ( destructible, despicable ) from the spiritual, pneumatic body ( glorious, powerful ). Sôma is ambivalent, linked to sin, rejected or elevated to the glory of resurrection. Paul’s sôma has no quality of its own. Sarx, however, is defined in the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians as being opposed to the spirit ( pneuma [πνεῦμα] ), but it is not identified with the somatic body, since as something selfishly closed upon itself, the residue of a sin that is legalized within the law, and the source of death, its meaning is entirely negative ( Rom 7:5–14; Gal 5:13–16 ). Sarx is understood in terms of a morality of abstinence, which gives it a worldly and finite meaning. This meaning of “flesh” as a manifestation of human finitude is also one we find in Matthew 26:41 ( or Mk 14:38 ): the Spirit is filled with love, but the flesh is weak.

In John 3:6, sarx and pneuma refer to two types of creation: “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” Sôma alone contains the possibility of a glorious self-transformation. Sôma alone can have an individuated and individuating status, while sarx is infra-individual: the asthenic flesh is thus contrasted with the force of the spirit. Yet this hypothesis ( Husserl, Thing and Space ) does not hold up, because ( a ) we are only dealing with one, asthenic, meaning of the flesh; and ( b ) the axiology of the spirit and of the flesh is supported by that of glory and sin. It is notable, however, that “the Word became flesh” ( Jn 1:14 ) has quite a different valence: the “flesh of life” in John is a redefinition of finitude as the possible power of individuation. The distinction is thus not between flesh and spirit ( and also not between Paul and John ), but between the flesh of sin and the flesh of glory and life ( Cyril of Alexandria, Deux dialogues christologiques ).

B. The univocality of the philosophical context: Soma, psuchê, nous

In the context of Plato and Aristotle, where sarx and pneuma do not form a conceptual framework, the distinction sôma/psuchê [ψυχή], or “animate body”/“intellect” ( nous [νοῦς] ), is the one that prevails, and it is linked to a depreciation of the somatic that would continue through the modern era, up to and including Descartes. Phaedo ( 83d ) and Gorgias ( 493a–b ) describe sôma as a prison cell, a tomb ( sôma = sêma [σῆμα] ), whose sign is desire, and understand psuchê as a form of exile, its own executioner crucified on the body. Aristotle radicalizes what in Plato was not a duality—but rather the soul’s desire through the body, and the soul’s exile in the body—by an ontological break that universalizes pure divine thought ( nous ) and individualizes corporeal form: psuchê and sôma are thus correlates of each other, as “form” ( morphê [μοϱφή] ) and “matter” ( hulê [ὕλη] ), or “activity” and “passivity” ( De anima, 430a 5 ).

This duality reappears in Descartes in the distinction between the res extensa and the res cogitans ( anima, mens, and cogitationes ). In short, the body ( sôma, corpus ) is ontologically insubstantial and is kept at a distance, as passive matter. Heidegger was therefore able to think of corporeality as ontic substantiality, so the Platonic and Aristotelian filiation is not the one we should retain if we wish to see corporeality as something productive.

C. The non-onto-theo-logical ( Hebrew ) dynamic of the flesh: Bāsār, rūah., nèfèš

To understand the theological ambivalence of sôma/sarx ( or of corpus/carne, in Tertullian ), and the positive meaning it can have, we might turn to another context: in the Hebrew scriptures, neither the body nor the flesh are valued negatively. The flesh ( bāsār [בָּשָׂר] ), as a human composite of body and soul, is even privileged as a concrete index of the spirit ( nèfèš [נֶפֶשׁ] ). A human being is an organic unity sometimes referred to as nèfèš, sometimes as bāsār, with rūaḥ [ ַרוּח] ( breath, spirit of God, soul ) linked to it.

As the RT: Traduction oecuménique de la Bible testifies, roughly half of the occurrences of bāsār are translated as chair ( flesh ) ( 137 out of 270 ), indicating a consistent use of this term, whereas corps ( body ) does not correspond to any unified conceptual register: it is designated by seventeen Hebrew terms, among them bāsār ( 28/270 ) and ḥayyah [חַיַה] ( 2/3 ), out of a total of seventy-two occurrences. “Flesh,” on the other hand, corresponds to only five terms in Hebrew.

Nowhere in the Judaic tradition is “flesh” reduced to the physical or organic body. Its spiritual dimension is even the basis from which a possible glorification of the body itself makes sense. Obviously, this dynamic sense of the flesh pulls it away from substantiality: with respect to this endorsement of the flesh, Christianity will then bear onward this non-onto-theological sense of the body to which the expression in John testifies: “the Word became flesh.”

D. How to translate?

We are dealing with four distinct conceptual fields. Christianity and phenomenology emphasize the ambivalence of the corporeal: sinful/glorious ( sarx-caro/sôma-corpus, and Körper/Leib ). The two other fields are unequivocal—either positive ( Judaism ) or negative ( philosophy ).

In addition, there is no analogical or inverse relationship between one pair ( sarx/sôma ) and another ( Körper/Leib ), in which sarx would be to Körper what sôma would be to Leib, since sôma also has a negative sense and sarx a positive sense. In short, the pair sarx/soma ( caro/corpus ) is not on its own a discriminating difference. A further quality polarizes its relevance: the modal pair sin/glory. Sarx on its own is not evil, but the sin by which Paul qualifies it is, to such a point that this sin then comes to define sarx. On the other hand, following the Judaic meaning of “flesh,” John makes it the flesh of life, which refers, as in the Old Testament, to the complete person—body, soul, and mind.

In this respect, one decisive historical point of reference is that of the German esotericists ( Weigel, Oetinger, Baader ), who make Leiblichkeit into a geistige Leiblichkeit, endowing the body-flesh with a spiritual life that Schelling would turn to his advantage, as the body-flesh that phenomenology would reactivate by relieving it of its substantial materiality, and by recasting it as a vital subjective dynamism.

The pair Körper/Leib allows for an operative distinction because of the inertia/life or objective/subjective polarities that the Greek and Latin pairs do not offer and that Hebrew alone allows for through the expanded sense of bāsār. So it is the qualities of sôma-corpus ( sin/glory ) and of sarx/carne ( death/life ) that come to be analogous with the qualities of Leib/Körper ( subjective lived experience / inert objectivity ).

We could say, then, that the Leib/Körper polarity is conceptualized without being terminological. In this respect, it is reasonable to follow Paul Ricœur’s appeal to the economy of meaning ( body/flesh ), and the use of a single term to cover the different concepts that Leib’s history and uses disclose. If we go along with this principle, we will opt for a minimalistic translation of Leib as “body”: we could also convey the phenomenological polarity by using the term “flesh,” given that Husserl uses Leib in a distinctive way, associating it with Körper, and articulating it with Seele. Distinct terms are thus legitimized according to their usage. Either Leib ( flesh ) works phenomenologically in liaison with Körper, or Leib ( body ) is associated with the psychic: in German ( Leib und Seele ), just as in French ( âme et corps ), idiomatic expressions are available that make sense in everyday language.

By working with two usages, one more technical, and the other more everyday, we bring into play a salutary contextualization. By maintaining a distinction between Leib and Körper in French, one can account for the difference between corporeal appearing and carnal appearing. It is then that the philosophical emerges: the aim of the German compound nouns is to indicate the interweaving that is the only way one can conceptualize unity in difference. Further, does this articulation ( as corps and as chair, or between a technical and an everyday term ) not correspond to the double meaning of Leib ( linked to Seele/opposed to Körper ), which signals Leib’s entry into philosophy?

Natalie Depraz

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avenarius, Richard Heinrich Ludwig. Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses: Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. 3rd ed. Berlin: Guttentag, 1917.

Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. Deux dialogues christologiques. Translated by G. M. de Durand. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964. Translation of the second dialogue by John Anthony McGuckin: On the Unity of Christ. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995.

Dodd, James. Idealism and Corporeity: An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1997.

Erdmann, Benno. Wissenschaftliche Hypothesen über Leib und Seele: Vorträge gehalten an der Handelshochschule zu Köln. Cologne: M. Dumont-Schauberg, 1908.

Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Elemente der Psychophysik. 3rd ed. 2 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1907. Translation by Helmut E. Adler: Elements of Psychophysics. Edited by David H. Howes and Edwin G. Boring. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

   . Religion of a Scientist: Selections from Gustav Th. Fechner. Edited and translated by Walter Lowrie. New York: Pantheon Books, 1946.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Die Tatsachen des Bewußtseins. Edited by I. H. Fichte. Vol. 1 in Nachgelassene Werke. Bonn: Marcus, 1834.

Franck, Didier. Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomelogie des Geistes. Edited by J. Hoffmeister. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1971. Translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Henry, Michel. C’est moi la vérité: Pour une philosophie du christianisme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996. Translation by Susan Emanuel: I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Hübner, Kurt. “Leib und Erfahrung in Kants Opus postumum.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 7, no. 2 ( 1953 ): 204–19.

Husserl, Edmund. “Aus den Vorlesungen, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Wintersemester 1910/1911.” In Zur Phänomenlogie der Intersubjektivität, edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana, no. 13. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Ingo Farin and James G. Hart: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2006.

   . Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Edited by S. Strasser. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Dorion Cairns: Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977.

   . Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen 1907. Edited by Ulrich Claesges. Husserliana, no. 16. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Richard Rojcewicz: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1997.

   . Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Edited by Karl Schuhmann ( vol. 1 ) and Marly Biemel ( vol. 2 ). 2 vols. Husserliana, nos. 3.1 and 4. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977, 1952. Translation by W. R. Boyce Gibson: Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1931.

   . Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Dritter Teil, 1929–35. Edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana, no. 15. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973.

   . Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Zweiter Teil, 1921–28. Edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana, no. 14. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973.

Kant, Immanuel. Opus postumum. 2 vols. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Vols. 21 and 22 in Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1936–38. Translation by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen: Opus postumum. Edited by Eckart Förster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Lipps, Theodor. Ästhetik; Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. 2 vols. Leipzig: Voss, 1914–20.

McGuckin, John Anthony. St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy; Its History, Theology, and Texts. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1994.

Midgley, Mary. “The Soul’s Successors: Philosophy and the Body.” In Religion and the Body, edited by Sarah Coakley, 53–68. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also sprach Zarathustra. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Vol. 4 of Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988. Translation by Adrian Del Caro: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Translation by Kathleen Blamey: Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Paul Deussen. 6 vols. Munich: Piper, 1911–13. Translation by T. Bailey Saunders et al.: The Works of Schopenhauer. Edited by Will Durant. Abridged ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928.

   . The World as Will and Presentation. Translated by Richard E. Aquila with David Carus. 2 vols. Longman Library. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008–10.

Stumpf, Carl. Leib und Seele: Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie; Zwei Reden. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Barth, 1903.

Welton, Donn, ed. The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.

Wundt, Wilhelm Max. “Über psychische Kausalität.” In Zur Psychologie und Ethik: Zehn ausgewählte Abschnitte aus Wilhelm Wundt, edited by Julius A. Wentzel. Leipzig: Reclam, 1911. Translation by Charles Judd: “Psychical Causality and Its Laws.” In Outlines of Psychology, 352–72. 3rd rev. ed. Leipzig: Engelmann, 1907.

LËV [לֵב], LËVAV [לֵבָב] ( HEBREW )

ARABIC			qalb [القلب], fu’ād [الفوٴاد], lubb [لبّ]
ENGLISH			heart
FRENCH			coeur
GREEK			kardia [ϰαρδία]

  HEART, and CONSCIOUSNESS, ESSENCE, GEMÜT, GOGO, INGENIUM, INTELLECTUS, SAMOST’ SOUL, Box 4, TO TI ÊN EINAI, TRUTH, UNDERSTANDING

This word is common to Semitic languages. Its usage represents, as with many languages, a remarkable case of the metaphorical use of a part of the body, considered as central, in order to express the moral worth of an individual or the very essence of something.

Arabic has specific words for the heart as an organ ( qalb [القلب], and less commonly fu’ād [الفوٴاد] ). In Hebrew lëv [לֵב] refers less to the organ than to the entire thorax ( cf. 2 Sm 18:14ff. ), with all of the entrails contained within the cavity that it forms. It is from the heart that the very source of life is said to spring ( Prv 4:23; cf. 25:13 ). It is the seat of life force and the center of the psychic life in all its dimensions ( cf. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I, 39 ). The heart is the source of perceptions ( Dt 29:3 ), memory ( Is 46:8 etc.; Jer 3:16, etc. ), feelings, and desire—including courage ( Ps 40:13 ), in the sense in which Rodrigue in Corneille’s Le Cid is asked “As-tu du coeur?’’ ( Do you have the heart? ). There is nothing specifically Semitic about this. In Aristotle, too, the “heart’’ ( kardia [ϰαρδία] ) is the end point of sensations, and the starting point of the movements of the organism ( cf. RT: Index Aristotelicus, 365b 34–54 ). And in Egypt, from the Middle Empire on, a heart would be weighed postmortem, a procedure that was supposed to assess the moral worth of the dead person and thus to determine his fate in the afterlife. Attributing higher intellectual functions to the heart is something we find in Latin ( cf. Cicero, Tusculanes, I, 9, 18 ), but this is not at all the case in Greek. The Bible talks about a wise and intelligent heart ( Ps 90:2; Prv 15:14 ). In the Qur’ān, people who “have a strong heart’’ ( ’ūlū ’l-albāb [أولو الألباب] are those who are intelligent enough to decipher the signs of creation and to see in them traces of the presence of Allah ( III, 190 ).

The meaning of “the innermost core,” which allows one to speak of the “heart of something,” is discreetly present in the Bible, which mentions, for example, the “heart” of an oak tree ( 2 Sm 18:14 ); it develops in medieval Hebrew and takes on a laudatory meaning under the influence of the Arabic lubb [لبّ], which can refer to the pit of a fruit and also to what is most pure about a thing, its quintessence.

Rémi Brague

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Shlomo Pines. Introductory essay by Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

LEX / JUS ( LATIN )

ENGLISH			right, law
FRENCH			loi, droit
GERMAN			Recht
GREEK			nomos [νόμος]
ITALIAN			diritto
SPANISH			derecho

  LAW, TORAH, and CIVILTÀ, DROIT [THEMIS], DUTY, FAIR, MORALS, PIETAS, RELIGIO, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, RULE, SOLLEN

The Greek nomos [νόμος], implying at the same time the notions of sharing, or division, of the law, of right, and of obligation ( see THEMIS ), has no corresponding term in modern languages. The exception is present-day Greek, in which two distinct lexical terms still designate the law and division ( more precisely “law” and “department”: cf. RT: Mirambel, Petit dictionnaire français-grec, and RT: Pernot, Dictionnaire grec moderne–français )—and in which the root of the word nomos is declined as a series of terms referring to the law ( so we have nomiki, the science of law [cf. RT: Kyriakides, Modern Greek-English Dictionary]; nomika, the study of law [cf. RT: Mirambel, ibid.]; nomikos, a lawyer [cf. RT: Mirambel, ibid., and RT: Pernot, ibid.]; and nomodidaskalos, a law professor [cf. RT: Alexandre et al., Dictionnaire français-grec] ). The Romans, aware of the correspondence between lex and nomos, emphasized the fact that the Latin word referred to a free choice and not to an imposed division. Thus lex prefigures jus in that it expresses a political will linked to Roman imperialism. As for jus, it acquires its full meaning in its interaction with directum ( the straight path, the correct way )—which through its popular usage produced, among other terms, “right,” droit, diritto, derecho, and Recht ( considered unhesitatingly as translations of jus )—and with rex, the one who draws lines and angles and who thus determines what is inside and outside, allowing for the construction both of the architectural town and of the city as Republic: hence rex, the “sovereign,” the “king.” In the context of the Roman Empire’s military and political victory in Greece, we can see why the Greek nomos succumbed to the Latin norma ( square ), a linguistic phenomenon indicating a true Roman “squaring off” of ancient civilization.

I. From Nomos to Norma

The Greek nomos [νόμος] does not explicitly designate the law but rather the “portion assigned” ( nemein [νέμειν], “to distribute”; see THEMIS ) to something or someone, particularly in terms of its species or genus. So men, unlike animals, are assigned dikê [δίϰη], “justice,” and not violence ( “So listen to justice [dikês], forget violence [biês ( βίης )] forever: this is the law that the Cronid assigned [nomon dietaxe ( νόμον διέταξε )] for men”; Hesiod, Works and Days, 275–76 ).

There is no distinction between the nomoi that regulate the universe and the nomoi of the city: indeed, the normative process that makes a certain type of mammal into a political animal takes the form of a determining structure of authority in which man is domesticated by the home before being civilized by the city. It is a matter of being shaped by the laws ( nomoi ) of the home ( oikos; see ECONOMY and OIKONOMIA ). Submission to the “laws of the home” was for pre-Christian antiquity the first stage of managing living beings, whether human, animal, or vegetable. The oikos ( the domus in Latin ) domesticates living beings, with only humans able subsequently to undergo the selective process of insertion into the city ( Baud, Le droit ). On the essential function of the laws of the home, one only need recall that the confrontation between Creon and Antigone, the most famous passage in ancient literature on the opposition between divine laws and those of the city, concerns the laws of the home that are dominated by funerary worship, which is ultimately related to the law of Zeus ( Sophocles, Antigone, lines 440–601 ).

Linguistically, there is no relation between nomos, lex, and jus. The contact between Greek and Latin is indeed somewhat perverse, since the transition occurs by way of instruments of measure. In fact, the Greek gnômôn [γνῶμων] ( which refers specifically to a sundial and a ruler ) is the source of the Latin norma, a square, a term no doubt borrowed, via the Etruscan language, from the accusative of gnômôn ( see RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, s.v. ). Nomos is what is attributed through an act of sharing or division and designates justice as first of all the justness of a measure. Measuring tools, designed to be used by a builder, are the true interface between justness and justice. What we find here in the Greco-Roman world is clearly expressed in the Bible: “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quantity. You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin” ( Lv 19:35–36; an ephah was “a dry measure having the capacity of about 3/5 of a bushel or about 22 liters,” and a hin was “a liquid measure having the capacity of about 1 gallon or about 3.8 liters”; RT: Holy Bible, New International Version ). Neither should we forget the weight and name for money ( nomisma [νόμισμα] in Greek, from nomos precisely, a point that Aristotle underlines in the Nicomachean Ethics, 5.8.1133a. 30ff. ). This is why the balance, or set of scales, has become firmly established as an allegorical figure for human justice. It should come as no surprise that in ancient Roman law a transfer of property required the ritual presence of a bronze ingot and a set of scales ( one acquired property per aes et libram, “with bronze and balance” ) nor that, in light of the intermediary situation of the laws of the home, an obligation could be created simply by writing in the account book of the father of the family ( known as expensilatio ).

The emergence of the “urbanistic” laws of the urbs and the “civic” laws of the civitas is thus identified with the addition of a metaphorical meaning to instruments that were first used to apprehend the physical world scientifically, then to organize space, and finally to build houses and design towns. In the city of the Republic, norma became a virtual form thanks to which man could make law out of the matter constituted by the society of animals already domesticated by the laws of the home. As for the forma, also derived from the Greek gnômôn, this referred to the mold, and especially the small mold, the formula, which gave a legal form to human relations: in classical Roman law, one could not bring about an action because one possessed a right, but one could have one’s right recognized because a lender had anticipated the small mold of the formula and had placed a legal claim relating to the dispute within it.

There was thus a logical chain, but one that went from Greek to Latin, linking nomoi to normae, the norms of a civilization that agreed on its laws, and also, more generally, on what was beautiful, good, and just—these norms establishing within the city, through various sanctions ( critique, ridicule, reprobation, banishment, and finally passing legal sentence ), a system that frames society using squares and formulas.

■ See Box 1.

1

Gnômôn, metron, kanôn

  TRUTH, Box 2

A large number of nouns are derived from gignôsko [γιγνώσϰω], “to learn to know by dint of effort” and, in the aorist, “to recognize, discern, understand” ( RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ), such as gnôsis [γνῶσις] ( search, enquiry, knowledge, gnosis ), gnômê [γνῶμη] ( intelligence, judgment, decision, intention, maxim; the composite term suggnômê [συγγνώμη] signifies forgiveness; see PARDON ), and gnôma [γνῶμα] ( a sign of recognition ). One of these terms, gnômôn [γνῶμων], as an adjective described someone who discerns, understands, and judges; as a noun, gnômôn refers to “that which regulates or rules.” It had many technical uses, whether it was a question of people, experts, inspectors ( hoi gnômones [οἱ γνώμονες] are the guardians of the sacred olive trees; Lysias, Orations 7 ), or, especially, things or instruments that measured time and space: the needle on a sundial and the dial itself ( Plutarch, Morals, 1006e; Herodotus, Histories, 2.109 ), a clepsydra or water clock ( Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 42b ), the sharp edge of a forest ( Apollodorus of Damascus, Poliorcetics, 149.4 ), and above all a carpenter’s square, which the Pythagoreans used to explain through representation how numbers are generated ( a square [gnomon], that, as Aristotle emphasizes in the Categories, “surrounding a square, magnifies it without altering it” [15a 30] ). It was the tool par excellence of astronomy, of geometry ( the gnômôn in Euclid is the complementary parallelogram of another parallelogram or of a triangle ), of arithmetics ( the gnômôn is the odd factor of an even number, as 3 is in relation to 6 ), and the tool in ancient mathematics of the co-constitution of arithmetic and geometry. We switch with this single word from the most intellectual to the most concrete ( the gnômônes are also the teeth by which one determines the age of a horse or a donkey; Xenophon, On Horsemanship, 3.1 ), from the operations of the mind to the instruments by which it is inscribed in the world.

The same type of semantic extension is true of the canon and the measuring stick.

Metron [μέτϱον], “measure,” from the same family as mêtis [μήτις] ( “cunning”: see MÊTIS ), refers equally to a measuring instrument ( the surveyor’s stick [Iliad, 12.422] ); the measures of wine and water [Iliad, 7.471] ), the factor in a product ( Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, 83–84 ), as well as to the quantity measured, space, or time ( sea, youth ), in particular a verse or meter ( as distinct from melos [μέλος] and rhuthmos [ῥυθμός]; Plato, Gorgias, 502c, and Laws, 2.669d ). Above all, as “measure” it means a just measure ( after Hesiod, Works and Days, 694, it is linked to kairos [ϰαιϱός]; see MOMENT ). Aristotle emphasizes, for example, that “there is a metron for the size of a city, as for everything else, animals, plants, organs” ( Politics, 7.4.1326a, 35–37 )—in this case the size being equal to the distance a voice will carry. Metron as a ( just ) measure and metriotês [μετϱιότης], “moderation,” are thus linked to meson [μέσον] and to mesotês [μεσότης], the ( exact ) middle, which are used to define virtue ( arêtê [ἀϱητή]; see VIRTUE; cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1106b 24–28 ). From metric system to just measure then, mathematics and morality, via poetry and music, are intrinsically linked. But a more telling testimony than anything else of the impact in ancient times of the metron and the art of measuring ( metrêtikê [μετϱητιϰή]; Plato, Protagoras, 356–357 ) is the celebrated phrase of Protagoras about man as measure and his violent reinterpretations: “man is the measure of all things [pantôn chrêmatôn metron estin anthrôpos ( πάντων χϱημάτων μέτϱον ἐστὶν ἄνθϱωπος )], of those which are that they are, and of those that are not that they are not” ( 80 B1 DK = Sextus, Adversus mathematicos, 7.60; see RES, Box 1; cf. Cassin, L’effet sophistique, 228–31 and 261–63 ). For the Plato of the Laws, it is God who is the measure ( 4.716c ), and for the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics, it is the spoudaios [σπουδαῖος], the good man, who is in himself kanôn [ϰάνων] and metron ( 5.11.1136a 32–33 ).

With kanôn, we move this time from matter to operation. The kanôn is the stem of a reed or the stalk of a rush ( kanna [ϰάννα] ) and refers to any long and straight bar made of wood ( the bars or handle of a shield, the keel or the centerboard of a boat, the stick of a distaff, the beam of a set of scales, the key of a flute, the posts of a bed ), particularly the ruler and line of woodworkers and carpenters ( Euripides, Trojans, 6; Plato, Philebus, 56b ), from which we get rules, models, principles ( Euripides, Hecuba, 602: “we know evil, when we have learned good as kanôn” ). Bailly ( RT: Dictionnaire grec-français ) explains that in music, kanôn refers to a kind of tuning fork; in history, to the different ages; in grammar, to the rules and the model of verb declensions and conjugations: in short, from the canon of Polycletus to the classical catalogue of alexandrines, by way of the logic ( to kanonikon [τὸ ϰανονιϰόν] ) of the Epicureans, a canon always provides the rule. The word was borrowed by administrative Latin to designate a tax, and by the language of the church to refer to a rule, or a canon ( RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ).

This set of terms, which explains why “no-one may enter if he is not a geometrician”—the words engraved above Plato’s Academy—attests to the close relationship in Greek between mathematics and morality. The Latin synergy between architecture and law constitutes one of the possible triumphs of this Greek relation.

Barbara Cassin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cassin, Barbara. L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.

Robin, Léon. La pensée grecque et les origines de l’esprit scientifique. Edited by P.-M. Schuhl and G. A. Rocca-Serra. Expanded ed. with complementary bibliography. Paris: Albin Michel, 1973. First published in 1923.

The norma became a linguistic vampire. Although it referred solely to the normative world, that is, the world of human activity, it became in modern languages the happy rival of nomos. Nomos is, of course, present in terms such as “economy” and “autonomy,” as well as in a few neologisms in scientific jargon, but “anomaly” still seems almost a grammatical error when opposed to the formidable army of terms like “norms,” “normal,” “normality,” “normalization,” and so on. The linguistic failure of nomos—which conceals its conceptual permanence—could be explained by the political domination of the Greek world by a Roman civilization founded on the preeminence of law and which was determined that the wisdom of law ( jurisprudentia ) should prevail over every school of Greek philosophy.

II. Lex

Although jus and lex were unrelated to Greek vocabulary, the proximity of lex to nomos was not difficult for the Romans to perceive, and this was what allowed them to claim jus as something truly their own. In other words, what we call law always expressed, at a time when the Roman Empire referred to itself as the West, a normative system that constituted the foundation of civilization. Since Romans had agreed to refer to the art of “being together” as “civility” ( civilitas ) ( Duclos, De la civilité ), including being together within their civil law, the French elaborated, one after the other in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the terms civiliser ( to civilize ) and civilisation ( civilization ) in order to refer, respectively, to a procedural act and to a legal situation: the fact of entering, and then of being within, a civil law ( Starobinski, “Le mot civilisation”; see also CIVILTÀ ). The romance languages followed suit, and English registers the first usages of “to civilize” in this sense in the last years of the sixteenth century.

A. Inscribing lex

The Greeks also respected “unwritten laws,” those agraphoi nomoi [ἄγϱαφοι νόμοι] that came down directly from a divine being and that were consonant with natural law, like those unprescribed laws of the family that Antigone obeys in disobeying Creon, and that, unlike written laws, could not be usurped by any tyrant ( Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.1373b 4–15; cf. Hoffmann, “Le nomos, ‘Tyran des hommes’ ” ) On the other hand, the Romans inscribed within the West the mystique of the founding text, even before it was reinforced by their own adherence to a “religion of the Book.”

Although it originally referred to a religious law, lex retained only traces of this origin in a few rare phrases. Unlike jus, the lex of the Romans was essentially human, first of all because it required some human work to give it its lapidary form ( in the broad sense of what is engraved in stone or bronze ), and because later on the Romans conceived that it could be incarnated by one man, the emperor. Unlike custom ( mos ), which presupposed a tacit common understanding, lex was what had to be engraved and displayed in the town. Legem figere means “to engrave the law in bronze or stone and display it in the forum”; legem delere, perrumpere, perfringere is “to erase,” “get rid of,” or “break the law” ( RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, s.v. lex ). Lex thus functioned as a kind of hinge connecting the materiality of the town ( urbs ) to the immateriality of the city ( civitas ), thereby confirming the link between architecture and law suggested by norma.

The most important lex for the Romans was the Law of the Twelve Tables, a written record from the fifth century BCE of the customs of a primitive and superstitious rural society, yet which Cicero presented as containing more wisdom than all of the schools of Athens ( Cicero, On the Orator, 44 ). The Romans did claim to respect a natural law that could be discovered by “correct reason” ( Cicero, On the Republic, 3 ), but they never missed an opportunity to point out that nothing was closer to correct reason than Roman law. With the Law of the Twelve Tables, the Romans went from engraving in stone to writing “within the heart.” Indeed, Romans in Cicero’s time learned the Law of the Twelve Tables as a rhyme ( Cicero, On the Laws, 2.4 ), despite the fact that it had become an archaic text whose meaning was only understood, and even then imperfectly, by a small minority of scholars. Even though in the second century CE writers were still defending its wisdom ( Gellius, Attic Nights, 30.1 ), the most important thing for the Romans was that the Law of the Twelve Tables was inscribed within the materiality of the town as well as in the legal truth of the city.

Engraved on the walls of the town, then in the hearts of the Romans, the lex was finally marked upon the emperor’s body. Drawing the consequences from the fact that the emperor of the late Roman Empire had become the cornerstone of Roman law, and reappropriating a phrase that the Hellenistic monarchies had popularized ( nomos empsuchos [νόμος ἔμψυχος] ), Justinian’s compilation transmitted to the West the idea that the emperor ( and, thereafter, the pope, the king, the state, etc. ) was a “living law” ( lex animata; Justinian, Corpus juris civilis, Novellae 105.2, §4 ), which medieval jurists completed by adding that he had “all the archives in his heart” ( a recurring theme in the entire work of Pierre Legendre; see in particular L’empire de la vérité ).

B. Nomos and lex

Cicero thematized the relationship between nomos and lex. Like all Romans, and like everyone in the ancient world, his admiration for Plato knew no bounds, but it was not so great as to temper the pride he felt when he contemplated a Roman culture based on law and that, sustaining as it did an empire which had conquered Greece, could claim that its science and wisdom in law, or jurisprudentia, was a match for Greek philosophy ( Cicero, On the Orator, 1.34.195, and On the Republic, 1.22 and 2.15 ). This was why he wanted to draw a clear distinction between nomos and lex. For him, then, the Greek nomos was a process of distribution, whereas the Roman lex was a deliberate choice:

And so they believe that law is intelligence, whose natural function it is to command right conduct and forbid wrongdoing. They think that this quality has derived its name in Greek from the idea of granting to every man his own [Graeco . . . nomine nomon suum cuique tribuendo appelatam], and in our language it has been named for the idea of choosing [ego nostra a legendo]. For as they have attributed the idea of fairness to the word law, so we have given it that of selection [ut illi aequitatis sic nos delectus vim in lege ponimus], though both ideas properly belong to law.

( Cicero, On the Laws, in Santangelo, “Law and Divination,” n. 15 )

Through its laws, Rome asserted itself as master of its destiny, an imperial destiny, which declared as one of its duties that of giving laws, leges datae, to the nations its conquered. The victorious general, or the governor appointed to administer the conquered territory, would generally give an engraved, public law, and the nations making up the empire were progressively identified by a lex, either original or given. Rome was sovereign judge of all other laws. So Justinian declared in 553, in Novella 146 of Corpus juris civilis that the Jews indulged in “senseless interpretations” of the Bible. Since it could not be linked to the “correct reason” of natural law, the Torah placed Jews outside the law. This is where we can locate the origin of Western anti-Semitism ( Legendre, Les enfants du texte ).

This ancient trajectory of the word lex, which led to its inscription within the body of the emperor, while also inversely pointing to an ethnic identity, explains why, as it traversed the Middle Ages, it could on the one hand refer to any fragment of what the medieval university called the Body of Roman Law ( Justinian’s Corpus juris civilis ), and on the other hand could refer during the Frankish period to that which distinguished one people from another ( the lex of the Salic Franks—the Lex Burgundionum, or Burgundian Laws—not to mention the lex of the different Gallo-Roman groups . . . and thereafter written by the barbarian king, whose subjects they had become! ).

III. Jus

Finally, why do we talk about “law” ( droit ) when we are dealing with what is “legal” ( juridique )? This important lexical question resists attempts to obscure it.

A. Of a so-called jus naturale

A great deal has been written by lexicographers on the origins of jus, which is so intimately bound up with Roman cultures ( RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, s.v. jus; RT: Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des insitutions indo-européennes, vol. 2, chap. 3: “Jus et serment à Rome” ). The indisputable connection to an oath ( jusjurandum ) firmly designates a religious expression that has the force of a law and a sacred expression of commitment. The desacralization of jus occurred over a long period of time. This took the form initially of making within the law a separate public law ( jus publicum ) containing everything to do with “sacred things, the priesthood and the public offices” (  Justinian, Corpus juris civilis, Digest, 1.1.1, §2: “Publicum jus in sacris, in sacerdotibus, in magistratibus consistit” ), and then by the medieval elaboration of canon law, which restricted public law to anything to do with public offices ( Chevrier, “Remarques” ). In addition, and quite understandably, imbuing jus with a religious meaning gave to the word, which expressed the law, an important political force. Linking the founding of a town to the existence of a city that had become an empire, Roman legal advisors created an indissoluble bond between jus and the political existence of Rome. Historians and Roman jurists transcribed the Ciceronian theory, according to which lex was at the origin of jus, into a patriotic register—thereby confirming our critical attitude when confronted by the bravura passages of the philosopher lawyer—and they have always emphasized the fact that the Law of the Twelve Tables was the sole “source of law,” the fons juris of Rome, and of this empire that made the West.

The transition in Latin from nomos to norma established as a first principle that law, unlike justice, but like architecture, was necessarily man-made. This is why it is imperative to understand what Romans meant when they, before anyone else, talked about “natural law.”

According to the author of Justinian’s Institutes ( 1.2 ), which was written in 533 to train future jurists of the empire, “natural law is that which she has taught all animals” ( jus naturale est, quod natura omnia animalia docuit ) and “a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea” ( nam jus istud non humani generis proprium est, sed omnium animalium quae in coelo, quae in terra, quae in mari nascuntur; Institutes of Justinian, trans. modified—Ed. ). As for what this jus naturale consists of, he only makes allusion to the union of male and female, to procreation, and to the education of the young. One essential text proves that we are dealing here not with what we would call law, but with what the Greeks referred to as the nomos that we have in common with animals: Demosthenes’s Against Aristogiton ( Orations ), in which he defined as a nomos of nature [τῆς φύσεως νόμος] the fact that humans love their parents just as much as animals do ( 25.65 ).

So the jus naturale that Justinian’s Institutes discusses does not belong to the normative world in which what we call the law operates but rather to the sphere of the most elementary of human observations. For jus naturale to come into the sphere of law properly speaking, one would have to have granted animals the legal status of persons. It is true that the philosophers of pre-Socratic antiquity, especially within the Pythagorean school, reflected deeply on the way in which one could conceive of justice between humans and animals ( see on this point the groundbreaking work of Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes ), but law has never taken this into account. Noxal surrender, whereby an animal that had caused injury was handed over to the victim of that injury, was nothing other than the vestige of the archaic principle according to which any living body could be materially committed to another in a relationship of obligation. However, because they considered that humans were clearly distinct from other animals, Roman legal advisors agreed that the child of a slave should never be kept by a usufructuary, yet the latter was perfectly entitled, at the end of his contract, to return the cow or mare but to keep the calf or the colt ( Terré, L’enfant de l’esclave ).

Justinian’s Institutes was a pedagogical work that moved from the general to the particular in order to arrive at the real object of the study: Roman civil law. This didactic operation starts out with the nomos common to men and animals, for which there is only the noun jus, since the ultimate objective is jus civile. So natural law ( jus naturale ) is retained, although to be more precise, it only appears in the introduction to the rubrics ( bk. 1, title 2 ), announcing what are in a sense the real legal topics, which are then defined in the first paragraph with a gradation in their relevance: “[L]aw is divided into the law of the people ( common to all men ) and civil law ( particular to a given city )” ( jus autem civile vel gentium ita dividitur ). As we can see, true law excludes the nomos of nature, translated as jus naturale, and only comprises two parts: the law of the people ( comprising the most common contracts ), and civil law, the real subject of the treatise, which can finally be achieved through the rhetorical operation of going from the general to the particular. Indeed, even though the Institutes concede that the laws of Solon and Dracon might have once been considered as the civil law of the Athenians, it goes without saying that, in the spirit of the work, the true civil law is that of the Romans. This is testimony to the often scornful condescension that Roman legal advisors showed, much as Cicero himself had done ( On the Orator, 1.44.97 ), whenever they mentioned the law of other cities, but it is also a consequence of the fact that, since Caracalla’s edict of 212, all those living within the empire had become Roman citizens.

“What we call law has nothing ‘natural’ about it,” writes Pierre Legendre, “any more that it constitutes an ‘objective’ phenomenon whose universal character is self-evident” ( Sur la question dogmatique ). Neither in Greek literature nor in Roman law do we find anything that is truly natural law. Whether it is a question of the unwritten laws ( agraphoi nomoi ) of the Greeks or of the jus naturale of the Romans, what we see is nothing more than a natural order guaranteed by a deity. Antigone appealed to Zeus’s law in opposing Creon, and the Christianized empire of Justinian’s time attributed “natural laws” to divine Providence, using a plural that reinforced the allegiance to the unwritten laws of the Greeks: “naturalia quidem jura . . . divina quadam providentia constituta” ( the laws of nature. . . are established by divine providence; Justinian, Institutes, 1.2, §11 ). So quite logically, therefore, in 1140, the Decree of Gratian, the founding text of the new discipline of canon law ( jus canonicum ), opens with the following definition of natural law: “Natural law is what is contained in the Law [the Law of Moses: the Old Testament] and the Gospels” ( Jus nature est, quod in Lege et in Evangelio continetur; Decree of Gratian, 1 d.a.c. 1 ). And following this same logic, Thomas Aquinas made natural law the means by which men approached a divine law that was beyond their intellect ( Strauss, Natural Right and History ).

B. Jus and directum

So in antiquity and in the Middle Ages in the West, divine laws ( lois divines ) absorbed natural law ( droit ) because law, properly speaking, was considered to be man-made. It was a necessarily human product because it was made using a ruler and a square. This was why the Roman jus, which was in fact visibly present as the root of several words associated with the “juridical,” gave way to directum ( RT: Du Cange, Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis, vol. 3, s.v. directum ), from which were formed most of the terms in the West that refer to the law: diritto ( Ital. ), derecho ( Sp. ), diretto ( Port. ), droit ( Fr. ), Recht ( Ger. ), right ( Eng. ), and so on. Light is shed on the mystery if we take into consideration that the Digest, this monumental work that Justinian’s compilers devoted to legal doctrine, ends with a concluding title ( 50.17 ), the “Rules of Ancient Law” ( “De regulis juris antiqui” ), and if we understand that the king ( rex ) is what links regula to directum. Gnômôn and norma opened up and circumscribed the space of norms, within which the rex designated rules, and prepared the way for what we today call law ( droit ). Before being a king, the rex is first and foremost the one who draws straight lines ( RT: Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des insitutions indo-européennes, vol. 2, s.v. Rex ), the one who makes a directum, that is, a straight line, using a regula or a ruler, the tool enabling one to rule ( regere ), that is, to “direct in a straight line,” and then to “be a director or a commander” ( RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, entry rego ). The rex Romulus ploughed the first straight furrow, from which the town ( urbs ) and the city ( civitas, the place of civil law ) were built.

By distinguishing what was sacred from what was profane ( at Rome there was a sacred inner space, the pomoerium, that one could not enter armed ) and also by distinguishing what was Roman territory from what was not, the rex defined as well the extendable site of civil law within which the West was formed.

Jean-Pierre Baud

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baud, Jean-Pierre. Le droit de vie et de mort: Archéologie de al bioéthique. Paris: Aubier, 2001.

Caillemer, Exupère. “Nomoi.” In Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, edited by C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, vol. 4, fasc. 1. Paris: Hachette, 1908.

Chevrier, Georges. “Remarques sur l’introduction et les vicissitudes de la distinction du ‘jus privatum’ et du ‘jus publicum; dans les œuvres des anciens juristes français.” In Archives de philosophie du droit, 5–77. Paris: Sirey, 1952.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. “On the Commonwealth” and “On the Laws.” Edited by James E. G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

   . Orations. Edited and translated by John T. Ramsey, G. Manuwald, and D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Demosthenes. Orations. Edited by A. T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939.

Duclos, Denis. De la civilité: Comment les sociétés apprivoisent la puissance. Paris: La Découverte, 1993.

Fontenay, Élisabeth de. Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard, 1998.

Gellius, Aulus. Attic Nights. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Vols. 1–3. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927.

   . Les nuits attiques, IV. Translated by Y. Julien. Paris. Les Belles Lettres, 1998.

Gratian. Corpus juris cononici. Vol. 1, Decretum, edited by E. Friedberg. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druk–u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959.

Hesiod. Works and Days. In The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.

Hoffmann, Geneviève. “Le nomos, ‘Tyran des hommes.’ ” Droit et Cultures 20 ( 1990 ): 19–30.

Justinian I. Corpus juris civilis. Edited by T. Mommsen and P. Krueger. Berlin: Weidmann, 1886.

   . The Institutes of Justinian. Translated by J. B. Moyle. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913.

   . Justinian’s Institutes. Translated and with an introduction by Peter Birks and Grant McLeod. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Legendre, Pierre. L’empire de la vérité: Introduction aux espaces dogmatiques industriels. Paris: Fayard, 1983.

   . Les enfants du texte: Étude sur la function parentale des états. Paris: Fayard, 1999.

   . Sur la question dogmatique en Occident: Aspects théoriques. Paris: Fayard, 1999.

Santangelo, Federico. “Law and Divination in the Late Roman Republic.” In Law and Religion in the Roman Republic, edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, 31–56. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2012.

Starobinski, Jean. “Le mot civilization.” In Le temps de la réflexion, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.

Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Terré, François. L’enfant de l’esclave: Génétique et droit. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.

Xenophon. The Economist. In The Shorter Socratic Writings: “Apology of Socrates to the Jury,” “Oeconomicus,” and “Symposium,” translated and with interpretive essays by Robert C. Bartlett, with Thomas Pangle and Wayne Ambler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

LIBERAL, LIBERALISM

  CIVIL RIGHTS, CIVIL SOCIETY, ECONOMY, LAW, LIBERTY, LIGHT, PEOPLE, POLITICS, POWER, STATE, WHIG

The English term “liberalism” evokes a political and cultural tradition that has no real French equivalent, which makes the word difficult not so much to translate as to use correctly. There have, of course, been French liberals, but when all is said and done, they have been fairly distant from the English model, and ended up abandoning what constitutes its core feature, namely the individual. With its origins in the Glorious Revolution and in the work of John Locke, liberalism in the sense of an affirmation of the priority of individual liberties, and their protection against the abuses of the sovereign or the collectivity, represents a national cultural tradition that spread across the rest of Europe, and has found its fullest expression in the American Constitution. But it is not easy to grasp its meaning outside of this context. It refers to a set of attitudes and convictions rather than a doctrine whose contours are well defined. This can lead to complete misunderstandings: thus, liberal designates a progressive or social-democratic attitude in the United States, but in France the word signals an opposition to the welfare state. It seems perhaps more satisfactory to draw a distinction between the acceptance and the refusal of a certain modernity: “liberalism” would then designate an acceptance of market capitalism, of individualism, of permissive morals, and a refusal of nationalism and of the all-powerful state. Given the ideological and emotional charge of this language, we should perhaps content ourselves with describing certain of its contemporary usages that translators need to be aware of, and between which they will have to choose. For the sake of convenience we will make a distinction between a liberal “philosophy”; the political positions that lay claim to this philosophy; economic liberalism; and finally, a rather vaguely defined social and cultural attitude particular to the Anglophone world and to northern Europe.

The word “liberal,” identical in contemporary English and French, is derived from the Latin liberalis, which designates that which relates to a person who is free ( in contrast to a slave ), and his physical or moral qualities ( “noble, gracious, honorable, beneficent, generous” ), as exemplified by the “liberal arts”: see especially ART, II, BILDUNG, CIVILTÀ, CULTURE. The entry ELEUTHERIA has a discussion of the different paradigms used to think and express liberty, including the one derived from the French liberté ( as opposed to “freedom” ), from the root *leudh ( to believe ), which is a root common to the Greek eleutheria [ἐλευθερία], the Latin liberi ( children ), liberty, or liberal. On the network freedom-nobility-virtue, see BEAUTY, Box 1, VIRTÙ, Box 1; cf. LIBERTY.

Politically, the term “liberal,” which originally referred to the virtue of liberality, has only come into usage fairly recently; what has been called liberal since the nineteenth century are those political movements that defend the legacy of the English and American revolutions, that is, limiting the powers of the state in the name of the rights of the individual. This limitation is by way of various institutional arrangements, such as representative government, and the separation of powers, and always presumes a clear distinction between the “state” and “civil society.” Liberalism in this sense rejects any integral political control of the economy, but does not rule out a certain redistribution of income. The French term libéral, which does not refer to the same tradition, cannot, of course, be superimposed on the English term: see below, and WHIG; see also CONSERVATIVE, and cf. CIVIL SOCIETY, LAW, POLITICS.

I. The Origins of Liberalism

As a complex cultural and political reality, liberalism seems to have a certain consistency at an intellectual level. But the myth of liberalism’s intellectual unity has been shattered, and we now talk instead of liberalisms. We can at least distinguish between two historical forms, the second of which is better known. The first liberalism was the “liberalism of diversity” ( W. Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism” ), a legacy of the Protestant Reformation and the War of Religions, which took the form, particularly in Locke, of an appeal for tolerance with respect to the diversity of religious beliefs. It was based on a fear of civil war, whence the expression “liberalism of fear” ( J. Shklar, Ordinary Vices ), rather than on the idea of tolerance as a positive ideal. The second liberalism, “the liberalism of autonomy,” emerged out of the Enlightenment and out of Kant’s work. He justified tolerance in terms of an appeal to universal reason, as a factor that could ultimately unify humankind. So it would be wrong simply to equate liberalism with the Enlightenment. Beyond these distinctions, however, we can identify several constant features within liberal philosophy as it was championed, in different ways, by Kant, Humboldt, Benjamin Constant, John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, and, more recently, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and John Rawls.

Its most characteristic feature is the priority of individual freedom. In opposition to the ancient ideal of direct or participatory democracy, as exemplified by the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, liberalism would instead represent modernity, with the “freedom of the Moderns” or the protection of the private sphere of individuals against any abusive interference, and it would defend the sovereignty of the individual for reasons that were both epistemological and moral. The epistemic foundation of liberalism, inherited from Locke and then redefined by Mill and Kant, and later by Popper, can be located in the affirmation of an intrinsic relation between the values of truth and of individual freedom. The access to truth appeared to be essentially linked to the individual’s freedom of judgment and of inquiry, and to the absence of barriers inhibiting dialogue and discovery. The origin of this idea is to be found in Greek philosophy, in the Socratic ideal of the free man, of which liberalism is the direct descendant ( certainly in Mill, at any rate ). Far from being a society like any other, the liberal world will claim to establish an essential link to truth and reason. Its moral basis lies in the conception, inherited from Kant, of the person and of his or her inalienable rights, a conception that leads an author like Rawls to place justice and rights at the heart of liberalism:

Each member of society is thought have an inviolability founded on justice or, as some say, on natural right, which even the welfare of every one else cannot override. . . . Therefore, in a just society the basic liberties are taken for granted and the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

( A Theory of Justice )

This priority of freedom leads to the defense of the theory that the power of the state and of government should be limited through the existence of a “Bill of Rights”; by establishing “checks and balances,” the best known of which is “judicial review”; by the separation of church and the state; and by the secularization of political power—even when there is an “established” religion in place, as in Great Britain.

■ See Box 1.

1

Checks, balances, and institutional restraints in the Anglo-Saxon world

  JUSTICE

a. Checks and balances

To the classic doctrine of the simple separation of powers ( Montesquieu ), the British constitutional practice has, since the eighteenth century, added the idea of the balance and control of powers by each other. The term “check” ( untranslatable into French ) refers to the capacity of control and prevention leading to an equilibrium, or to “balances.” In the American Constitution, this principle of checks and balances has given the president the power, among others, to block legislation and to nominate judges to the Supreme Court; the Senate can ratify treaties; and the House of Representatives can itself initiate the process of impeaching the president, etc.

b. Judicial review

“Judicial review” first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a typically American constitutional conception, and it has come to be part of most contemporary democratic regimes. Whenever there is a conflict between the executive, legislative, and judiciary powers, or between the regions ( or states ) and the central ( or federal ) power, or even between the citizens and the state, there is a higher moral authority ( the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Council, etc. ), which has the power to decide and to judge whether laws ( or actions of the state, etc. ) comply or not with the Constitution.

c. Judicial activism / judicial restraint

This concerns a fundamental dilemma of any constitutional philosophy, which could be expressed as follows: when should one accept the verdict of an election, and when should one intervene and defend what one believes to be the “principles” of the Constitution? Divided between activism ( for example, at the time of the New Deal, which judges had condemned as anticonstitutional ) and the duty to restraint with respect to legitimately elected powers, or of laws voted in Congress, magistrates in constitutional courts cannot lay claim to objectivity, and consider themselves as simple interpreters of the Constitution and of the fundamental laws. It is in this sense that one should understand the question of the “power of judges.”

It is only in recent times that liberalism has moved closer to democratic ideals. Indeed, liberalism traditionally mistrusted democracies, and was suspicious of the “despotism” of majorities, a mistrust that was articulated eloquently by Tocqueville. Since popular and electoral forms of democracy had shown themselves to be powerless in the face of the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, they were rejected in the twentieth century by liberalism as carrying within them the seeds of tyranny and of antiliberalism, as conveyed by the debatable notion of “popular sovereignty.” This gave rise to the conception of a liberal democracy, in which constitutionalism tempers the errant behavior of elected majorities. But the weak point of liberalism, in contrast to the Republican ideal, remains therefore its failure to leave room for political participation ( the “liberty of the Ancients” ). It can lead only to social atomism, since its individualism deprives it of any true doctrine of citizenship, or of political community.

II. Liberalism as a Political Reality: “Radicals,” “Conservatives,” and “Liberals”

It is important to note, at the outset, that the term “liberalism” has only a relational meaning, as a function of the existence or absence of other political or social movements, in particular long-standing worker movements, and communist or socialist parties, which were established in the nineteenth century. In the exemplary case of the United States, where the three political families ( conservatism, liberalism, radicalism ) are different from those in Europe, and can only really be defined through their relations to each other, liberalism clearly occupies more or less the ground of the political left as it is understood in Europe.

Conservatives or, more recently, neo-Conservatives, correspond roughly to the European right wing, but with nuances that have to do with particularities of American history. There is no place in the imaginative world of this history for the ancien régime: while religion, notably Protestantism, plays a central role, even though the Constitution has broken away from the idea on any established religion. So American conservatives very much favor security and tough penal politics ( “law and order” ); they distrust the welfare state, in the name of both individual property and individual responsibility; they are worried about the difficulties that the institution of the family is undergoing, or about the decline of churches, and some of them are even inclined to support the positions of the religious right on questions such as abortion, prayer in school, or the anti-Darwinian teaching of creationism.

Radicals, in contrast to liberals, would correspond to the European extreme left, but their lack of a Jacobin tradition, and especially of any Leninist ideology, means they are most often fervent democrats who are very attached to the “formal liberties” ( to certain of these, at any rate ) that most of the “leftist” tendencies of the Old World do not really value. There is, moreover, a specifically American genealogy of radicalism, which aims to revive the democratic elements of the national tradition by harking back to figures such as Thomas Paine ( during the Revolutionary era ), or even the abolitionist Garrison: on closer examination, it becomes apparent that this radicalism owes a great deal to the “liberal” and puritanical roots of American democracy—hence, the quite accurate characterization of the American Revolution, by the historian Gordon S. Wood ( The Radicalism of the American Revolution ), as a “radical” revolution. In this context, we could justifiably see “liberals” as representing a moderate left. The following are, or were, all liberals: supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, lawyers who have defended the rights of women and of blacks, advocates of a security policy that is more preventive than punitive, or even all those who accepted the profound changes that have affected the American way of life since the 1960s.

It goes without saying that, as is also the case with the original French distinction between right and left, the relational nature of these definitions means that the respective positions of the “liberals,” “conservatives,” and “radicals” on any specific problem can vary. Thus, for example, a certain activism on the part of the Supreme Court justices, which came across as conservative during the time when it blocked reforms deemed to be progressive, belongs now, on the contrary, to the shared “liberal” culture of the present age, marked by the historic role played by Chief Justice Earl Warren and his immediate successors ( the fight against racial segregation, making abortion a constitutional right, and so forth ); and conversely, most conservatives today would say they are in favor of a certain “judicial restraint” ( see Box 1.c ). The fact that liberalism is also a philosophical movement whose definition is itself an important matter of debate can complicate things even further, since politically conservative movements can be led to present themselves as liberal ( see A. Bloom’s foreword to L. Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern ). Moreover, one could legitimately think that the respective positions are always essentially situated within a broader context, which remains that of liberalism in the wider sense, which is to say, a politics inscribed within the constitutional framework of a representative government.

The situation is obviously quite different in Europe, and particularly in France, where liberalism is historically the movement that has, one might say, consciously pursued the development of a “modern regime” based on the defense of individual freedoms and rights, while resisting the democratic excesses of the “tyranny of public opinion” and, above all, of socialism. Although it has its origins in England, it also had a number of very eminent representatives in France ( Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville ) and even in Germany ( Wilhelm von Humboldt ). Its golden age was in the nineteenth century, and it has appeared to be on the wane since then, with the progress of socialism, the establishment of worker and trade union traditions, and the rise of the postwar welfare state, all of which has led European liberalism to be more closely aligned with the conservative right. Margaret Thatcher’s new right in Great Britain appropriated the term “liberal” and gave it a new meaning in order to wage war on both the welfare state and the paternalism of traditional conservatives. She thus introduced so-called liberal deregulatory and monetarist economic policies, which did not prevent her from reinforcing and centralizing the state in a way that was totally opposed to the liberal conception of politics. Liberals everywhere came to occupy a rather vague middle ground, along with the more moderate tendencies of the Christian Democrats ( liberal parties can act as bridge parties, as in Germany—or be prevented from doing so because of the electoral system, as in Great Britain ). Within a broader context, the situation in France is rather unique, since liberals there have been led more and more to efface the individual from their preoccupations, and to come round ultimately to republicanism and statism ( L. Jaume, L’individu effacé ). If French “radicals” could no doubt place themselves somewhere between their American homonyms and “liberals,” a further “leftism” ( sinistrisme ), to borrow René Rémond’s expression, pushed them more toward the right with the development of socialist, and then communist, political parties.

It is clear in any case that, until quite recently, one had to be very cautious about transferring the American categories of “conservatism,” “radicalism,” and “liberalism” to discussions of French politics. Conservatism was weakened because many of its themes were taken over by the far-right party Action Française: the most liberal republicans, in the European sense of the term “liberal,” certainly formed an important trend during the Third Republic, but they had no successors within subsequent political movements ( only a few politicians aligned themselves with their politics ).

III. Liberalism and the Market

Would it clarify matters, then, to link liberalism to a conception of society in which the market and “civil society,” in Hegel’s sense, would be the true agents of social organization, thereby making the role of the state secondary? This approach is tempting, since if we make the role of the state definitive, we end up with a split between individualist liberals and interventionist and centralizing antiliberals, on both the left and the right, which would perhaps correspond better to present-day transformations in French democracy and society. The market has, indeed, been conceived by some authors, the most famous of whom is Friedrich von Hayek, as a political principle that limits power, and thus as the source of a greater freedom of choice for individuals. But this conception has led to further confusions, and for this reason in English the term “libertarianism” is preferred to “liberalism.”

■ See Box 2.

2

Libertarianism

Libertarianism represents the position that goes furthest in defending the minimal state, advocating a principle of nonintervention and of nonredistribution for the most disadvantaged, based on a theory of alternative justice—one of entitlements or freely acquired property rights ( Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia ), without a principle of justice ( for instance, a principle that would affirmatively mandate equality of opportunity, or that would establish the principle that certain needs are basic, and their fulfillment equally so ) that would act as a corrective of this initial distribution. A position such as this is inspired by the idea of the self-regulation of economic and social change, illustrated by the metaphor of the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith. It leans upon Vilfredo Pareto’s principle of “optimality,” that is, the existence of points of equilibrium in the market, and argues that the market by itself provides the criteria of justice: a distribution is optimal or just when there is one single individual whose position would be worsened if distribution were modified to compensate for the situation of the most disadvantaged. Freedom of exchange is thus sufficient to ensure its justice, with any intervention of the state being unjust because it limits individual freedoms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, 1974.

Van Parius, Philippe, Qu’est-ce qu’une société juste? Paris: Seuil, 1991.

On the other hand, for social-democratic liberals, best represented by the philosopher John Rawls—but the economist John Harsanyi would also be a good example—it should be possible to reconcile social justice and the respect for individual freedoms. The market cannot by itself be the source of a principle of justice or redistribution; in order to respect equal freedoms for all, such a principle needs to be the object of an agreement on the part of those who can hope to profit from it, as well as of those who would see their benefits diminish. Liberalism has no hesitation, then, in placing itself within the great tradition of the social contract in arguing that the principles of economic justice ( Rawls’ second principle ) are just if they can be the object of unanimous consent ( that is, of a contract ), and can be shown to benefit the most disadvantaged. Far from being subject to the laws of the market, contemporary liberalism justifies its limits in the name of social justice:

A social ideal in turn is connected with a conception of society, a vision of the way in which the aims and purposes of social cooperation are to be understood.

( Rawls, A Theory of Justice )

What is common, however, to the different expressions of the vague concept of economic liberalism is, as Bernard Manin has clearly shown, the idea of an order that would not result from a central power, and that would even in a way come to take its place, in order to free individuals from oppression. If the market is well used, it would appear as a source of emancipation like other dimensions of civil society, whose field of action extends well beyond the satisfaction of economic needs.

■ See Box 3.

3

Communitarianism

  COMMUNITY, GENDER

An important critical movement in the United States and Canada has emerged to challenge classical liberalism: it is known as “communitarianism,” a term one could translate into French, though awkwardly, by the neologism communautarisme. This movement aims not to defend traditional communities per se, but to recognize the modern individual’s need for rootedness and identity. Just as the abstract and universalist philosophy of the Enlightenment was rejected by Hegel and by the political romanticism of Herder and Schleiermacher in the name of the value of traditions, community, Gemeinschaft, and a sense of history, so the contemporary communitarian critique of liberalism emphasizes the importance of individuals being rooted in communities, and of the concrete diversity of cultures, as well as of gender differences ( feminist critiques ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berten, André, ed. Libéraux et communautariens. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997.

Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Walzer, Michael. Pluralisme et démocratie. Paris: Esprit, 1997.

   . Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

IV. A Liberal Culture?

The term “liberalism” ultimately describes a cultural tradition that emphasizes the autonomy of individuals, their spirit of enterprise, their capacity for self-government, without the need to refer to a central power, certainly at an economic level, but no less at a social level, in the tradition of eighteen-century civil society in the English sense. This liberal conception of civil society is not the same as the bürgerliche Gesellschaft execrated by Marx, but conforms more closely to the zivile Gesellschaft, that is, the “public forum” within which citizens of a democracy organize themselves, communicate, act together, cooperate, and develop their potential, without necessarily going through the structures of the state, or through a centralized bureaucracy. This is a culture for which the world of associations, far from being marginal, is at the heart of the full development of the individual, and of his or her peaceful relationships with others. This social dimension of liberalism is often overlooked by those who understand individual freedom solely in terms of its tension with an external authority, as the “freedom to say no.” This misunderstanding corresponds to a religious division within Europe, and the question can be clarified if we consider liberalism in light of Protestant values, in the sense in which an individual, according to these values, is conceived of as morally responsible for his choices, and as having no other judge for his acts than his own conscience. Permissiveness and individualism in liberalism are inseparable from what one could appropriately call an interiorized “moral code based on principles,” as opposed to a “moral code based on authority,” whereby the law is always external, and overshadows the agent. Depending on whether one admires or detests this tradition, whether one condemns it as permissive and as the source of social fragmentation and anomie, or whether one thinks of it as providing new sources of happiness and fulfillment, the term “liberalism” will be used with pejorative or positive connotations, and it is set in opposition either to totalitarianism and state violence or to the republic and social democracy, or even to “libertarianism” and the dangers of the anarchic development of the postmodern individual, as the American or Canadian “communitarians” emphasize.

Catherine Audard
Philippe Raynaud

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin, Isaiah. Liberty. Edited by Henry Hardy. With an essay on Berlin and his critics by Ian Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Constant, Benjamin. Principes de politique. In De la liberté des Modernes. Paris: Hachette, 1980. Principes de politique was first published in 1818.

Galston, William. “Two Concepts of Liberalism.” Ethics 105 ( April 1995 ).

Gautier, Claude. L’invention de la société civile. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Francs, 1993.

Halévy, Élie. La formation du radicalisme philosophique [1901–4]. 3 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.

Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hayek, Friedrich A. von. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Translation by G. Blumberg: La route de la servitude. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985.

Jaume, Lucien. L’individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français. Paris: Fayard, 1997.

Manent, Pierre. Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1987.

   . Les Libéraux. Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1986.

Manin, Bernard. Principes du gouvernement représentatif. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by David Bromwich and George Kateb. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. First published in 1858.

Pareto, Vilfredo. Manuel d’économie politique. Translated into French by A. Bonnet. Paris: Giard et Brière, 1909.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Renaut, Alain. L’ ère de l’individu. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.

Rosanvallon, Pierre., Le libéralisme économique. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

Shklar, Judith. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Smith, Adam. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, general editors. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. First published in 1776.

Strauss, Leo. Liberalism, Ancient and Modern. New York: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.

LIBERTY

I. Domains and Models

1. The polysemy of the word “liberty” is a source of considerable difficulty. The adjective “free” ( Fr. libre ) covers a spectrum of nuances: it can be a synonym for “spontaneous,” “unconstrained,” “uninhibited” ( so a body, for example, can be in “free fall”; see FORCE ), and also for “independent,” “autonomous,” even “autarchic”; it can have the more technical sense of “indeterminate” or “indifferent,” and so one might talk of a free choice that makes no difference either way, or of free will. One finds just as many nuances in most modern languages.

2. The question of liberty is a determining one for the constitution of subjectivity, and subsequently for psychology, even down to the word “subject” itself ( in which one hears “subjection” ); see SUBJECT and WILL, WILLKÜR; cf. CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, ES, I/ME/MYSELF, UNCONSCIOUS.

3. For the moral dimension of liberty, see PRAXIS; cf. DESTINY, DUTY, MORALS, OBLIGATION.

4. The sense of “liberty” informs the political and social domains from the outset, beginning with the difference between free individual and slave: see in particular LIBERAL and BILDUNG, Box 1; see also CIVIL SOCIETY, HERRSCHAFT, LAW, POLIS, POLITICS, POWER, WORK.

Refer to ELEUTHERIA, I and Box 1 for the different clusters of meaning within the main linguistic networks: nature and growth; or culture and belonging to a group of friends; see also SVOBODA, one of the ways of saying “freedom” in Russian, which is formed from the Slavic possessive svoj [CBOЙ], analogous to suus.

II. From Greek to Latin

The main focus here, however, will be on two problems of translation from Greek to Latin, which allow for a better understanding of a certain number of particularities within the networks of modern languages.

A. From the Greek eleutheria to the Latin libertas

1. How does one get from the regulated development that characterizes the Platonic eleutheria [ἐλευθερία] to libertas, conceived of as the freedom of the will, when the very notion of “will” has no direct equivalent in Greek? Two entries respond to this question: ELEUTHERIA, which discusses the translation of Greek meanings of “freedom” in the Latin of the Church Fathers and of Scholasticism; and WILL, which reconstructs the medieval history of the formation of a terminological equivalent to the Greek thelêsis [θέλησις]: voluntas as the freedom to agree to or to reject the content of a judgment, or to act rationally for the general good. The secularization of this notion of will leads to the modern, Cartesian notion that “[t]here is no one who does not feel and does not experience will and freedom as one and the same thing, or rather that there is no difference between what is voluntary and what is free” ( Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, “Réponses aux troisièmes objections,” in Œuvres [AT], 7:191.I.10–14 ).

2. On the changes that the vocabulary of the will undergoes in contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, refer to WILL, Box 1; cf. CONSCIOUSNESS and SOUL.

B. The translation of to autoexousion by liberum arbitrium

1. The Latin liberum arbitrium ( free will ) replaced the Greek notion of authority over oneself with that of an indifferent choice between opposites, and thus locates the entire concept of liberty in this indifference of choice. In other words, the two determinations of “freedom,” which, for us moderns, seem to be self-evident are as follows: a ) the near synonymy of “free” and “voluntary,” which means that any form of freedom is fundamentally determined as freedom of ( the ) will; b ) the fact that the proper locus of freedom is to be found in election, that is, in a choice between opposites, such that freedom itself can be understood as freedom of the will ( cf. Thomas Aquinas: “The proper act of free will is choice. For we may say that we have a free will because we can take one thing while refusing another. And this is to choose.” Summa theologica, I, quarto 83, article 3, reply ).

2. In this respect, the translation of the question of free will in turn leads to several decisive choices. In German, the term Willkür links from the start the matter of the freedom of the will to the autonomy of the will: The discussion of the Kantian problematic, which is inherited by our terminology, can be found in the entry WILLKÜR.

In Russian, the semantic play between the two words for “freedom”—svoboda [свобода] and volja [воля]—offers a different coupling of the relationship between the infinite nature of the will and the affective naturalness of motives, while the term postupok [поступок] refers to a free act, insofar as it can take the form of a commitment: see POSTUPOK and SVOBODA.

  ACT, PEOPLE, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD

LIE

The French word for “to lie,” mentir ( derived from the Latin mentiri; the etymologies do not tell us much, including those related to Anglo-Saxon, English “lie,” German Lüge ), means to say something false with the intention of deceiving. Lies thus refer to the articulation of the true and the real, the logical and the ontological, but they involve an ethical register. One can find under TRUTH ( in particular TRUTH, IV; see also, for the Russian, ISTINA and PRAVDA ) a discussion of the antonyms of truth, one of which is the lie. The main dividing line falls between languages and traditions that fail to distinguish between error and lie ( the Greek pseudos [ψεῦδος] might be from the root *bhes-, “to breathe,” like psuchê [ψυχή], “the soul,” or phêmi [φημί], “to say” ), and do not reflect the Latin, then Christian, differentiation between the two.

I. Logic and Ontology

Refer to FALSE for the articulation between these two registers.

II. Ethics

Lying is a discursive act ( see SPEECH ACT; cf. ACT ) that makes a willful use of something false. The problem of intention, good or bad, is central: are there “good lies”? Is there a “right to lie”? See INTENTION, WILLKÜR. Lies are in this sense connected to a will that is judged from the outset as condemnable ( see GOOD/EVIL, MORALS, VALUE ), unlike aesthetic illusion ( which is not ): see FICTION, and cf. APPEARANCE ( particularly DESENGAÑO, LEGGIADRIA, MIMÊSIS ).

A “lie” brings into play the belief of the listener: see FAITH, GLAUBE; cf. CLAIM.

The devil is the “liar” par excellence: see DEVIL.

LIEU ( FRENCH )

The Latin locus, which means not only “place, location, site” but also “rank, situation,” translates the Greek topos [τόπος]. In French, the word for place, lieu, has come to be used in a range of technical senses, particularly medical ( “sick region,” “genitalia” ) and rhetorical ( lieu commun, or commonplace ).

1. In aesthetics, refer to IN SITU, which reappropriates an archeological term to mean the fundamental trait of a work of art conceived in terms of its site. On the ontological relationship between a work of art and its place, see in particular LIGHT, Box 2, and cf. IL Y A.

2. On the rhetorical topos, see COMMONPLACE; cf. ANALOGY, COMPARISON, IMAGE, MIMÊSIS, TROPE, and more broadly, DISCOURSE, LOGOS, SPEECH ACT.

3. On place in relation to space and physics, see FORCE, MOMENT, NATURE, TIME, WORLD.

4. On place conceived of as an originary place of one’s own, see HEIMAT, IL Y A, OIKEIÔSIS, PROPERTY, and SEHNSUCHT, Box 1, cf. MALAISE; see also DASEIN, LEIB, WELTANSCHAUUNG ( WORLD, 5, 6 ); cf. PEOPLE/RACE/NATION and PRINCIPLE.

  SEIN

LIFE / LEBEN

The French vie ( life ), deriving from the Latin vita, serves to designate existence, the type of life ( a creature’s ways of living and means of existence ), the life story, biography, or model for living.

1. In the German ERLEBEN, as distinguished from Leben, one finds a reflection on how to separate out natural life—the Greek zôê [ζωή], see ANIMAL—from the reflective life that enables human experience and existence—the Greek bios [βίος], in the sense of mode or “species of life,” and aiôn [αἰών], “the span of life.” In addition, see AIÔN, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, EXPERIENCE, LEIB, cf. OLAM.

2. For the relation to death, as tied to human consciousness, see also CONSCIOUSNESS, DESTINY, MALAISE.

3. On the relationship between the mode of life and the means of existence, see BERUF, ECONOMY, ENTREPRENEUR, OIKONOMIA, WISDOM.

4. On the relation of “life” ( vie ) to narrative, to models, and to history, see HISTORY, RÉCIT, VIRTÙ; cf. SPECIES.

  GESCHLECHT, GOD, HUMANITY, PATHOS

LIGHT / ENLIGHTENMENT

DANISH			lys
DUTCH			licht
FRENCH			lumière, Lumières
GERMAN			Licht; Old High German, lio( t )ht; Aufklärung
GREEK			leukos [λευϰόϛ], phôs [φῶϛ]
HEBREW			haśĕkālâ [הַשְׂכָּלָה]
ITALIAN			luce, Lumi/illuminismo
LATIN			lux, lumen
RUSSIAN			svet [свет]
SPANISH			luz, Luces/Ilustración

  BILDUNG, DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, IDEA, ITALIAN, MADNESS, MIR, REASON, SVET

The Indo-European vocabulary for “light” refers to what is brilliant or resplendent, based on the idea of a free, clear space in the open air as opposed to a wooded and enclosed space.

Closely related to sight, a bodily sense granted privilege in the Western tradition, “light” serves as a paradigm for knowledge and reason. The term’s use to describe the European movement known as the Enlightenment derives from Novalis, who employed it having in mind the new status of light in modern physics.

I. The Indo-European Vocabulary of Light

The set of terms expressing “light” in the modern European languages comes from the Indo-European root *leuk-, which gives us the Greek leukos [λευϰόϛ], “a luminous, brilliant white,” and the Latin lucere, “to shine”; lustrare, “to illustrate”; and luna, “moon.” The Indo-European vocabulary of light shows a remarkable proximity between the Greek, Romance, and Germanic families, even if the Greek only happens to be represented by leukos and its derivations ( but see also Box 1 ).

■ See Box 1.

1

Phôs, phainô, phêmi ( light, showing [oneself/itself], speaking ): An ultra-phenomenological Greece

  ERSCHEINUNG, PHÉNOMÈNE, PROPOSITION

Even though the term “phenomenology,” as Heidegger remarks, does not appear historically until the eighteenth century ( in Johann-Heinrich Lambert’s Neues Organon of 1764 ), it belongs to the Greek epoch. Phainomenon [φαινόμενον], the middle participle of phainô [φαίνω], “what appears, by itself, from itself,” and logos, “to say.” In paragraph 7 of Being and Time, Heidegger recalls that phainô comes from phôs [φῶϛ], “light.” But in truth, there is an even tighter etymological knot to be tied here. Chantraine ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ) notes that phainô is formed from the Sanskrit root bha, which is semantically ambivalent, since it means both “to enlighten,” “to shine” ( phainoi, phami ), and “to explain,” “to speak” ( phêmi [φημί], fari in Latin ); in other words, “saying” and “shining” are already mutually interdependent; there is already a phenomenology in the phenomenon itself.

Finally, phôs [φώϛ], the same word as “light” aside from the accent ( acute instead of perispomenon ), also refers to a man, a hero, a mortal and was a common term in Homer’s time. Its etymology is “obscure,” Chantraine tells us ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ). Yet, “if the dental inflection is secondary, there is a formal identity between the Greek nominative and the Sanskrit bhas, light, brilliance, majesty.” “But,” he adds, “from the semantic point of view, the connection is not so easy to make.” Phenomenologically, it is, however, too good to be true: etymological evidence that joins together in the same dazzling term “light,” “phenomena,” and “man.” Greek man is then the one who sees, as a mortal, the light ( that of the day of his birth, of the return, of death ), what appears in the light, phenomena, and the person who enlightens them by expressing them. The play on words between allotrion phôs [ἀλλότϱιον φῶϛ], now a perispomenon, from fragment 14 of the poem by Parmenides ( “light from elsewhere,” that is, the light that the moon has by borrowing it from the sun ), and allotrion phôs [ἀλλότϱιον φῶϛ], with an oxytone accent, “the man from elsewhere,” “the stranger” of the Homeric poems ( for example, Iliad, 5.214, or Odyssey, 16.102, 18. 219 ), and its fate in Empedocles ( fr. 45; RT: DK ), are sufficient to confirm that the etymology, whether Cratylean or not, was understood. The two words resonate within each other, as they do in Homer’s Parmenides, the epic poem on cosmology and philosophy.

We have here the common matrix of perception in Greece, both classical and romantic, and the theme that interested Heidegger so keenly: truth—if it is a mutual interdependence of appearing and of saying in human Dasein, both openness and finitude—seems to be a copy of, and a meditation on, this etymology.

Barbara Cassin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Parmenides. The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary. Edited by A.H. Coxon, Assen: 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.

The adjective leukos [λευϰόϛ], like all those that in ancient Greek have to do with the vocabulary of color, refers less to whiteness itself than to its intensity, its brilliance. It describes marble, and “when the notion of brilliance is used it indeed seems to be related to hêlios [ἥλιοϛ], [sun] [( Iliad, 14.185 ) and in the expression λευϰὴ φωνή = λαμπϱὰ φωνή [leukê phônê = lampra phônê], ‘ringing voice’ in Aristotle ( Topics, 106a )” ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ). We might compare this to argos [ἀϱγόϛ] ( from which the Latin argentum is derived ), which is also used to describe the sheen of white ( clay, the white of the eyes ), expressed in this case as a rapid flash ( lightning, horses, Ulysses’s dog ) and from which the Greek name “Argonauts” is formed ( cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. argos ).

In Latin, lumen, -inis ( neut.; from *leuk-s-men > *louksmen > *lousmen > lumen ) differs from lux, lucis ( fem. ) in that it must have originally referred to a means of lighting, a “light,” with the concrete sense that the suffix -men gave to the formation. Lux, write Ernout and Meillet ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine ), is light “considered as an activity, an active and divine force, particularly as the ‘light of day’ . . . . [L]ux is a more general term than lumen, and their uses do not overlap.”

Under leukos, Chantraine ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ) makes a connection to the Latin lucus, originally a “clearing,” literally laûkas, “field” ( Old High German loh, “clearing” ). Ernout and Meillet ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine ) note under lucus, with reference to the lux group ( cf. also the possible but contested etymology of the French word lucerne, “skylight”; RT: Dictionnaire étymologique du français ), that “[t]his Indo-European word designated a free and clear space, as opposed to a wooded one—woods and covers being the main obstacles to man’s activity.” These connections between the bright space of a clearing and the clarity of light are not self-evident. The English “light” ( Lat. lux ) is more strictly distinguished from its homonym “light” ( Lat. levis ), which is related to the German leicht, lichten, Lichtung, than in Continental cognates. Heidegger’s thought can help us to think of lightness as a condition of light.

■ See Box 2.

2

Lichtung, “clearing,” “bright space,” “lightness”

Contrary to appearances, the German Lichtung does not come from Licht, “light,” but from leicht ( cf. Eng. “light” ), which is from the verb lichten, “to lighten,” “clear,” “free.” So the Lichtung in question in section 28 of Being and Time ( “To say that it is ‘illuminated’ [erleuchtet] means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared [gelichtet] in itself” ) in no way places Dasein within a “photological” tradition, nor does it take up again the Platonic metaphor of light. Returning in 1965 to these questions, in the text that would appear in 1984 as Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens, Heidegger states:

The presence of what-is-present has as such no relation to light in the sense of brightness. But presence is referred to light [das Lichte] in the sense of the clearing [Lichtung].

What this word gives us to think about may be made clear by an example, assuming that we consider it sufficiently. A forest clearing is what it is, not because of brightness and light, which can shine within it during the day. At night, too, the clearing remains. The clearing means: At this place, the forest is passable.

The lightening [Das Lichte] in the sense of brightness and the lightening of the clearing [Lichtung] are different not only regarding the matter, but regarding the word as well. To lighten [Lichten] means: to render free, to free up [freigeben], to let free. To lighten belongs to light [leicht]. To render something light [Leichtmachen], to lighten something means: to clear away obstacles to it, to bring it into the unobstructed, into the free [ins Freie]. To raise [lichten] the anchor says as much: to free it from the encompassing ocean floor and lift it into the free of water and air.

Or again, in a seminar held jointly with Eugen Fink in 1966–67:

Haben Lichtung und Licht überhaupt etwas miteinander zu tun? Offenbar nicht. . . . Die Lichtung dürfen wir nicht vom Licht her, sondern müssen sie aus dem Griechischen heraus verstehen. Licht und Feuer können erst ihren Ort finden in der Lichtung.

( Do clearing and light have anything to do with one another? Evidently not. . . . We must not understand clearing from light, but we must understand it from the Greek. Light and fire can only find their place first in a clearing. )

( “Seminar in Le Thor,” Gesamtausgabe )

It is therefore a matter of going back from light to its nonvisual condition of possibility, which no longer has anything to do with the opposition of light and dark but precedes it as its a priori, as a “lightness of being” ( as A. Schild’s translation into French of Heidegger’s expression in Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung has it: “légèreté de l’être” ). The French translation of Lichtung as allégie ( F. Fédier’s translation ), unlike Lichtung’s translations into French as clairière ( clearing ) or éclaircie ( bright space ) or into Spanish as claridad and claro, frees the term from the register of light, in accordance with Heidegger’s indications.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fédier, François. Regarder voir. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens. Edited by Hermann Heidegger. St. Gallen, Switz.: Erker, 1984. Translation by Richard Capobianco and Marie Göbel: “On the Question concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 ( Spring 2010 ): 213–23. Translation by A. Schild: L’affaire de la pensée. Mauvezin, Fr.: Trans-Europe-Repress, 1990.

Heidegger, Martin, and Eugen Fink. Heraklit: Seminar Wintersemester 1966/1967. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986. Translation by Charles H. Seibert: Heraclitus Seminar, 1966/67. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979.

Sallis, John. “Into the Clearing.” In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan. Chicago: Precedent, 1981.

Sallis, John, and Kenneth Maly, eds. Heraclitean Fragments: A Companion Volume to the Heidegger/Fink Seminar on Heraclitus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980.

II. Light, Sight, and Idea

In the vocabulary of Western thought, light enjoys an equally privileged position as the one that sight occupies among the five senses, to the point where sight serves as a common denominator of the other senses, as Saint Augustine noted:

Ad oculos enim videre proprie pertinet. Utimur autem hoc verbo etiam in ceteris sensibus, cum eos ad cognoscendum intendimus. Neque enim dicimus: audi quid rutilet, aut: olefac quam niteat, aut: gusta quam splendat, aut: palpa quam fulgeat: uideri enim dicuntur haec omnia. Dicimus autem non solum: uide quid luceat, quod soli oculi sentire possunt, sed etiam: uide quid sonet, uide quid oleat, uide quid sapiat, uide quam durum sit.

( Vision belongs properly to the eyes. But we use this term even for the other senses when we apply them to knowing. Yes, we do not say: “Listen to how this shines,” nor: “Feel how this glows,” nor: “Taste how resplendent this is,” nor “Touch how bright this is.” It is “see” that we use, indeed, in all these cases. Not only do we say: “See how this shines”—and the eyes alone can perceive this—but also: “See how this sounds, see how this feels, see how tasty this, see how hard it is.” )

( Confessions, 10.35, 54 )

What is expressed here is the primacy of sight, illustrated and reinforced by a common means of expression; we might even say a “photological” tradition. The brightness of the sun, called leukos [λευϰόϛ] by Homer ( see above ), will become, in the famous allegory of the cave in Plato ( Symposium, 7 ), the analog of light received from the Idea of the Good, as opposed to the darkness, which reigns in the cave.

The light of the sun will remain in Descartes’s programmatic text the paradigm for knowledge:

. . . cum scientiae omnes nihil aliud sint quam humana sapientia, quae semper une et eadem manet, quantumvis differentibus subjectis applicata, nec mejorem ab illis distinctionem mutuatur, quam Solis lumen a rerum, quas illustrat, varietate . . . 

(  . . . just as all sciences are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and identical to itself, however different the subjects to which it is applied may be, and it receives no more diversity than the light of the sun from the variety of things its illuminates . . .  )

( Regulae ad directionem ingenii, 1; my italics )

( On the sources of the “metaphor of a radiant sun to signify the universality of an omniscient understanding,” cf. Jean-Luc Marion, in Règles utiles et claires: “Should we conclude that the ‘solar’ relationship of understanding to its truths is transposed, with Descartes, from the divine to the human?” ) It is not accidental that Descartes mentions the naturali rationis lumen ( natural light of reason ) at the end of the same Rule 1: a decisive shift occurs, in fact, from external light to the light of the human mind, as lumen naturale = ratio. This is the “light of reason” ( Descartes ), “the daylight of reason” ( Boileau, Art poétique, 1.19 ), “the natural light of reason” ( Leibniz, Théodicée, §120 )—which is alone capable of lighting “someone who walks alone in the dark” ( Descartes, Discours de la méthode ). “Tremble in case the light of reason does not come,” Voltaire will say in the following century ( RT: Dictionnaire philosophique, “Abbé” ).

III. The Aufklärung/“Enlightenment”

A. The emergence of a terminus technicus

Combined with the advent of modern rationalism, the determination of reason as lumen naturale would lead to the characterization of the eighteenth century as the “age of Enlightenment” ( Sp. El siglo de las luces and Ilustración; Ital. Lumi/Illuminismo; Fr. Lumières; but Ger. Aufklärung, from the adj. klar; Lat. clarus; Eng. clear ). The expression es klart auf ( aufklaren, with no vocalic alternation ) is used first of all to describe the weather brightening up, the sky clearing, through a borrowing of the German from Dutch sailors ( cf. RT: Duden: Das Herkunftswörterbuch ). This was the origin of the transitive verb aufklären, in the sense of the English “to enlighten” ( an Aufklärer is not only someone with an enlightened mind or a philosopher of the Enlightenment, but also someone who “lights the way” in the military sense of reconnaissance ), and leads to the formation in the eighteenth century of the term Aufklärung as a philosophical concept, terminus technicus. In 1784, Moses Mendelssohn still felt the term was a neologism. This is how he puts it in his essay “Ueber di Frage: Was heißt aufklären?”:

Die Worte Aufklärung, Kultur, Bildung sind in unsrer Sprache noch neue Ankömmlinge. Sie gehören vor der Hand bloß sur Büchersprache. Der gemeine Haufe versteht sie kaum. ( 3 )

( The words “enlightenment,” “culture,” “education” are still newcomers to our language. At the present time they belong merely to the language of books. The common masses scarcely understand them. )

The term Aufklärung, however, still retains a close semantic, even lexical, relation to “light,” as shown by the definition Wieland gives of it ( “Sechs Fragen zur Aufklärung” ):

Was ist Aufklärung?

Antwort: Das weiß jedermann, der vermittelst eines Paars sehender Augen erkennen gelernt hat, worin der Unterschied zwischen Hell und Dunkel, Licht und Finsternis besteht.

( What is Aufklärung?

Answer: this is what everyone knows who, having eyes to see, has learned by using them to recognize the difference between the bright and the dim, between light and darkness. )

( my italics )

Or again, in this statement by Lichtenberg:

Man spricht viel von Aufklärung und wünscht mehr Licht. Mein Gott, was hilft aber alles Licht, wenn die Leute entweder keine Augen haben, oder die, die sie haben, vorsätzlich verschließen.

( One talks a lot about Aufklärung, and one wishes for more light, but my God, what is the use of all the light you can wish for, if people either have no eyes to see, or if they do, close them on purpose. )

( Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, 1:201 )

It is proper for the light of reason to cast itself everywhere and thus to reject prejudices and superstitions in respect of which the Aufklärung claims to be a liberation ( Kant, Was ist Aufklärung? 1783 ). The light of enlightened reason against the darkness of obscurantism—indeed, in German, the counterconcept of Aufklärung is Schwärmerei, a tricky word designating excessive, sometimes infantile, perhaps misguided enthusiasm or adulation.

■ See Box 3.

3

Haśĕkālâ [הלָכָּשְׂהַ]

Haśĕkālâ, [הלָכָּשְׂהַ] sometimes retranscribed as Haskālā, comes from śēkel [לכֶשֵׂ], “reason,” “intellect,” “discernment,” “culture.” Formed from a Hebrew root, this term is not strictly speaking a Hebrew translation of the German term Aufklärung nor of the English “Enlightenment,” even if it refers to a movement closely associated with the Enlightenment. “Even though it is inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, its roots, its particular character, and its development, are entirely Jewish” ( RT: Dictionnaire du judaïsme ). The name “Age of Enlightenment” would in Hebrew be almost blasphemous, if only because of verses 3–5 of bĕrēšīt ( Genesis ), where it falls not to man but to God to say of ( and to ) the light ( ôr [אוֹר] “light,” “sun,” “morning,” “brightness” ) that it be—Septuagint: [Г ενηθήτω φῶϛ]; the Vulgate: “Fiat lux”; Luther ( RT: Die Bibel nach der Übersetzung Martin Luthers ): “Es werde Licht”; RT: The Bible: Authorized King James Version: “Let there be light”; Le Maistre de Sacy: “Que la lumière soit faite.” The term “Haskalah,” which is foreign to biblical Hebrew, first appeared in Germany in the 1760s and referred to a social and cultural movement in Judaism in Central and Eastern Europe that grew from the middle of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth. It expressed a more open attitude among Jews regarding their values and the way of life of their non-Jewish neighbors; the desire to emerge from the ghetto; and the rejection of what we might today call a withdrawal into ethnic identity. In place of these, Haskalah favored an emancipation, even assimilation, that opposed both orthodox Judaism and Hasidism. Its emblematic figure was Moses Mendelssohn ( 1729–86 ), the author—notably—of a German translation of the Torah, yet one that was printed in Hebrew characters.

It was out of the Haskalah movement in Germany that a Wissenschaft des Judentums, or “science of Judaism,” was born and was according to Steinschneider able to develop alongside an agnostic, even atheistic, position. Steinschneider, as Gershom Scholem asserts, “did not hide the fact that in his eyes the function of the science of Judaism consisted in burying the phenomenon with dignity.” ( Scholem had planned to write an article, which would in fact never appear, to be titled “Sebstmord des Judentums in der sogenannten Wissenschaft des Judentums” [The suicide of Judaism in what has been called the science of Judaism]. ) We should no doubt take into account, in this uncompromising judgment, Scholem’s own position on what came to be known as the Deutschjudentum, a Judeo-German symbiosis, of which Hermann Cohen would become the most celebrated representative. How, though, was the sometimes frenzied anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, sadly exemplified by Voltaire, compatible with a knowledge of Judaism and with a recognition of the status ( social, political, and legal ) of European Jews? This was one of the inherent tensions of the Haskalah—at the same time, it was a dissemination of Jewish culture, even if it was in a vernacular language other than Hebrew or Yiddish, and the sowing of the seeds of an ideology that would come to deny it, embalming it if necessary and placing it outside the realm of the properly scientific. How could a “religion of reason,” or a “religion considered within the limits of pure reason” ( Kant ), acknowledge the attested Revelation of Judaism, which we commonly refer to as Judeo-Christian? Cohen would attempt heroically to overcome this contradiction in his Religion der Vernunft aus der Quellen des Judentums ( Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Hermann. Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Edited by Bruno Strauss. Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1988. Translation and introduction by Simon Kaplan: Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Introductory essay by Leo Strauss. New York: Ungar, 1972.

Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. Von Berlin nach Jerusalem: Jugenderinnerungen. Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1994. Translation by Harry Zohn: From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth. New York: Schocken, 1980.

B. Critique of the Enlightenment and the reductive conception of light in modern physics

Novalis, who was the author of Apologie der Schwärmerei ( 1788 ) and who thus of his contemporaries set himself apart from the Aufklärer, made a highly original link between the French, then German, movement of the Enlightenment and the new status of light being defined by modern physics as a mathematical science of nature. He thereby anticipated the critiques that Merleau-Ponty, in his Eye and Mind ( chap. 3 ), would subsequently direct at Descartes’s Dioptrics:

Das Licht war wegen seines mathematischen Gehorsams und seiner Frechheit ihr Liebling geworden. Sie freuten sich, daß es sich eher zerbrechen ließ, als daß es mit Farben gespielt hätte, und so benannten sie nach ihm ihr großes Geschäft, Aufklärung.

( Light had become their favorite theme because of its obedience to mathematics, and because of its insolence. They rejoiced at seeing that it is refracted rather than being iridescent [playing with its colors], and it is from this that they gave the name Aufklärung to their great affair. )

( “Die Christenheit oder Europa,” 1799 )

Descartes indeed stated in Discourse 1 of his Dioptrics ( 6:85, ll. 1–4 ) that “in the bodies we name colored, colors are nothing but the different ways in which these bodies receive it [light] and send it back to our eyes.”

Elsewhere ( in a letter to Mersenne from December 1638, Correspondance, 2:469, ll. 1–2 ), Descartes would define light as a propulsion ( poussement ): “it is only this propulsion in a straight line which is called Light.” So Novalis constructed a genealogy of the project of the Aufklärung, the Enlightenment, as well as of the name claimed for it, with reference to the history of the sciences, that is, by connecting this project to the new way in which modern physics was approaching the phenomenon of light. In French, the Enlightenment ( Les Lumières ) was also sometimes called la lumière ( RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française, s.v. “lumière,” meaning 13 ), as is attested by this statement from Voltaire ( letter to Gallitzin, 14 August 1767, Correspondance ), which is a counter-illustration to the genealogy proposed by Novalis: “It pleases me to see that an immense republic of cultivated minds is being formed in Europe: light is communicating from all sides [la lumière se communique de tous côtés]” ( my italics ).

So in the eyes of Novalis, it was on the basis of a simplistic ( and reductive ) conception of light, an optical narrowing particular to modern physics, that the word and the idea of the Enlightenment were able to germinate and flourish. Going against the grain of the very project of modern science as a mathematical science of nature, Novalis remained here a witness to a Platonic, even Neoplatonic, or Plotinian understanding of light. He was not alone: Goethe exclaims, in a reply to Schopenhauer, “What are you saying! Light only exists when you see it? No! It is rather you who would not be there if light itself didn’t see you” ( Gespräche, 2:245 ).

Indeed, according to Plotinus, “What the soul must see is the light by which it is illuminated. For neither is the sun seen in another’s light. How is this achieved? Take everything away” ( Ennead, 5.3, 17, 28 ). “What we must see is what enables us to see; it is light which is the source of our gaze” ( Hadot, Plotin ), and not only its object. This is what is “solar” ( sonnenhaft ) about the eye, as Goethe will say at the beginning of a celebrated quatrain:

Wäre nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,

Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken?

( If the eye were not sun-like,

How could we perceive light? )

( Zur Farbenlehre; translation modified )

One of the other repercussions of this shift from external, solar light to the “enlightenment” of the human mind would be a singular reevaluation of the light that is not produced by the human mind, or by reason: Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and the illuminism movement would still use light as a frame of reference but in a completely different way.

Pascal David

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Augustine, Saint. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Boileau, Nicolas. L’art poétique. Edited by Sylvain Menant. Paris: Flammarion, 1998.

Descartes, René. Correspondance. Vol. 2 of Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1973.

   . Dioptrics. In Discours de la méthode et essais, vol. 6 of Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1973. Translation by Paul J. Olscamp: Optics. In Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, edited by Paul J. Olscamp. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001.

   . Discours de la méthode. In Discours de la méthode et essais, vol. 6 of Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1973. Translation by Desmond M. Clarke: Discourse on Method and Related Writings. London: Penguin, 2003. See also translation by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross: Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, edited by David Weissman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.

   . Regulae ad directionem ingenii / Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence. Edited and translated by George Heffernan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Translation by Jean-Luc Marion: Régles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977.

Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Edited by Otto Schönberger. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994. Translation by John Oxenford: Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, edited by J. K. Moorhead. Introduction by Havelock Ellis. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.

Goethe, Johann W. von, and Johann Peter Eckermann. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens: 1823–1832. Vol. 2. Leipzig, 1836.

   . Zur Farbenlehre. 2 vols. Tübingen: J. G. Cottäschen, 1810. Translation by Charles Lock Eastlake: Theory of Colours. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982.

Hadot, Pierre. Plotin ou la simplicité du regard. Paris: Plon, 1963. Translation by Michael Chase: Plotinus; or, The Simplicity of Vision. Introduction by Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. Théodicée. In Œuvres de Leibniz, series 2, edited by M. A. Jacques. Paris: Charpentier, 1842.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Sudelbücher. In Sudelbücher I, vol. 1 of Schriften und Briefe, edited by Wolfgang Promies. Munich: Hanser, 1967.

Mendelssohn, Moses. “Ueber die Frage: Was heißt aufklären?” In Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen, edited by Ehrhard Bahr. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974. Translation by Daniel O. Dahlstrom: “On the Question: What Does ‘to Enlighten’ Mean?” In Moses Mendelssohn: Philosophical Writings, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. L’œil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1964. Translation by Carleton Dallery: Eye and Mind. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, edited by James M. Edie, 159–90. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. “Die Christenheit oder Europa.” In Vol. 3 of Schriften, edited by Paul Kluckhohn, Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Gerhard Schulz, 507–25. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967. Translation by John Dalton: Christianity, or, Europe. London: Chapman, 1844.

Schmidt, James, ed. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Voltaire. Correspondance. Edited by Theodore Besterman. 13 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1977–87.

   . Select Letters of Voltaire. Translated and edited by Theodore Besterman. New York: Nelson, 1963.

   . Voltaire in his Letters, Being a Selection of His Correspondence. Translated by S. G. Tallentyre. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004.

Wieland, Christoph. “Sechs Fragen zur Aufklärung.” In Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen, edited by Ehrhard Bahr. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974.

LOGOS [λόγος] ( GREEK )

ENGLISH			discourse, language, speech, rationality, reason, reasoning, intelligence, foundation, principle, proportion, count, account, recount, thesis, tell, tale, tally, argument, explanation, statement, proposition, phrase, definition
FRENCH			discours, langage, langue, parole, rationalité, raison, intelligence, fondement, principe, motif, proportion, calcul, rapport, relation, récit, thèse, raisonnement, argument, explication, énoncé, proposition, phrase, définition, compte/conte
GERMAN			Zahl, Erzählung, cf. legen/liegen/lesen
HEBREW			dāvār [דָּבָר]
LATIN			ratio/oratio, verbum

  DISCOURSE, REASON and GREEK, HOMONYM, LANGUAGE, MADNESS, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, RES, SENSE, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPEECH ACT, WORD

The Greek word logos [λόγος] has such a wide range of meanings and so many different usages that it is difficult to see it from the perspective of another language except as multivocal, and in any case it is impossible to translate it except by using a multiplicity of distinct words. This polysemy, sometimes analyzed as homonymy by grammarians, has usually been considered by modern commentators as a characteristic of Greek language and thought that relates, before all of the technical meanings, to the primordial meaning of the verb legein [λέγειν]: “to assemble,” “to gather,” “to choose.” What is untranslatable here, paradigmatically, is the unity beneath the idea of “gathering together,” a series of concepts and operations—mathematical, rational, discursive, linguistic—that, starting with Latin, are expressed by words that bear no relationship to one another.

One authoritative way of indicating this lost unity is to see it as inscribed within a play on words that incorporates this relationship etymologically, or even simply at the level of signifiers, as in the Latin ratio/oratio ( the first comes from reor, which, like one part of legein, means “to count” then “to think”; the second, which according to a popular etymology is derived from os, oris, the “mouth,” complements the first with the meaning of “speech” ). In French the play is on compte/conte, which are both derived from computare but were certainly not distinguished from one another until the seventeenth century; in English there is an analogous play on “count”/“account”/“recount” and also on “tell”/“tale”/“tally”; in German, on Zahl/Erzählung and also on legen/liegen/lesen.

The other way one could proceed, which is not an alternative, is to import the word into one’s own language: this culminates in the Heideggerian usage, which bears witness to philosophy’s debt to Greek. Finally, to get the full measure of the polysemy of logos in the course of the word’s history, we have to trace the connection between the first branching into ratio/oratio ( or “reason”/“speech” ) and the Logos in John’s Gospel, translated as Verbum, which refers back to the Hebrew dāvār [דָּבָר], and which means both the word and the thing, in this case, Christ as the word made man.

I. The History of the Language and Lexicography

The multiplicity of meanings of logos [λόγος] poses for the language historian the question of knowing whether we are dealing with a phenomenon of polysemy properly speaking ( the proliferation of meanings that begins with a single etymological root ) or of homonymy ( a formal convergence that is produced from several homophonic etymological roots ). As always in such cases, the question generates different answers depending on whether one looks at it from a synchronic perspective ( how did the language users experience things? ) or a diachronic perspective ( what do we learn from an etymological investigation? ).

■ See Box 1.

1

Compound words and derivations: One or two roots?

In addition to the word λóγος itself, ancient Greek has more than two hundred compound nouns with -λογος/-λóγος as the second element. The sheer number, as well as the open-ended proliferation of this lexical group, suggest that the group itself is a good, if indirect, way of approaching an analysis of the term.

From a semantic point of view, this set of terms can easily be divided into two groups:

– In the first, -λογος refers to the notions of “gathering together,” so we have σύλλογος: “gathering,” “meeting,” assembly”; and λιθολóγος: “stone-mason” ( who puts stones together ).

– In the second, -λογος refers to the notion of “word,” “speech,” so we have διάλογος: “conversation,” “dialogue”; and μυθολóγος: “storyteller.”

In both cases, -λογος is clearly related to the verbal root λεγ-, which is able to convey the two meanings identified in the compound nouns: so σύλλογος} is related to συλλέγειν, “to gather,” and διάλογος is related to διαλέγεσθαι, “to have a dialogue.” Faced with this lexical range, a speaker of Greek might feel that his language had two homophonic roots of the form λε/ογ-, one meaning “to gather”—hereafter referred to as λε/ογ-1; and the other, “to speak,” “to say”—hereafter referred to as λε/ογ-2.

Morphologically, the compound words with the ending -λογος can be separated, according to the general rules of Greek, into two conceptual categories:

a. those ending in -λογος, in which the unaccented λ can be interpreted as an action noun, for example, διάλογος, “conversation,” “dialogue” ( λε/ογ -2 ); σύλλογος, “act of putting together,” “the result of this act” ( λε/ογ-1 ); φιλóλογος, this word having a “possessive” sense: “someone who cherishes the λ,” “a lover of literature, a philologist” ( λε/ογ-2 ); and

b. those ending in -λóγος, in which the accented λ can be interpreted as an agent noun, with the compound X-λóγος meaning “( someone ) who λέγει X”; for example, μυθολόγος, “( someone ) who tells stories” ( λε/ογ-2 ); and λιθολόγος, “( someone ) who puts stones together” ( λε/ογ-1 ).

So it is the accent that allows us to determine that the “philologist” is a lover of language rather than someone who talks about love.

As we can see, the two types ( a ) and ( b ) allow for the two meanings identified of the root λε/ογ-. Moreover, all of those compound terms that are used to designate an agent—all of group ( b ) in theory, and several of the representatives of group ( a )—in turn quite naturally provide the basis of a verb derivation ending in -εῖν ( -εῖσθαι ) and of an abstract noun derivation ending in -ία, designating the activity of the agent; for example:

– φιλόλογος → φιλολογεῖν, “to devote oneself to the study of literature” and φιλολογία, “the study of literature, philology”

– μυθολόγος → μυθολογεῖν, “to tell stories” and μυθολογία, “( *the act of telling stories )”, whence “imaginary story”

– λιθολόγος → λιθολογεῖν, “to build by putting stones together” and λιθολογία, “the activity of a stone-mason”

The uniformity of the derivations produced in this series, which culminates in a relatively technical vocabulary often designating activities relating to professions of one kind or another, undoubtedly helps to give a semantic unity to this range of terms containing the root λε/ογ- and in which the initial opposition we envisaged between λε/ογ-1 and λε/ογ-2 is blurred. Alongside the series of terms—such as, on the one hand, ϰαϰολόγος ( a malicious gossip [person] ), ϰαϰολογεῖν ( to speak ill of someone ), ϰαϰολογία ( malicious gossip [noun] ) and ἀντίλογος ( someone who contradicts ), ἀντιλογεῖν ( to contradict ), ἀντιλογία ( contradiction ) ( λε/ογ-2 ); and on the other hand, ποιολόγος ( a haymaker ), ποιολογεῖν ( to make hay ), ποιολογία ( haymaking ), βοτανηλόγος ( a botanist ), βοτανηλογεῖν ( to collect plants ), βοτανηλογία ( plant collecting ) ( λε/ογ-1 )—where the two semantic fields are quite distinct, it is likely that for the linguistic sensibility of Greek speakers of different periods, the semantic values associated with -λογεῖν/-λογία fluctuated more or less whenever the designated activity linked the notion of “collecting,” “assembling,” “recording” ( λε/ογ-1 ) with the notion of “a discourse on . . . ,” a theory of . . . ” ( λε/ογ-2 ). This was manifestly, and tendentiously, the case for “scientific” activities, in which a learned person with specialist knowledge would give a more or less theorized discourse on the objects or facts he had collected. Could we not say that the occupation of the ἀστρολόγος, someone who tells us about the stars, is also to record them for us? Or that the ἐτυμολόγος, who shows us through a kind of second-level discourse the ways in which words “say the truth,” is not also a collector of etymons, and potentially, a compiler of ἐτυμολογιϰά ( lists of etymologies )? And that the γενεαλόγος has to record previous generations before telling me my own ancestry?

The unanimous view of modern etymologists is that what can appear from a synchronic point of view as a more or less accidental semantic convergence between homophonic roots ( homonymy ) must on the contrary be described as the effect of a diachronic differentiation in the original meaning of a single root λε/ογ-, thus as a phenomenon of polysemy. Where logos is concerned, a philological analysis of the occurrences in ancient Greek of the terms, both noun and verb forms, that are based on this root and comparison with the Latin leads us indeed to think that the fundamental sense of λε/ογ- is that of “collecting,” “gathering,” and “assembling” and that the use of the Greek verb legô [λέγω]—Latin, lego—in specific contexts is, for each of the languages, the source of differentiations that a priori are unforeseeable but that are in fact very real.

In Latin, it seems plausible that a syntagma like legere oculis ( to take in with a glance ) as applied to the graphic signs of a text or the names of a list gives us the origin of the meaning of “to read,” which lego acquired in this language without, however, losing its original meaning. This polysemy was retained all the way through to the Romance languages, in which—to give the example of French—lire ( read ), relire ( reread ), élire ( elect ), dialecte ( dialect ), and collecte ( collect ) sit happily alongside one another. In Greek, the Homeric uses of legô—ostea legômen [ὀστέα λέγωμεν], “let us gather up the bones” ( Iliad, 23.239 ); duôdeka lexato kourous [δυώδεϰα λέξατο ϰούϱους], “he chose/assembled/counted twelve young men” ( Iliad, 21.27 ); leg’ oneidea [λέγ’ ὀνείδεα], “reeled off / uttered curses” ( Iliad, 2.222 ); and su de moi lege theskela erga [σὺ δέ μοι λέγε θέσϰελα ἔϱγα], “gather together for me/enumerate for me / recount to me / tell me your marvelous exploits” ( Odyssey, 11.374 )—allows us to see clearly how the already frequent use of this verb in Homer ( meaning “to assemble” ) and complemented by terms referring to linguistic entities ( curses ) or lending themselves to linguistic form ( “accomplished exploits” → “things recounted” ) could have led to its more specific designation as a spoken word: “gather together” → “put into a row” → “count ( out )” / “enumerate” → “( re )count” → “say.” The compound Homeric verb katalegein [ϰαταλέγειν] ( and later on its nominal derivations katalogos [ϰατάλογος], then katalogê [ϰαταλογή], “record,” “register,” “list,” “catalogue” ) illustrates particularly well the flexibility and the contextual conditions in which the initial semantic value of the root λε/ογ- is modulated. An epic expression such as ἀλλ’ ἄγε μοι τόδε εἰπὲ ϰαὶ ἀτϱεϰέως ϰατάλεξον, “come now, tell me this, record / enumerate / recount calmly” ( Iliad, 24.380 and 656; Odyssey, 1.169, etc. ) is certainly a precious example of these “linguistic” contexts that, beginning with the prehistory of the Homeric text, have oriented the semantic evolution of the root λε/ογ.

These historical data, now well established, enable us to consider from a more accurate perspective the somewhat flexible and ultimately uncertain polysemy manifest in the Greek words belonging to the semantic family of logos. One point is worth emphasizing. The Greek logos retains, from the basic meaning “to gather” of the root λε/ογ- and as an almost indelible connotation, the semantic feature of being syntagmatic. Of all the well-known semantic variations of logos—“conversation,” “speech,” “tale,” “discourse,” “proverb,” “language,” “counting,” “proportion,” “consideration,” “explanation,” “reasoning,” “reason,” “proposition,” “sentence” ( see Box 3 )—there is barely a single one that does not contain the original sense of “putting together”: the constitution or consideration of a series, of a notionally complex set. As “counting” or “proportion,” logos is never an isolated “number”; as “tale,” “discourse,” “proverb,” “proposition,” or “sentence,” it is never ( or only ever marginally ) a “word,” and so on. One only has to consider the relative semantic poverty of another root related to “saying,” *Ϝεπ- ( cf. epos [ἔπος], eipein [εἰπεῖν] ), which is closely related to λεγ- in the auxiliary inflection of the verb legô, to understand how much the extraordinary richness of λε/ογ- owes to this “syntagmatic” dimension of its semantic field. Even if, as we know, etymology does not control indefinitely and absolutely the meaning that words can take on in the course of their history, it is important to keep in mind that the Greek logos is connected to a polysemic etymon in which the sememes “to gather” and “to say” are closely related. This has to be the starting point of any reflection on the history of logos as a philosophical term.

■ See Box 2.

2

How do dictionaries translate logos?

Dictionaries, whether etymological or not, distinguish between two verbs: legô and *legô, étendre ( RT: Bailly, Dictionnaire grec français ), “lay” ( RT: LSJ ) [by contrast, see Box 6]. The LSJ then gives for the first a single entry, divided into three main meanings: 1. “pick up,” 2. “count, tell,” and 3. ( with the future and aorist 2 ) “say, speak.”

The Bailly dictionary, basing its definitions on the distribution of usual moods and tenses, lemmatizes two verbs formed from the same root *leg-, rassembler ( to gather ): the first means 1. “to gather,” 2. “to pick,” from which we get “to collect,” “to sort out,” “to count,” and only later, “to enumerate,” “to say one after the other”; the second straightaway means: 1. “to say,” in the sense of “to speak,” “to declare,” “to announce,” 2. “to say something,” “to speak reasonably,” 3. “to designate,” and 4. “to signify”—before giving a number of more technical meanings ( “to praise,” “to recite,” “to read out loud,” “to organize,” “to speak like an orator,” “to move a vote,” etc., until 11. “to have someone say” ). This series of dissonant meanings, entirely motivated by English dictionaries’ desire for simplicity, is a symptom of the modern difficulty of discursively binding together a rational trajectory with a wide range of verbal statements. In French, the adjective discursif denotes both a rigorously ordered series, as well as a digression ( RT: Le nouveau petit Robert ), while discursivité is only first attested in 1966 in Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses ( RT: DHLF, vol. 1 ).

As for the noun logos, Bailly makes a distinction between two broad semantic fields, which become increasingly complex: A. parole ( speech ); B. raison ( reason ). The RT: LSJ, on the other hand, juxtaposes a series of entries: 1. “computation, reckoning”; 2. “relation, correspondence, proportion”; 3. “explanation”; 4. “inward debate of the soul”; 5. “continuous statement, narrative”; 6. “verbal expression or utterance”; 7. “a particular utterance, saying”; 8. “thing spoken of, subject matter.” It is noticeable that there is a transition from the mathematical ( 1–2 ), to the rational ( recounting to the other and to oneself, 3–4 ), and then the linguistic ( statement, utterance, or reference ). In one case we start with speech and arrive, via reason, with its capacity to judge and evaluate, at the mathematical sense of “relation, proportion, analogy” ( B.III.4 of Bailly, 4th and final sense in RT: Bonitz, Index aristotelicus ); in the other, it is the mathematical that provides the starting point ( RT: LSJ ). The essential dissonance could thus be expressed as a double question: as the history of the language suggests ( see above ), was the mathematical sense primary, with relationality and proportionality serving as a paradigm, even a matrix, of a syntagmatic structure in general, in a line that ran from Pythagoras to Plato and then Neoplatonism? Or rather, from a structural perspective that is no doubt more Aristotelian ( Bailly, Bonitz ), is mathematical technique simply one application of the human logos?

II. The Polysemy of Logos Thematized and Used by the Greeks Themselves

The history of Greek philosophy can be described as a series of reinterpretations of the meaning of logos against a background of a still-active polysemy. What we find is a shift from one doctrine or systematics to another through a strategy of refocusing. From the pre-Socratics and the Sophists to Plato, from Plato to Aristotle, from Aristotle to the Stoics, and so on, the polysemy of logos is reorganized each time around a different matrix of meaning. We offer here merely a few examples.

A. From the power of speech ( logos ) to the correctness of the statement ( logos )

From the Sophists to Plato, the sense of “speech” is very clearly devalued in favor of that of “rational statement.” In his Gorgias, subtitled On Rhetoric, Plato shifts logos away from the field of discursiveness, which he assigns to rhetoric, and toward that of the rationality and correctness of statements, which he reserves for philosophy.

The Sophist Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, a famous speech that had the effect of absolving her before the whole of Athens of any blame for the Trojan war, defined logos as “a great sovereign [dunastês megas ( δυνάστης μέγας )] who, with the smallest and most inapparent of bodies, accomplished the most divine acts [theiotata erga apotelei ( θειότατα ἔϱγα ἀποτελεῖ )]” ( 82B11 DK, §8 ). The power of logos-as-speech ( discours ), which is greater than that of force, is thus linked to its performative effectiveness. More than simply saying what is, in accordance with the movement of revealing and of representational adequacy proper to ontology, logos-as-speech enacts what it says, and in particular produces the polis ( see POLIS ), the city, as a continuous discursive exchange and creation of consensus, which characterizes that political animal endowed with logos that is man ( see epideixis in SPEECH ACT, I ).

Socrates, in dialogue with Gorgias, begins with an apparently banal definition of rhetoric as the “art of speaking” ( technê peri logous [τέχνη πεϱὶ λόγους]; 450c ). However, when he examines rhetoric more closely, he refuses to call it an art, describing it instead as alogon pragma [ἄλογον πρᾶγμα] ( 465a ), an expression that we are compelled to translate, following Alfred Croiset ( in his 1974 translation into French of Gorgias and Meno ), as a practice or a thing “devoid of reason”: that logoi-as-speech can redeem or recall the alogon-as-irrational is the mark of the Platonic operation that devalues and excludes from philosophy one meaning of logos in favor of another. Within this shift from one sense of logos to another a war is waged between philosophy and rhetoric, which constitutes one of the key points of access to the Greek world: “The most immoderate presumption of being able to do anything, as rhetors and stylists, runs through all antiquity in a way that is incomprehensible to us” ( Nietzsche, “The History of Greek Eloquence” ).

The Platonic dialectic then reinvests each of the accepted senses of logos with new meaning. As the art of asking the right questions and giving the right answers to them, it is also the art of defending a thesis ( logos ), in which the musical sense of setting the tone, of finding the key or the dominant, is still resonant: it is the art of “reasoning” and “accounting for” ( logon didonai [λόγον δόδιναι] ); logos, or discourse as argumentation, is opposed to muthos [μῦθος], or discourse as narration. The ploysemy of logos is thus placed under the yoke of correct or rigorous statement ( orthos logos [ὀρθὸς λόγος] ), or of reasoning, as the very medium of philosophy: “[W]hen we ask men questions, and if we ask questions in the right way, these questions say by themselves everything as it is. Now if knowledge and correct reasoning [orthos logos] were not present within them, they would not be able to do this” ( Phaedo, 73a8 ). This is the turn that Socrates thematizes in Phaedo ( 99e ), when he declares himself tired of the materialist examination of existing things and maintains that one has to “take refuge in reasoning [eis tous logous ( εἰς τοὺς λόγους )] and, within this reasoning, examine the truth of beings” ( M. Dixsaut’s French translation is “raisonnement,” which she describes as a cache-misère [respectable outer garment, or better: a fig-leaf; Platon: Phédon], but this is nevertheless preferable to “proposition” [Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedo]; idées [ideas] or notions [notions; Robin, Plato’s Œvres Complètes], or “definitions” [Bluck, Plato’s Phaedo] ).

Logos, as a rational statement, entails analysis: “grammatical” analysis before it was invented—inseparable from dialectical activity with respect to forms and the five basic genres—is linked in the Sophist to the logical analysis of truth. Logos is the “first combination” ( hê protê sumplokê [ἡ πρώτη συμπλοϰή]; Sophist, 262c 5–6 ) made up of a noun and a verb and could be either true or false ( 263b ): the meaning of logos as “statement” was therefore set at exactly the same time as the meaning of onoma as “name” ( until then, onoma had meant, rather, a “word” ) and the meaning of rhèma [ϋῆμα] as “verb.” Understood in this way, logos is perhaps the best way of designating definition itself: for the word or name “circle” ( onoma [ὄνομα] ), there is a corresponding logos made up of nouns and verbs: “something whose extremities are all at a perfectly equal distance from the center” ( ex onomatôn kai rhêmaton [ἐξ ὀνομάτων ϰαὶ ῥημὰτων]; Letter 7, 342c ).

B. The network of meanings of logos in Aristotle

In the philosophical “dictionary” that Aristotle proposes in Book Δ of his Metaphysics, there is no entry entitled logos that records and clarifies the uses of this word. Yet the word is caught within a multiplicity of networks that, even if they are primarily anchored in different places of his work, are used ( without being thematized ) within one and the same treatise. This is particularly true of De anima, and in analyzing these networks, we gain a better understanding of the extreme difficulty of a classic work such as this. Any interpretation of Aristotle is always faced with the the choice of two approaches to the networks in which a work’s key terms are embedded: either exploring the differences and revealing the gaps and conceptual shifts by using a multiplicity of heterogeneous translations ( so Hamlyn, for example, states in the preface to his edition of De anima: “to prevent misunderstanding I have flagged all occurrences of the word by providing the translations with the subscript ‘_L’ ” ) or attempting to “make . . . available the source which motivates the different ways of meaning” ( Heidegger, Phänomenologische interpretationen ) by reinventing the scope of the Greek language within the target language.

A first network ( De anima, 1 and 2 ), thematized in Book Ζ of the Metaphysics, links logos to eidos [εἶδος] ( “form” as opposed to “matter” ), to to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι] ( quiddity, quintessence ), and to entelecheia [ἐντελέχεια] ( “act” as opposed to “power” ), as well as to horos [ὁρος] ( definition ). So the soul is the logos of the body, as ( for instance ) ax-ness is the logos of the ax—and we should add that it is the logos of the soul to be logos of the body ( see 412b 11–16 ). Logos, designating what gives form to a thing, thereby constitutes its definition: it is simultaneously “essence,” “finality,” “raison d’etre,” “definition,” and “account” ( as the swarm of translations at 412b 10 testifies: “this is what the soul is,” that is, ousia . . . hê kata ton logon [οὐσία . . . ἡ ϰατά τὸν λόγον]: “a substance . . . in the sense of form” [Barbotin]; “substance, that corresponding to the principle L” ( De anima ); “substance as that which corresponds to the account of a thing” [Durrant]; “the substance which corresponds to reason” [Bodéüs]; “the essence insofar as it is expressed” [cf. Heidegger, Questions II] ). Being par excellence and the expressible par excellence, physics and metaphysics, are thus onto-logically bound together and open the Metaphysics out onto the Organon.

A second network connects logos, “voice,” “discursiveness,” and “rationality” ( De anima, 2.8 and 3.3 ) in several statements that make logos something proper to man. This network remits to two kinds of analysis: one is based in anatomy and physiology and specifies the type of linguistic articulation proper to the human logos ( The History of Animals, 9.535a, 28–30, for example ); the other, via the elaboration of expressiveness as articulated in the Peri hermeneias ( 4.16b 26: logos . . . esti phônê sêmantikê [λόγος . . . ἐστι φωνὴ σημαντιϰή], “a vocal sound that has a conventional meaning” ) relates, by virtue of their connections to the right and the good and to living well, man conceived as an “animal endowed with logos” and man conceived as a “political animal” ( Politics, 1.1.1253a 7–15 ). With the phantasia logistikê [φαντασία λογιστιϰή] ( “representation”—though not aisthêtike [αἰσθητιϰή], “representation with the senses,” as is the case with animals—but “rational” [Barbotin, among others], “calculating” [Bodéüs], or better still, “discursive,” De anima, 3.10.433b 29–30 ), which conjoins imagination and persuasion, De anima brings together under the term logos domains that we would separate under the headings of, on the one hand, anatomy and physiology, and on the other, politics and ethics, but also rhetoric and poetics.

The third, more specific, network in the De anima defines “sensation” as a logos, in the mathematical sense of “relation,” “proportion,” a ratio: sensation ( aisethêsis [αἴσθησις] ), the name for the actual coincidence between a sensory organ ( aisthêtêrion [αἰσθητήριον] ) and an object sensed ( aisthêton [αἰσθητόν] ), is nothing other than the calculation of an average between contrasting qualities—for example, white/black to make gray. This is why “an excess of objects sensed destroys the sensory organs: for if the movement is too strong for the organ, the logos [the relation] is broken, and this is sensation” ( De anima, 2.12.424a 30–31; cf. 3.2.426a 27–b 8 ). But the fact that logos is frequently translated as “form” ( Barbotin ) or “reason” ( Bodéüs ) does not facilitate this understanding, or our understanding generally.

The fourth network involves a semantic field that is barely distinct from the second network: at most it gives logos, when joined to phasis [φάσις] and apophasis [ἀπόφασις] ( “affirmation” and “negation” ), the specific meaning of “statement.” But what is new has to do with the subject capable of legein, of making statements: not man, but aisthêsis itself, including that of the aloga, or “beasts,” legei. Sensation states what it senses by itself; sight says what it sees ( white ), but still it does not speak, it does not produce logos, that is, a grammatical statement, a predicative sentence ( “Socrates is white” ). So the perplexity remains as to which part of the soul it is that senses, and “one could not easily class it as alogon, nor as logon echon [λόγον ἔχον]” ( De anima, 3.9.432a 15–17 ).

This survey of the meanings of logos makes their disjunction, as well as their systematization, apparent: so a gap remains between the mathematical logos, which calculates sensation, and the logos proper to man, who makes statements, constructs arguments, and unites and persuades citizens. It is as if the Greek language contributed to confusing, and thus to foreclosing, a certain number of questions that Aristotle, “compelled by truth,” nevertheless persisted in asking.

C. Logos and Stoic systematics

The Stoics, unlike Aristotle, turned the polysemy of logos into a principle of their systematics. For them, logos thematically organized and unified the three parts of the philosophical logos: physics, ethics, and logic.

Physical logos is the rational and immanent order of the world ( kosmos [ϰόσμος] ), which is fully determined by causal relations without exception. The Stoics made a distinction between two fundamental cosmological principles that reproduced the strict division between acting and suffering: between matter ( hulê [ὕλη] ), which is a pure indeterminate principle, the absolute capacity to undergo, and logos, which is the source of the determination of everything. They called this logos “god,” insofar as they considered it the demiurge, a driving force and formative power. Its physical name was “fire,” a legacy of the Heraclitean logos: so for Zeno, this god was “an artistically working fire, going on its way to create; which is equivalent to a fiery, creative, or fashioning breath” ( Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers ). In addition, each living being, each body, each individual in the physical world, contained logoi spermatikoi [λόγοι σπερματιϰοί], seminal reasons, from which he developed, each one representing the singular reason of the fatal law according to which he would develop, provided the conditions he encountered were favorable. Logos justified the Stoic identification of nature—common nature as nature proper, fate, providence, and Zeus: it was well known the world over that, in Plutarch’s words, “common nature and the common reason of this nature [ἡ ϰοινὴ φύσις ϰαὶ ὁ ϰοινὸς τῆς φύσεως λόγος] are Fate, Providence and Zeus” ( Plutarch, Contradictions of the Stoics, 34.1050b.

This identity was also a principle of Stoic ethics, a rational ethics that affirmed an identity between virtue, happiness, and the sovereign good. For Zeno, the end is a way of living in accordance with nature, itself identified as a way of living according to virtue, that is, a “way of living in accordance with the experience of the events which occur naturally.” The order of the events is nothing other than fate, which is logos ( Plutarch, ibid. ).

In logic, logos was the faculty of reasoning that distinguishes men from animals. This is the faculty of giving reasons or providing causal relations or of accounting for ( logon didonai ) what we perceive by formulating our perceptive data, or of providing logical representations ( phantasiai logikai [φαντασίαι λογιϰαί] ) between them. In every case, what the faculty furnishes are human representations as distinct from animal representations; throughout, logikos indissociably means both rational and discursive.

■ See Box 3.

3

The polysemy of “logos” according to Greek grammarians

A marginal scholium of a manuscript of the Technê grammatikê by Dionysius Thrax, the text below should be taken for what it is: a more or less careful ( there are several redundancies ) and byzantine compilation of notes of different sources and dates. It does not, therefore, call for the same kind of exegesis as a deliberately constructed text. We offer it here as a kind of “exhibit” in a trial to show the extent to which the polysemy of logos, described here as equivocal or as a homonym, had struck Greek grammarians. In this respect, the zealous manner in which our scholiast provided as long a list of meanings as possible, even at the cost of occasionally repeating himself, is in itself a noteworthy symptom:

<Heliodorus>

Logos is used in many different senses: it is an equivocal word that can signify many things. Logos can mean

1. the rational capacity ( ἐνδιάθετος λογισμός ) that makes us reasonable, thinking beings ( λογιϰοί ϰαί διανοητιϰοί );

2. concern ( φροντίς ), cf. the expressions “it is not worthy of logos” or “I do not feel any logos about him”;

3. consideration ( λογαριασμός ), cf. “the commander feels logos for his lieutenants”;

4. justification ( ἀπολογία ), cf. “He gave a logos for that”;

5. the general ( logos ) [ὁ ϰαθόλου] that encompasses all parts of speech ( μέρος λόγου );

6. definition ( ὅρος ), cf. “sentient living being,” as the answer to the question “give the logos for animal”;

7. the juxtaposition of words which express full meaning, that is syntactical logos, cf. “finish your logos [sentence]”;

8. ( logos ) of expenses, sometimes called logos of the bank;

9. the ( logos [relation] ) of geometry, cf. “there is the same logos between two cubits and four cubits, as between a half and one cubit”;

10. proportion ( ἀναλογία ), cf. “the logos of four to three is four thirds”;

11. a good reason ( τὸ εὔλογον ), cf. “he did not do that without a good logos,” meaning “with good reason” ( εὐλόγως );

12. the conclusion that follows from premises [he then gives an example of a syllogism];

13. the fact of being rationally endowed ( λογιϰὴ ϰατασϰευή ), when we say that men are endowed with logos, but not beings that are devoid of reason ( ἄλογα );

14. potentiality ( δύναμις ), when we say that it is by virtue of a natural logos that animals have teeth and a beard, in other words, by virtue of natural and seminal potentialities;

15. the vocal form that is coextensive with thought ( ἡ συμπαρεϰτεινομένη φωνὴ τῶ διανοήματι ), cf. ἄπελθε [go away], which is a word ( λέξις ), insofar as it has a meaning and also a logos because of the sense of the thought content that completes it;

16. that which expresses self-sufficiency ( ὅ δηλοῖ τὸ αὐτοτελές ), cf. what one says when something is missing from a statement: “finish your logos”;

17. extension ( logos ), as a given type of completion, cf. “the logos of Demosthenes against Midias is beautiful”;

18. book ( βιϐλίον ), “lend me the book Against Androtion” [a speech by Demosthenes];

19. the relation between sizes ( σχέσις τῶν μεγεθῶν ), when we say that one size has the same logos in relation to another size, as some other size has in relation to some other size;

20. subject ( ὑπόθεσις ) [i.e., the summary of the plot], cf. “I am now going to read out the logos of the play and its didascalic [comic fragment]”;

21. cause ( αἰτία ), cf. Plato [Gorgias, 465a]: “I do not call art an activity devoid of logos [ἄλογον πρᾶγμα]”;

22. God, par excellence ( ϰατ’ ἐξοχὴν ὁ θεός ), cf. Jn 1.1: “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God”; in other words, “the son of God, in the beginning, was exactly the same and equal to his Father.”

( Dionysius Thrax, Scholia in Dionysii Thracis artem grammaticam, in Grammatici Graeci, vol. 1, fasc. 3 )

III. From Greek to Latin

A. Logos / ratio, oratio

The Latin term ratio does not cover all the senses of logos: it has neither the meaning of “gathering” nor the meaning of “speech.” From the verb reor ( “to count,” “to calculate,” and in popular usage “to think,” “to estimate,” “to judge” ), and used less frequently than puto or opinor, the noun ratio did not produce many compound terms: ratiocinor is rare, and the adjective rationalis was not used before Seneca. It was out of the meanings of “counting” and “calculation,” which ratio has in common with logos, and from the time of Plautus ( 300 BCE ), that all of the uses attesting to the values of “reasoning,” “method,” and “explanation” developed. This was why, when Cicero and Lucretius translated and expounded Greek philosophical doctrines, ratio was available to them as a term that was able to convey a large number of the meanings of logos. A given meaning could be made clearer with another noun, which was not added to ratio but qualified it, in pairs such as ratio et consilium ( the plan, intention ), ratio et mens ( intelligence, the faculty of reason ), ratio et via ( method ). To convey the sense of “speech,” the term oratio, which is not etymologically related to ratio but is a remarkable homophone, allows us to hear the polysemy of logos, especially when it is paired with ratio.

1. The new coherence of Lucretius

The uses of the term ratio in the poem De rerum natura ( On the Nature of Things ) by Lucretius tended to reduce the polysemy of the term in order the reinforce the coherence of the Epicurean method and the didactic effectiveness of his exposition; this movement of reduction and unification of meaning is marked on the one hand by a recurrence of the vera ratio, and on the other by a number of uses that cover several different Greek compound nouns that are based on logos: logismos [λογισμός], epilogismos [ἐπιλογισμός], phusiologia [φυσιολογία].

Vera ratio describes the Epicurean doctrine ( see, e.g., On the Nature of Things, 1.498; 5.1117 ), whose truthfulness is proclaimed in opposition to the erroneous theories of Heraclitus ( 1.637 ) and of Anaxagoras ( 1.880 ). It is “just reasoning” that allows us to account for the movement of atoms ( 2.82; 2.229 ), and it is the advent of an explanation that will reveal a new aspect of the world:

Now, pay attention to the true doctrine.

An unheard of discovery will strike your ears.

A new aspect of your universe will be revealed.

( Nunc animum nobis adhibe veram ad rationem.

Nam tibi vehementer nova res molitur ad auris.

Accidere, et nova se species ostendere rerum. )

( Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 2.1023–1025 )

In these uses, ratio covers almost the only sense of logos that it does not have in Latin, that is, the sense of “speech”; it is the master’s speech, the revealed word, this logos that, at the end of the Letter to Herodotus ( Diogenes Laertius, 10.83 ), refers to the synthesis of the main points of this doctrine, which can lend a certain force to anyone who has memorized it.

On the other hand, ratio unifies several aspects of Epicurean natural science ( phusiologia ), whose objective is to “explain the causes of phenomena” ( Diogenes Laertius, ibid., 10.78 ): ratio is thus often paired with causa ( 4.500, 6.1000 ), and sometimes replaces it ( 7.1090; the ratio of an epidemic ). Ratio covers all natural laws ( 2.719 ) and, for this very reason, provides a general principle of explanation of nature: ratio is thus closely associated with natura in the expression natura haec rerum ratioque, which refers to the recent discovery by Epicurus of the system of nature and its explanation in Latin by Lucretius:

Lastly, this recent discovery of the system of nature, and today, indeed, I am the very first able to translate it into the language of our fathers.

( Denique natura haec rerum ratioque repertast nuper, et hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus nunc, ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces. )

( Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 5.335–337 )

The importance of this use is indicated in the syntagma that appears as a refrain four times in the poem ( 1.148, 2.61, 3.93, 6.41 ), natura species ratioque, “the sight and explanation of nature,” or more precisely, “the explanation that accounts for phenomena” ( naturae species, what nature makes manifest ), but also “the explanation that proceeds by reasoning on the basis of phenomena.” These glosses, which are not translations, are intended to remind us that ratio refers here to logismos, the reasoning by which the lessons of nature are explained ( Diogenes Laertius, 10.75 ), or to epilogismos, through which we understand the end of nature ( 10.133 ). Two fundamental aspects of this methodical reasoning are thus conveyed by the single term ratio. Nonetheless, the understanding of invisible things, perceived dia logou [διὰ λόγου] ( 10.47, 10.59, 10.62 ), is not expressed by ratio, but by mens ( 6.77 ) or by injectus animi, the mind’s projection. Rational activity, when it covers any kind of perception, is thus directly related to the thinking and feeling subject, which no compound of ratio could express.

2. The nodal points of translation in Cicero

The uses of ratio in the Ciceronian corpus reveal at least two “nodes” of translation, which stand out against the banalization of the term as a result of what we might call a diffuse Stoicism. We find an example of this banalization in the brief exposition of the physical doctrine of Anaxagoras ( De natura deorum, 1.26 ): the ordering of the world produced by the nous ( fr. A38 RT: DK ), the diakosmêsis [διαϰόσμησις], is translated by a phrase in which the group of words vis ac ratio describes the rational process set in motion, as if the diachosmêsis of Anaxagoras were the unfolding of an immanent rationality, the one postulated by the Stoics ( “Anaxagoras . . . was the first to argue that the well-ordered organization of all things was a result of an infinite intelligence which had perfected their composition by proceeding rationally [omnium rerum discriptionem et modum mentis infinitae vi ac ratione dissignari]” ).

A first node occurs around the translation of logikê ( technê ) [λογιϰή ( τέχνη )], “logic”: “in altera philosophiae parte, quae quaerendi ac disserendi quae logikê dicitur” ( in the second part of philosophy, concerning the search for and exposition of arguments, which is called “logic”; De finibus, 1.22 ). We note here that ratio is not what technique is concerned with, but rather the method itself of quaerere and disserere: “logikên quam rationem disserendi voco” ( De fato, 37 ).

The sense of “gathering,” well attested for logos but not for ratio, is thus conveyed by the term disserere, “to connect words together, in the right order.” Ratio has to do more with the unfolding, with the method of the process, as is made clear by this definition of apodeixis [ἀπόδειξις], or demonstration, translated as argumenti conclusio ( giving form to an argument ): “ratio quae ex rebus perceptis ad id quod non percipiebatur adducit” ( the method that leads from perceived things to what was not perceived; Academica, 2.26 ).

According to another translation choice ( which we find relates to the doctrine of Antiochus; Academica, 1.30–32 ), ratio is given a meaning that is closer to the sense of logos as “reason and discourse”: logic is defined as “philosophiae pars, quae erat in ratione et in disserendo” ( the part of philosophy that concerns the methods of reasoning and its exposition ), and the object of dialectics is said to be “oratio ratione conclusa,” discourse governed by the rules of argumentation.

The homophonic play of words ratio/oratio allows us to resolve, from a point of view that is here clearly marked by Stoicism, the impossible translation of the object of logic. However, the occurrences of this nonetymological pair ( but which must have been perceived as etymological, to judge by Cicero’s uses of the terms ) help us to understand where the second difficulty lies.

When ratio and oratio are used together, they emphasize a mythical kind of coherence: the origins of eloquence in De inventione ( 1.2 ) and of the social bond in De officiis ( 1.50 ), are explained by the ability to handle ratio and oratio, whether in teaching or learning. This coherence is also the one that Stoic discourse aspires to, over and against moral suffering ( Tusculanes, 4.60 ). But the dissociation between the two terms highlights their irreducible distinction, or the trap of the Stoic conception of language. When arguing against the Stoic Cato, Cicero states his disagreement at the level of words, oratio, while claiming to be in agreement with Cato about the main points of doctrine, the ratio: “Ratio enim nostra consentit, pugnat oratio” ( we agree on doctrine, it is language which opposes us; De finibus, 3.10 ). Similarly, in Cicero’s translation of the Timaeus, the inadequacy of all language, other than by “resemblance,” to translate anything to do with gods and the creation of the universe ( 29c ) is clearly marked thanks to the distinction between the ratio of the demiurgical god and the oratio that gives us its image—and yet both terms serve to translate logos.

The uses of ratio in Seneca’s language are marked by an interpretation of the doctrine that limits man’s participation in the reason of the world: the animus of god is wholly ratio, that of man is possessed by error ( Natural Questions, preface, 14 ). Man’s rationality is constitutive, and Seneca coins the adjective rationalis, which essentially covers the first manifestation of logos through the mastery of the spoken language: infans irrationalis, puber rationalis ( the newborn infant is without reason [without speech], the child possesses reason; Epistles, 118.14 ). But if ratio is the imitatio naturae ( ibid., 66.39 ), the conditions of this imitation are made more difficult by a general blindness that prevents us from perceiving the rational principles at work in nature and in the nature proper to man ( ibid., 95 ). So the construction of the rational subject does not coincide with a progressive reinforcement of reason, but with a process of curing this blindness ( ibid., 50 ). This interpretation, which systematically treats errors of judgment as an illness, privileges the vocabulary of care, and of the willingness or disposition to be cured ( hence Seneca’s interest in bona mens and voluntas ).

B. From Logos to Verbum: The Gospel according to John

1. The Logos: Son of God, .hokmah ( wisdom ) or dāvār ( the spoken word )?

Logos appears seven times in the Gospel according to John in the New Testament ( four times in the prologue to the fourth Gospel 1:1, 14; twice in John 1 1:1, 5:7; once in Rv 19:13 ). The term is translated canonically as “Word,” or Verbe in French, which is a calque of the Verbum of the Vulgate.

John says that the Logos was “in the beginning” ( John 1 1:1 ), even before the creation of the world, and it was through it that God created all things ( 1:3: “all things were made through him” ). The Logos “was God” ( 1:1 ), as well as being a person distinct from God ( 1:2: “the Word was with God” ). It is also called the “only Son” of God ( 1:14 ). What is specific to John’s Logos is that it “became flesh and dwelt among us” ( 1:14 ): incarnation confers upon Logos the mission of communicating with men and of revelation to them, which is related to its current sense of “spoken word” in common Greek. We go from the organic nature of the logoi spermatikoi ( seminal reasons ) of the Stoics, a legacy of Aristotelian form, to the economy of persons and of filiation.

The ancient exegetes ( e.g., Origen, Saint Augustine ) were convinced early on of the continuity between the two Testaments. In this perspective, it was first of all the Wisdom of the Old Testament ( ḥokmah [חַכְמָה] ), translated as Sophia in the Septuagint ), which prefigured the Logos of John: Paul ( 1 CE ) was thus already calling the Son of God “wisdom of God” ( 1 Cor 1:24 ). There are many points that Wisdom and Logos have in common that allowed for this assimilation: both are created by God ( Prv 8:22; cf. Jn 1:4 ); both represent life ( Wisdom declares “for he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord” [Prv 8:35]; cf. the Logos: “in him was life, and the life was the light of men” [Jn 1:4] ); both preexist creation ( “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old” [Prv 8:22] ); and both constitute the means of creation ( Wisdom is the worker, technitis, who makes everything that is [Prv 7:21 and 8:6]; and Jn 1:3 says of Logos that “all things were made through him” ). Wisdom is even presented as spoken “from the mouth of the Most High” ( Eccl 24:3 ), and in that regard, it reconnects with the usual meaning of logos and its communicative function.

Despite these convergences, John did not use Sophia, which is a translation of ḥokmah, to designate the Son of God but rather Logos, which is a translation of dāvār. Beside the difference in gender of the nouns ( Sophia is a feminine term, unlike Logos, which is masculine and then appropriated as the Son of God ), Logos covers a much greater semantic field than Wisdom, which is associated in Rabbinical tradition with the Torah, the written Law ( cf. Eccl 24:23 ). Dāvār is, like Logos, the means of revelation ( cf. Ex 3:14, where God reveals himself to men through his Word as the One and Only God ), and above all, it is an active power.

■ See Box 4.

4

The ambiguity of the Hebrew dāvār [דָּבָר], spoken word

The Hebrew word dāvār [דָּבָר] presents an interesting ambiguity, since it means both “word” and “thing”—this last, first of all in the sense of “fact,” “event.” This Semitic substratum explains certain oddities of the early Gospels, such as the angel’s expression to Mary “no word [rhêma ( ῥῆμα )] is impossible for God,” or the words of the shepherds at the Nativity: “let us go see this word which has happened” ( Lk 1:37 and 2:15 ). The same ambiguity exists in Arabic, where amr [الأمر] sometimes refers to the “matter at hand” ( pl. umūr [أمور], sometimes to the command given ( pl. awāmir [أوامر] ). In French, chose ( thing ) is a doublet of cause ( cause, reason, case ): la chose ( thing ) is what is en cause ( the case ) in a legal debate, and the thing one is talking about ( ce dont on cause ). The words Ding in German and “thing” in English both recall the thing, which was the name for an assembly of people where certain “things” would be on the agenda.

The ambiguity of the word makes sense in terms of the representation of creation as having issued forth from a divine command. This idea is found in the ancient Near East, perhaps as a result of the idea of thunder as a divine voice ( cf. Sumerian ENEM = Akkadian awātum ). It appears in the Bible: “By the word [dāvār] of the Lord the heavens were made” ( Ps 33:6 ). It is implicit in the first story of creation at the beginning of Genesis. This creative word is hypostasized in Philo, who gives it the name logos. The term is used in John’s Gospel to designate the word in which all things were created and that became flesh. The Latin translates this as Verbum, which refers in theology to the second person of the Trinity before his incarnation as Jesus Christ. The emphatic usage of “word” to refer to the poetic word, sometimes with a capital letter, represents a secularization of the idea.

A further representation comes to be grafted on to this meaning, whereby the word can magically act upon reality. To know the “answer to a mystery,” or mot ( word ) de l’énigme in French, enables one to change things by returning to their verbal source. Things are like frozen words, which one can free up. This idea is echoed, finally, in a quatrain by Eichendorff: “a poem [Lied] lies dormant in all things” ( “Wünschelrute” ), and in Proust: “[W]hat lay hidden behind the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a pretty phrase” ( Swann’s Way, chap. 1 ).

One of the most famous plays on words in Western literature is based on the ambiguity of dāvār [דָּבָר]. In the first Faust, Goethe has his hero retranslate the opening of the prologue to John’s Gospel: “in the beginning was logos.” He rejects Wort ( word ), then Sinn ( meaning ), then Kraft ( power ), to settle in the end on Tat ( act ) ( vv. 1224–37 ). This choice seems arbitrary, unless we understand that Faust begins with an implicit retroversion of his text, which is attentive to its Semitic substratum.

Rémi Brague

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Translated by C.K.S. Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin. London: Chatto and Windus, 1981

2. Logos: Verbum, sermo, ratio, or causa?

a. Logos, verbum, and sermo

In the Latin versions of the Bible, two concurrent translations for the logos of the prologue of Jn 1:1 are attested depending on the geographical region: in North Africa, sermo was used ( cf. Cyprian, Ad Quirinum testimoniorum, 2.3: “In principio fuit Sermo et Sermo erat apud Deum et Deus erat Sermo” ). In Europe, however, it was verbum that prevailed ( Novatian, De Trinitate, 30 ). Whether the term that was kept to translate logos was verbum or sermo, Christ was the spoken word. But verbum was more suited than sermo, which had strong connotations of internal plurality, for the unity and uniqueness of the Son of God. So in his Tractatus in Johannis Evangelium ( Tractates on the Gospel of John, 108.3 ), Augustine comments on the passage from John 17:17 in the following terms:

“Your discourse [Sermo],” he says, “is truth.” What else did he say than “I am the truth”? For indeed, the Greek Gospel has logos, that which is also read there where it was said, “In the beginning was the Word [Verbum] and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” And of course we know that the Word itself is the only-begotten Son of God, who “was made flesh and dwelt among us [Et utique Verbum ipsum novimus unigenitum Dei Filium quod caro factum est et habitavit in nobis].” And because of this [verbum] it could also be put here and in some codices has been put: “Your Word [Verbum] is truth,” as in some codices even there it was written “In the beginning was the Discourse [Sermo].” But in the Greek, without any variation, both there and here, is logos. And so in truth, that is, in his Word, in his Only-Begotten, the Father sanctifies his own heirs and his coheirs [Sanctificat itaque Pater in veritate, id est in Verbo suo, in unigenito suo, suos heredes ejusque coheredes].

( Tractates on the Gospel of John )

The association made at the end of this passage between Verbum and veritas ( truth ) is not coincidental. It points to a popular etymology, traditionally attributed to Varro and that Saint Augustine adopts when he links verbum ( the word ) either to verum ( true ) or to verum boare ( to proclaim what is true ) ( De dialectica, 6 ). One can probably see here another factor explaining the translators’ choice of Verbum to translate the Logos of John.

b. Logos and ratio

Yet the church fathers would continue to question the possible translation of Logos by Ratio, which pointed to the divine Reason of the creative God.

For Tertullian ( verses 150–222 ), who possessed an African version of the Bible in which the translation of logos as sermo was preferred, logos does not correspond to the Latin verbum but instead to the combination of ratio ( reason ) and sermo ( speech ). Indeed, although it is true ( Tertullian maintains ) that thought precedes the spoken word, that reason ( ratio ) is the substance of this spoken word ( sermo ), ratio is nonetheless expressed in the form of an inner spoken word.

This [reason] the Greeks call Logos, by which expression we also designate discourse [sermo]: and consequently our people are already wont, through the artlessness of the translation, to say that Discourse [sermo] was in the beginning with God, though it would be more appropriate to consider Reason of older standing, seeing that God is [not] discursive [sermonalis] from the beginning but is rational [rationalis] even before the beginning, and because discourse itself, having its ground in reason, shows reason to be prior as being its substance. Yet even so it makes no difference. For although God had not yet uttered his Discourse [sermo], he always had it within himself along with and in his Reason [ratio], while he silently thought out and ordained with himself the things which he was shortly to say by the agency of Discourse: for while thinking out and ordaining them in company of his Reason, he converted into Discourse that which he was discussing in discourse. [Cum ratio enim sua cogitans atque disponens sermonem, eam efficiebat quam sermone tractabat].

( Tertulliani adversus Praxean, §5 )

In Augustine we find an analogous opposition between Verbum, as the creative Word of the Father, and Ratio, as the Reason immanent to God independently of all creation. But Augustine prefers verbum to sermo as a translation for logos, since the former term for him emphasizes, better than ratio, the notion of an effective Word, as we can see in the De diversis quaestionibus ( Eighty-Three Different Questions, question 63 ):

“In the beginning was the Word.” The Greek word logos signifies in Latin both “reason” [ratio] and “word” [verbum]. However, in this verse the better translation is “word” [verbum], so that not only the relation to the Father is indicated, but also the efficacious power with respect to those things which are made by the Word [Sed hoc loco melius verbum interpretamur, ut significetur non solum ad Patrem respectus, sed ad illa etiam quae per Verbum facta sunt operativa potentia]. Reason, however, is correctly called reason even if nothing is made by it.

In the Tractatus in Johannis Evangelium ( 1.10 ), Augustine considers this translation to be established, in spite of the potential ambiguity of the word verbum, which refers equally to the Word and to human spoken words. Rather than suggesting a better translation, the author is content to underline the difference between the Verbum of the Father and our human words ( verba ): “And whenever you hear: In the beginning was the Word [In principio erat Verbum], so that it does not make you think of something of little value—as you normally do when you hear talk of human words [cum verba humana soleres audire]—this is what you must think: the Word was God [Deus erat Verbum].”

c. Logos and causa

In the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena ( 810–877 ) also reflected on the notion of Logos in his Periphyseon ( On the Division of Nature ). In this text, he blends a number of Neoplatonic elements with his own Christology and argues that within the Word reside Ideas, that is, the first causes from which all things were created:

The most primary reason of all things, which is simple and multiple, is God the Word. For it is called by the Greeks logos, that is, Word [verbum] or Reason [ratio] or Cause [causa] [Nam a Grecis logos vocatur, hoc est verbum vel ratio vel causa]. Therefore, that which is written in the Greek gospel, en archêi în ho logos, can be interpreted “In the beginning was the Word,” or: “In the beginning was the Reason,” or: “In the beginning was the Cause.” For nobody who makes any one of these statements will be deviating from the truth. For the only-begotten Son of God is both Word and Reason and Cause, Word because through Him God uttered the making of all things [verbum quidem quia per ipsum deus pater dixit fieri Omnia]—in fact He is the Utterance of the Father and His Saying and His Speech [immo etiam ipse est Patris dicere et dictio et sermo], as He Himself says in the gospel, “And the speech which I have addressed to you is not Mine but His that sent Me” [et sermo quem locutus sum vobis non est meus sed ipsius qui misit me]. . . . Reason because He is the principal Exemplar of all things visible and invisible, and therefore is called by the Greeks idea, that is, species or form [ratio vero quoniam ipse est omnium visibilium et invisibilium principale exemplar ideoque a Grecis idea, id est species bel forma dicitur]—for in Him the Father beholds the making of all things He willed to be before they were made—; and Cause because the origins of all things subsist eternally and immutably in Him [causa quoque est quoniam occasiones omnium aeternaliter et incommutabiliter in ipso subsistunt].

( 2.642b–642c )

With Meister Eckhart, the theology of the Word become even more complex. He devoted paragraphs 4 to 51 of his Commentary on the Prologue of the Gospel of Saint John to an exegesis of the expression in principio erat Verbum. Following Augustine, he proposed the equivalence between Logos and Verbum et ratio ( §4 ). For him, logos is the first cause of all things ( §12: “causa prima omnis res ratio est, logos est, Verbum in principio” [the first Cause of all things is Reason, Logos, the Word in the Principle] ). He emphasizes the intellective nature of the Word ( §38: “Verbum, quod est ratio . . . in intellectu est, intellegendo formatur, nihil praeter intellegere est” [the Word, which is reason . . . is in the intellect, is formed by knowing, is nothing but knowing] ). Man, as intellect, can find himself again in the Word and can be reborn to his true divine nature, while the Father creates his Son in the human soul.

This use of logos in the language of theology to refer to the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, is strikingly original. John deflected the term by wresting it from its usual noetic domain and dwelling on the Incarnation. Thereafter followed a period when the notion of causality, which was essential to the Christian conceptualization of creation, was eclipsed. Then the Latin of the medieval theologians reinvested logos with the profane values of Greek philosophy ( the Platonic idea and the Stoic cause ).

■ See Box 7.

7

Glossolalia: From the unity of the word to plurality of tongues

“Glossolalia” is a technical expression referring to a variety of speech act whose name derives from the Greek term for speaking in tongues. Saint Paul may have been the first to define this linguistic practice. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he enjoins his addressees not to “speak into the air” ( 1 Cor 14:1–25 ). To “speak in tongues,” Paul suggests, is how to forget the meaning of one’s words. It is to abandon one’s tongue for “tongues” and “obscure expressions,” such that one becomes a “child in understanding” and a “barbarian . . . that speaketh unto a barbarian.” In The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, Giorgio Agamben has commented that such speech consists not so much in the “pure uttering of inarticulate sounds” as in a “ ‘speaking in gloss,’ that is, in words whose meaning one does not know.” To hear such sounds is to know they mean something without knowing exactly what such a “something” might be; in other words, it is to discern an intention to signify that cannot be identified with any particular signification. Agamben notes that the traditional translations of the Greek text of Paul’s letter fail to capture the full radicalism of the linguistic “barbarism” that it clearly describes. Whereas the King James version, following the Vulgate, has “If I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto he that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me,” a literal rendition would read otherwise on a single, decisive point: “If I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto he that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian in me [en hemoi].” “The text’s en hemoi,” Agamben writes, “can only signify ‘in me,’ and what Paul means is perfectly clear: if I utter words whose meaning I do not understand, he who speaks in me, the voice that utters them, the very principle of speech in me, will be something barbarous, something that does not know how to speak and that does not know what it says.”

One might well conclude that to speak in tongues is therefore to speak without speaking. For glossolalia begins where the canonical determinations of language end: at the point at which speech is irrevocably loosened from both its significance and its subject, as one experiences, within oneself, “barbarian speech that one does not know.” It is an “unfruitful” state, in Paul’s words, since it is one in which language is sundered from its semantic and intentional ends, suspended, “in unknown tongues,” without the “profit” of a definite sense or purpose. But it is precisely this semantic sterility that also renders glossolalia stimulating for thought. What is speech loosened from its adherence to the rules of a particular language, from the will of an individual speaker, from the conventions of adult and native discourse? Giorgio Agamben may be the contemporary philosopher who has considered these questions with the greatest acuity, and he has suggested more than once that in such glossolalia one may discern a fundamental dimension of language all too seldom considered as such: communicability without content, or, more simply, “gesture.”

Daniel Heller-Roazen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

   . Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1993.

   . Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

   . Means without Ends: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

   . Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

   . Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999.

   . The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Heller-Roazen, Daniel. “Speaking in Tongues.” Paragraph 25, no. 2 ( 2002 ): 92–115.

IV. Vernacular Puns

A. English: “Tell,” “tale,” “tally”; “count,” “account,” “recount”

“Say,” the most common word in English to express “saying,” is not really polysemic and can only ever translate one of the meanings of legein. It competes with other families of words, in particular those around the verbs “tell” and “count,” which like legein, open out onto more complex usages that are at once arithmetical, discursive, and performative.

( a ) A first important and rather archaic meaning of “tell,” which is still present, was that of “counting” or “enumerating”—saying or “telling” out the numbers one by one ( one, two, three, etc. ), a first form of counting that also interested Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. We find this usage in Robinson Crusoe in the following:

He could not tell twenty in English; but he numbered them by laying so many Stones on a Row, and pointing to me to tell them over.

( Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, chap. 15 )

This is what one does when one counts out coins, for example, or banknotes, and a “teller” in English is both someone who tells tales, as well as someone who counts money in a bank. ( Automatic tellers dispense cash or tell customers the balance in their bank accounts. ) The idea of counting is associated with the idea of saying ( stating the numbers, one by one ), and arithmetic is the ability to follow a series out loud, such as two, four, six. Conversely, the association of “tell” with “count” defines narration; hence, a “tale,” as derived from a primary form of counting, like a series with stages that can be enumerated and well defined: serialized tales are of this kind.

“Tell” is specifically oriented toward the effect or intention of the spoken word and has the dimension of a speech act: “telling” is always something other than describing or stating and does not refer, as “say” almost always does, to a statement. So rather than “say,” one will “tell a lie” or “tell the truth,” and “tell” adds to the simple idea of speaking, the fact of pointing out ( to tell the time ), of announcing or informing, correctly or not; of letting others know. “Tell” also means to narrate or relate, as in to “tell tales” ( the two words being closely linked ). “Tell” sometimes suggests, again going beyond a descriptive use of language, confession or revelation, as in “to disclose,” “to reveal” ( cf. the expression “tell all” ). Its usage also extends to cases where it is a matter of making distinctions, of showing discernment, as one speaks ( tell friend from foe, tell right from wrong ). So “telling” is distinct from the notion of stating and means “to make or see a difference” and “to have some criterion for” ( “I can tell,” or “How can you tell it’s a goldfinch?” the example given by J. L. Austin in “Other Minds” ).

So we can identify two directions in the verb “tell”: that of narrating or recounting and that of enumerating or counting ( cf. the verb “tally” ). The usages of the verb “tell” suggest two dimensions of logos that go beyond the simple description of what is: the “telling,” the narrative saying, which is intended to have an effect on others ( what Austin, in How to Do Things with Words, defined as the perlocutionary dimension of what is said ); and the act of counting implied in any statement ( which would be its illocutionary dimension ). Whatever the case, it seems that the verb “to tell” and its usages highlight more than “to say” and more than its French equivalents, a performative dimension of spoken language that is inseparable from a conception of logos as performance.

( b ) This duality, to which the false French pair conter ( to tell ) / compter ( to count ) curiously enough corresponds, is to be found in the compound words based on “count” ( recount, account ). ( Romance languages in general play on this pun: see, for instance, Cervantes, Don Quixote 1.28, where Dorotea refers to the sad account of her woes: “el cuento, que no le tiene, de mis desdichas” ( the story [cuento], which is uncountable [que no tiene cuento], of my sorrows ). “To recount” in the strict sense means “to count again,” but also “to narrate.” “Account” can be used not only in the sense of “counting” ( money ) but also in the sense of “giving an account of” something or of “accounting for” ( as in the Greek logon didonai, the “day of reckoning” is the last judgment ). This is precisely how Locke uses the noun “account,” which is why in the French translation, Pierre Coste ( Essai philosophique ) alternatively uses compte ( tally ) and récit ( tale ). This, of course, then poses the problem of translating into French the expression “accountable” for one’s actions, where the French for “accountable” should be not, as Coste translates it, responsable ( responsible ), but rather comptable ( countable ) ( as Étienne Balibar proposes in his version, in “Points-bilingues” ). We can see here, then, how moral philosophy during this period of English philosophy is defined in economic terms.

The pairs “count”/“account” and “tell”/“tally” thus articulate a remarkable link connecting counting, saying, and debt. Stanley Cavell identifies a Shakespearean source of this problematic that links the economic to the moral. In his essay on A Winter’s Tale entitled “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses,” he shows how Shakespeare’s vocabulary is saturated with these double usages of “tell” and of “count,” “account,” “loss,” “gain,” “owe,” “debt,” “repay,” etc. We can see how rich the economic lexicon already is in Shakespeare’s language, but counting, or rather the impossibility of counting, takes on an added dimension, that of the inability to say, to express oneself, or to “tell.” Leontes in A Winter’s Tale is thus “unable to tell anything,” to know and to say what counts, and Cavell, returning to the dual sense of saying and knowing in “telling,” sees in this attitude an expression of skepticism itself—the impossibility of expression repeating the inability of counting, and of counting for others.

This usage of the pair “tell”/“count” closely links “saying” to categorizing, as in the expression “to count as.” To “count something as” is to put it in a category or a semantic unit. Here again is Cavell: “how we determine what counts as instances of our concepts, this thing as a table, this other as a human. To speak is to say what counts” ( In Quest of the Ordinary ). To see a thing as this or that is to “count” it, in the literal sense, as one of these words ( or concepts ), or as one of those others. In This New Yet Unapproachable America ( 1989 ), Cavell reads Kantian, but also Emersonian, categories as the means by which we count things, that is, count a given thing as falling under a given word, and thereby, he concludes, “recount our condition.” The term “recount” thus becomes untranslatable. ( The French translation is forced to invent the verb ra-compter for “to recount” ). The linguistic play surrounding “tell”/“count” would thus allow for a new definition of the categories ( that is, of the application of concepts and words to the world ) by the invention of a conception of logos that would at the same time, and indissolubly, be a narrating ( recounting ), a counting out of differences, and an accounting. So it is through the English language and its usages that the irreducibility of logos to a simple description of the world, or the irreducibility of description to statement, becomes apparent in very concrete ways.

B. German: Legen, liegen, lesen

The difficulty of translating legein and logos is a cornerstone of Heidegger’s reflection on Greece, on language, and on philosophy, and it prompts a complex linguistic play in German. One of the starting points of this reflection is Heraclitus’s fragment 50.

■ See Box 5.

5

Translating a pre-Socratic ( Heraclitus, fragment 50 )

A “fragment” is surrounded by an aura of meaning and depends on an interpretation of the whole that is more wished for than guaranteed. This is true of the very famous fragment of Heraclitus:

οὐϰ ἐμοῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀϰούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἕν πάντα εἶναι

( Not after listening to me, but after listening to the account [logos], one does wisely in agreeing that all things are one. )

( Heraclitus, Fragments )

– A more rationalist interpretation understands logos in the sense of Sinn, “sense,” “reason,” and founds a pre-Stoic cosmic physics, in which logos produces the unity of the world; this is how we might read the German translation by Diels Kranz ( RT: DK ): “Haben sie nicht mich, sondern den Sinn vernommen, so ist weise, dem Sinne gemäss zu sagen [to say according to the meaning], alles sei eins.” Dumont proposes, in French: “Si ce n’est pas moi, mais le Logos que vous avez écouté, il est sage de convenir qu’est l’Un-Tout” ( If it is not me, but Logos that you listened to, it is wise to agree that One is All ).

– A more discursive interpretation, defended for example by J. Bollack and H. Wismann, emphasizes the difference between signifier and signified, between saying and what is said: “L’art est bien d’écouter, non moi, mais la raison, pour savoir . . . dire en accord toute chose-une” ( Art is indeed listening, not to me, but to reason, to know how . . . to say in agreement all one-thing ). The commentary does not “rationalize”; quite the opposite: “To allow the signifier to act, Heraclitus asks that we listen to what is being said, without being limited by the intention of the speaker” ( ibid. ).

– An ontological interpretation, like the one Heidegger proposes, links logos to the unveiling of being: “Nicht mir, aber der Lesende Lege gehörig: Selbes liegen lassen: Geschickliches west ( die lesende lege ): Eines einend Alles [Belonging and lending an ear, not to me, but to the gathering Posing: leaving the Same laid out: something well-disposed spreads out its being ( the gathering Posing ): One uniting All]” ( “Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]” ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bollack, Jean, and Heinz Wismann. Héraclite ou la séparation. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972.

Dumont, Jean-Paul, ed. Les écoles présocratiques. Paris: Gallimard / Folio, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. “Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50].” In Vorträge und Aufsätze, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7, 211–34. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000. Translation by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi: “Logos ( Heraclitus, fragment B 50 ).” In Early Greek Thinking, translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, 59–78. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975.

Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated by T. M. Robinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.

Maly, Kenneth, and Parvis Emad, eds. Heidegger on Heraclitus: A New Reading. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1986.

In discussing this fragment, Heidegger proposes retranslating logos and homologein by taking as a pivotal term the “literal” or “authentic” ( eigentlich ) meaning of legein.

Wer möchte leugnen, dass in der Sprache der Griechen von früh an λέγειν reden, sagen, erzählen bedeutet? Allein es bedeutet gleich früh und noch ursprünglicher und deshalb immer schon und darum auch in der vorgenannten Bedeutung das, was unser gleichlautendes “legen” meint: nieder- und vorlegen. Darin waltet das Zusammenbringen, das lateinische legere als lesen im Sinne von einholen und zusammenbringen. Eigentlich bedeutet λέγειν das sich und anderes sammelnde Nieder- und Vor-legen. Medial gebraucht, meint λέγεσθαι: sich niederlegen in die Sammlung der Ruhe; λέχος ist das Ruhelager; λόχος, ist der Hinterhalt, wo etwas hinterlegt und angelegt ist.

( Who would want to deny that in the language of the Greeks from early on λέγειν means to talk, say, or tell? However, just as early and even more originally, and therefore already in the previously cited meaning, it means what our similarly sounding legen means: to lay down and lay before. In legen a “bringing together” prevails, the Latin legere understood as lesen, in the sense of collecting and bringing together. Λέγειν properly means the laying-down and laying-before which gathers itself and others. The middle voice, λέγεσθαι, means to lay oneself down in the gathering of rest; λέχος is the resting place; λόχος is a place of ambush where something is hidden, poised to attack. )

( “Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]” )

There are several comments one might make here.

In the first place, with regard to the Greek. Heidegger makes no distinction ( in contrast with the standard etymology given by Frisk [RT: Griechiches etymologisches Wörterbuch] and by Chantraine [RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque] ), between *λέγω, from the Indo-European root *legh- “to be lying down” ( from which we get λέχος and λόχος, as well as legen, liegen, or the French lit ) and λέγω, from *leg-, “to gather.” This fusion or confusion is an essential part of his argument. Here the onto-logical privileging of the Greek Logos takes root by his raising the following question: “How does λέγειν, whose literal meaning is to lay out ( legen ), come to mean saying and speaking ( sagen und reden )?” The answer concerns the being of language:

To say is λέγειν. This sentence, if well thought, now sloughs off everything facile, trite, and vacuous. It names the inexhaustible mystery that the speaking of language comes to pass from the unconcealment of what is present [der Unverborgenheit des Anwesenden], and is determined according to the lying-before of what is present as the letting-lie-together-before [dem Vorliegen des Anwesenden als das beisammen-vorliegen-lassen].

( “Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]” )

Logos, which is thus linked to the unveiling of alêtheia, is what allows the phenomenon to show itself as itself ( apophainesthai; cf. Sein und Zeit, §7B ).

What would have come to pass had Heraclitus—and all the Greeks after him—thought the essence of language expressly as Λόγος, as the Laying that gathers! Nothing less than this: the Greeks would have thought the essence of language from the essence of Being [das Wesen der Sprache aus dem Wesen des Seins]—indeed, as this itself. For ὁ Λόγος is the name for the Being of beings [das Sein des Seienden]. Yet none of this came to pass.

( “Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]” )

With Logos ( and its capital letter ), the Greeks “inhabited this being of language,” but they never thought it, not even Heraclitus, who made it appear “for the time of a lightning flash.”

In German, the same fusion/confusion is repeated, now pertaining to legen and lesen: “To lay [legen] means to bring to lie [zum Liegen bringen]. Thus, to lay is at the same time to place one thing beside another [zusammenlegen], to lay them together. To lay [legen] is to gather [lesen]” ( ibid. ). The present day meaning of lesen in German, “to read” ( like the Latin legere ), is therefore only a variation of the lesen that gathers together, gathers up, and shelters ( cf. Ährenlese, “gleaning”; Traubenlese, “grape harvest”; Lese, “crop,” “harvest”; Auslese, “selection”; Erlesen, “election”; Vorlese, “preselection”; etc. ). Heidegger’s German articulates the being of saying and the being of holding forth as a laying out, exactly as the Greek does.

■ See Box 6.

6

Vernunft ist Sprache, λόγος: The three senses of Wort

If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes I would yet have to do nothing more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this marrow-bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.

( Letter from Hamann to Herder, 8 August 1784, Heidegger, “Language” )

The famous passage quoted by Heidegger, “Reason is language, λόγος,” in the essay “Language” is dated 8 August. Hamann addresses Herder by putting himself in the position of Job in his mire ( Job 30:6ff. ); he refers to Herder’s later Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, which he has just received, as a Lustgarden ( garden of pleasures ) and only feels directly concerned by book 4, on the divine origin of language and the role of religion in the life of mankind. “Vernunft ist Sprache, λόγος” refers to the entire conception of creation in its two aspects—nature and history—as the word of God, in accordance with his reading of Genesis. This clear “language” that God speaks is made obscure ( finster ) by the fall; this is why intelligence only comes at the end of time, with the angel of the apocalypse, who will reveal its meaning, and not with a human Clavis Scripturae ( kritische Grübeley ). Reason is in the abyss of language, which is itself the veiled speech of God, a divine proffering that is the model of all creation. Herder’s explanation is thus somewhat too short for Hamann; although it reintegrates reason with language, it does not see the divine word as being within language, whereas for Hamann the three are inseparable, and the logic of specialization that is particular to the modern world is unaware of this. To counter this logic of specialization ( which Herder embodies, despite his critical stance toward it ), Hamann suggests that we need to return to the three senses of logos, which are to be found also, he says, in the German Wort: reason ( Vernunft ), speech ( Sprache ), word ( Logos ). According to Hamann, this strategy could be put in terms of the rhetoric of Demosthenes, as actio, actio, and actio ( adapting a passage in Cicero he was fond of, De oratore, 3.56.213; cf. Orator, 27.56 ). Through Luther’s translation of the Logos in John’s Gospel, Hamann sets out to rediscover the unity of reason and language, but especially their shared origin in the word of God. The reason of Modernity is absorbed in the divine word, Wort expressing simultaneously, in Protestant cultures, revelation and language. The defense of natural language is thus for Hamann a way to contain reason ( Vernunft ) and to subject it to the word. So for him, Wort is more a strategic reduction of Logos than an adequate translation, but it allows him to intervene in the three domains covered by this term.

Denis Thouard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heidegger, Martin. “Language.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, edited by A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Barbara Cassin
Clara Auvray-Assayas
Frédérique Ildefonse
Jean Lallot
Sandra Laugier
Sophie Roesch

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

   . On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. Translated by W. S. Hett. Rev. ed. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Augustine, Saint. Eighty-Three Different Questions. Translated by David L. Mosher. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 70. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1982.

   . Tractates on the Gospel of John. Translated by John W. Rettig. 5 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988–95.

Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

   . “Other Minds.” In Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 83–84. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Balibar, Étienne. “Points-bilingues.” In Identité et différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997.

Bluck, R. S., trans. Plato’s Phaedo. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955.

Bray, G. “The Legal Concept of Ratio in Tertullian.” Vigiliae Christianae 31 ( 1977 ): 94–116.

Cassin, Barbara. Aristote et le logos: Contes de phénoménologie ordinaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997.

   . L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.

   . “Who’s Afraid of the Sophists? Against Ethical Correctness.” Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. Hypatia 15 ( Fall 2000 ): 102–120.

Cavell, Stanley. “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses.” In In Quest of the Ordinary, by Stanley Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

   . This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989. Translation by S. Laugier: Une nouvelle Amérique encore inapprochable. Paris: Éditions de L’Éclat, 1991.

Dictionnaire de théologie catholique. Alfred Vacant, Eugène Mangenot, and Emile Amann. Paris: Letouzey and Ané, 1923–50.

Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. London: Heinemann, 1925.

Dixsaut, Monique, trans. Platon: Phédon. Paris: Flammarion, 1991.

Ebbesen, Sten. Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.

Erigena, John Scotus. Periphyseon ( On the Division of Nature ), Book 3. Edited by I. P. Sheldon-Williams with the collaboration of Ludwig Bieler. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1981.

Gilson, Étienne. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. New York: Random House, 1955.

Grillmeier, Alois. Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche. Freiburg, Ger.: Herder, 1979. Translation by John Bowden: Christ in Christian Tradition. 2nd rev. ed. 2 vols. London: Mowbrays, 1975.

Hackforth, R., trans. Plato’s Phaedo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955.

Hawtrey, R.S.W. “ ‘Ratio’ in Lucretius.” Prudentia 33 ( 2001 ): 1–11.

Heidegger, Martin. “Logos ( Heraklit, Fragment 50 ).” In Vorträge und Aufsätze. 3rd ed., Pfulligen, Ger.: Neske, 1967. First published in 1954. Translation by David F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi: “Logos.” In Early Greek Thinking. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

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

   . “Vom Wesen und Begriff der PHYSIS. Aristoteles, Physik B, 1 ( 1939 ).” In Wegmarken, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, 239–302. 3rd ed. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by Thomas Sheehan and William McNeill: “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, I.” In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 183–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Keener, Craig S. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. 2 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003.

Kertz, Karl G.S.J. “Meister Eckhart’s Teaching on the Birth of the Divine Word in the Soul.” Traditio 25 ( 1959 ): 327–63.

Léon-Dufour, Xavier. Lecture de l’Évangile selon Jean. 4 vols. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988–96.

Libera, Alain de, and Emilie Zum Brunn. Maître Eckhart: Métaphysique du verbe et théologie négative. Paris: Beauchesne, 1984.

Locke, John. Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain, où l’on montre quelle est l’etendue de nos connoissances certaines, et la manière dont nous y parvenons. Translated by Pierre Coste. Amsterdam, 1700.

Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Nicolas, Christian. Utraque lingua: Le calque sémantique: Domaine gréco-latin. Louvain, Belg.: Peeters, 1996.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The History of Greek Eloquence.” In Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, edited and translated by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent, 213. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Ojeman, R. “Meanings of ‘Ratio’ in the De rerum natura.” Classical Bulletin 39 ( 1963 ): 53–59.

O’Rourke Boyle, Marjorie. “Sermo, reopening the conversation on translating in Jn 1, 1.” Vigiliae Christianae 31 ( 1977 ): 161–68.

Plato. Œuvres complètes. Edited and translated by Leon Robin. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1940.

   . Plato [in twelve volumes]. Translated by H. N. Fowler et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914–37.

Schindler, Alfred. Wort und Analogie in Augustins Trinitätslehre. Tübingen: Mohr, 1965.

Tertullian. Tertulliani adversus Praxean liber: Tertullian’s Treatise against Praxeas. Translated by Ernest Evans. London: SPCK, 1948.

Weigelt, Charlotta. The Logic of Life: Heidegger’s Retrieval of Aristotle’s Concept of Logos. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2002.

Yon, Albert. Ratio et les mots de la famille de reor: Contribution à l’étude historique du vocabulaire latin. Paris: Champion, 1933.

LOVE / LIKE

CATALAN			amistança
FRENCH			aimer, amour, amitié
GERMAN			lieben, mögen, Minne
GREEK			eran [ἀϱᾶν], agapan [ἀγαπᾶν], philein [φιλεῖν], erôs [ἔϱως], philia [φιλία], agapê [ἀγάπη]
HEBREW			’āhëv [בהֵאָ], ’ahavāh [הבָהֲאַ]
ITALIAN			amare, voler bene a, piacere a
LATIN			amare, diligere, amicitia, caritas
SPANISH			amar, amistad

  MORALS, NEIGHBOR, PATHOS, PLEASURE, SENSE, SOUL, VERGÜENZA, VIRTUE

Our present-day languages deriving from Indo-European ones are connected mainly with two major etymological types: for Romance languages, the Latin verb amare, which may be based on amma ( mother ), and for the Germanic group ( with lieben and “love” ), a Sanskrit root that has sometimes been associasted with the Greek eros [ἔϱως], as well as with the Latin libido. But whatever the etymology may be, the various words all have a generic sense of equivalent extension, unless they are inserted into a system of opposition: the pair to “love” / “to like” in English; mögen/lieben in German. In French, aimer designates a whole spectrum of relationships and affects that ranges from sexuality and eroticism to more or less sublimated relationships between people, values, things, or behaviors ( when one “loves” [aime], one can “make love,” “be in love,” “cherish,” “like,” etc. ). The semantic indetermination that consequently characterizes these terms forces us to resort to complements or to circumlocutions that enable us to determine which kind of affect we are dealing with ( in French, aimer d’amitié vs. aimer d’amour ), and these complicate translation accordingly. This indetermination also leads to the reinvestment or invention of new words to specify a kind of love or object ( in the New Testament, agapê [ἀγάπη], and its translation by caritas, the Germanic Minne, and in Catalan, Raymond Lully’s amistança ). From this point of view, the first of modern languages is Latin, since it combines in amare what are in Greek two completely distinct poles: on the one hand, eran [ἐϱᾶν], aimer d’amour, “to ( be in ) love,” a disymmetric relation of inequality and dissimilarity ( active/passive )—a Platonic word whose extension determines an erotics of philosophy; on the other hand, philein [φιλεῖν], aimer d’amitié, “cherish,” a relation of equality or commensurability and resemblance—an Aristotelian word that characterizes ethical and political bonds.

I. The Bipolar Schema: In Modern Languages, “to Love” Means Everything

The different affective modalities covered by the verb “to love” ( or aimer, lieben, etc. ) are located between the extremes of a bipolarity ranging from sensuality to intellect: depending on the context, the period, or the author, the meaning moves, in each language, now toward one extreme, then toward the other. To determine which of these two poles we are referring to, we are often obliged to resort to several kinds of qualification that take into account especially the nature of the affect involved, its intensity, or its object ( one can love God, one’s neighbor, one’s wife, one’s sexual partner, one’s child, a close friend, something one will never see again, a landscape, chocolate, staying home ). Thus the differentiation will be made by means of epithets, complements, expressions of modality ( e.g., with sensual desire, eroticism, libido, or inversely, with respect, tenderness, friendship, sympathy, charity ). But the dichotomy can also manifest itself as an antithesis between two different semantic fields: in German, lieben ( love ) and mögen ( like ), or Liebe and Minne ( a poetic type of love ); in Italian, amare and voler bene a ( which includes the idea of a strong desire ); whereas in French, aimer means both “love” and “like” and thus sometimes has to be further specified ( aimer d’amour, aimer bien ). However, even this antithesis is not always maintained. Thus, although the disjunction between “love” and “like” works for the differentiation by affect ( I love you, je vous aime / I like her, je l’aime bien ), the same is not true when it is a matter of intensity: to the question “Do you like cabbage?” one may very well reply “I love it” ( “J’adore ça!” French says, using the same verb as for God ) or “I am fond of it.”

A. Dichotomies based on the nature and modalities of the affect

The bipolar character of the vocabulary of love is manifested especially through a series of pairs of opposites, the most common of which are those that distinguish between eroticized, sensual, or carnal love and romantic, tender, spiritual love, two affects whose interaction was analyzed by Freud; “concupiscent love” and deep affection for a friend ( amour d’aimitiè ), a classical distinction, especially since the time of Aristotle, Cicero, and Descartes; love as affectus and love as esteem, an opposition close to the one Malebranche establishes between “instinctual love” ( amour d’instinct ) and “rational love” ( amour de raison ); “pathological love” and “practical love,” which Kant radically opposes to each other. We can add the dichotomy proposed by Pierre Rousselot regarding medieval authors: “physical love,” which is governed by natural tendencies ( phusis [φύσις] ) that lead every being to seek its individual happiness, versus “ecstatic love,” violent, independent of natural appetites, foreign to any personal interest and to any selfish inclination. This distinction is related to the one, also concerning the love of God, on which Fénelon and quietism base themselves when they oppose “mercenary love” to a “pure love” that pushes contempt of self and disinterestedness to the point of showing itself to be indifferent to the “impossible supposition” of damnation itself.

1. Sensual love and romantic love

Liebe, on the one hand, and amour, on the other, conjoin in their generic meaning the amor/libido bipolarity that the Latin substantives perfectly distinguish. But they do not proceed from the same source. When Freud opposes two forms of love that are expressed, one by tender or romantic feelings, and the other by directly sexual tendencies, he has no trouble in discerning, beneath Liebe, the force of the libido, sexual desire, which organizes itself, invests itself, transfers itself, sublimates itself ( see DRIVE ). On the other hand, for Lacan, amour is radically opposed to desire.

■ See Box 1.

1

The Freudian and Lacanian dichotomies

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego ( Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, 1921 ), chap. 8, “Being in Love and Hypnosis” ( “Verliebtheit und Hypnose” ), Freud points out that the affective relationships that we designate by the term “love” ( Liebe ) represent such a vast “scale of possibilities” that the term is full of ambiguities: it can designate “the object-cathexis on the part of the sexual instincts with a view to directly sexual satisfaction . . . , what is called common, sensual love,” as well as feelings of “affection” ( Zärtlichkeit ). At a certain stage of development, the latter are grafted onto the original libidinal current, inhibiting its drives toward sexual aims. In adolescence, the sensual current ( sinnliche Strömung ), which reappears with a certain intensity, enters into competition with “affectionate trends of feeling that persist” in such a way that the subject’s future destiny will be marked by the existence between these two currents of either a genuine schism or a sort of harmony. In the first case, “A man will show a sentimental enthusiasm for women whom he deeply respects but who do not excite him to sexual activities, and he will only be potent with other women whom he does not ‘love’ and thinks little of or even despises” ( cf. “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men” [“Über einen besonderen Typus der Objektwahl beim Manne,” 1910] ). In the second case, a synthesis regarding the same erotic object is produced “between the unsensual, heavenly love and the sensual, earthly love,” so that “[t]he depth to which anyone is in love, as contrasted with his purely sensual desire, may be measured by the size of the share taken by the aim-inhibited instincts of affection.”

In his article of 1912 that was reprinted in Contributions to the Psychology of Love and called “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” ( “Über die Allgemeinste Erniedrigung des Liebeslebens” ), Freud mentions the rift observable in some men between the current of sensuality and that of affection. He states that psychoanalysis should allow such men to arrive at “a completely normal attitude in love” harmoniously combining the two tendencies. In reference to the last of the stages of libidinal development ( after the oral, sadistic-anal, and phallic stages ), some of Freud’s disciples have theorized this as “genital love”—a notion that Jacques Lacan criticized, targeting those who, without regard for “the fundamentally narcissistic nature of all being in love ( Verliebtheit ) were able to so utterly deify the chimera of so-called ‘genital love’ as to attribute to it the power of ‘oblativity,’ a notion that gave rise to so many therapeutic mistakes” ( Écrits ). Perhaps it is because of such criticisms that the French often use the English term “genital love,” as if to remind themselves that this “illusion” seduced chiefly Anglo-Saxon psychology.

Lacan adopted Freud’s distinction but inflected it in the form of a radical opposition between amour and désir, the former being rigorously defined as “ignorance” of the latter and as being nothing more than “what substitutes for the sexual relationship.” However, Freud maintained a link between the two, asserting that love is what enables the sexual appetite to revive after a certain period of non-desire following satisfaction, after what he calls “an interval free of desire.” In Lacan, the word amour is thus made unequivocal by the fact that it signifies nothing other than de-eroticized sentimentality. Thus he posits a difference in nature between love thus defined and what has been excluded from it: desire. For Freud, on the contrary, what is called “spiritual love” is merely erotic love metamorphosed, in the best of cases, by sublimation, a process that redirects the infantile libido toward nonsexual cultural goals.

This radical Lacanian dichotomy is nonetheless tempered by the fact that for psychoanalysis, “love” designates not only the “choice of object” ( Objektwahl ) but also “transference love” ( Übertragungsliebe ), a phenomenon that is fundamental for the functioning of analytical procedures. It was after the failure of his treatment of his first hysterical patients that Freud theorized transference and, more precisely, transferential love as “resistance” to analysis. This love is transformed into an “indispensable requirement,” its manipulation allowing the analyst to make “the patient’s buried and forgotten love-emotions actual and manifest” ( die verborgenen und vergessenen Liebesregungen )” ( “The Dynamics of Transference” [“Zur Dynamik der Übertragung,” 1912]; see also “Postscript,” in Fragment of an Analysis [Dora] ).

We can thus say that Lacan qualifies, on this subject, his opposition between amour and désir. While on the one hand he defines love as nothing more than “ignorance” of desire and the sexual, on the other hand he posits that love itself, as the motive force of transference, is a necessary condition for the analytical process: “At the beginning of the analytical experience, let us recall, was love” ( Le transfert ). Thus, this same seminar of 1960–61 was devoted almost entirely to the question of love. A minute analysis of Plato’s Symposium provided Lacan with an opportunity to theorize the relations between amour and désir differently. From the myth of the birth of the daimon Erôs, as he is mentioned in Socrates’s and Diotima’s speeches ( Symposium, 202a ), Lacan takes the formula “Love is giving what one does not have” ( Le transfert ), declaring: “We can say that the dialectical definition of love, as it is developed by Diotima, rejoins what we have tried to define as the metonymic function in desire” ( ibid. ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freud, Sigmund. “Being in Love and Hypnosis.” Chapter 8 of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 111–16. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.

   . “The Dynamics of Transference.” In vol. 12 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 97–108. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

   . Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989.

   . Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 3–112. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

   . “Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the I.” In Mass Psychology and Other Writings, translated by J. Underwood. London: Penguin, 2004.

   . “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life.” In “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” chap. 4 of Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, edited by P. Rieff. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

   . “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.” In vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 177–90. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.

   . “A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men.” In vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 163–76. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.

   . “The Technique of Psycho-analysis.” In An Outline of Psycho-analysis, translated by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Lacan, Jacques: Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Translation by B. Fink: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

   . Le transfert. Vol. 8 of Le séminaire ( 1960–61 ). Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991. Translation by C. Gallagher: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan 8: Transference. London: Karnac Books, 2002.

2. From love to tendresse and sentimentality

In translating the opposition that Freud establishes between sinnliche Liebe and Zärtlichkeit, French translators render the latter term as tendresse ( tenderness ). Tendresse came into common use only in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, being limited to the sense that it currently has, amorous feeling, whereas amour was also applied to sexual or eroticized love. The vocabulary of tendresse came to replace that of friendship ( amitié ), which had had since the sixteenth century the strong sense of “love” ( amour ), following on the adjective tendre ( tender )—which, like the Latin tener, expressed the idea of youth, freshness, or delicacy, in the sense in which one speaks of “tender years” ( âge tendre ). In the French classical period, tendre was even used as a masculine noun to designate the love relationship, in particular in Mlle. de Scudéry’s famous “Carte du Tendre” ( Map of the Land of Tenderness ).

■ See Box 2.

2

Affectionate, affection, sentimental

Starting from tendresse ( tenderness ) ( or from the related forms tendreur and tendreté ), which was initially understood literally—Vauvenargues still preferred the literal meaning, for example, regarding the “tenderness of meat”—the classical French language came, through the compassion inspired by the delicate or fragile nature of an object, to an attitude corresponding, in the subject, to a penchant henceforth designated by the word tendresse in the affective sense. In other languages this semantic shift took place on the basis either of the same Latin adjective tener ( as in English with “tenderness,” in Italian with tenerezza, and in Spanish with ternura ) or of another word that had as its primary meaning the idea of weakness or delicacy ( like zart in German, from which Zärtlichkeit is derived ). Nevertheless, Kant, precisely in referring to the fragility of the feeling of friendship ( teneritas amicitiae ) in his “Doctrine of Virtue” ( The Metaphysics of Morals, pt. 2, §46 ), paradoxically brings us back to the literal, pre-seventeenth-century sense of the French word tendresse. He states that “[f]riendship . . . is something so tender that if it is based on feelings [and not on principles and rules] it cannot for an instant be guaranteed against interruptions.”

The semantic development of the French word tendresse can in fact be explained in two ways: either the object affected by tenderness in the pre-seventeenth-century sense of “weakness” inspires a sympathetic attention in others that is called upon to transform itself into a dynamics of love that will assume the name of tendresse in the affective sense; or such a passionate fire in the heart flaring up independently of any previous emotion is perceived as a typically feminine feeling, that is, one related to the sensitivity of the “weaker sex.” But in both cases, we are dealing with the register of weakness, of inclination, that is, of pathein [παθεῖν], or what Spinoza calls the animi pathema, and even of defectiveness, for example, when one is said to have weakness for a person, an expression that corresponds to prendre quelqu’un par son faible ( to attack someone at his weak point ) and that leads to the notions of attraction, the traps of seduction, and charms from which someone suffers.

This avatar of the word tendresse is related to the modern meanings that were acquired at the same period by the noun sentiment and the epithet sentimental. The latter made its entrance, with the meaning it now has, through the 1769 translation of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. The translator explained the word this way: “It has not been possible to render the English word ‘sentimental’ in French by any expression that might correspond to it, and it has therefore been left in English. Perhaps in reading it will be found that it deserves to be made part of our language.” The adjective “sentimental” had only very recently appeared in English, in 1749, by derivation from “sentiment” ( which had itself been borrowed from French in the fourteenth century ), with its double meaning of opinion based on an evaluation that is more subjective than logical ( according to the meaning that is found, for example, in David Hume’s work ) and a disposition belonging to the register of the heart and affectivity ( and sometimes given a pejorative connotation, particularly emphasized in what is called ressentiment ). German has adopted the epithet sentimental and the noun Sentimentalität, which has the meaning of “sentimentality” when it is preceded by the adjective affektiert.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sterne, Laurence. Le voyage sentimental. Translated by J. F. Frenais. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1769.

3. Bipolarities from the Middle Ages to Kant

Christian authors of the Middle Ages base themselves partly on Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics, 8.2 ) and Cicero ( De amicitia, §6 ) to oppose “concupiscent love” ( amor conscupiscentiae ) to “the love of friendship or good will” ( amor amicitiae seu benevolentiae ). The former, which ranges from the desire for the pleasures of the senses to the desire for divine benefits ( which is related to what Kant was later to call amor complacentiae ), consists in a selfish attraction to objects that provide us with delight or enjoyment and that we want to possess. The latter, whose definition is reminiscent of the Greek eunoia [εὔνοια], draws us toward a being whom we love for himself, whom we wish well, or whom we are happy to see possess this good. In his Passions of the Soul ( §81 ), Descartes says that this “distinction” is traditional, but he thinks that “it concerns solely the effects of love” and that this does not imply a genuine duality in the essential definition of the latter, which is always, whatever its effects or objects might be, a mixture of concupiscence and good will. In the 1950s, in order to translate this distinction into contemporary language, some psychologists popularized the opposition between amour captatif and amour oblatif ( “the desire to have and possess the object, to assimilate it and identify it with oneself,” as opposed to the “desire to give oneself and lose oneself in the love object, to identify with it”; Maggini, Lundgren, and Leuci, “Jealous Love” ). The latter is characterized by an altruistic propensity to sacrifice oneself in which Jacques Lacan discerned a form of egocentric aggressivity.

The resort to the bipolar schema was also established in the context of a question that remained acute throughout the history of conceptions of love, that is, the question of whether love is essentially a matter of sentiment and affectivity to the point of culminating in an absence of any moderation and the most irrational passion, or whether it must necessarily be in accord with reason and knowledge. Some medieval theologians had already adopted the traditional idea, which began with Origen and Saint Augustine and continued to Leibniz and Malebranche and which sees true love as having to be based on an exact appraisal ( aestimatio ) or discernment ( discretio ) of the value of its object. This intellectualist program, which finds its application particularly in the case of “ordinate love” ( “Ille autem iuste et sancte vivit qui rerum integer aestimator est; ipse est autem qui ordinatam dilectionem habet” [Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control]; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, bk. 1, chap. 28 ). This thesis is in contrast to the doctrinal orientation of Bernard of Clairvaux, the bard of love as affectus and as the impulse of the heart escaping not only all measure but also all rational control. However, his friend and disciple William of Saint-Thierry elaborated a theory of “love-intellection,” that is, a love regulated by knowledge. We find this idea, which was fairly widespread in the seventeenth century, in Descartes and especially in the works of Corneille. Descartes emphasizes, in fact, the importance of an intellectual appraisal of the value of the different objects of love. Thus he observes that love differs from other affections “by the esteem one has for what one loves, in comparison with oneself” ( Passions of the Soul, §83 ) and that it is governed by “judgments that also lead the soul [âme] to join itself willingly with things that it considers good and to separate itself from those that it considers bad” ( ibid., §79 ).

With Spinoza, we find once again, in a more original form, the idea of the rationality of the order of love, notably with regard to amor Dei intellectualis, which is for him the crowning achievement of reason. This love goes beyond reason itself and beyond law. It represents the plenitude of knowledge that prevents the soul from getting lost in the fog of affectivity or passion, a torment that Romanticism later magnified under the name of Leidenschaft ( an ambiguous composite derived from leiden, “to suffer”—the substantive Leiden designating the Passion of Christ ), whereas affectivity itself, developing in it as legitimately as that other natural force constituted by the imagination, permits it to overcome pure intellectualism.

■ See Box 3.

3

“Pathological love” and “practical love” in Kant

The pair “pathological love” / “practical love” introduced by Kant at the beginning of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ( RT: Ak., 6:399 ), illustrates once again the bipolarity of the notion of love and the necessity of resorting to epithets. Kant’s problem is the following: love seems to depend on sensibility alone, and as such it should be excluded from an ethics that posits that in principle an act has no moral value unless it is done out of duty. What then should we do with the duty of love expressed in the Old Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” ( Lv 19: 18; cf. Mt 22:39 )? Kant was forced to recognize in “The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue” ( pt. 2 of the Groundwork ) that “a duty to love makes no sense” ( RT: Ak., 6:401–2 ). The solution to this problem involves a distinction opposing “practical” love, which can be the object of a duty insofar as it resides in the will, to a “pathological love” depending on sensibility. “The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue” makes use of a parallel distinction between “charity” ( amor benevolentiae ) and “kindness” ( amor complacentiae ). In each case the distinction seeks to bring the principles of Kant’s moral doctrine into conformity with the Scriptures: this attempt was given particular attention by the neo-Kantians, who in the early twentieth century reexamined the question of Kant’s Christianity ( cf. Bauch, “Luther und Kant” ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bauch, Bruno. “Luther und Kant.” Kant-Studien 4 ( 1900 ): 416–19, 455–56.

B. Dichotomies based on the object: The invention or reinvestment of other words

To the various binary oppositions we have just mentioned as enabling us to clarify the meaning, obviously so ambiguous, of the word “love” ( and amour, Liebe, or amore ), one can add others that take into account not the nature or modalities of the affect, but rather the object loved or its specific qualities. For example, the following: love of God / love of one’s neighbor or oneself; filial love / love of country; earthly love / heavenly love ( cf. Lucien’s work on Marguerite de Navarre published under this title ); self-love ( egocentric love; Aristotle calls it philautie, Hugo of St. Victor calls it amor privatus ) / altruistic love ( according to Gregory the Great ); homosexual love / heterosexual love. But the invention of other words is made necessary precisely when the object cannot be confounded with any other, as for example, in the case of God or a person loved with an incommensurable love.

1. Conjugal fides and courtly love

In his famous book Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont opts to harden the opposition that manifested itself in the twelfth century between two forms of love: on the one hand, the love between Christian spouses, founded on a mutual fides, and on the other hand, “courtly love” ( or fin’amor, “refined love,” or “pure love” in Occitan ), which he assimilates to the adulterous, murderous passion felt by the troubadour or the hero ( notably Tristan ) with regard to the “lady of his thoughts.” However, the expression “courtly love” appeared in French only very lately, around 1880, in the work of Gaston Paris, whereas, to designate such a form of love, German had long had the untranslatable noun die Minne.

■ See Box 4.

4

The Germanic Minne

Although the erotic ideal advocated by the Provençal troubadours and the trouvères in northern France has only recently been given the name of “courtly love” ( which amounts to defining such an original experience by the place where it developed: the seigneurial or royal courts—corteis—of the period ), in the Middle Ages the German language already had a specific term, die Minne, to designate this form of love and more particularly what characterizes it in its essence. Moreover, down to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, we find it personified, in the same way as fin’amor in courtly literature, as the goddess of love ( Liebesgôttin ), as Lady Minne ( Frau Minne ).

According to the usual etymology ( Lat. memini, “remember,” and mens, “mind” ), the noun Minne ( like the verb minnen and the adjectives minnig and minniglich ) emphasizes the presence of the beloved in the consciousness of the lover and the fact that this presence continues over time in the form of phantasm and memory. In short, Minne is love insofar as it occupies the lover’s mind and leads him to resort to poetry, for instance, to testify to his psychic experience. The latter corresponds to the experience medieval theologians described, in order to stigmatize it, as delectatio morosa, that is, the habit of dwelling with pleasure on thoughts of the absent beloved. It is illustrated still more clearly by the passion that the courtly poet cultivates for the “lady of his thoughts,” especially in the extreme situation of amour de loin. Thus, around this courtly adventure of fin’amor, the Germanic lexicon acquired the following components: der Minnesang ( the poetry of the troubadours ), das Minnelied ( love song ), der Minnedichter and der Minnesänger ( troubadour ), der Minnedienst ( service to the lady ), der Minnetrank ( love philter ). But the term Minne and the characteristics of Provençal “pure love” were also used by the thirteenth-century Flemish members of a lay sisterhood ( the Béguines ) in developing a theory of the love of God. For Hadewijch of Antwerp ( d. ca. 1260 ), the love-experience designated by the expression Minnemystik included two phases. The first takes the form of an impetuous, passionate desire ( aestus amoris; in Dutch, orewoet ); this is the element of joy ( ghebruken ) in total union. The second is marked by an experience of ravishment and privation ( ghebreken ), of suffering and distress. However, this is more of an alternation; indeed, a coexistence of apparent contradictions corresponding to the antithetical feelings of joy and desolation in which courtly poetry saw the expression of the essential transcendence of love.

2. The New Testament between eros and agapê

Sometimes the disparity with which human love is confronted when it has as its object not a peer or an inferior but God himself is considered impossible to render using oppositional terms taken from the common vocabulary. When the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren found himself in this situation, he compensated for this difficulty by appealing to the two Greek terms erôs [ἔϱως] and agapê [ἀγάπη]. But he considered them as far more than simple polarities of love; between them he saw an opposition that broadened “to the point of becoming a philosophical antithesis” that presented itself as an irreconcilable conflict between “two fundamental motives” ( Agape and Eros ). Nygren indicates what is at stake through an epigraph borrowed from the Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: “Although the German language is so poor that it has to use the single term ‘love’ [Liebe] in both cases, the two ideas [erôs and agapê] nonetheless have nothing in common.” Believing that he saw in the Greek conception of erôs both a synthesis of nonpossession and possession, on the one hand, and on the other hand a demonic intermediary that allowed the subject to move from the crude forms of desire to truth and immortality, Nygren thought Christianity had radically overthrown this monist conception of love by promoting, in opposition to the Platonic erôs, the agapê revealed by the New Testament writings of Paul and John.

■ See Box 5.

5

The “true” Christian notion of love according to Nygren

In his work Agape and Eros, Nygren maintains that even when it takes the form of “celestial love,” the primary characteristic of Orphic or Platonic erôs is “aspiration, lust, desire” and remains ineluctably faithful to its basic nature as man’s appetite for an object to be possessed, whereas the agapê celebrated in the New Testament is supposed to be essentially a gift of oneself, a totally disinterested descent, and for that reason a sacrifice of which God alone is capable. Moreover, Nygren seeks to identify the “transformations” to which, since the end of the Middle Ages, theology is supposed to have subjected the “true” Christian notion of love, which is agapê. It is supposed to have adulterated the latter by developing the theory of caritas ordinata, or “the order of love,” that is, the order of a love that has the property of necessarily conforming to the value of the object itself. In Nygren’s view, such a theory represents a “fatal synthesis” from which Luther was to seek to free theology and that amounts to including in agapê one of the essential elements of erôs, namely an interested desire motivated by the qualities that can be discerned in the love object. The Scholastic adage according to which a thing must be loved in proportion to its value ( magis diligendum quia magis bonum ) would thus take us back to the kind of love that is traditionally described as mercenary and that is in reality radically foreign to the New Testament conception of love.

Nygren’s work, which had a wide impact, has a weak philological basis. Interpreters pointed out, in particular, that unlike the Hebrew language, which had only the verb ’āhëv [בהֵאָ] and the noun ’ahav āh [הבָהֲאַ] to designate all forms of love ( sacred or profane, noble or impure, selfish or disinterested, etc. ), the Greek of the Septuagint had several words to render the diversity of these forms, such as agapê, erôs, and philia. Even when the Hebrew text refers to sensual love, the Septuagint prefers erôs—a word that is, moreover, extremely rare in the Septuagint as a whole—the term agapê ( which the Latin Vulgate renders as caritas ). It is the word agapê that we find in the most erotic passages of the epithalamium of the Song of Songs. Thus lines 7–10 in chapter 7, which express a passionate desire for the physical possession of the beloved, begin with these words: “How fair and pleasant you are, O love [agapê], delectable maiden!”

But if the term agapê has been thus used by the Greek Jews of Alexandria to designate forms of love other than spiritual love, and inversely, Christian authors have traditionally interpreted this biblical poem attributed to Solomon as an allegory of mystical love, that is no doubt because beneath the instability of the vocabulary, we can discern a certain semantic malleability and, more precisely, a certain legitimacy in passing from one kind of affect to another. Thus Nygren’s “systematic” dichotomy would be replaced, as Paul Ricoeur puts it ( in Liebe und Gerechtigkeit ), by a “process of metaphorization” by virtue of which, for example, erotic love, erôs, has the power to signify and express agapê, thus rendering the real analogy that connects distinct affects.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Translated by Philip S. Watson. London: SPCK, 1953.

Ricoeur, Paul. Liebe und Gerechtigkeit = Amour et justice. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990.

The special problem posed for theologians and mystics by the human soul’s love for God also led them to invent specific words in their own vernacular languages, usually by derivation from a common word in these vernaculars or from a Latin word. That is what happened, precisely with regard to “love,” in the work of the creator of philosophical and literary Catalan, Ramon Llull ( ca. 1235–1315 ).

■ See Box 6.

6

Amistat and amistança

Catalan words ending in -ança or -ància designate the action of the verb and are derived from it. Thus contemplança means the action of contemplating ( contemplar ). In the case of amistança, the verb amistansar is not attested before 1373. It has two meanings: “reconcile,” “make friends”; and “live in concubinage with.” Thus it is because a third term is required alongside amor and amistat, and not by derivation, that Ramon Llull created the word amistança.

This term is never translated as “action of reconciling.” Whereas in common usage amistat acquires the sense of amorous friendship outside marriage ( “women’s amistat is deceiving,” Llull, Blanquerna, chap. 27 ), amistança is reserved for loyal, pure, disinterested friendship between two persons ( Ausiàs March, poem 92: “But the other love, amistança pura, / After death its great strength endures . . .” ). Amistança ( whose character is emphasized by the use of pura ) is felt by the poet for a dead woman. For the poet, who never mentions God’s love or love for God, amistança pura constitutes the major elevated form of love. Amistança subsequently underwent the same development in meaning as did amistat: in the seventeenth century, the word could mean “concubinage.”

For Llull, amor is reserved for God, along with the verb enamorarse, which frequently reinforces the verb amar. In his Llibre d’amic et amat ( The Book of the Lover and the Beloved ), he describes the amor of the amic; it is never a question of carnal amistat: “Blanquerna [the fictional author of the Llibre] wanted to make them [his hermit-readers] to love [enamorar] God.” Similarly: “The amic says to the amat: You who fill the sun with spendor, fill my heart with love.” In this context, amistat would have an unacceptable sexual connotation and amistança would be too human. The doublet amic/amat takes into account the intentionality of amor and the duality Ramon Llull considered constitutive of the love between man and God.

Dominique de Courcelles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Llull, Ramon. Blanquerna. Translated from the Catalan with an introduction by E. A. Peers. London: Dedalus, 1988. First published in 1926.

   .The Book of the Lover and the Beloved. Edited by Kenneth Leech. Translated by E. A. Peers. London: Sheldon Press, 1978.

3. Lexical investments and reinvestments in Christian Latin

In fact, to translate the Hebrew ’āhëv, which is applied to the love of God, Christian authors initially adopted relatively new terms, either Greek ones like agapê ( whereas agapan [ἀγαπᾶν] is older ) rather than erôs or philia, or Latin ones such as caritas rather than amor. In Latin, they even invented dilectio, built on the older verb diligere.

a. Caritas in the church fathers

The notion of caritas was established by the first Christian authors writing in Latin when they had to translate the Bible into that language. At that time they were dependent on Greek—that of the books of the New Testament and the translation of the Bible made by Alexandrian Jews ( the Septuagint ). As we have seen, the translators of the Septuagint, who had had three verbs to render the Hebrew verb ’āhëv: eran [ἀϱᾶν] ( erôs ), philein [φιλεῖν] ( philia ), and agapan ( agapê ), showed a marked preference for the last, probably because, having classically a much less determinate meaning, it lent itself to a semantic innovation corresponding to the stronger and deeper meaning of the Hebrew’āhëv. As G. Kittel and Friedrich’s RT: Theologisches Wörterbuch notes in the article “agapê,” “the old word ’āhëv imbued the pale Greek word with its rich and yet precise meaning. . . . The whole group of words in the family of agapan received a new meaning through the translation of the Old Testament.”

In their turn, Christian authors writing in Latin had to wonder how to render the word agapê as used in the Septuagint and in the New Testament. At that time, Latin had two verbs meaning “to love”: amare ( with the broad sense of amorous passion as well as that of disinterested affection ) and diligere, and also two nouns, amor and caritas. Caritas, which we frequently find in Cicero and which later became an important term in the Christian Scriptures and in Christian theology, is derived from carus, which had the twofold meaning of what one “cherishes” and what is “of great price”—whence the proximity of the terms charité and cherté in French. Caritas adds to the meaning of amor that of esteem and respect, as we see, for example, in Seneca and especially in Cicero. For the latter, amor designates the affection two spouses or two brothers have for each other or that of parents for their children, but the use of caritas was considered preferable when speaking of the love one has for the gods, for the fatherland, for one’s parents, for superior men, or for humanity, notably in the expression caritas generis humani ( De finibus, 5.23, 65 ).

But the first Latin Christian authors adopted none of the words of this classical vocabulary to render the word agapê in the Septuagint and the New Testament. Thus in the first half of the third century, Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage limited themselves to transcribing the word as such, as was also done with other Hellenisms, like baptizein [βαπτίζειν] and charisma [χάϱισμα], that were permanently established. Nonetheless, in their commentaries on the Scriptures and in their theological writings, they tended to render the verb agapan by diligere and the substantive agapê by either dilectio ( especially Tertullian ), a word that had just appeared in the language of the Church, or by caritas ( especially Cyprian ). It was only later on, and mainly with Saint Jerome at the end of the fourth century, that the latter two terms entered into the translation of the Bible itself, but with a preference for caritas, which occurs 114 times as opposed to 24 times for dilectio. Thus, as Hélène Pétré points out, “the term which in everyday language served to designate the affections, and whose use Cicero had broadened in the expression caritas generis humani, expresses for Christians the highest virtue that contains both the love of God and love for humans.” It is notably by caritas that the Vulgate renders agapê in the famous Pauline hymn in 1 Corinthians ( 13:1–8 ): “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not caritas [King James: “. . . have not love”], I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. . . . If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not caritas I gain nothing. . . . Caritas never ends.” Nonetheless, Augustine, for instance, sometimes declares that the three terms amor, dilectio, and caritas are more or less equivalent.

Among the church fathers, caritas designates the love man has for God and for his neighbor propter Deum, in conformity with the evangelical principle, as well as the love that is in God himself ( Caritas summa or Caritas in Deo ) and that is expressed particularly in the mutual relations among the three persons of God. In the Middle Ages, Peter Lombard ( ca. 1100–60 ) maintained in his Sentences that caritas is a love so sublime that it can be conceived only as identical with the presence of God himself ( and more precisely of the Holy Spirit ) in the soul. At the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, most theologians rejected this theory ( which was officially condemned by the Council of Vienna in 1311–12 ) and made caritas a habitus in the Aristotelian sense of the term, that is, a peculiarly human capacity for action and merit, like faith and hope, over which it has precedence as the “mother of all virtues.” These theologians thus came to distinguish this supernatural caritas from dilectio naturalis, or the love of God and one’s neighbor, of which the first spiritual creatures ( Adam, Eve, and the angels ) were capable before the Fall—that is, without grace, a state that according to some writers corresponded to the state of pure nature.

In twelfth- and thirteenth-century theological summas, the treatises dealing with the virtue of caritas gave particular attention to the notion of caritas ordinata, or amor discretus, that is, supernatural love’s property of conforming to the value of its object. This property derives from the diversity of the measure implied in the double commandment that demands that man love God “with all his heart” and his neighbor “as himself.” Thus the quantum of love that serves as a basis for these two movements of incommensurable love is the one that one must have for oneself, amor sui, which Aristotle calls philautia ( Nicomachean Ethics, 9.8 ) and Hobbes calls “self-love” ( Leviathan, chap. 15 ). This Scholastic notion seems to be the origin of a proverb that is usually used ironically and is translated in French as “Charité bien ordonnée commence par soi-même.” Other languages translate it more prosaically, omitting the dimension of ordo amoris. Thus in German, people say, “Jeder ist sich selbst der Nächste,” and in English, “Charity begins at home.”

b. From caritas to “charity”

In addition to the specifically theological meaning of the love of God and neighbor, in the third century caritas acquired the meaning of “gift” or “alms.” In the tenth century it was gallicized in the form of caritet and then charité, which designated the theological virtue, particularly in its dimension of mercy and benevolence with regard to the poor and deprived. Thus this word was later adopted to designate congregations or associations ( Brothers or Sisters of Charity, Ladies of Charity ) that were especially attached to this form of religious devotion. Then the term was extended to the various manifestations of aid and assistance in social life ( vente de charité, bureau de charité ). The epithets charitable ( sometimes used ironically ) and caritatif derive from the word charité. Caritatif, which was relatively rare, came to be widely used in the twentieth century to refer to Catholic charitable movements, under the influence of the English “caritative,” which was originally part of the vocabulary of political economy. Thus while retaining, especially for moral theology, its meaning of supernatural virtue turned toward God and neighbor, “charity” assumed more and more the restricted meaning of mercy, humanity, and philanthropy, whereas in modern times, debates about the theological virtue itself, notably those in which Fénelon and quietism were involved, are recentered more specifically on the believer’s love of God, and more precisely on the question “in what sense it must be disinterested,” as Malebranche put it in the subtitle to his treatise De l’amour de Dieu ( 1697 ).

The semantic evolution of the French word charité ( like that of the Italian carità, the Spanish caridad, and the Portuguese caridade ), in the sense of mercy as a feeling and benevolence as an act, is unknown in German. In German, the New Testament agapê ( the supernatural love of God and neighbor ) is rendered by Liebe ( notably in 1 Cor 13:1–8, where the clause “If I . . . have not agapê” is translated by Luther as “wenn ich hätte der Liebe nicht” ) and charity toward one’s neighbor, in a literal way, by die Nächstenliebe, but when it is a matter of the feeling of mercy and generosity, by die Mildtätigkeit, and for charitable action, by die Hilfsbereitschaft or die Barmherzigkeit. Finding it easier than other languages to do without periphrases, German translates “mutual love” by Gegenliebe. Max Scheler even proposed the neologisms miteinanderlieben for “to love in mutual contiguity” and Liebensgemeinschaft for “community of love”—a reality that was, according to him, introduced into history by Christianity.

II. The Latin and Greek Vocabulary of Love

A. Latin: Amare, amor, amicitia

In Latin, as in modern languages, the uses of amare cover the whole spectrum of sexual, amorous, familial, and friendly relationships, so that the expression of a specific bond requires the adjunction of other terms. In Cicero’s language, the implementation of distinctions through juxtapositions and contrapositions of other terms involves precise stakes, since it is a matter of defining, on the one hand, amor in relation to the tradition of the Platonic theory of love and, on the other hand, amicitia as a notion constructed on the basis of Roman practices. But the distinction between the two substantives is a constructed effect that is all the more obvious because they derive from amare ( De amicitia, 27.100 ) and because it is amor that gives amicitia its name. In his Tusculan Disputations ( 4:68–76 ), quoting numerous examples of amor in the poets, Cicero tries to show that amor is usually “borne by desire” ( libidinosus ) and that this desire leads to an illicit sexuality ( stuprum ) or even to madness ( insania/furor ); consequently, one cannot “accord authority to love [amori auctoritatem tribuere]” as Plato does or accept the Stoics’ definition, in which love is “the drive that moves us to make friendships on the basis of a vision of beauty” ( conatum amicitiae faciendae ex pulchritudinis specie ). Connoting amor in this way, Cicero refuses to accept the positive values of the Platonic theory of love, and he elaborates a notion of amicitia in which amor does not play a major role. In the dialogue De amicitia, he takes the various levels on which the bond of friendship was expressed in Rome as a basis for a definition of amicitia that includes, with numerous mediations, the Greek traditions, whose lexicon is in this case untranslatable. Friendship is a special relationship, the one that unites two great statesmen, Scipio and Laelius, which makes it possible to articulate the connections between political friendship and private friendship: the choice of the interlocutors allows Cicero to emphasize something to which the language itself testifies, namely the identity of the vocabulary of political relations and private relations.

Amicitia is an active relationship that is expressed above all in benevolentia, the will to act for the good of the friend, and it is precisely benevolentia that enables us to distinguish the bond of family relationship ( propinquitas ) from friendship: “Whereas you may eliminate [goodwill] from [family] relationship, you cannot do so from friendship. Without it, family relationship still exists in name, friendship does not” ( translation modified ). This active goodwill gives the service rendered ( prodesse ) and pleasure ( delectare ) equal weight, and they mutually correct each other: the attraction to the other may then be expressed by amor and motus animi; it grows and is confirmed only through the exchange of services ( beneficium ) and lasting attachment ( studium consuetudo ). The association of pleasure with services rendered seeks to refute both the Epicurean thesis that friendship arises from need and weakness and the conflations of friendship with flattery ( blanditia ) characteristic of relationships with a tyrant, in which the absence of fides and caritas are manifest. It is, on the contrary, a question of guaranteeing the equality of exchange that alone can provide pleasure: “There is nothing more pleasant than performing duties for one another with devotion” ( nihil vicissitudine studiorum officiorumque jucundius ). It is on this basis that the sweetness of private relationships can flourish ( suavitas-comitas-facilitas ).

B. Greek: The two poles of eran and philein

Greek distinguishes very clearly between two ways of loving, eran and philein. Thus it has a verb, and a whole terminological complex, for each of these poles, which most modern languages now differentiate only by means of adjuncts. Eran is presented as a passion that comes from outside, like Cupid’s arrows, and is connected with desire ( epithumia [ἐπιθυμία] ), pleasure ( hêdonê [ἡδονή] ), and the enjoyment ( charis [χάϱις] ) of an object; it designates an essentially dissymmetrical relation between an erastes who feels love and makes it ( he is the Corneillian amant or, rather, amoureux, because it is never taken for granted that his love is shared ) and an eromenos who is its object ( the “beloved” ). Philein ( “to love as a friend,” “to cherish,” and “to like to . . .” ) is on the contrary an action or activity freely consented to and deployed from within an ( ethical ) character or a ( political, social ) position; it determines a relationship that is not always symmetrical but is in any case mutual and reciprocal, whether it is a matter of similarity, equality, or commensurability.

That is how we can understand, in the first cosmogonies, difference as an originary power between erôs and philia or philotês [φιλότης], both of which are usually translated by “love.” Hesiod’s erôs “softens the sinews” ( lusimelês [λυσιμελής]; Theogony, 121 ) and intervenes to pass from parthenogenesis to the embrace of Earth and Sky ( 137ff. ); in Parmenides’s Poem ( 28B12 DK ), erôs causes the elementary polarities to be deployed and dispersed. On the contrary, Empedocles’s philotês unites similars with similars, which Discord ( neikos [νεῖϰος] ) separates again ( e.g., 28B22 DK ).

But the peculiarly philosophical use of these terms is determined by Plato, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other. Plato seeks to capture philein under eran and proposes erotics as the very model of philosophy; Aristotle makes eran a special and accidental case of philein and describes in terms of philia the whole of the relations constitutive of the human world. We are justified in supposing that modern languages are rather Platonic, since they combine everything under the pole of the erotic, hierarchizing objects and affects.

■ See Box 7.

7

An etymological romance: Amare, the maternal breast; eran, the male body; philein, the sociability of the bond

Etymological and semantic disputes rage about whether fantasies and repression are to be compared or distinguished.

Ernout and Meillet ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine ) acknowledge the plausibility of the derivation of amare from amma, “mother,” which is closely related to amita, “aunt,” the father’s sister, and of course to mamma, “nurse,” “mother,” “breast.” On the other hand, eran, which also translates amare, tends to be on the side of the male. Chantraine ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ) stands by an unknown etymology, rejecting, along with Benveniste ( RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes ), the series of comparisons proposed by Onians ( RT: Origins of European Thought, p. 177, n. 2; p. 202, n. 5; pp. 472–80 ) and instead connecting “damp desire” ( pothos hugros [πόθος ὑγϱός] ) and erôs with hersê [ἕϱση], “the dew” ( like houreô, “urinate,” from the Sanskrit word for “rain,” varsa- ) and dew with the male, arsên [ἄϱσην], which we find in the “sap” of “spring” ( both designated by the Greek ear [ἕαϱ], or in “spring,” as in the Latin words for “man” ( ver and vir ).

Whatever the word’s etymology may be, Onians suggests that the primary meaning of eraô, is “I pour out ( liquid ),” and in the middle voice, “I pour out myself.” Dictionaries try to avoid this lexical oddity by distinguishing two eraôs, one meaning “to love” and the other, used only in compounds, meaning “to pour” ( for exeraô [ἐξεϱάω], “pour out,” “vomit”; Chantraine proposes a derivation from era [ἔαϱ], which is preserved in eraze [ἔϱαζε], “on earth” ). In general, dictionaries that take this path do not succeed in maintaining a clear separation ( thus according to RT: LSJ, suneraô [συνεϱάω] is a single verb with two meanings, “pour together” and “love jointly,” and not two distinct verbs as in Bailly’s RT: Dictionnaire grec-français ). For Onians, the meaning of eran thus merges with that of leibô [λείϐω], “pour drop by drop” ( in the middle voice, leibesthai [λείϐεσθαι], “to spread out,” “to liquefy” ), which he compares with liptô [λίπτω], liptesthai [λίπτεσθαι], “desire” ( with its “lipidic” family of fat, gluey, shining ) to the point of identifying ho lips [ὁ λίψ], “rainy wind”; hê lips [ἡ λίψ], “the running, the drop or libation”; and lips [λίψ], “desire.” He then proposes a truly remarkable cluster combining liquid poured out ( Gr. leibein, Lat. libare, “make a libation” ), desire ( Lat. lubet or libet, libido ), love ( Ger. lieben ), and procreation and freedom ( Liber, the Italic god of fertility; liberi, “children”; libertas, “liberty” ), which he finds in the same form in the Saxon cluster froda, “foam”; Freyr and Freyja, the gods of love and fertility; and “free” and frei.

This is probably an etymological fiction and is censured at every step by Chantraine and Benveniste, who distinguish, for example, between leibô and libare, liptô and libet/lubet, “desire”; but their censure is also acrobatic, because to account for the “disturbing polysemy” of Latin libare, Benveniste has to retain from the ancient meaning of “pour a few drops” that of “take a very small part” ( RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2:209 ).

For philein, we must begin from the adjective philos [φίλος], which enters into the construction of several hundred words in the Greek lexicon; and since, Benveniste writes ( ibid., 1:353 ), the debate about its origin is ongoing, “it is more important to begin to see what it means.” Benveniste starts over from the fact, “peculiar to a single language, Greek,” that the adjective philos, which means “friend,” also has, apparently as early as Homer, the value of a possessive: “mine, thine, his, etc.” ( philos huios [φίλος υἱός] means “his son,” philon êtor [φίλον ἦτοϱ], “my heart” [Iliad, 18.307]; phila heimata [φίλα εἷματα], “your clothes” [Iliad, 2.261] ). Nevertheless, the possessive does not constitute the matrix of the word’s meaning. Benveniste finds the latter in the connection between philos and xenos [ξένος], in the “relationship of hospitality” through which a member of a community makes a foreigner his “guest”: this is a reciprocal obligation that may be given material form in the sumbolon [σύμϐολον] ( a sign or token of recognition, for example, a broken ring, of which the partners have kept corresponding halves ), which establishes a pact ( philotês ) that can be seen in the word philêma [φίλημα], “kiss.” To translate philein, Benveniste resorts to a neologism: hospiter ( ibid., p. 341; for example, Illiad, 6.15: “C’était un homme riche, mais il était philos aux hommes; car il hospitait [phileesken ( φιλέεσϰεν )] tout le monde, sa maison étant au bord de la route” ). Rooted in the society’s oldest institutions, philos thus designates a type of human relationships: “All those who are bound to each other by reciprocal duties of aidôs [αἰδώς] ( “respect,” see VERGÜENZA ) are called philoi” ( Benveniste, ibid., p. 341 ), since combatants who make a pact, including relatives, allies, servants, friends, and particularly those who live under the same roof ( philoi )—that is, the wife, designated as philê when she is made to enter into her own home. In that very way the term acquires its affective value.

1. Eran or dissymmetry: Plato’s philosophy as a generalized erotics

Plato reveals the dissymmetry inherent in the erotic relationship connecting pederastry with Socratic dialectic and makes erôs a condition of philosophy. In Lysis, which is considered one of the dialogues of Plato’s youth, Socrates’s whole operation consists in treating erôs as if it meant philia or, to put it another way, in eroticizing philia ( the subtitle of the dialogue is peri philias ), so as to convince little Lysis that he should submit to his lover without shame ( 222b ). That is why one of the central questions concerns the difference between active and passive, “the person who loves” and “the person who is loved,” in a relationship of philia conceived on the model of that of erôs: “As soon as one man loves [philei ( φιλεῖ )] another, which of the two becomes the friend [philos ( φίλος )]—the lover of the one loved [ho philôn tou philomenou ( ὁ φιλῶν τοῦ φιλουμένου )], or the loved of the lover [ho philoumenos tou philountos ( ὁ φιλούμενος τοῦ φιλοῦντος )]?” ( 212b ). The strategy consists in making “desire” ( epithumia ), erôs, and philia equivalent ( 221b–e ) and in deducing the necessity of loving ( eran ) one’s lover under cover of the reciprocity inherent in philein, which is expressed by the creation of the verb antiphilein [ἀντιφιλεῖν], “love in return”: “Though [lovers] [hoi erastai ( οἱ ἐϱασταί )] love [philountes ( φιλοῦντες )] their darlings as dearly as possible, they often imagine that they are not loved in return [antiphileistai ( ἀντιφιλεῖσθαι )], often that they are even hated” ( 212b–c ). The fact that from the point of view of the eromenos, philia is thus simply a more suitable or socialized lure for erôs is clear in Socrates’s recantation in the Phaedrus, where the seduced beloved sees himself in his lover as in a mirror: “he possesses that counterlove which is the image of love [eidôlon erôtos anterôta ( εἴδωλον ἔϱωτος ἀντέϱωτα )], though he supposes it to be friendship rather than love, and calls it by that name [erôs]” ( 255d–e; cf. Symposium 182c, where the erôs of the erastes has as its complement the philia of the eromenos ).

This play between eran and philein is particularly difficult to render in French: the French translation of both philein and eran by aimer erases any trace of the Platonic operation, as if French had already registered it. But in the Socratic dialogues, if erôs can take on the traits of philia, that is because philia is never more than one of the possible kinds of the comprehensive class of erôs. In the Symposium, Diotima explains to Socrates that through synecdoche, a name that is in reality the name of the whole has been limited to a small part ( the erotic erôs, that of the erastes, the lovers ): “You see, what we’ve been doing is to give the name of Love [erôta ( ἔϱωτα )] to what is only one single aspect of it [tou erôtos ti eidos ( τοῦ ἔϱωτός τι εἶδος )]; we make just the same mistake, you know with a lot of other names” ( 205b ); so that one does not talk about eran in relation to those who love money, gymnastics, or wisdom, but rather about philein: whence “philosophy” ( 205d ). It is understandable that this is naturally followed by the demonstration of a perfect continuity between the desire for sensual beauty and the love of the beautiful that in itself is monoeides [μονοειδές], “a single idea,” a “unique form” ( 210b, 211e ). The right path thus consists in “mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is” ( 211c ). Although this exposition of the asceticism of pederastic erôs practiced by Socrates ( 212b ) is delivered by a foreigner, a woman, and a Sophist ( the subject is beauty and speech, not the Good ), it continued to define Platonism, Platonic love, and its process of sublimation. All the more because this asceticism itself is contagious, taught de facto, since Alcibiades, who is loved so “Platonically” by Socrates that he ends up pursuing him as a lover, notes that the erastes is not the person people think he is: in these dialogues in which the person who is questioned starts answering ( Plato often plays on the proximity of eromai [ἔϱομαι], “I question,” and erômai [ἐϱῶμαι], “I love” ), Socratic irony consists in trading roles and making others who have been “bitten” by his philosophy ( 218a; 222b ) fall in love with him. Thus erotic dissymmetry determines the practice of philosophy.

2. Philein: The equality of roles, equalization, and commensurability. Aristotle or an ethics and politics of friendship

To give a sense of the difference between eran and philein, we can begin again from the compounds antiphilein and anteran [ἀντεϱᾶν]. There is nothing more misleading than a parallel, for anti- sometimes indicates reciprocity: antiphilein means “love in return,” “to return philia for philia,” which in Aristotle refers to the very definition of philos ( “philos is the person who loves [ho philôn ( ὁ φιλῶν )] and who is loved in return [kai antiphiloumenos ( ϰαὶ ἀντιφιλούμενος )]”; Rhetoric, 2.4.1381a 1; Aristotle’s and Cicero’s uses [redamare, “love in return,” Laelius, 14.49] thus function as displacements of the Lysis and returns to common usage ) and sometimes antagonism. Before Plato, anteran meant essentially “compete in love,” when the problematics of love was not deliberately inflected in terms of philia ; political office should be reserved for philosophers who do not seek power ( see, e.g., Republic, 7.521b: “those who take office should not be lovers of rule [erastas tou archein ( ἐϱαστὰς τοῦ ἄϱχειν )], otherwise there will be a contest with rival lovers [anterastai ( ἀντεϱασταί )]” ). Compare Calame ( Poetics of Eros ), where in the apocryphal dialogue Anterasti ( The Rivals ), the rivalry concerns the dignity of the object of love, wisdom, or gymnastics.

Books 8 and 9 of Nicomachean Ethics ( cf. Eudemian Ethics, 7, and Rhetoric, 2.4 ) testify to the breadth of the notion of philia: it designates all the positive, mutual relationships between the self and others, in the home and in civil and political society, on the basis of the bond between self and self. “Friendship” is the customary translation, but it is obviously untenable because it cannot cover this whole set of meanings that includes, in particular, love for those of one’s own species ( “philanthropy,” 1155a 20; the master even has philia for a slave, insofar as the slave is a man, 1161b 6 ), the bond between parents and children ( affection, paternal, maternal love / filial piety ), husband and wife ( tenderness, conjugal love ), companions ( “camaraderie” or “love” among hetairoi [ἑταῖϱοι] ), age groups ( “benevolence” in the elderly, “respect” among the young ), mutual-aid relationships ( charity, hospitality ), trade and business ( esteem, confidence, fairness ), specifically political relations that are vertical ( rulers’ “consideration,” subjects’ “devotion” ) and horizontal ( “sociability,” “harmony”; thus homonoia [ὁμόνοια], “concord,” “consensus” of citizens, is “political friendship,” 1167b 2 ), and even the relationship between men and the gods ( piety, indulgence ). Thus it is, conversely, in Aristotelianism that philia becomes generic, and erôs becomes simply one of its species, based on the consideration of “pleasure” ( di’ hêdonên [δι’ ἡδονήν] ), 1156a 12 ), which is frequent among the young, just as friendships among older people are based on the “useful” ( to chrêsimon [τὸ χϱήσιμον], 1156a 10 ). But both of these are only “accidents” of the third and essential kind of philia: “friendship” properly so called, which is based on virtue ( true friends are kat’ aretên [ϰατ’ ἀϱετήν], “like in virtue,” 1159b 4 ). Only the last expresses the essence of friendship, because it is situated from the outset in an exchange, a stable and equal reciprocity: “Now equality and likeness are friendship [hê d’ isotês kai homoiotês philotês ( ἡ δ’ ἰσότης ϰαὶ ὁμοιότης φιλότης )], and especially the likeness of those who are like in virtue” ( 1159b 2–4 ). Let us note also the peculiarity, which is consonant with philein, of the English expression “to like,” whose etymology includes the idea of “similar to,” in which affection and resemblance agree in the attraction of the same by the same.

Whence the clear relationship between philia and democracy, “for where citizens are equal they have much in common” ( 1161b 10 ). But when inequality is evident, and the superiority of one party over the other is constitutive of the relationship ( man/woman, dominant/dominated, etc. ), then it is “proportion that equalizes the parties and preserves the friendship” ( to analogon isazei kai sôizei tên philian [τὸ ἀνάλογον ἰσάζει ϰαὶ σῴζει τὴν φιλίαν]; 1163b 29f. ); the inferior’s philia compensates by its intensity and constancy the merit of the superior, for example, by returning in honor what he receives in money: “even unequals can be friends; they can be equalized” ( isazointo gar an [ἰσάζοιντο γὰϱ ἄν]; 1159b 2; cf. 7.15 and 16 ). This characteristic of commensurability enables us to understand why the institution of money ( nomisma [νόμισμα], 1164a ) depends on philia, and how, more generally, the passage to the symbolic makes it possible to acquit oneself of what is unacquittable with regard to relatives and with regard to the gods ( e.g., 1163b 15–18 ).

■ See Box 8.

8

Aimance / “lovence”

Aimance, in spite of its romantic sound ( parallel to “romance” ) and its association with ideas that trace back to amour courtois and the troubadours, is apparently a recent term. It was coined in 1927 by the French linguist and psychoanalyst Edouard Pichon, a figure who influenced Lacan. Aimance was interestingly picked up by the francophone Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, who used it as a general title for his poetic works. It is from Khatibi, a close friend, rather than from Pichon, that Jacques Derrida borrowed the term. He used it extensively in his Politiques de l’amitié ( 1994 ), and when the work was translated into English as The Politics of Friendship in 1997, the translator, George Collins, coined the neologism “lovence.”

The reference to Pichon is interesting, however, because his intention was to provide an equivalent for Freud’s concept of libido that would avoid its overly sexualized connotations and point to a broader concept of object attraction, one that would not necessarily entail sexual satisfaction. Pichon’s move was symptomatic of a general “French” resistance to “German” psychoanalysis in the name of a more civilized culture of sentiments. This appeal to the tradition of amour courtois and the troubadours formed part of a larger trans-European conflict over definitions of desire and sublimation ( which is evident in C. G. Jung’s critique of Freud’s “hypersexualism” ).

In a sense, what Derrida performs in Politics of Friendship through the deconstructive reading of a philosophical tradition ranging from Aristotle to Nietzsche is a complete displacement of this ill-formulated sex/amour debate. One of Derrida’s reasons for having recourse to a third term that is neither love nor friendship is to identify an indeterminate affect that circulates among modalities of love and friendship on a spectrum of sentiments that defy description or enumeration. Derrida’s use of aimance parallels, in this respect, Freud’s use of the category pulsion, with its neutralization of the active/passive opposition in desire. Aimance also fosters a phenomenology of the transference processes through which love, friendship, hostility, and rivalry are institutionally and sentimentally constituted and undone. This phenomenology of twoness ( what Nietzsche in an extraordinary wordplay called Zweisamkeit, literally “loneliness-in-two” ) significantly questions the rigid distinction between the public and private spheres, as well as conventional, gendered views that sustain the “double interdiction” against friendship with and among women in the philosophical tradition. Recent reclamations in English of the word “amity” ( as in Sharon Marcus’s Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England ), to signal forms of female friendship and affection that fall outside heteronormative and same-sex vocabularies of love and sexual relation, might well be considered a fair approximation of the French aimance.

Étienne Balibar

REFERENCES

Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. First published in 1994.

Khatibi, Abdelkebir. “L’aimance et l’invention d’un idiome.” In Œuvres. Vol. 2, Poésie de l’aimance. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2008.

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Pichon, Edouard. Développement psychique de l’enfant et de l’adolescent. Paris: Librairie de l’Académie de médecine, 1965.

In view of the heterogeneity of the paradigms of erôs and philia, we can gauge the scope of the problems and transformations that their translation by a single word presupposes.

Clara Auvray-Assayas
Charles Baladier
Philippe Būttgen
Barbara Cassin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De amicitia. Laelius: A Dialogue on Friendship. Translated by E. S. Schuckburgh. London: Macmillan, 1931.

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