POWER and DROIT, FORCE, HERRSCHAFT, JETZTZEIT, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, VALUEMACHT, GEWALT ( GERMAN )
| ENGLISH | might, power, violence |
POWER and DROIT, FORCE, HERRSCHAFT, JETZTZEIT, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, VALUE
When Luther comments on Romans 13 ( “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” ), he writes that “one must not resist authority ( Obrigkeit ) by force ( Gewalt ), but only by confessing the truth” ( Weimar Ausgabe, 11: 277 ). This interpretation underlines one of the connotations—rebellious force—that gradually, and especially toward the end of the Middle Ages, came to be added to the traditional meaning of Gewalt, which originally referred to the entire range of acts connected with the exercise of temporal power: administering, reigning, organizing ( the root of the term goes back to the Latin valere ). It is clear that the associated notions of potestas and of vis ( force ) are directly linked to this exercise of power, and because Gewalt implies the use of force, the meaning of the term moves easily, by extension, toward the idea of violence, that is, a rebellious, even revolutionary, force exerted against power ( Macht ). Gewalt and Macht thus share the idea of potestas, with Gewalt inflecting this idea toward vis and violentia, while Macht tends more toward potentia.
I. An Uncertain Division: The Arbitrary and the Free Deployment of Force
It is not so much the etymology of these terms or the tradition of their usage that suggest or anticipate the semantic value they assume in philosophical reflections but rather a terminological decision that establishes a division at the heart of their fields of connotation, whose borders are blurred. When Kant calls Macht a “power which is superior to great hindrances,” and Gewalt this same force “if it is also superior to the resistance of what is also endowed with Macht,” we can say on the one hand that Gewalt is understood as a modality of Macht, and on the other that these definitions transpose what is normally a political and legal linguistic usage into the domain of nature. This well-known quotation is the beginning of paragraph 28 of the “Analytic of the Sublime” where Kant talks of natural force ( which should be expressed rather by the term Kraft, referring to physical force in general, see FORCE ). He simply wants to emphasize that the force of nature can be understood as a power that, on certain occasions, is unleashed and turns violent. This violence is understood as an avatar of power that, as such ( that is, as potentia ), is synonymous with possibility ( here the connection with “potentiality” is of importance ) in the broad sense of the term.
In contemporary usage Macht might be best understood in Max Weber’s definition of the term: “Any possibility, within a social relationship, of imposing one’s will, even in spite of a resistance, and regardless of what this possibility is based on” ( Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 28 ). Gewalt in turn refers first and foremost to the exercise of a constraint ( and it matters little whether it is legitimate or not ). The minimal distinction between the two notions comes down to the following: Gewalt always refers to the idea of “free” control of something or of someone; consequently, the connotations of arbitrariness, of instrumentalization, or of reification belong logically to this semantic field. Macht, on the other hand, refers essentially ( if not exclusively ) to the vita activa, to using one’s will and establishing aims that one attempts to achieve. The connotations of Macht thus have more to do with autonomy and coherence of action, and its adequacy to the goals pursued, which implies that Macht inevitably requires legitimacy and recognition.
II. From Potestas and Potentia to Macht and Gewalt: The Different Stages in the Critique of Domination
The evolution of the semantic fields of these two terms, which have continually cut across one another, has had at least three clearly identifiable phases.
The first has accompanied the formation of modern political forms of authority since the end of the Middle Ages, which have, with increasing concentration, placed the exercise of domination into the hands of the state apparatus. One effect of the reception of Roman law, and of conflicts between princes, imperial power, and papal authority, which appealed to divine omnipotence ( Allmacht ), has been to make the notions of potestas and of potentia increasingly abstract terms. This phase has ended with a distribution of “domination” among the state ( which has been able to “monopolize the legitimate use of constraint” [M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 29] ), civil society, the economy, and the remains of the different spiritual authorities.
The second phase concerns the vast domain of the legitimization of power and the use of force. In the article on Gewalt in his dictionary, Grimm points out that the meaning of “a misuse of power was barely formulated” in the Middle Ages: this sense of the term arises with the convergence of a concentration of powers, the move toward secularization, and the rationalization of the conception of law. It was only then that the terms of power and of constraining force departed from their status as normative notions expressing the legitimate need to conserve a social and political order, whose essentially Christian foundations were never questioned. Gewalt and Macht thus became either descriptive notions ( whose connotations remained relatively “neutral” ), or states of things that, while they had no clear and explicit justification, nevertheless aroused the suspicion that they were potentially illegitimate. From the sixteenth century onward, political thought would continually reflect upon the opposition between right and force, just as, in parallel, moral thought would oppose the “power” of reason to the “violence” of passions. The term Gewalt was interpreted from the perspective of natural justice, for example, as referring at the same time to the space of freedom belonging to each individual, the illegitimate intrusion of an individual into the private sphere of another individual, and the legitimate force that preserves this natural space of freedom. It is difficult to avoid noting how much Macht, in this semantic extension, can cut across each of the values attributed to Gewalt, with the one partial exception that the connotations of Macht are slightly less negative.
The third phase, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the phase of contestation that came with the fact of power and force being concentrated in the hands of the apparatuses of the state and of domination. Revolutionary phenomena, modern wars, the analysis of the structure of society in terms of conflict and exploitation, the critique of law in the name of the ideological interests it served and whose “reality” it masked, all brought about a shift in the understanding of these two notions. They were no longer understood in the general context of law but became poles of social and political theories, whose objective was the critique of domination with a view to its redefinition, its control, or even its disappearance in history. At the same time these two terms were notions that became as much concepts of theoretical reflection as they were notions usurped for instrumentalized ends ( revolutionary “violence” [Gewalt], for example, could be said to be “legitimate” from the perspective of an ideology of history judging the present in the name of a “scientifically” guaranteed future, based on a belief in the “power” [Macht] of the exploited classes ).
When Fichte develops the idea, in his 1796 work Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre, that the “law must be a power ( Macht ),” and when he asks what the nature of this power should be, such that it goes beyond the law of the will of each individual, from a contractual perspective directly inspired by Rousseau, he will use the term Übermacht, which immediately becomes a synonym for Übergewalt, in other words, a superior power, or the supreme force/power of the law. The “common will” of the contracting parties must have a “superior power in view of which the power of each individual is incommensurably restrained, so that this will can be preserved beyond itself and ensure it is maintained: this is the force of the state ( Staatsgewalt )” ( ibid., 153 ). The only distinction one can make in the use of these two terms is that Macht here appears as more abstract and general, whereas Gewalt is explicitly referred to the potestas executiva, since then the use of force is concretely required for the constraining force of the law to be effectively realized.
In Hegel, as in Kant, the distinction between the two notions is thematized—“Force ( Gewalt ) is a manifestation of power ( Macht ), or it is power as exteriority” ( Hegel, Logik, 2: 200 ). The Enzyklopädie ( 1830, §541 ) talks about Staatsgewalt in the same sense as Fichte and uses Gewalt to refer to the distribution of the power of the state into different powers ( executive, legislative, judicial ). When the Enzyklopädie discusses the state of nature ( ibid., §502 ), however, Gewalt signifies less “force” than “freely disposing of something” ( according to its first meaning ):
The law of nature—strictly so called—is for that reason the predominance of the strong ( Stärke ) and the reign of force ( Gewalt ), and a state of nature a state of violence ( Gewalttätigkeit ) and wrong, of which nothing truer can be said than that one ought to depart from it. The social state, on the other hand, is the condition in which alone right has its actuality: what is to be restricted and sacrificed is just the willfulness and violence of the state of nature ( Gewalttätigkeit ).
( Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. and with introduction by William Wallace, 1894 ).
However, in his Philosophy of Right §95 ( cf. also §93 add. ), Hegel will use Gewalt to designate constraint ( Zwang ), that is, the use of brute force against a natural existence that is an agent, the bearer or the product of will ( the existence of a man, or what he has produced or built ). But Gewalt also serves here as a synonym for “possession” ( Besitz ), which is defined by the fact of disposing externally of something in whatever way one wishes. This first level of possession will be overcome to reach the level of property ( Eigentum ), which is no longer defined in terms of free disposition but also of the right which of course guarantees this free disposition ( within certain limits ) over and against the arbitrary power of another person.
Marx will not depart radically from this distribution of connotations. His now celebrated expressions—“the proletariat must abolish political power when it is in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They must themselves become a power ( Gewalt ) and, first and foremost, a revolutionary power” ( “Moralisierende Kritik und kritisierende Moral,” 4: 338 ); “force ( Gewalt ) is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” ( Capital, I, §8, chap. 31 )—do not essentially modify the meanings of the two terms, and the differences between them are more of degree and of modality than of nature.
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The “will to power” ( “Wille zur Macht” ) in Nietzsche This expression, “will to power,” first appears at the time Nietzsche was writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883, thus in the final phase of this thinking. It is understood first of all as another, more precise way of referring to what is commonly called life. But in Zarathustra itself, the “will to power” is directly related to the evolution of cultures across time and history, as a way of establishing control over the whole of phenomenal reality. This expression returns at several points in 1885, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, and refers there to the furthest level that our own reflection can reach when it attempts to interpret reality ( what Nietzsche designates as the “original text” ). So the “will to power” is the highest level attained by our hypotheses, and it thus becomes identified with philosophy as the attempt to think the totality of what is. The “will to power” thus refers to the general dynamic of our instincts, from the most basic to the most refined drives, to the dynamic of the body, and even that of the inorganic world. But we must never forget that instincts constantly adjust themselves and evaluate circumstances with a view to satisfying themselves and that they necessarily enter into conflict with one another. There are thus only transient and fragile states of equilibrium between these different movements, and this is what we call the “self,” for example, or a “cause,” or “knowledge,” or “will.” Since Nietzsche on the one hand says that “will” ( Wille ) is an exoteric term, that it does not exist as such—there is only an instinctual dynamic that is absolutely inseparable from the dynamic of the mind—and since on the other hand what he declares as his most profound thought is that of the “eternal return” ( ewige Wiederkunft, an expression we find in 1882, before the notion of the “will to power” makes its appearance ), we are entitled to consider the “will to power” as the “mask” of the eternal return. Nietzsche explains in a posthumous fragment ( 7 [54], end 1886–spring 1887 ) that the “supreme will to power” is the fact of “impressing upon becoming the character of being . . . that everything returns is the most extreme convergence between a world of becoming and a world of being.” In 1887 Nietzsche planned to write a book that would bear the title “Will to Power.” He worked on this plan during the course of the year in 1888, explaining that, on the one hand, the 372 fragments mentioned in relation to this plan were only to help him clarify his own thoughts, and that any publication of them was consequently prohibited ( letter to P. Gast, February 1888 ), and on the other hand, that this same project from then on was to be called “Transvaluation of All Values” ( letter to F. Overbeck, 13 February 1888 ). In September of that same year, Nietzsche abandoned the expression “will to power” as a designation of what he was about to publish, and the foreword to the Twilight of the Idols was completed on 30 September, identifying this date as year one of the “transvaluation of all values.” The different editions of the Will to Power that appeared after Nietzsche’s death were simply compilations of posthumous fragments, grouped more or less coherently according to the themes defined by the successive teams at the Weimar Archives ( under the aegis of Nietzsche’s sister ). |
III. Macht and Gewalt, “Power” and “Violence”: Arendt and Benjamin on the Functions of Violence
There have been only two real and original departures from these meanings. The first of these is Walter Benjamin’s use of the term Gewalt, in the extreme extension of its sense, that is, the violence against all tradition, to which he is not afraid of adjoining the adjective “divine” ( göttliche ) violence. The second is to be found in the decisive opposition between power ( Macht ) and violence ( Gewalt ) that Hannah Arendt develops in the essay bearing this title ( Macht und Gewalt ).
In his 1920 essay “Critique of Violence” ( Selected Writings, vol. 1 ), Benjamin opposes the mythical, foundational, and conservative violence of law with divine, destructive, and purifying violence: “For only mythic violence ( schaltende Gewalt ), not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men. Once again all the external forms are open to pure divine violence, which myth bastardized with law. Divine violence may manifest itself in a true war exactly as it does in the crowd’s divine judgment on a criminal. But all mythic, lawmaking violence ( verwaltende Gewalt ), which we may call ‘executive,’ is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, ‘administrative’ violence that serves it. Divine violence ( göttliche Gewalt ), which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign’ ( waltende ) violence” ( ibid., 252 ). This violence, whose conception is manifestly inspired by the ideas of Georges Sorel, is also said to be revolutionary; it is a “pure violence exerted on behalf of living beings against all life,” it is a “liberation from all law,” whereas mythical violence “imposes all at once both guilt and expiation.” A manifestation of divine violence can be found in the element of “educative power” that is “outside of all law.” In essence, the backdrop to this divine violence is a transposition of a conception derived from Jewish mysticism into terms that are Sorelian rather than Marxist ( even though the idea of pure violence is very close to the Hegelian Marxist sense of Gewalt as negativity ). This is Isaac Luria’s cabalistic notion of the “breaking of vases,” this catastrophe that is responsible both for the dispersion into the world of the sparks of evil and for the “exile” of God himself, the “divine contraction” whose consequence is creation itself. Divine violence is also manifested in the idea of the here and now ( see JETZTZEIT ), the potential sudden eruption of the messianic dimension at the heart of the mythical, and thus fallacious, continuity of time.
Arendt, for her part, opposes the domain of “force,” that is, the domain of technology ( production, and making the material means adequate to the ends ), to that of “power,” or of institution, supported by a greater or lesser number of individual wills. “Power” ( Macht, pouvoir ) is thus both the condition of any sociopolitical order and a finality in itself, whereas “force” ( Gewalt, or violence ) only has aims that change each time. In addition, power has no need for justification, but only for legitimacy, whereas force is never legitimate. The use of force can in certain circumstances be justified in terms of an anticipation of what it could achieve; power, in contrast, derives its legitimacy instead from the past, from a tradition. At the same time revolutions are only the results of redistributions of power, and force itself cannot set them in motion ( its function being instead to introduce reforms ). When “revolutionary violence” ( revolutionnäre Gewalt ), however, brings about a transformation of reality, it only achieves one result: “the world has become more violent ( gewalttätiger ) than it was before” ( Macht und Gewalt, 80 ). Power is normative, while force as violence is instrumental; power is not identifiable with domination, since it is lacking constraint, manipulation, and conflict. Neither is defined by its capacity to overcome resistance ( it does not pertain, as in Max Weber, to a relation of order and obedience ). To refer to a “power without violence” ( gewaltlos ) is a pleonasm. Violence can destroy power; but it is absolutely incapable of creating power” ( ibid., 57 ).
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah. Macht und Gewalt. Munich: Piper, 1970. Translation: On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991.
. Selected Writings. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996–2003.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre. In Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 3. Edited by I. H. Fichte. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965. First published in 1845. Translation by Michael Baur: Foundations of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre. Edited by Frederick Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Hanssen, Beatrice. Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. London: Routledge, 2000.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 20. Hamburg: Meiner, 1992. First published in 1830. Translation by Steven A. Taubeneck: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, and Critical Writings. Edited by Ernst Behler. German Library. Vol. 24. New York: Continuum, 1990.
. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Edited by Klaus Grotsch and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 14. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, forthcoming. Translation by T. M. Knok: Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Edited and with introduction by Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
. Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Band: Die objektive Logik. Edited by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 21. Hamburg: Meiner, 1985. First published in 1832. Wissenschaft der Logik, Zweiter Band: Die subjektive Logik. Edited by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 12. Hamburg: Meiner, 1981. First published in 1816. Translation by A. V. Miller: Science of Logic. London: Allen and Unwin, 1969.
Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. 3 vols. In Marx-Engels Werke. Vols. 23–25. Berlin: Dietz, 1963–1983. Translation: Capital. 3 vols. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works. Vols. 35–37. New York: International Publishers, 1996–98.
. “Moralisierende Kritik und kritisierende Moral.” In Marx-Engels Werke. 4: 331–59. Berlin: Dietz, 1972. First published in 1847. Translation: “Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works. 6: 312ff. New York: International Publishers, 1976.
Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Siebeck, 1922. Translation by Ephraim Fischoff et al.: Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
MADNESS / INSANITY
| FRENCH | folie, démence | ||
| GERMAN | Schwärmerei, Wahn; Unsinn, Verrücktheit | ||
| GREEK | mania [μανία], phrenitis [φϱενῖτιϛ], aphrosunê [ἀφϱοσύνη], paranoia [παϱάνοια] | ||
| ITALIAN | follia, pazzia; demenza | ||
| LATIN | furor, phrenesis; dementia, insania, insipientia |
DRIVE, GENIUS, LOGOS, MALAISE [MELANCHOLY], MEMORY, MORALS, PATHOS, PRUDENCE, REASON, SOUL, WISDOM
The terminology of madness follows two distinct models in most languages. On the one hand, there is a positive model, which treats madness as a distinct entity subject to the highest valuations: thus Greek mania and, in another register, Latin furor, which indicate exceptional states. These persist in literary modernity in the ideas of inspiration, enthusiasm, and genius, as well as Schwärmerei, the extravagance in terms of which Immanuel Kant characterizes both the madness of Emanuel Swedenborg and that of dogmatic idealism. On the other hand, we also find a negative or privative model: madness and the insane are outside or past reason or even wisdom ( aphrôn, insipiens, insania, dementia, from which come our terms “insanity,” “dementia,” “paranoia,” and others ). Unreason in this sense is in danger of being run together with irrationality ( the aphrôn [ἄφϱων] is the opposite of the phronimos [φϱόνιμοϛ], the morally sensible sage ).
Cicero, with the goal of personally overseeing the shift from Greek vocabulary to Latin, opens the latter up to the symmetry of the health of the body and that of the soul. The medieval terminology of the subject confers a sort of technical value, even in theological controversies, upon terms like insipiens and phreneticus. The many terms of antiquity, which were initially based on Greek mania [μανία], were retained in modern languages until the advent of modern psychiatry, at the end of the eighteenth century, though at the cost of semantic shifts and new linguistic choices owing in particular to translations and definitions of Cicero, the Stoics, and Augustine.
I. Greek Mania and Its Modern Destiny: From Enthusiasm to Psychosis
A. The mania of philosophers and the phrenitis of doctors
Concerning mania [μανία], Boissier de Sauvages writes: “From the Greek mainomai, I am crazy, furious; in Latin, furor, insania; in French, folie & manie” ( Nosologie, 7.389 ). The word is thus trapped in its equivalences in Latin and in French. We may consider it the most general, the most available, both in extension and in understanding ( mainomai [μαίνομαι] answers to a Sanskrit root that means “to believe, to think,” from which we derive both menos [μένοϛ], “warrior spirit,” and mimnêskô [μιμνήσϰω], “I remember” ( see MEMORY ). Mania initially refers to what we tend to place under the vague word “madness,” and continues to do so in ordinary language. In Hippocrates, we may say that mania is only found as a symptom, as are all changes of êthos [ἦθοϛ], “character.” It does not yet exist as a concept of sickness.
Plato describes four forms of divine madness ( mania, Phaedrus 265b, and esp. 244–45 ). The first, inspired by Apollo, is mantic delirium, divination. The “moderns,” says Plato, are the ones who, lacking a sense of beauty, introduced a t to the word and called the art of divination mantikê [μαντιϰή] rather than manikê [μανιϰή]. The second form is “telestic” delirium, given by Dionysus, who “accomplishes” ( teleô [τελέω] ) in the sense that he initiates one into mysteries. The third is the delirium inspired by the Muses, namely poetic delirium. The fourth form, a gift of Aphrodite or Eros, is that which incites love, erôtikê mania [ἐϱωτιϰή μανία]. This text, which ancient medicine carefully recalls, is of primary importance for understanding this medicine’s definition of mania. Thus, Caelius Aurelian, a doctor in the fifth century CE ( who is transposing a second-century doctor, Soranus of Ephesus, into Latin ), writes:
Plato, in the Phaedrus, declares that madness is twofold: one comes from a tension of the mind, having a cause or origin in the body, the other is divine or sent down, and is inspired by Apollo; now we call this divination.
( Chronic Illnesses 1.5, ed. Bendz, 144 )
Continuing to cite the text of the Phaedrus in the Chronic Illnesses, Caelius is right to speak of the duality of madness. For whatever the number of distinctions Plato makes, alongside these “meaningful” madnesses, there is the sickness of madness. In fact, we may speak of a “double madness,” a good one ( “the greatest gifts come by way of madness,” Plato, Phaedrus 244b ) and a pathological madness. It is this duality that is put to the test in Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae.
Something happened, however, that we could not better show than by citing Galen. When he reads in a Hippocratic constitution ( Epidemics 3 = RT: Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 3:92 ) that “none of the frenetics had an attack of mania . . . but instead of that they were prostrate,” he is perplexed. The conjunction of mania and phrenitis [φϱενῖτιϛ] is incomprehensible to him. Since Hippocrates cannot be wrong, Galen thinks we must give phrenitic a metaphorical sense. In truth, the Hippocratic text is a problem for him because a very important epistemological break had taken place, namely, the development of definitions of illnesses. As for the systematic contrast between phrenitis and mania, no doubt we must place it in the second half of the second century BCE. Thus, since diagnosis follows definition, we could not confuse phrenitis—that is, insanity with fever, crocudismos [ϰϱοϰυδισμόϛ] ( the gesture of ripping out strands of tissue or blades of straw ) and carphologia [ϰαϱφολογία] ( permanent and involuntary movements of hands and fingers )—and mania, insanity without fever. With regard to this text, Galen has the same problems of translation and understanding as we do.
The determination and definition of illnesses like mania, phrenitis, or melancholy presuppose a certain number of complex cultural facts, including in particular: the constraint of the definition according to the model of philosophy and rhetoric; the definitive separation between illness of the body, reserved for doctors, and that of the soul, reserved for philosophers; the victory of soul-body dualism; and the triumph of the Stoic theory of passion as an illness of the soul ( see PATHOS ). Celsus attempted a new grouping. He classified under the notion or “genre” of insania the three major illness among which “madness” is essentially distributed, namely, phrenitis, melancholy ( the fear and sadness attributed by Hippocratics to “black bile” ), and mania. Why insania? We would be at a loss to give a semantic analysis, but a shift has occurred in any case from a positive entity, mania, to a privation, insanity, that authorizes and promotes the parallel between illness of the soul and illness of the body. The determinations of madness, or the ways of expressing it in the widest sense in Latin, are numerous. It seems indeed that this is Celsus’s choice. The semantic field of madness is henceforth determined by the history of medicine.
B. Psychiatric frenzy and mania
These problems are not restricted to Greco-Roman antiquity. This is not only because these texts were well known and scrutinized through the middle of the nineteenth century, and play a role in the foundation of psychiatry, but also because a certain number of problems were dealt with in antiquity in a way that was decisive for psychopathology, and for the very meaning of the word “mania.”
When psychiatry was created ( at the end of the eighteenth century ), the question of terminology returned. Philippe Pinel writes then: “The happy influence exercised on medicine recently by the study of other sciences can no longer allow giving the general name of madness, which may have an indeterminate scope, to insanity” ( Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique ). There are in his writings, however, two concepts of madness. One, in his Nosographie philosophique, corresponds to the tradition; another one, wider and newer in its definition, creates problems of categorization with the first, in his Traité médico-philosophique ( 128–29 ).
However, Pinel’s student Esquirol wrote, in 1816, an article entitled “On Madness.” In 1818, he wrote another, “On Mania,” in which he returns to the classic definition: “Mania is a chronic affection of the brain, usually without fever, characterized by perturbation and exaltation of the senses, mind, and will.” “I shall use,” Vincenzo Chiarugi had written, on the other hand, “the word insanity [pazzia] without having to adopt a term taken from a foreign language, thus avoiding the risk of confusion and misunderstanding” ( Della pazzia in genere e in speczie, trans. Mora ).
Finally, outside of any medical context, it is prudent to avoid translating mania by “mania,” since the English term is reserved for technical use; “madness,” which remains the most general and least technical term, is used instead. It is common to see translators, out of a desire to avoid repetition, go so far as to translate mania by “frenzy.” This is unfortunate, since in traditional nosography, mania is in fact opposed to “frenzy” ( phrenitis ). Translating mania by “delirium” should also be avoided, as since Pinel, we know that there are manias without delirium. Mania remains a technical term today, defined thus: “State of intellectual and psychomotor excitation, and exaltation of mood, with morbid euphoria, of periodic and cyclic evolution, entering the framework of manic-depressive psychosis” ( RT: Postel, Dictionnaire de psychiatrie, s.v. ).
■ See Box 1.
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Contemporary nosography The conceptions of “madness” that were developed in antiquity did not find a place in the nomenclatures established by contemporary psychiatry, in which, for example, we find words or expressions like aliénation mentale ( P. Pinel, 1797; “insanity” in English ), psychosis ( E. Feuchtersleben, 1844 ), paranoia ( C. Lasèque, 1852 ) or Verrücktheit in German ( W. Griesinger, 1845, then E. Kraepelin ), schizophrenia or dementia praecox ( E. Bleuler, 1908 ), and phobia ( 1880 ). In this new nosography, the denotations of ancient terms like mania [μανία], phrenitis [φϱενῖτιϛ], and pathos [πάθοϛ] for the Greeks, or furor, insania, and perturbatio for the Romans ( whose symptomatology generally went back to Hippocrates or Galen ), often only retained from that point on a literary or popular usage. The modern and contemporary nosography of madness relies on a wide variety of neologisms borrowed from Greek, such as “phobia” ( from phobos [φόϐοϛ], illness whose primary symptom is a paralyzing and irrepressible fear when faced with an object or situation that in reality presents no danger; psychoanalysis refers to this rather as “anxiety hysteria” ), “manic-depressive psychosis” ( from the beginning of the twentieth century, the third, after paranoia and schizophrenia, of the major current psychoses that is characterized by a disturbance of mood in which states of manic euphoria and fits of melancholy or depression alternate ), “hysteria” ( an eighteenth-century term; then, at the end of the nineteenth century, a collection of disorders that was initially believed to be related to eroticism originating in the uterus—from the Greek hustera [ὑστέϱα]—and that relate to unconscious conflicts manifested by bodily symptoms and in the form of symbolizations ), “paranoia” ( from paranoia [παϱάνοια], a kind of systematic delirium in which interpretation predominates and which does not include intellectual deterioration; Freud saw it as a defense against homosexuality ). However, note that, alongside these various terms, psychiatry and psychoanalysis place emphasis on the idea of a schize or a defect in the personality of the subject, notably with regard to what is called “schizophrenia.” This last term, by which Bleuler replaces the expression dementia praecox used by Kraepelin, comes directly from the Greek verb schizô [σχίζω], which means “to separate, split, dissociate,” and which had already yielded “schism” in the sense of “separation.” Thus schizophrenia would be characterized by symptoms of mental dissociation, discordance of affects and frenzied activity that lead to a general withdrawal into oneself ( autism ) and a breaking off of contact with the external world. The same idea is found in the German noun Spaltung used by Freud, which French psychoanalysts translate by clivage, though often using it rather loosely, with the meaning of a dissociation of consciousness, or of the object, or of the ego—regarding this Freudian Ichspaltung, Lacan translates the expression as “refente du sujet” ( Écrits, 842 ). BIBLIOGRAPHY Bleuler, Eugen. Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie. Berlin: Springer, 1916. Ey, Henri. Consciousness: A Phenomenological Study of Being Conscious and Becoming Conscious. Translated by J. H. Flodstrom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. . Études psychiatriques. 3 vols. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948–52. Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Edited by J. Khalfa. Translated by J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kraepelin, Emil. Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie. 9th ed. Leipzig: Kraepelin and Lange, 1927. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. |
We may note, furthermore, that traditional nosography found itself overlaid, from the end of the eighteenth century on, with a “scientific” nomenclature derived from the medicalization of madness, henceforth defined as “mental illness.” However, as Michel Foucault noted, between these two lexica of madness—that is, before the era of medicalization—an intermediate, purely descriptive terminology developed. A person was described as a “stubborn litigant,” a “big liar,” a “mean and quibbling” person, a “worried, despondent, and gruff mind”:
There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree. . . . What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely a disturbance.
( Foucault, A History of Madness, 133 )
II. The Latin Terminology: Furor / Insania / Dementia
A. Cicero as a translator of the Greeks
The uses of Latin terminology for madness are marked by the influence of Stoicism, the distinctions and analyses of which are taken up in contexts that are not strictly Stoic. Thus Cicero:
I shall . . . follow the time-honoured distinction made first by Pythagoras and after him by Plato, who divide the soul into two parts: to the one they assign a share in reason, to the other none. . . . Let this then be our starting point; let us nevertheless in depicting these disorders employ the definitions and subdivisions of the Stoics who, it appears to me, show remarkable penetration in dealing with this problem.
( Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.11, trans. King, 339 )
A first attempt deals with the distinction of passions and illness, which the Greek groups under the general expression pathê:
Terror, lusts, fits of anger—these belong, speaking generally, to the class of emotions which the Greeks term pathê [πάθη]: I might have called them “diseases,” and this would be a word-for-word rending: but it would not fit in with Latin usage. For pity, envy, exultation, joy, all these the Greeks term diseases, movements that is of the soul which are not obedient to reason; we on the other hand should, I think rightly, say that these same movements of an agitated soul are “disorders,” but not “diseases” in the ordinary way of speaking.
( Ibid., 3.7, trans. King, 233 )
It is in the context of this general distinction that we must understand the etymological connection between insania ( madness ) and insanitas ( ill health ), on the basis of which Cicero develops the Stoic doctrine of passion/illness: “The word insania refers to a weakness and a sickness of the intelligence [mentis aegrotatio et morbus], that is, the ill health [insanitas] of a sick mind [animus aegrotus]” ( ibid. ). Thus the appeal to a play on etymology makes it possible to find a linguistic correlate of the symmetry between bodily and mental health, which is a philosophical construction. In this way, Cicero gives Latin a capacity that neither the general term pathê nor mania ( which insania translates ) has in Greek, at the expense of forcing Latin usage: whereas sanus may mean either healthy of body or healthy of mind, insanus only means “mentally ill / crazy.”
Once this symmetry has been established, Cicero can interpret the only legal text from the classical period that refers to a person as a madman ( furiosus ), so that the oldest legal usage of the language coincides with the Stoic approach: furor is, just as much as insania, an imbalance of the mind, but it is such that it prevents one from fulfilling the obligations of life.
I cannot readily give the origin of the Greek term mania: the meaning it actually implies is marked with better discrimination by us than by the Greeks, for we make a distinction between “unsoundness” of mind, which from its association with folly has a wider connotation, and “frenzy.” The Greeks wish to make the distinction but fall short of success in the term they employ: what we call frenzy they call melancholia, just as if the truth were that the mind is influenced by black bile only and not in many instances by the stronger power of wrath or fear or pain, in the sense in which we speak of the frenzy of Athamas, Alcmaeon, Ajax and Orestes. Whosoever is so afflicted is not allowed by the Twelve Tables to remain in control of his property; and consequently we find the text runs, not “if of unsound mind,” but “if he be frenzied.” For they thought that folly, though without steadiness, that is to say, soundness of mind, was nevertheless capable of charging itself with the performance of ordinary duties and the regular routine of the conduct of life: frenzy, however, they regarded as a blindness of the mind in all relations.
( Ibid., 3.11, trans. King, 237–39 )
The distinction suggested on the authority of the Twelve Tables allows for a better account of what separates the state of fury of the great tragic heroes from the madness that the paradoxical definition of the Stoics attributes to the non-sages: this distinction does not exist in the verb mainesthai, which refers equally to the madness of Heracles, prophetic fury, and non-wisdom. The paradox “hoti pas aphrôn mainetai [ὅτι πᾶϛ ἄφϱων μαίνεται]” is translated “omnem stultum insanire” ( Cicero, Stoic Paradoxes 27 ). The choice of the Latin stultus, which does not connote madness, to render the Greek aphrôn [ἄφϱων], whose most well-attested meaning is “demented/crazy,” reinforces the effect of distinguishing them and expresses what is most characteristic of the Stoic doctrine of the passions: all passion comes from an error of judgment.
However, the distinction drawn does not simply dispose of furor as an illness of “great natures”: Cicero refuses to attribute it to black bile, and presents it rather as a complete blindness that results from excess. In this way, he maintains the Stoic point of view by taking advantage of everything that, with regard to furor, connotes excess—from heroic fury to the self-dispossessions of erotic poetry—without appealing to a precise form of judgment. The term is also absent from the list of forms of anger that yields, in the Ciceronian translation, ira, excandescentia, odium, inimicitia, discordia ( anger, irascibility, hate, enmity, resentment ) ( Tusculan Disputations 4.21 ).
B. Furor and insania in the Stoics
Cicero’s attempts at drawing distinctions are largely adopted by Seneca, who nevertheless takes advantage of them to explore the confusion of moral and physical causes of collective disorder:
Between the insanity of people in general and the insanity which is subject to medical treatment, there is no difference, except that the latter is suffering from disease and the former from false opinions. In the one case, the symptoms of madness may be traced to ill-health; the other is the ill-health of the mind.
( Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistolae morales 94.7, trans. Gummere, 3:21–23 )
However, furor and insania are used conjointly to refer to evils of body and mind, the evil of the individual in civilization: furor refers to a state of ingratitude that has become so general that it threatens the foundation of all social bonds ( “Eo perductus est furor ut periculosissima res sit benificia in aliquem magna conferre,” ibid., 81.31–32 ), or the blindness comparable to that of the clown who, having lost his sight, believed that the house had gone dark ( ibid., 50 ). It is the state of all who can no longer perceive that they are affected, since the organ of judgment is too sick: Seneca’s language exploits the symmetry between insania and insanitas more widely than Cicero does, to apply the Stoic paradox to a state of civilization: “We are mad, not only individually, but nationally [non privatim solum sed publice furimus]” ( ibid., 95.30, trans. Gummere, 77 ).
III. Scholastic Expressions for Unreason and Christian Faith as “Madness”
A. The fol
From the eleventh century on, under the influence of the Gregorian reform and of Cluny, all the different components of European society came to be integrated into what was called Christendom. Those who were excluded—Jews, Saracens, heretics—ran the risk of being accused of thinking or acting “differently.” Their deviance was then classified as a major defect of confusion or madness. In the vernacular, the “other” was called a sot ( in Old French soz, sos, from the medieval Latin sottus, of unknown etymology ), a maniac, a dervé, insane, fol. This last term, which would take up a prime position in the language of madness, comes from the Latin follis, which means “pouch of sealed leather, goatskin flask, balloon or bellows for fires.” Only in the Middle Ages does it take on a derisive second meaning, designating a stupid person or idiot.
In their own academic disputes in Latin, theologians did not refrain from stigmatizing their adversaries as incapable of correct reasoning, stricken with stultitia, amentia, or furor. However, among the terms related to unreason or mental confusion that they exchanged in more or less insulting ways, there are two terms that assume, in the disputes, a properly technical sense: insipiens and phreneticus. The first is the Vulgate translation of the epithet aphrôn, found in the Septuagint in the incipit of Psalm 52 ( 53 today ), which stigmatizes unbelief. This incipit, in effect, appears in Latin bibles in the following form: “Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus” ( The fool said in his heart: There is no God ). This is why medieval iconography illustrating madmen or madness takes as its frame the illuminations of the letter D, which is the initial letter of this verse of the psalm.
B. The insipiens
Unlike fol, insipiens is etymologically close to the idea of mental derangement, coming from sapio, “to have taste, discernment,” and from sapiens as a noun or adjective “sage,” referring to the non-sage—someone whose reason is faulty. It is translated into French as insensé, that is, someone whose statements are contrary to good sense and whose mind wanders ( from sensus and, in the language of the Church, insensatus, an adjective that evokes absurdity, stupidity, idiocy, like “nonsense” in English ).
Yet, even though this same attitude of mind, this unreason, was also imputed to the Jews, guilty of not having recognized Jesus as the Messiah, it is Anselm of Canterbury who pronounces it of its most emblematic figure, the monk Gaunilo, for refusing to accept the proof of God’s existence offered by the author of the Monologion and the Proslogion. When Anselm attacks him, especially in chapters 2 and 4 of the latter, he never refers to Gaunilo by name—only, and often, as the insipiens. He asks in particular how this fool par excellence “could say in his heart what cannot be thought [quomodo insipiens dixit in corde suo, quod cogitari non potest].” What “cannot be thought” is that God does not exist, once one has in one’s mind the idea of a being such that it is impossible to conceive a greater one. It is necessary, indeed, that he exists both in thought and in reality ( “et in intellectu et in re” ). “Why then did the fool say in his heart: God is not, . . . unless it is because he is stupid [stultus] and foolish [insipiens]?” ( See SENSE. )
C. The phreneticus
Among the most violent attributions the authors of the Latin Middle Ages hurled at their opponents, we also find phreneticus. Thus, in the twelfth century, Richard of Saint-Victor defends the constricting character of his argument relative to the Trinity by falling back on dialectic: “This hard to break triple-bond by which any frenetic destroyer of our faith finds himself firmly chained [unde phreneticus quivis fidei nostrae impugnator fortiter alligetur],” De Trinitate, 3.5 ). Yet the term phreneticus comes here not from a scriptural source, but from the tradition of Augustine, himself well aware of ancient medico-psychological terminology.
The bishop of Hippo first recalls the clinical table ( cf. Guimet, “Caritas ordinata et amor discretus,” 226–28 ). Phrenesis ( from the Greek phrenitis ) is a mental illness that engenders the loss of reason and that, for example, leads the subject to laugh when he should cry ( Sermo 175, 2.2, RT: PL 38.945 ). It is sometimes accompanied by delirium, visions, and extravagant divinatory phenomena ( De Genesi ad litteram, 12.17.35–36, RT: PL 34.468 ). It is indicated by disorders such as fever, abuse of wine, and insomnia, and leads to crises that become increasingly violent as death approaches ( De quantitate animae, 22.38, RT: PL 32.1057, 40.1058; Ennaratio in Psalmum 58, RT: PL 36.696 ). In all of these symptoms, the “frenetic” is contrasted with the “lethargic,” who founders constantly in inertia and in sleep ( Sermo 87, 11.14; RT: PL 38.538 ).
Augustine then puts this classic schema to a moral and spiritual use. In his eyes, the two components of phrenesis, confusion and violence, are found in particular in the case of the Jews. It is under the influence of a virulent furor that they, refusing the salvation brought to them by Christ, made themselves executioners. And it is with respect to their blindness that the Messiah begs divine forgiveness for them: “They know not what they do.” Attributing this same pathological state to his other adversaries, the Donatists, Augustine suggests binding the phreneticus with constrictive arguments ( Sermo 359, 8, RT: PL 39.1596 ), a remedy taken up by Richard of Saint Victor in attempting to restrain this lunatic by means of dialectic.
Nevertheless, the phrenesis of late antiquity and the Middle Ages is paradoxically rehabilitated in the romantic period, continuing into surrealism, by so-called frenetic literature, which, especially with Charles Nodier ( 1781–1840 ), is presented as a deliberate intensification of sensuality, passion, imagination, revolt, and fantasizing.
■ See Box 2.
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The Pauline praise of madness The parable of the wise virgins and the mad virgins ( Matthew 25:1–2 ) only invokes madness as a synonym of distraction, casualness, lack of foresight: “Five among them were mad and five prudent [pente de ex autôn êsan môrai kai pente phronimoi ( πέντε δὲ ἐξ αὐτῶν ἦσαν μωϱαὶ ϰαὶ πέντε φϱόνιμοι )].” It is in Paul that the paradoxical situation in virtue of which Christian faith is a form of madness radically opposed to reason and common wisdom is described ( 1 Cor. 1:23–25 ): “We declare a Christ crucified, scandal for Jews and madness for pagans [ethnesin de môrian ( ἔθνεσιν δὲ μωϱίαν )] . . . for what is madness of God is wiser than men [hoti to môron tou theou sophôteron tôn anthrôpôn estin ( ὅτι τὸ μωϱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ σοφώτεϱον τῶν ἀνθϱώπων ἐστίν )].” Paul adds ( 1 Cor. 3:18 ): “If someone among you thinks himself wise in the way of the world, let him become mad [môros genesthô ( μωϱὸϛ γενέσθω )].” And later in the same epistle ( 4:10 ): “We are mad [êmeis môroi ( ἡμεῖϛ μωϱοὶ )], we, because of Christ.” To express this idea of madness and scandal applied to devotion to the crucified Christ, Paul appeals to the term môria [μωϱία], which, present notably in Aeschylus and Plato, is related to the verb môrainô [μωϱαίνω], which means, in the transitive sense, first “to dull” or “to stultify” ( cf. Matthew 5:13: “If the salt becomes bland [môranthê ( μωϱανθῇ )] . . .” ), then “to make mad.” Thus the adjective môros [μωϱόϛ] has the primary sense of “dulled” or “insipid,” and the secondary sense of “mad” or “insane.” Translated into the Vulgate as stultitia, môria comes in composition in Greek terminology with sophos [σοφόϛ] and phrôn [φϱῶν] to yield môro-sophos [μωϱό-σοφοϛ] and môro-phrôn [μωϱό-φϱων], terms meaning equally “madly wise” and “wisely mad,” as though they were especially apt to express the Pauline paradox. |
IV. Kantian Schwärmerei and the Relation to Belief
A. The “swarm of bees”
Originally, the German noun Schwärmerei meant the agitation of bees, which move about without stopping; more precisely, on the one hand, it means the disorderly movements of each of the bees considered independently, and on the other hand, it means the compact flight of the swarm forming a group, equally uncontrollable. This double meaning made it possible to apply the term to religious beliefs that could be stigmatized as “wandering” and “sectarian.” Thus it was often used by Luther starting in the 1520s to denounce the “left wing” of the Reformation, which condemned the flesh in an exalted manner, interpreting the Gospel of John ( 6:63 ) in a fanatical sense: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.” Schwärmerei connotes the exalted imagination that moves outside of accepted paths, the uninhibited stubbornness of beliefs, and sectarian behavior. It is truly an untranslatable term, since neither Latin, nor English, nor French has a term with any sort of link to the image of the swarm of bees, in which the evocation of the isolated adventure of a dreamer meets up, contradictorily, with that of the fanaticism of an uncontrollable group. In French, the term is translated as exaltation, fanatisme, or enthousiasme, depending on the case. In German military terminology, the image of the swarm is also invoked to refer to the activity of a scout who is detached from the group on a personal adventure, as well as the compact but uncoordinated movement of a group of soldiers.
B. Kant: From Swedenborg’s hallucinations to Leibniz’s idealism
The term Schwärmerei was used until the eighteenth century in theological controversies to refer to heretics, schismatics, and innovators who deviated and disturbed the equilibrium and calm of the Church. All of these uses involve insulting or stigmatizing labels rather than a clear concept. Kant transforms the polemical usage into a concept when, in 1766, in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Explained through Dreams of Metaphysics, he describes the thought of the visionary Swedenborg as deriving from Schwärmerei, contrasting it with Leibnizian idealism. In this work, Kant analyzes at length the system of beliefs and thoughts that, based on the idea of the unreality of death, allows the seer to communicate with the spirits from beyond, who speak to him in virtue of the ecstatic transformations of his senses. The sensory hallucinations are interpreted by Swedenborg as a message from angels and the Christ, which reveal to him the true order of things under the appearance of laws of nature. The content of the images in these visions, which dwell in him, is related by this “prophet of the other world” to the text of Genesis, of which Swedenborg claims to give the correct interpretation by arguing that his “internal being is open” and that he is therefore himself the oracle of the spirits.
The terminology of Schwärmerei is thus related, in 1766, to that of ghosts and interaction with spirits. If, as we have just seen, the extravagance of the speeches and practices of the seer do not give rise only to ridicule but also to conceptual elaboration, the link between extravagance, madness, and the belief in spirits gives Kant the opportunity to play with these different terms. Indeed, besides Schwärmerei, German has another term that comes from the life of insects to express the ideas that populate the heads of deranged individuals: Hirngespinst ( in RT: Ak., 2:926 ). Spinnen means “to spin.” Hirngespinst, just as untranslatable as Schwärmerei ( except perhaps by “chimera” or “fantasmagoria” ), refers to having a spider in the brain, or, as is sometimes said more colloquially, “to have spiders in the belfry.” However, the images of bees and spiders are conjoined in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer in such a way that the reference to the extravagance of interaction with the spirits yields another term, Hirngespenst, by which Kant means the notion of a “ghost in the head.” The system of these different terms is what also transforms the sense of the word Wahn, which thenceforth means not so much illusion, understood as perception of an appearance, as madness—and this sense is maintained in the Critique of Pure Reason. The word Wahn is thus distinguished from all of those that Kant uses, from the Essay on Illness of the Head ( 1764 ) through Anthropology Considered from a Pragmatic Point of View ( 1798 ), where he attempts to classify all the forms of mental derangement according to the faculties, perceptual or intellectual, that are affected. Besides the common forms of head and heart sickness, which range from stupidity ( Blödsinn ) to clownery ( Narrheit ), derangement ( Verkehrtheit ) is the inversion ( Verrückung ) of empirical notions. Delirium ( Wahnsinn ) is the disorder that strikes judgment at the point closest to this perceptual experience; dementia ( Wahnwitz ) is the upsetting of reason in its most universal judgments. Of course, the term Wahn is related to Wahnsinn, “delirium,” and in 1766 Kant writes that what interests him about Swedenborg is the disturbance of judgment at its closest resemblance to perceptual disorder, that is, the latter’s hallucinations. But Wahn gets its specific meaning from the philosophical discussion that links Swedenborg’s delirium to that of reason in the idealism represented by Leibniz.
When Kant comments on Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, he insists on the fact that, more than the wild construction in itself, what Schwärmerei really consists in is consistent sensory hallucination, when it feeds the belief in the unreality of death and in the communication with spirits, and, last but not least, when it constructs a philosophy of nature as simple appearance, which enters into the minds of men through the conversations they have with spirits from the beyond. It is as an idealist theory of nature that Kant connects Schwärmerei to Leibniz’s thought. He makes the connection since, in 1766, Kant challenges rationalists to say in what the difference between the two systems of thought consists. However, the reformulation introduced in 1781 in the Critique of Pure Reason, when he gives a transcendental definition of the modality of our judgments, retains the imprint of this closeness established in 1766 between Schwärmerei and Leibniz’s thought. Kant distinguishes, in effect, that which “without being impossible in the sense of contradiction, cannot be counted among the things that are possible.” There are two forms of this impossibility in the transcendental sense: the Leibnizian intelligible world, and the fanatical world system of the Schwärmer. Further, in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant creates a composite word that unites once again the ecstatics and the dogmatists, against which the critique of reason will teach us to preserve ourselves. The critical response that he brings to bear on the problems of metaphysics will not be content, he says, with “the extravagant-dogmatic desires for knowledge” ( “Zwar ist die Beantwortung jener Fragen gar nicht so aufgefallen, als dogmatischschwärmende Wissbegierde erwarten mochten,” in RT: Ak., 3:14 ).
We may note that Kant uses Schwärmerei as a synonym for Fanatismus when he insists on the practical function of the extravagance that determines the will in these cases. This explains why, in the Critique of Practical Reason, the term “fanaticism” is most often used to refer to the insane illusion of moral and political reformers who wish to convince us that a good determined in its content is the absolute achieved. The formalism of morality according to Kant has the function of avoiding the madness of the will that is fanaticism. And we know that, in the Kritik der Urteilskraft ( Critique of the power of judgment, usually translated as “Critique of the faculty of judgment” ), Kant returns to the closeness of enthusiasm and fanaticism. It is this usage of the term Schwärmerei, and not its meaning as strictly related to critical and transcendental themes, that is taken up by all the authors, writers, philosophers, and poets of the romantic era in Germany. Its mild forms make it equivalent to whim, but a whim that cannot be uprooted, that develops into fantasies or all-pervasive beliefs.
■ See Box 3.
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Freudian Schwärmerei Curiously, we find the term Schwärmerei in Freud, in a very specific sense. It does not refer, in the writings of the founder of psychoanalysis, to any form of delirium, nor any belief, but to the stories that adolescents tell each other when they bestow a worshipful love upon someone of the same sex: oaths of fidelity, daily correspondence, declarations of the absolute. These whims or flames usually disappear as if by enchantment, says Freud in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie ( Three essays on the theory of sexuality [1905], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5 ), and in particular when love for someone of the opposite sex appears. However, there again, the paradox of the Schwärmerei is to be an uncontrollable belief despite its fragility, and to construct an imaginary world in which one is ecstatic. As a result, the term Schwärmerei is also used by Freud in two other cases. The first is in the exalted love of what is called “the young ( female ) homosexual” for a mature woman of low morals, to whom she attaches herself. The seriousness of the passion is shown when, meeting her father one day while she is walking with the woman of her thoughts, she throws herself off a bridge that overlooks a railway ( “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” [1920], in Standard Edition, 18:145–72 ). In another case, Freud describes as Schwärmerei the dedication of martyrs who do not feel pain when they suffer for their God ( “Psychical [or Mental] Treatment” [1890], in Standard Edition, vol. 7 ). He insists there on the transition that takes place, in these experiences, between the perverse components of drives and the self-sacrifice that ensures belief ( see “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14 ). BIBLIOGRAPHY Freud, Sigmund. Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. First published in 1905. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. Translation by J. Strachey: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. . Gesammelte Werke. 18 vols. London: Imago, 1940–52. Translation by J. Strachey: The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. |
V. The Right to Madness
At the end of the Middle Ages, in a register similar to that of the Pauline dialectic between the madness and the wisdom of the Cross, several currents of thought attempted to give a positive view of madness using the same terms that had thus far been considered pejorative, or at least to mitigate their seriousness. The fifteenth century locked up the cargo of the insane in the strange “Ship of Fools” ( Narrenschiff ), which long wandered the rivers and canals of the Rhineland and Flanders. By contrast, Erasmus made his Praise of Folly ( 1509 ) the tool of a reversal that made it possible to see two very different aspects of all human things, one seeming glorious despite being pathetic ( such as the conceits of scholars and theologians ), the other held to be extravagant and contemptible, but in reality filled with a noble prudence and genuine wisdom. Montaigne does the same in making wisdom of madness and madness of wisdom. At the start of the seventeenth century, Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a comic interrogation of the indefinite boundary between delirium and good sense, between enchantment and disillusionment ( see DESENGAÑO ). Fascinated by and basking in the feats of chivalry from old novels, the noble hidalgo of La Mancha leaves his village, wearing his armor, to make what he has read become real. In this way, though himself bewitched, he ends up bewitching the world and preserving truth through the lies of fiction.
In its turn, rationalism, especially that of Descartes and Spinoza, aims to banish the insane from the order of reason and to deny their psychic states any positive reality, whereas the philosophes of the Enlightenment make their position more nuanced by interpreting insanity as a ruse of nature that is only harmful past certain limits. The latter view clears of all charges, for example, the “literary madmen” of Raymond Queneau and Andre Blavier, and those who have given approval to what is called “the art of the mentally ill,” inheritors of part of the positivity of Greek mania. However, the same attempt at understanding will underwrite the idea that madness can appear in anyone, even if its extravagance is not always perceptible.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, indeed, the symbolic softenings attributed to Pinel with regard to the treatment of madness paradoxically liberate a highly vengeful language opposing the so-called scientific approach to psychiatry that accompanied them. Visiting the “lunatics” in a hospital, Charles Nodier, in La fée aux miettes ( 1832 ), defines the “madman” as “a discarded or chosen creature like you or me, who lives by invention, fantasy, and love in the pure regions of the intelligence.” From romanticism to surrealism, with André Breton, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault, in relation to Gerard de Nerval, Comté de Lautréamont, Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Friedrich Hölderlin, the claim “he is mad” is dropped in the face of the question, “Is he mad?” Thus, as Blanchot says about Hölderlin’s extreme and genuinely schizophrenic fits:
Madness would be a word perpetually in disagreement with itself, and thoroughly interrogative, so that it calls into question its possibility, and thereby, the possibility of the language which would compose it, hence the questioning as well, insofar as it belongs to the game of language . . . a language, as such, already gone mad.
( Preface to Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, trans. Holland )
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury. Basic Writings. Translated by T. Williams. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.
Blanchot, Maurice. “La folie par excellence.” In K. Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh: Swedenborg et Hölderlin. Paris: Minuit, 1953. Translation by M. Holland: “Madness par excellence.” In The Blanchot Reader, edited by M. Holland, 110–28. London: Blackwell, 1995.
Boissier de Sauvages, François. Nosologia methodica. Amsterdam, Neth.: Sumptibus Fratrum de Tournes, 1763. French translation by M. Gouvion: Nosologie méthodique, ou Distribution des maladies en classes, en genres et en espèces. Lyon, Fr., 1772.
Brisson, Luc. “Du bon usage du dérèglement.” In Divination et rationalité, 230–48. Paris: Seuil, 1974.
Chiarugi, Vincenzo. Della pazzia in genere e in specie: Trattato medico-analitico. Con una centuria di osservazioni. 3 vols. Florence: Carlieri, 1793–94. Reprinted Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1991. Translation by G. Mora: On Insanity and Its Classification. Introduction by G. Mora. Canton, MA: Science History Production, 1987.
Cicero. Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. London: Heinemann, 1945.
David-Ménard, Monique. La folie dans la raison pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg. Paris: Vrin, 1990.
Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito et histoire de la folie.” In L’écriture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Translation by A. Bass: “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In Writing and Difference, 36–76. London: Routledge, 2001.
Esquirol, Jean Étienne. Des maladies mentales. Paris: Baillière, 1838. Translation by E. K. Hunt: Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity. Introduction by R. de Saussure. New York: Hafner, 1965.
Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Edited by J. Khalfa. Translated by J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006.
Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1988.
Guimet, Fernand. “Caritas ordinata et amor discretus dans la théologie trinitaire de Richard de Saint-Victor.” Revue du Moyen-Âge ( Aug.–Oct. 1948 ).
Iogna-Prat, Dominique. Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’Islam, 1000–1150. Paris: Aubier, 1998.
Jaspers, Karl. Strindberg et Van Gogh: Swedenborg et Hölderlin. Paris: Minuit, 1953.
Laharie, Muriel. La folie au Moyen-Âge: XI–XIIIe siècles. Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1991.
Pigeaud, Jackie. Folie et cures de la folie chez les médecins de l’antiquité gréco-romaine: La manie. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987.
. “La réflexion de Celse sur la folie.” In La médecine de Celse: Aspects historiques, scientifiques et littéraires, 257–79. Saint-Étienne, Fr.: Publication de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, Centre Jean Palerne, 1994.
Pinel, Philippe. Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, ou la Manie. 2nd ed. Paris: J. A. Brosson, 1809.
Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Seneca. Ad Lucilium epistolae morales. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. London: Heinemann, 1925.
MALAISE ( FRENCH )
Malaise ( the opposite of aise [ease] in French, from the Latin jacere [to throw], itself linked to the idea of dwelling, then to the idea of convenience and of pleasure ), refers to a painful sensation, as much moral as physical, and in particular implies the more or less conscious, or more or less confused, perception of a dysfunction in the relationship between the soul and the body. The term malaise can cover a multitude of experiences of suffering, whether fleeting or chronic, slight or keen, that a person, but also a group, might undergo. An era, a language, a culture, or a nation can distinguish itself by naming, defining, or expressing its malaise, in literature as well as in philosophy.
I. A Dysfunction between Soul and Body
1. On the relationship between soul and body, the networks of affect and passion, see in particular CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, GEFÜHL, GEMÜT, GOGO, LEIB, PASSION, PATHOS, PERCEPTION, PHANTASIA ( and IMAGINATION ), STIMMUNG, STRADANIE, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH; cf., ANIMAL, LOVE, PLEASURE, SOUL, SUFFERING.
2. The physiological location in which malaise is rooted varies with the organic cause to which one attributes the dysfunction: so it could be the bile, see MELANCHOLY; the spleen, see SPLEEN; or the throat, see ANXIETY. The degree of its possible medical diagnosis and treatment varies as well: see MELANCHOLY; cf. GENIUS, MADNESS, PATHOS.
II. Sketch of a Typology of Different Kinds of Malaise
A. Individual suffering, ontological suffering, national suffering
Individual malaise can lead one to question one’s relationship to being, and one’s sense of belonging to the world; see ANXIETY, DOR, HEIMAT, Box 2, SAUDADE; cf. CARE, DASEIN, SORGE, SOUCI, and TRUTH, Box 8. It can also have a moral, religious, or social register, or bear witness to a whole era: see ACEDIA, SEHNSUCHT, SPLEEN.
In more general terms, these affects form part of a national cultural register, with the word used to designate them functioning as a password, even when it is “imported,” like “spleen,” for example: see ACEDIA, DESENGAÑO, DOR, SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, SPLEEN.
B. Models and expressions
A number of different temporal and spatial models are involved, one of the richest being the Greek nostalgia, always turning back to the past and seeking to return to the place of origin: see SEHNSUCHT, Box 1 and NOSTALGIA; cf. HEIMAT. But the future and the unknown beyond can be no less determining: see SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, cf. DESTINY.
The expressions of malaise and of pain are also significantly different from one another, implying syntactically the whole ( Lat., me dolet, “I am suffering” ) or the part ( Eng., “my foot aches” ), and determining a relation to philosophy ( angst, Sehnsucht ), and/or to poetry ( nostalgia, saudade, spleen ), to literature ( desengaño ), or to silence ( acedia ): see all of these terms.
MANIERA ( ITALIAN ), MANNER, STYLE
| DUTCH | manjer; handeling; wijze van doen | ||
| FRENCH | manière, faire, style | ||
| GERMAN | Manier; Stil | ||
| ITALIAN | maniera; stile |
AESTHETICS, ART, BAROQUE, CLASSIC, CONCETTO, DISEGNO, GENIUS, GOÛT, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, ROMANTIC, TABLEAU
The word maniera as it was used in different languages, and understood in its different senses, was at the heart of the language of art criticism from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. It refers to the personal nature of an artist’s work, to the taste of a whole school, and to the use of a formal language associated with a particular time and place ( the Florentine manner, the Roman manner, the Flemish manner ). When used with other adjectives ( grand manner, strong or clashing manner ) or with proper names ( in the manner of Michaelangelo, of Carrache, of Raphael ), it refers to the modes of expression chosen by artists. It can take on a negative connotation: a mannered artist is one who copies a manner, who neglects to imitate nature. This diversity of meanings led to a number of substitutes ( in particular faire in French, Stil in German, “style” or “stile” in English, all with different nuances ), and finally to the word being abandoned at the end of the eighteenth century.
I. Maniera and the Origin of Art Theory
It seems that the word maniera first appeared in Italian art literature. The first known occurrence is in the Libro dell’arte by Cennino Cennini, written at the end of the fourteenth century: “Always attach yourself to the best master and, following him everywhere, it would be unnatural for you not to take on his manner [sua maniera] and his style” ( chap. 25 ). Maniera is here the characteristic hallmark of an artist, his signature style, but also the particular qualities that could, paradoxically, be acquired by others. For Raphael, in his letter to Pope Leo X ( in Gli scritti ) on the conservation of ancient monuments, the term can suggest the formal characteristics of a monument: “The monuments of our time are known for not having a maniera that is as beautiful as those of the time of the Emperors, or as deformed as those of the time of the Goths,” which he describes later on as “dreadful and worthless”; these Gothic buildings, he writes, are “senza maniera alcuna [without any manner].” It was, however, in Vasari’s Le vite that maniera became a key term in the language of art criticism. The different meanings and the frequency of its use made it one of the richest notions of Vasari’s text. Maniera referred to the particular character of a people ( Egyptian maniera, Flemish maniera. . . ), and to the different stages in the evolution of art history ( maniera antica, maniera vecchia, maniera moderna ). Each artist had his own maniera, comparable to writing, and it was also sometimes defined with the help of adjectives ( “hard,” “dry,” “great” ). Maniera was also something like an artistic recipe, used to express the nonrepresentable effects of nature: sculptors tried to find a maniera to represent horses. It was above all the hallmark of the greatest artists ( with Michaelangelo the foremost among them ) who knew how to surpass nature. It could, finally, be a form of infidelity to nature, a simple artistic practice.
This meaning became more clearly developed in the seventeenth century, and the most famous expression of a critique of maniera is without doubt that of Bellori, in his introduction to the life of Annibale Carracci:
Artists, abandoning the study of nature, have corrupted art with maniera, by which I mean a fantastic idea, based on practice and not on imitation.
( Le vite, 31; Lives of the Modern Painters, trans. A. S. Wohl )
An art that is too dependent on maniera is removed from nature, and must therefore be condemned.
II. The Double Meaning of “Manner” in European Languages
The adaptation of the word maniera was a determining factor in the transmission of the Italian conception of the work of art to the different countries in Europe. It is striking, then, that in Dutch art criticism, the term manier was used in combination with the term handeling, which had an equivalent meaning. So Van Mander ( 1604 ) talked about the vaste stoute handeling ( the assured and bold manner ) of painting, like the vaste manier van Schilderen of Cornelis van Haarlem. The word manier could also refer to a comparative art criticism: Van Eyck painted his draperies, according to Van Mander, op de manier van Albertus Durerus ( in the manner of Dürer ). Samuel van Hoogstraten, in his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole des Schiderkonst ( Introduction to the high school of painting ) ( 1678 ), uses different expressions incorporating the term—each with a slightly different meaning—within a span of two pages. He uses the word manier in a negative sense in talking about painters who adopt the habit of coloring “als of de dingen aen haere manier, en niet haere manier aen des aerd verbonden was” ( as if things were dependent upon their manner, and not their manner dependent upon things ). Yet the following chapter is entitled “Van der handeling of maniere van schilderen [Of handling or the manner of painting],” where maniere is spelled with an e at the end. In commenting on the word handeling, he talks about wijze van doen ( way of doing ), and the word manier in Holland indeed seemed to remain linked to the particular nature of the hand.
In France, the word had different meanings, and was used in different ways depending on the authors. Abraham Bosse, in his study of the manner of the greatest painters, adjudged that “if the natural was well copied according to the rules,” there would not be so many different manners; but “because ignorance reigned for a period of time among the practitioners of this art, many of them as a result came to formulate manners that pleased their particular fancies” ( Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses manières de peinture [Sentiments on the distinction between different manners of painting], 1649, p. 142 ). Manner was both the characteristic hallmark of an artist and a proof of whim opposed to nature. For André Félibien, manner was “the habit painters adopted in the practice of all the aspects of painting, whether it be composition, or design, or use of color” ( Des principes de l’architecture [Principles of architecture], 1676 ). As he goes on to explain, “Painters normally adopt a habit that is related to the masters they have learned from, and whom they have wished to imitate. So we recognize the manner of Michelangelo and of Raphael in their students.” Depending on which master or model a painter chose, the manner could be good or bad. As the result of this kind of training, manner was the equivalent of an “author’s style,” or the “writing of a person who frequently sends one letters” ( ibid. ). Roger de Piles borrows Félibien’s definition and inflects it: “What we call Manner is the habit painters have adopted, not only in how they use the paintbrush, but also in the three main aspects of Painting” ( Conversations [1677], unpaginated first draft of a dictionary ). He eliminates the reference to the acquisition of manner from the masters, and goes on to compare manner to the “style and the writing of a man from whom one has already received a letter,” whereas Félibien compares it to both. Although his formulation is close to Félibien’s, Piles gives a wider sense to his definition. Manner was both a characteristic of the “hand” of an artist ( handling a paintbrush, writing ) and a characteristic of his mind ( style ). “All kinds of manner are good when they represent Nature, and their difference comes only from the infinite number of ways in which Nature appears to our eyes” ( ibid. ). Manner was the way in which each artist interpreted nature personally, and not the result of a scholarly apprenticeship.
The negative meaning gradually prevailed, however. Within the Académie Royale de la Peinture et de Sculpture, manner was condemned in a lecture delivered in 1672 by Philippe de Champaigne, “Contre les copistes de manière” ( Against artists who copy manner ), which would be delivered five more times between 1672 and 1728. The topic would be taken up again in 1747 in a lecture by the comte de Caylus, “Sur la manière” ( On manner ), which would also be delivered four times over the next twenty years. While Champaigne restricted his condemnation to the lack of originality of the painters who appropriated the manner of others, Caylus defined manner as “a more or less happy failing . . ., a habit of always seeing in the same way . . ., a thing we put in place of nature to be approved, by means of an art that consists merely of its perfect imitation.” Painters who were renowned for having no manner would be deserving of the greatest praise. The lecture by Charles Antoine-Coypel on the “Parallèle entre l’éloquence et la poésie” ( Parallel between eloquence and poetry ) ( 1 February, 1749; published in 1751 ), though, was more in the tradition of Roger de Piles:
Everyone knows that in talking about different kinds of writing we use the word “style,” which thus signifies figuratively the manner of composition or of writing. As painters each have their own manner of composing and writing with a paintbrush, they could use this word, just as orators do. But they simply call this large part of their art “manner.” So when I say that this painting is in the manner of Raphael, I put in the art lover’s mind an idea that is equivalent to what a man of letters would think if I said this speech is in the style of Cicero.
Most dictionaries from the second half of the seventeenth century, which were often compilations, systematically presented these two meanings of the word “manner,” namely the way of doing things that characterized the works of a particular artist, and the artistic failing that consisted in “departing from what was true, and from nature.” They would generally distinguish between “having a manner” and “being mannered,” even though there was often no clear distinction between this latter expression, and “having a bad manner.” When “manner,” understood in the sense of “a way of doing,” was qualified by other adjectives ( “strong and deeply felt,” “weak and effeminate,” “gracious,” and finally “gentle and proper” ), it enabled a series of categories to be established into which one could place all of the greatest painters. As for the “great manner,” it was defined as a knowing exaggeration that created a distance from the baseness of the natural. This expression characterized paintings in which nothing is small, in which details are sacrificed for the idea, and it was, above all, the definition of a genre of painting.
Artists themselves, however, remained critical and used the word “manner” in a predominantly negative sense. For the painter Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, “Manner is an improper assortment of exaggerated traits and of excessive forms” ( Traité de peinture [Treatise on painting] ). He goes on to explain,
This definition states clearly enough that by manner we do not here mean the way of doing things, the style that distinguishes one master from another master, for in this sense everyone has his own manner . . ., besides the shame of ignorance, nothing is more insulting to an artist than being called mannered.
Manner understood in this sense was condemned less forcefully by the engraver and secretary of the Académie, Charles-Nicholas Cochin, than it was by Dandré-Bardon. In a lecture delivered in 1777 at the Académie of Rouen, Cochin took “manner” to mean not “the manner of painting or of drawing,” but everything that was at a remove from nature, every “convention learned or imagined that is not based on what is true, either because it comes from imitating the masters, or from our own mistakes” ( Discours sur l’enseignement des beaux-arts ). For him, manner was associated with the search for an ideal beauty that was superior to nature. But he was nevertheless keenly aware of the technical limits of painting, and considered that it “is very difficult, and almost impossible, not to be somewhat mannered in painting shadows” ( ibid., 21 ). This assimilation of “manner” to convention led to the word entering ordinary language, as is illustrated by Diderot’s essay “On manner,” published in the Salon of 1767:
It would seem, then, that manner, whether in social mores, or criticism, or the arts, is a vice of a civilized society. . . . Every person who departs from the appropriate conventions of his state and of his nature, an elegant magistrate, a woman who despairs and swings her arms, a man who walks in an affected manner, are all false and mannered.
( Les Salons, 3:335–39 )
III. The Search for a Substitute in French: Faire ( Technique )
This negative sense of manière prompted critics to look for an alternative term to describe an artist’s personal way of painting or of drawing. The word goût ( taste ) had been used since the sixteenth century as a synonym for manière, and dictionaries would systematically cross-reference the two terms. Expressions such as “painted with great taste” or “a picture that shows a great taste in painting,” “a taste like Raphael’s,” and so on, would continue to be found in many texts of art criticism. By the seventeenth century, however, the meaning of the word goût had become too broad for it to be able systematically to replace the word manière. Charles Nicholas Cochin attempted to substitute the noun faire for manière, and indeed refused to use manière to refer to the technical qualities of a painting, which in his view were the only ones that mattered:
One of the greatest beauties of art . . . is . . . the singular effect of the sentiment that moves an artist while painting; it is this artistry in the work, this assuredness, this masterly ease, that often distinguishes beauty, that beauty which arouses admiration, from mediocrity, that always leaves us cold. It is that faire [technique] ( as artists call it ) that separates the original of a great master from a copy, no matter how well executed, and that characterizes so well the true talents of an artist, that the smallest, even most uninteresting detail of the painting reveals to the connoisseur that the piece must be the work of a great master.
( “De l’illusion dans la Peinture [On illusion in painting],” 1771 )
Faire, used in the sense in which Bosse and Piles use manière, was thus the subject of long, enthusiastic definition, which allowed Cochin to defend faire against the accusation that it described just a kind of mechanics. Even in poetry, he would say, faire is essential, and is what distinguishes Racine’s Phèdre from Pradon’s. Dictionaries, however, would mention the term only very briefly, and would refer to manière, thus demonstrating the other term’s relative failure. Watelet, in the RT: Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, considered it to apply to the “mechanism of the brush and the hand.” Dandré-Bardon, in his Traité de peinture, instead preferred beau-faire ( fine technique ).
Watelet and Lévesque’s Encyclopédie méthodique: Beaux-Arts ( 1788–92 ) attests to the aesthetic revolution that was taking place around 1790. In the entry “Illusion,” Watelet reproduced in its entirety a lecture by Cochin in which the word faire is foregrounded. Lévesque, who was responsible for completing the dictionary after Watelet’s death ( 1786 ), asked the painter Robin for an article on “Beau-Faire” ( which, under the same heading “Faire,” had followed the former entry by Watelet in Diderot’s Encyclopédie ). Robin radically condemned the term: “It is not, however, that good technique [le bien-fait] or bad technique [le mal-fait] in art do not have their charm and their unpleasantness; but woe betide anyone who does not see them as the least worthy or most insignificant vice of a work of art!” The failure of the word faire is linked to the failure of an aesthetics that wanted to emphasize the technical qualities of painting.
IV. The Emergence of the Notion of “Style”
The notion of “style,” which would ultimately replace that of manner, emerged gradually in art theory. It was used above all comparatively, but from the seventeenth century, certain writers tried to give the word some of the meanings of maniera. Thus, for instance, this passage, cited approvingly in his notes by Nicholas Poussin, which he found in and borrowed from A. Mascardi’s treatise Dell’arte istorica ( Rome, 1636 ):
La maniera magnifica in quattro cose consiste: nella materia overa argumento, nel concetto, nella struttura, nello stile. . . . Lo stile è una maniera particolare ed industria di dipingere e disegnare nata dal particolare genio di ciascuno nell’applicazione e nel uso dell’idee, il quale stile, maniera o gusto si tiene dalla parte della natura e dell’ingenio.
( The magnificent manner consists of four things: the matter or argument, the idea, the structure, the style. . . . Style is a particular manner or talent in painting and in drawing, which comes from the particular genius of each person in the application and use of the idea. This style, or manner, or taste, are on the side of nature and genius. )
( Notes cited in Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni [1672], 480 )
Style, or the particular manner, is thus subordinate to the grand manner, and is inherent in a creative personality. Despite the confused nature of the language, Poussin and Mascardi are certainly trying to draw a distinction between two meanings of the word maniera: one that has to do with the particular character of an artist, and the other that is presented as a rhetorical category characterizing the painting.
In France, the notion of style had been used as a comparative term by Félibien and Piles. Coypel’s lecture cited earlier ( “Parallèle,” 1751 ) helped to determine the meaning of the word style as it applied to painting. Style was a reflection of content, and Coypel established the traditional distinction for painting among the heroic and sublime style ( that of the frescoes of Michaelangelo and of Raphael in the Vatican ), the simple style ( landscapes and animals ), and the tempered style ( the historical paintings of Alabani or Maratta, subjects that were more graceful than impassioned ). Style characterized as much the subject as the way in which it was handled. This parallel influenced dictionary definitions, which all noted that style was an inherent part of composition and execution. While the word indicated a reflection of the genre and the content as far as the composition was concerned, and a formal quality as far as the artistic execution was concerned, it was almost never used in isolation; it could be heroic, simple, tempered, and so on, or dry, polished, assured, harsh, and so forth. The term remained fairly marginal in France, however, and it was the translations of English and German texts that would help make “style” into one of the key notions of art theory.
While Johann Georg Sulzer, in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste ( General theory of art ), used Manier in a sense very close to the French and Italian meanings, the word Stil began to appear in Johann Joachim Winckelmann almost simultaneously, and in a much broader sense. Winckelmann in 1764 made reference to “dem verschiedene Stile der Völker, Zeiten und Künstler” ( Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums [History of the Art of Antiquity] ), which his French translator J. Huber rendered in 1789 as “les différents styles et les différents caractères des peuples, des temps et des artistes” ( the different styles and the different characters of the people, the times, and the artists ).” Stil borrows certain of the connotations of “manner,” but eliminates the particular role of the artist. Styles are characteristic of peoples and times, like manners for Vasari. Winckelmann thus studied the Egyptian style, the Etruscan style, and identified four styles among the Greeks: Älter Stil, which could be translated as “ancient style” or “style of imitation”; hohe Stil or Stil der Grosse, sublime or grand style; schöne Stil, beautiful style; and finally Stil den heinlichen oder den platten, minor and vulgar style. “Style” for Winckelmann, and similarly for Anton Raphael Mengs, thus replaced “manner” as a means of talking about the formal characteristics of a civilization, while “manner” introduced a personal dimension.
In England, there was a similar shift: the reflection on “manner” referred to connoisseurship, and the word was used in the senses Abraham Bosse gave to it. “Manner” still had a positive connotation in Jonathan Richardson, but a much more ambiguous one in William Hogarth:
What are all the manners, as they are called, of even the greatest masters, which are known to differ so much from one another, and all of them from nature, but so many strong proofs of their inviolable attachment to falsehood, converted into established truth in their own eyes, by self-opinion?
( The Analysis of Beauty, [1753] )
Joshua Reynolds reversed the terms, and used the term “manner” negatively:
[T]hose peculiarities, or prominent parts, which at first force themselves upon view, and are the marks, or what is commonly called the manner, by which that individual artist is distinguished. . . . A manner, therefore, being a defect, and every painter, however excellent, having a manner.
( Discourses on Art, 6th Discourse [1774] )
Reynolds introduced the term “style,” while he spelled “stile” and “style” in a somewhat unsystematic fashion. “Stile” could be the equivalent of “manner” in the sense of designating the ways in which a subject is expressed: “Stile in painting is the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colours, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed” ( 2nd Discourse [1769] ), whereas “the style” would refer to the rhetorical category to which the work corresponds: “The Gusto grande of the Italians, the Beau idéal of the French and the ‘great style,’ ‘genius,’ and ‘taste’ among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing” ( 3rd Discourse [1770] ). But the two meanings and the two spellings are also used interchangeably: “And yet the number is infinite of those who seem, if one may judge by their style, to have seen no other works but those of their master, or of some favourite whose manner is their first wish and their last” ( 6th Discourse [1774] ).
In the Encyclopédie méthodique, Lévesque devoted an entry of five-and-a-half columns to the word Style ( as much as the two combined entries of Manière and Maniéré [Mannered] ). His definition, which he acknowledged was essentially taken from the writings of Mengs and of Reynolds, was an attempt to synthesize the meaning of Stil in Winckelmann and Mengs, and the second sense of “style” in Reynolds: “The combination of all the elements that come together in the conception, the composition and the execution of a work of art make up what we call its style, and one might say that it constitutes the manner of being of this work” ( Watelet and Lévesque, Encyclopédie méthodique, “Style” ).
So even though the word “style” had been used previously in art criticism, it was only through the detour of its translation that it became established within a critical metalanguage and replaced “manner,” at the expense, however, of a narrowing of its semantic field. “Style” quickly assumed all of the meanings that until then had been associated with “manner,” with the exception of the sense of practice pure and simple, which was seen as negative. It did not encompass the particular character of the hand of an artist, and subordinated painting to style as a means of expressing an idea. In the nineteenth century, however, the contradictory senses of “manner” reappeared in relation to the word “style,” and brought into play at the same time the particular style of the artist, that of his time and his school, the mode of representation chosen, and the difference relative to a natural model. The nuances introduced by each artist in the use he made of this term make any single definition impossible, and leave translators no other solution but to adapt this catchall word to each of their respective languages so as to enrich their own treatises.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bellori, Giovan Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architettori moderni. Torino: G. Einaudi, 1976. First published in Rome, 1672. Translation by Alice Sedgwick Wohl: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Bosse, Abraham. Le peintre converty aux précises et universelles règles de son art. Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses manières de peinture, dessin et gravure . Edited by R.-A. Weigert. Paris: Hermann, 1964. First published in 1649.
Brusati, Celeste. Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Caylus, Anne Claude de. “Sur la manière et les moyens de l’éviter.” In Vies d’artistes du XVIIIe siècle. Discours sur la peinture et la sculpture. Salons de 1751 et de 1753. Lettre à Lagrenée, edited, with introduction and notes, by André Fontaine. Paris: Laurens, 1910.
Cennini, Cennino. Il libro dell’arte della pittura: Il manoscritto della Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, con integrazioni dal Codice riccardiano. Edited by Antonio P. Torresi. Ferrara, It.: Liberty House, 2004. Composed betwen 1400 and 1437; first published in 1821. Translation and notes by Christiana J. Herringham: The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini: A Contemporary Practical Treatise on Quattrocento Painting. London: Allen and Unwin, 1899.
Champaigne, Philippe de. “Contre les copistes de manière.” In Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle, edited by Alain Mérot, 224–28. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996.
Cheney, Liana de Girolami. Readings in Italian Mannerism. Foreword by Craig Hugh Smyth. New York: Lang, 1997.
Cochin, Charles-Nicolas. “De l’illusion dans la Peinture.” In vol. 2 of Œuvres diverses; ou, Recueil de quelques pièces concernant les arts. Paris, 1771.
. Discours sur l’enseignement des beaux-arts prononcés à la séance publique de l’Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Rouen. Paris: Cellot, 1779.
Coypel, Charles-Antoine. “Parallèle entre l’éloquence et la poésie.” Mercure de France ( May 1751 ): 9–38.
Dandré-Bardon, Michel-François. Traité de peinture suivi d’un essai sur la sculpture. Paris, 1765.
Diderot, Denis. “De la manière dans les arts du dessin.” In vol. 3 of Les Salons, edited by Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Essay first published in 1767.
. Diderot on Art. 2 vols. Edited and translated by John Goodman. Introduction by Thomas Crow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Eck, Caroline van, James McAllister, and Renee van de Vall, eds. The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Félibien, André. Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, et des autres arts qui en dependent: Avec un dictionnaire des termes propres à chacun de ces arts. Paris, 1676.
Franklin, David. Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500–1550. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. Edited, with introduction and notes, by Ronald Paulson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. First published in 1753.
Hoogstraten, Samuel van. Inleyding tot de hooge schoole des Schiderkonst. Rotterdam, 1678. French translation and commentary by Jan Blanc: Introduction à la haute école de l’art de peinture. Geneva: Droz, 2006.
Mérot, Alain. French Painting in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Caroline Beamish. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Piles, Roger de. Conversations sur la connaissance de la peinture et sur le jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. First published in 1677.
Raphael. Gli scritti: Lettere, firme, sonetti, saggi tecnici e teorici. Edited by Ettore Camesasca, with Giovanni M. Piazza. Milan: Rizzoli, 1994.
Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by R. R. Wark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. First published ca. 1774.
Smyth, Craig Hugh. Mannerism and Maniera. Introduction by Elizabeth Cropper. 2nd ed. Vienna: IRSA, 1992.
Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: In einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann Reich, 1771–74.
Van Mandel, Karel. Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by H. Miedema. Doornspijk, Neth.: Davaco, 1994.
Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de più eccelenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani. 9 vols. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Sansoni, 1878–85. First published in 1568. Translation by Gaston du C. de Vere: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 10 vols. New York: AMS, 1976.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. First published in 1764. Translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave: History of the Art of Antiquity. Introduction by Alex Potts. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006.
MATTER OF FACT, FACT OF THE MATTER
| FRENCH | fait, réalité |
FACT and BELIEF, ENGLISH, NATURE, PROPOSITION, REALITY, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, TATSACHE, THING, TO TRANSLATE, WORLD
We will here be less interested in fact, than in the rather strange expression “matter of fact,” which is found in English philosophy, and notably in Hume. “Matter” means ( a ) “material substance, thing” and ( b ) “affair, subject,” and “matter of fact” thus in a sense replicates the word “fact.” We might mention a number of typical common expressions, such as “for that matter,” “a matter of time,” “what’s the matter with you?” but “matter” in its derived verbal form also indicates importance and implication: “no matter,” “it matters.” This specifically English double-meaning enables a number of clever plays on words, such as the title of Peter Geach’s book Logic Matters, or Bertrand Russell’s What Is Mind? No Matter? What Is Matter? Never Mind. It is an integral part of the semantics of the expression “matter of fact,” which both refers to factuality and posits it as necessary and essential. This duality is found in the ( absolutely untranslatable ) inverted form of the expression, as it is used by the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine: “fact of the matter,” which is a particularly forceful statement of factuality, while adding to this notion a physicalist dimension ( the “fact of the matter” as a physical reality ), but also, paradoxically, an ontological question.
I. “Matters of Fact”
“Matters of fact” ( it is frequently in the plural in Hume ) is normally translated into French as faits ( facts ), but also sometimes, with a surprising literalism, as choses de fait ( factual things ) ( see the French translation of Book 1 of the Treatise of Human Nature by G. Tanesse and M. David, 1912; the term was retained in a recent edition by Didier Deleule ). This translation, in addition to demonstrating the paradoxical nature of the expression “matter of fact,” highlights the “hardness,” or at least the reality of a fact defined in this way. It does seem at first sight as if for Hume the expression “matter of fact” means an empirical fact, a state of affairs, which is part of reality: “This is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained” ( Treatise of Human Nature, 1.1 §7, 19 ). “Fact” and “reality” sometimes appear to be synonymous: “If this be absurd in fact and reality, it must also be absurd in ideas” ( ibid. ).
“Matters of fact” are thus questions that concern the existence of objects, and empirical reality:
It is evident, that all reasonings from causes or effects terminate in conclusions, concerning matter of fact; that is, concerning the existence of objects or of their qualities.
( Treatise of Human Nature, 1.3 §7, 94 )
We have to add that these “matters of fact” are objects of “belief.” They are “conceived” by us; we have an idea of them, but a particularly strong and lively idea. This liveliness defines belief, which “super-adds nothing to the idea”:
It is certain we must have an idea of every matter of fact which we believe. . . . When we are convinced of every matter of fact, we do nothing but conceive it.
( Ibid., 1.3 §8, 101 )
These are the two aspects we also find in the famous definitions of Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a work in which Hume draws a distinction between “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas.” Facts, by contrast with relations of ideas, are not known by understanding alone: their opposite is always possible, and the certainty proper to them is different:
All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. . . . Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter is still possibility.
( Enquiry, 25 )
We might wonder first of all what Hume means in referring to the “contrary” of a fact when he has defined a fact as an empirical fact, and not as an idea, a belief, or a proposition ( whose object is a fact ). Here we encounter a peculiarity of “fact” that “encapsulates” a state of affairs and a proposition, a specific characteristic indicated by the English expression “that-clause”: a fact is expressed in the form “that p,” which refers both to a fact and to a proposition:
That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.
( Ibid., 25–26 )
“That the sun will not rise tomorrow” is an “intelligible” proposition, which can be affirmed, but also a fact ( see SACHVERHALT ). To believe a proposition is not to have a feeling of belief that would be attached to a given proposition, it is to “believe a fact,” directly so to speak, which is indicated by the construction “believe that.”
If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country, or in France; he would give you a reason. . . . All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature.
( Ibid., 26 )
“That-clauses” of this kind have been subsequently explored by contemporary philosophers of language, notably Ramsey, Austin, Strawson, and Davidson, in order to challenge the idea that there are objective “facts” ( see BELIEF, PROPOSITION ) that are objects of belief, or of statements. So they explore expressions such as “true to the facts” and “unfair to facts,” as well as the question of what we say when we “say that” ( see “On Saying That” in Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation ). What is at stake is knowing whether we can eliminate the notion of fact from the theory of language.
II. The Expression “Fact of the Matter”
In several well-known texts, Quine used the expression “fact of the matter,” as a rather puzzling inversion of Hume’s expression “matter of fact” ( the reinvention of Humean naturalism being one of Quine’s goals, Hume is naturally one of Quine’s main philosophical points of reference ). The expression, first used in a negative form ( “no fact of the matter” ), suggests that some questions have no reality or foundation. Quine expresses this idea in the context of his thesis concerning the indeterminacy of radical translation. The situation of radical translation is the case where we are dealing with a radically foreign language, with no dictionary or tradition of translation, nor any bilingual interpreter, and where a linguist has to compose a translation manual from his or her empirical observations of the verbal behavior of an indigenous people. According to Quine’s thesis, there are several possible, empirically equivalent, and incompatible translations of one and the same expression. It is meaningless to ask which is the correct translation, the correct reconstitution of the foreign language. In From a Logical Point of View, he summarizes his method using the expression ex pede Herculem: we can reconstitute the statue of Hercules from his foot, but there is nothing from which the language can be reconstructed, no “fact of the matter,” no ( physical ) reality that allows us to ask the question:
In projecting Hercules from the foot we risk error, but we may derive comfort from the fact that there is something to be wrong about. In the case of the lexicon, pending some definition of synonymy, we have no statement of the problem; we have nothing for the lexicographer to be right or wrong about.
( From a Logical Point of View, 63 )
Quine explains the meaning of the expression in the context of a polemical exchange with Chomsky by comparing the indeterminacy of translation to the underdetermination of theories by their data. Just as several theories can account for the same set of empirical data, several theories of language can account for the same verbal behavior. Linguistic theory, as part of science, is underdetermined by the data of indigenous verbal behavior. But this is not sufficient to account for the indeterminacy of translation, which is a banal epistemological problem, since, as Quine explains, the indeterminacy of translation is additional to this empirical undeetermination:
Though linguistics is of course a part of the theory of nature, the indeterminacy of translation is not just inherited as a special case of the under-determination of our theory of nature. It is parallel but additional.
( Reply to Chomsky, in Words and Objections, 303 )
This is where the “fact of the matter” comes into play, with respect to empirical data as well, or even in a “physicalist” context, where reality is defined solely by the natural sciences: “This is what I mean by saying that, where indeterminacy of translation applies, there is no real question of right choice; there is no fact of the matter even to within the acknowledged under-determination of a theory of nature” ( ibid. ).
Translation has no “fact of the matter”; it translates “nothing.” When a linguist thinks he has discovered something, he is only projecting his own hypotheses, “catapulting” himself, as Quine puts it, into a native language using the categories of his own language:
There is no telling how much of one’s success with analytical hypotheses is due to real kinship of outlook on the part of the natives and ourselves, and how much of it is due to linguistic ingenuity or lucky coincidence. I am not sure that it even makes sense to ask.
( Word and Object, 77 )
There is no sense, or rather no reality ( of “fact of the matter” ) to the question, since the translator, to a large extent, “reads” his or her own language into the native language. The absence of “fact of the matter” repeats in a particularly radical form Quine’s critique of meaning: nothing is translated in translation, and no meanings or senses ( see SENSE ) of which the expressions in different languages would be the counterpart or the expression.
The “fact of the matter,” as the redundant nature of the expression suggests, gestures toward a physicalist point of view, as Quine says in an article entitled “Facts of the Matter.” If the question of translation—knowing which manual of translation is the “correct” one—is deprived of the “fact of the matter,” it is because it has no physical relevance:
My position was that either manual could be useful, but as to which was right and which wrong there was no fact of the matter. . . . I speak as a physicalist in saying that there is no fact of the matter. I mean that both manuals are compatible with the fulfillment of just the same elementary physical states by space-time regions.
( “Facts of the Matter,” in Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine, 167 )
A real difference for “fact of the matter” would be a difference in the way elementary physical states are distributed. However, we should not deduce from this that the notion is just a physical one, which would weaken Quine’s thesis. It is a naturalist notion ( and here, very characteristically, the reference to Hume reappears ): the notion of “fact of the matter” is intrinsic to scientific theory; this factuality is defined by our theory of the world, as a product of human nature. The “fact of the matter” is no longer a physical substratum ( “a distribution of elementary physical states” ) that is independent of language, but also turns out to be, by an effect of mise en abyme, part of our conceptual schema: “Factuality, like gravitation and electric charge, is internal to our theory of nature” ( Theories and Things, 23 ). The notion “fact of the matter” is itself to be considered immanently. This is Quine’s conclusion in Theories and Things: “The intended notion of matter of fact is not transcendental or yet epistemological, not even a question of evidence; it is ontological, a question of reality, and to be taken naturalistically within our scientific theory of the world” ( 23 ).
So the truly radical nature of his notion of “matter of fact” comes to the fore in Quine’s late texts: it refers not only to empirical evidence, like the Humean “matter of fact,” but also to a radical ontological indeterminacy. “What counts as a fact of the matter” is, as such, subjected to indeterminacy: “We can switch our own ontology too without doing violence to any evidence, but in so doing we switch from our elementary particles to some manner of proxies and thus reinterpret our standard of what counts as a fact of the matter” ( Theories and Things, 23 ).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davidson, Donald. “On Saying That.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 93–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Davidson, Donald, and Jaako Hintikka, eds. Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1969.
Follesdal, Dagfinn. “Indeterminacy of Translation and Underdetermination of the Theory of Nature.” Dialectica 27 ( 1973 ): 289–301.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. Edited by Stephen Buckle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published in 1748.
. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. First published in 1739–40.
Laugier-Rabaté, Sandra. L’anthropologie logique de Quine: L’apprentissage de l’obvie. Paris: Vrin, 1992.
Pitcher, George, ed. Truth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
Quine, W. V. O. “Facts of the Matter.” In Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine, edited by Robert W. Shahan and Chris Swoyer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. Also in American Philosophy from Edwards to Quine, edited by R. W. Shahan, 176–96. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.
. From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays. 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
. “Indeterminacy of Translation Again.” Journal of Philosophy 84 ( 1987 ): 5–10.
. “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation.” Journal of Philosophy 67 ( 1970 ): 178–83.
. “Replies.” In Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, edited by Donald Davidson and Jaako Hintikka, 292–352. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1969.
. Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
Strawson, Peter S. “Truth.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 24 ( 1950 ): 129–56.
MEDIA / MEDIUM ( of communication )
I. The Magic of Words
Here is Freud in 1890 on “Psychische Behandlung ( Seelenbehandlung )” for a medical manual whose title, Die Gesundheit, needs no translation:
Wir beginnen nun auch den “Zauber“ des Wortes zu verstehen. Worte sind ja die wichtigsten Vermittler für den Einfluß, den ein Mensch auf den anderen ausüben will; Worte sind gute Mittel, seelische Veränderungen bei dem hervorzurufen, an den sie gerichtet werden, und darum klingt es nicht länger rätselhaft, wenn behauptet wird, daß der Zauber des Wortes Krankheitserscheinungen beseitigen kann, zumal solche, die selbst in seelischen Zuständen begründet sind.
( Gesammelte Werke, 5:301–2 )
The French edition of this text, translated and edited by Jean Laplanche, renders the paragraph:
A présent, nous commençons également à comprendre la ‘magie’ du mot. Let mots sont bien les instruments les plus importants de l’influence qu’une personne cherche à exercer sur une autre; les mots sont de bons moyens pour provoquer des modifications psychiques chez celui à qui ils s’adressent, et c’est pourquoi il n’y a désormais plus rien d’énigmatique dans l’affirmation selon laquelle la magie du mot peut écarter des phénomènes morbides, en particulier ceux qui ont eux-mêmes leur fondement dans des états psychiques.
( “Traitement psychique [traitement d’âme]” )
Finally, here is Strachey’s translation in the Standard Edition:
Now, too, we begin to understand the “magic” of words. Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental changes in the person to whom they are addressed. So that there is no longer anything puzzling in the assertion that the magic of words can remove the symptoms of illness, and especially such as are themselves founded on mental states.
( “Psychical [or Mental] Treatment” )
Even after setting aside the problems of translation in general and of the Freud translation in particular, we are left to wonder over Strachey’s choice of the word “media” where Freud wrote Vermittler and the French translators opted for instrument—not because “media” works poorly, but because it works so well, perhaps better than the original. A Vermittler is a person who acts as a broker or intermediary; to suggest that words are the most important, Vermittler is to offer us a metaphor that evokes a person in a well-tailored suit working on commission. The French instrument presents still other challenges of interpretation, not metaphorical this time, but metonymic. The claim that words are instrumental in exercising influence is clear enough. But what about the claim that they are the “most important” instruments? Compared to what? The dictionary offers us such examples of the word instrument as “compasses” ( un instrument de bord ) and “tractors” ( un instrument agricole ) but nothing that would make a compelling alternative to “words,” which is what it would take for Freud’s argument to make sense.
By contrast, the English word “medium” raises far fewer difficulties, and the ones it does raise are much more interesting. The RT: Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a medium is “any intervening substance or agency.” We understand right away that Freud is arguing that of the various substances or agencies through which men and women seek to intervene in one another’s lives—drugs, money, caresses, and so on—words are the most effective when it comes to producing beneficial changes in mental states. It would have been helpful if Freud had specified whether he meant spoken words or written words, or both, but that is a problem of argumentation rather than of language or translation. In short, the term makes it easier to understand Freud’s claim and then to have an argument about it. After centuries of untranslatability, “medium” has been welcomed into French and German and a number of other languages for precisely this reason. It allows authors to join an argument long dominated by Anglo-American philosophy, social science, and industry.
II. A Wonderfully Perfect Kind of Sign-Functioning
The Latin adjective medius has roots in the Sanskrit madhya and the Greek mesos, all three terms meaning something like “in the midst” or “in the middle.” One could be in the midst or middle of any number of things, some quite concrete—the distance from here to there—and others more abstract. Hence Quentin Skinner cites Cicero’s maxim in De officiis that “our highest duty must be to act in such a way that communes utilitates in medium afferre—in such a way that the ideal of the common good is placed at the heart of our common life.” This idea was taken up by Renaissance civic humanists, who held that classical virtues “ought to be in medio, in our midst; they ought indeed to be actively brought forth in medium, into the center of things” ( Visions of Politics ).
“Medium” approaches a recognizably modern sense when, in addition to being a place where ideas or affects can be brought forth, it becomes a way of bringing them forth. One of the first appearances of this notion is in book 2 of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning ( 1605 ), where Bacon takes up Aristotle’s claim that “words are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words.” This may be true, he writes, “yet it is not of necessity that cogitations be expressed by the medium of words.” Bacon mentions the gestures of the deaf and dumb, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese characters. One could even say it with flowers: “Periander, being consulted with how to preserve a tyranny newly usurped, bid the messenger attend and report what he saw him do; and went into his garden and topped all the highest flowers, signifying, that it consisted in the cutting off and keeping low of the nobility and grandees” ( in The Major Works ).
This argument may well have been influenced by Montaigne, who, in one especially beautiful passage in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” ( 1580 ), reflected on the many forms of communication available to animals and men: “After all, lovers quarrel, make it up again, beg favors, give thanks, arrange secret meetings and say everything, with their eyes.” Not only eyes, but heads, eyebrows, shoulders, and hands communicate “with a variety and multiplicity rivalling the tongue.” Montaigne called these moyens de communication ( John Florio’s 1603 translation of the essay translates this as “meanes of entercommunication” ). But there is a crucial difference between Montaigne and Bacon’s theories of media: Montaigne is concerned to show the many ways men and women can communicate with one another; Bacon wants to find the most effective ways. The introduction of “medium” into English-language theories of communication shifted the grounds of philosophical debate toward pragmatic matters.
This shift was helped by the word’s associations with natural philosophy, which classified media according to how they assisted or resisted whatever passed through them ( e.g., light, magnetism ). “When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language,” James Madison writes in Federalist Paper no. 37 ( 1788 ), “his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.” Madison’s pun neatly captures this conflation of the two senses of medium in English; such a pun would not have been possible in French or German ( the French translation of 1792, usually attributed to Trudaine de la Sablière, misses it entirely by describing His will as “obscurcie par le voile dont elle s’envelope”; a translation of 1902 by Gaston Jèze does much better with “le nébuleux moyen par lequel elle est communiquée” ).
As chemical and mechanical technologies for reproducing words and images proliferated in the nineteenth century, so too did the sense that these technologies were members of the same conceptual family: the family of media. Thus a treatise on libel from 1812: “Libel in writing may be effected by every mode of submitting to the eye a meaning through the medium of words; whether this be done by manual writing, or printing, or any other method” ( George, A Treatise on the Offence of Libel ). The formula “medium of words” evokes Bacon, but the emphasis is now on the “symbolical devices,” as the author calls them, rather than on the symbols themselves. The word “medium” could expand to include nearly anything that facilitated communication. In his 1864 account of the analytical engine, one of the first general-purpose computers, Charles Babbage explains that it functioned through the “medium of properly-arranged sets of Jacquard cards” ( Passages from the Life )—the punch cards engineered by Joseph-Marie Jacquard to operate his automatic looms. By the turn of the twentieth century, the concept had expanded yet again to include new electrical means of communication. ( On electrification’s contribution to the unification of a concept of media, see Gitelman and Collins, “Medium Light.” )
■ See Box 1.
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Ordinateur/Computer/Numérique/Digital For the advocates of a purity of the French language jeopardized by the multiplication of imports from English, computer science and digital culture have represented an important battleground because of the Anglo-American preeminence that has marked them since their beginnings in the 1940s. In their perspective, the adoption of terms like ordinateur and informatique to designate computer and computer science appeared as clear victories. These words not only sounded French, they also conveyed a different take on what computing was about. More recently, however, the line of demarcation has become less evident because of the ambiguity that surrounds the definition of numérique versus digital. Ordinateur was proposed in 1955 by the Latin philologist and Sorbonne professor Jacques Perret, who had been asked by one of his former students to suggest French names for the new machines that IBM was about to commercialize in the country. Perret suggested ordinateur, which applied to the capacity of someone to arrange and organize. Ordinateur used to have strong religious connotations. According to the RT: Le Littré, the adjective had been applied to God bringing order to the world. It also designated the person in charge of ordaining a priest. But very few persons would be aware of this religious dimension, argued Perret, so that the name would essentially relate to the notions of ordering and accounting, just like the other French term, ordonnateur, which was used in the administration for officials with power to authorize expenditures. Ordinateur was from the start a success. It was even transposed in Spanish and Catalan as ordenador and ordinador. ( It is however worth noting that most other Romance languages preferred to translate the word “computer”: calcolatore in Italian or calculator in Romanian. ) This success coincided with a major evolution in the public perception of computers. Whereas the first machines had been generally envisaged as mere computing devices, the accent was shifting toward their capacity to order logical propositions, a capacity that seemed to announce the possibility of an artificial intelligence. Thus, despite its French particularism, ordinateur was in profound accordance with a worldwide transformation epitomized by the 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In charge of every aspect of the mission to Jupiter staged in the film, the HAL 9000, the ship’s computer, was definitely more an ordinateur than a computing device. Informatique was another major success. Coined in 1962 by a former director of the computing center of the French company Bull, Philippe Dreyfus, from the contraction of information and automatique, the term was officially endorsed during a cabinet meeting by President Charles de Gaulle, who preferred it to ordinatique to name the science of information processing ( see Mounier-Kuhn, L’informatique en France ). Around the same time, the German Informatik, the English “informatics,” and the Italian informatica also appeared. But the French term has enjoyed a widespread use without equivalent in other countries. Since its adoption, first by the government, then by the French Academy, the term has evolved in two seemingly discrepant directions. On the one hand, it covers a much broader range of subjects and domains than was envisaged by its creator and early promoters. Beside computer science proper, it applies to information technology as well as to the entire computer industry. On the other hand, it retains a distinctive scientific flavor. In French, informatique seems to belong to the same disciplinary family as mathematics, thus putting the emphasis on the abstract dimension of computer science, on its logic and algorithmic content. It is worth noting that until recently, computer science was often associated with mathematics in the programs of study of French higher-education institutions. Such an association bore the mark of the long-standing approach of technology as an “application” of pure science, a conception epitomized by institutions such as the École Polytechnique. At this stage it would be tempting to contrast a French propensity toward abstraction when dealing with computer and digital subjects with a more concretely oriented English vocabulary. Browsing through the various official publications devoted to French alternatives to the use of English words and expressions ( the feared anglicismes ), such as the Vocabulaire des techniques de l’information et de la communication published in 2009 by the Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie, the official committee for seeking such alternatives, seems to confirm such an opposition. The contrast between the French numérique and the English “digital” could easily pass for a typical instance of this divergent orientation. A closer examination reveals, however, a more confusing set of relations between the two terms, as if the full meaning of what is at stake in their contemporary use could be apprehended only by playing on the interwoven resonances that they evoke. This ambiguous relation might represent an incentive to question the opposition mentioned above between allegedly French and English approaches to computer and digital subjects. Numérique versus “digital”: both terms derive from a similar reference to numerals. The French term is directly related to nombre and numération, whereas the English comes from “digit.” Contrary to its French equivalent, “digit” refers to the concrete operation to count on one’s fingers: digitus means “finger” or “toe” in Latin. The term “digital” is thus well adapted to the most recent evolution of computer culture, namely, its more and more concrete, almost tactile, turn. Conceived initially as mere electronic calculators, then as logical machines that could possibly become intelligent in the future, computers have become emblematic of a new cultural condition giving priority to the individual and his/her sensations and emotions. This evolution had been foreseen by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab—an institution devoted to the exploration of the new possibilities of interface between human and machine. In his 1995 book, Being Digital, Negroponte opposed the information age to the digital age about to unfold. According to him, whereas the former was all about anonymity, standardization, and mass consumption, the new cultural era would see the rise of individual experience and preferences. The French numérique definitely misses this individual and sensory dimension. But the full scope of what is at stake in the rise of digital culture is perhaps better understood by playing on the extended resources that a comparison between English and French offer. The lack of direct tactile connotation of culture numérique is partly compensated by the fact that the adjective “digital” is more clearly related to fingers in the French language. It applies among other things to fingerprints: empreintes digitales. With the new importance given to biometrics in emergent digital culture, this connection matters. It reveals that what is at stake today is not only individual experience but also identification by institutions and corporations. From numbers to fingers and back, it becomes then interesting to work constantly on the border between French and English, on a moving threshold marked by disconcerting exchanges and uncanny inversions of meaning. Antoine Picon BIBLIOGRAPHY Mounier-Kuhn, Pierre-Eric. L’informatique en France de la seconde guerre mondiale au plan calcul: L’émergence d’une science. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1996. |
This proliferation was such that Charles Sanders Peirce attempted to arrive at a formal definition in his 1906 essay “The Basis of Pragmatism in the Normative Sciences.” What do all these media have common? “A medium of communication is something, A, which being acted upon by something else, N, in its turn acts upon something, I, in a manner involving its determination by N, so that I shall thereby, through A and only through A, be acted upon by N.” He offered the example of a mosquito, which is acted upon by “zymotic disease,” which it in turn transmits to a new host animal in the form of a fever. It was an odd example, logically and biologically, and Peirce recognized its oddness. “The reason that this example is not perfect is that the active medium is in some measure of the nature of a vehicle, which differs from a medium of communication in acting upon the transported object, where, without further interposition of the vehicle, it acts upon, or is acted upon by, the object to which it is conveyed.” In other words, the mosquito did not simply transmit the zyme unchanged; it transformed the zyme into a fever. This logic of the parasite stood in contrast to a classically logocentric scenario: “After an ordinary conversation, a wonderfully perfect kind of sign-functioning, one knows what information or suggestion has been conveyed, but will be utterly unable to say in what words it was conveyed, and often will think it was conveyed in words, when in fact it was only conveyed in tones or facial expressions” ( “The Basis of Pragmatism” ).
III. A Somewhat Cumbrous Title
Samuel Weber has argued that the modern era is characterized by a theological stance that attributes to media “the function of creatio ex nihilo.” “The ‘singularization’ and simplification of the complex and plural notion of ‘the media’ would be a symptom of this theology” ( Benjamin’s -abilities ). He credits this sacralization to Hegel, whose notion of mediation ( Vermittlung ) elevates the process to world-historical importance. However, it was not only, or even mainly, speculative philosophy that gave us “the media” as an uncountable noun with innumerable powers. It was Anglo-American social science.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the recognition of a family resemblance between the various “implements of intercommunication” ( to take another phrase of Peirce’s ) meant that they could be compared and contrasted in profitable new ways ( Weber, ibid. ). “The medium gives a tone of its own to all the advertisements contained in it,” writes Walter Dill Scott, a student of Wilhelm Wundt, who was a professor of applied psychology at Northwestern University, in his Theory of Advertising of 1904. Scott made this remark in a section of his book entitled “Mediums,” but this form was soon obsolete. The plural would vacillate in grammatical number before settling into a singular that could be labeled as “mass,” “mainstream,” “new,” and so forth. Indeed, as late as the 1940s, it was still necessary to explain what one meant by “mass media.” Julian Huxley, presiding over the newly formed UNESCO in 1946, announced that “Unesco is expressly instructed to pursue its aims and objects by means of the media of mass communication—the somewhat cumbrous title ( commonly abbreviated to ‘Mass Media’ ) proposed for agencies, such as the radio, the cinema, and the popular press, which are capable of mass dissemination of word or image” ( the English text of Article I reads “means of mass communication”; the French text, “organes d’information des masses” ).
The term “mass media” found its niche in scholarly articles by such influential American midcentury thinkers as Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, and Paul Lazarsfeld.
But European philosophers resisted this tendency. Their attitude is summed up by Sartre in a fragment from his notebooks of 1947–48 entitled “The American Way: Technical Civilization, hence Generality”: “This is what mass media, best seller, book of the month, best record, Gallup, Oscar, etc., tend to do,” he wrote, leaving all the important words in English. “It is a matter of presenting to the isolated exemplar the image of the totality” ( Notebooks for an Ethics ). Back in Germany, Adorno also took his distance from a term that he had resorted to repeatedly while in exile. In “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” first delivered as a radio address in 1963, he argued that “the very word mass-media [Massenmedien], specially honed for the culture industry, already shifts the accent onto harmless terrain. Neither is it a question of primary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufflates them, their master’s voice.” For Sartre, Adorno, and their contemporaries, “mass media” was less an untranslatable than an untouchable sullied by intellectual and institutional associations with American cultural imperialism. The entry in the current edition of the RT: Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française reflects this sense of its origins: “Média. n. m. XXe siècle. Abréviation de l’anglais des États-Unis mass media, de même sens.”
This resistance was soon exhausted. In the late 1960s, the German publishers of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media settled on the weirdly operatic title Die magichen Kanäle. At the end of the century, a collection of McLuhan’s writings appeared under the title Medien Verstehen: Der McLuhan-Reader ( 1998 ). In France, in the 1990s, Régis Debray launched the excellent Cahiers de médiologie, devoting issues to themes like theatricality and bicycles; more recently he started a review entitled, simply, Médium. Cognates like “multimedia,” “remediation,” and “mediality” proliferate globally. This reflects less the dominance of English than the collective urgency of an intellectual project. “For the moment,” Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “it is less important to respond to the question of the meaning of Being than it is to pay attention to the fact of its exhibition. If ‘communication’ is for us, today, such an affair—in every sense of the word . . . —if its theories are flourishing, if its technologies are being proliferated, if the ‘mediatization’ of the ‘media’ brings along with it an auto-communicational vertigo, if one plays around with the theme of the indistinctness between the ‘message’ and the ‘medium’ out of either a disenchanted or jubilant fascination, then it is because something is exposed or laid bare” ( Being Singular Plural ).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. “Résumé über Kulturindustrie.” In Ohne Leitbild. Frankfurt: Suhrhampf Verlag, 1967. Translation by Anson G. Rabinbach: “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 ( Fall 1975 ): 12–19.
Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman, Green, 1864.
Bacon, Francis. The Major Works. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Freud, Sigmund. “Psychische Behandlung ( Seelenbehandlung ).” In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. London: Imago Publishing, 1942. Translation by Jean Laplanche: “Traitement psychique ( traitement d’âme ).” In Résultats, idées, problèmes I. ( 1890–1920 ). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. Translation by James Strachey: “Psychical ( or Mental ) Treatment.” In vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74.
George, John. A Treatise on the Offence of Libel, with a Disquisition on the Right, Benefits, and Proper Boundaries of Political Discussion. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1812. Reprinted in The Monthly Review 73 ( January–April ) 1814.
Gitelman, Lisa, and Theresa M. Collins. “Medium Light: Revisiting Edisonian Modernity.” Critical Quarterly 51, no. 2 ( July 2009 ): 1–14.
Huxley, Julian. Unesco: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy. UNESCO Preparatory Commission, 1946. Links to these versions, along with Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, can be found at http://www.onlineunesco.org/UNESCO%20Constitution.html ( accessed 1 Sept. 2009 ).
Madison, James. Federalist Paper no. 37. In The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, edited by Terence Ball. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Translation by [Trudaine de la Sablière?]: Le Fédéraliste, ou Collection du quelques écrits en faveur de la constitution proposée aux États-Unis. Vol. 2. Paris: Chez Buisson, 1792. Translation by Gaston Jèze: Le Fédéraliste ( commentaire de la constitution des États-Unis ). Paris: V. Girard & E. Brière, 1902.
Montaigne, Michel de. “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” In The Complete Essays, translated by Michael Andrew Screech. New York: Penguin, 1993.
. The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne. Translated by John Florio. London: George, Routledge, 1886. First published in 1803.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Peirce, Charles S. “The Basis of Pragmatism in the Normative Sciences.” In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 ( 1893–1913 ). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Scott, Walter Dill. The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology in Their Relation to Successful Advertising. Boston: Small, Maynard, and Company, 1904.
Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics. Vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Weber, Samuel. Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
MELANCHOLY
| FRENCH | mélancolie | ||
| GERMAN | Melancholie, Schwermut | ||
| GREEK | melagcholia [μελαγχολία] | ||
| LATIN | melancholia, furor |
ACEDIA, DESENGAÑO, DOR, ES, FEELING, GEMÜT, GENIUS, INGENIUM, I/ME/MYSELF, LEIB, MADNESS, MALAISE, PATHOS, SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, SPLEEN, STIMMUNG
Although we can date the origin of what we know as modern psychiatry back to the work of Philippe Pinel—whose Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation or Mania ( year IX, 1801 ) signaled both the autonomy of mental illness as a field of study separate from physiology and the application of new clinical and institutional practices to the treatment of patients—the study of mental illness, or of madness, as a discipline has a longer history that goes back to antiquity. The word “melancholy” at that time referred to a state of sadness and anxiety, without a fever, and most often accompanied by an obsession, or near delirium, this state being marked by an excess of black bile, which some authors considered to be the cause of the illness and others as a concomitant symptom.
The word “melancholy,” then, comes originally from the Hippocratic theory of the humors ( melas [μέλας] ), “black”; cholê [χολή], “bile” ), as well as from a chemical theory of fermentation and of vapors, and would continue to be understood more or less explicitly as such until the nineteenth century, even though “melancholy” tended by then to refer to a state of mental alienation that was increasingly distinct from physiology. By exploring the history of the term and the shifts in its meaning, we can thus identify four themes and points of reference to consider diachronically: the conception of humor, the symptom of obsession, lovesickness, and the nature of genius. The way in which we will discuss them will help us to differentiate between the major trends of English, German, and French psychiatry, and the typologies that they propose.
One might have thought that the general application in psychiatry of the assessment scales of humor—in its psychological sense, close to the Greek thumos [θυμός], and its disorders ( dusthumia [δυσθυμία] )—would have attenuated the former denotations of the term “melancholy.” It seems, however, that modern approaches to melancholy—particularly as it is manifested in mourning, psychomotor slowing down, generalized negativism, or intellectual hyper-lucidity—are on the contrary reviving the figures as they were used by writers in antiquity, in that they pertain more to actual psychological mechanisms than to simple semantic analogies.
I. The Ambiguity of the Concept
From the perspective of contemporary psychiatry, melancholy is something of a paradox, in that it has to take account both of the relativity of a nosology that has largely been superseded by our understanding of how complex affections are, and also of the uniformity of a semiology determined by the different scales of assessment of the symptoms ( for the most part American ) which European psychiatry is compelled to use as its points of reference. Nevertheless, melancholy still seems to elude any attempt at a definitive classification, as can be seen, for example, in the shift from DSM III ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ) ( 1980 ) to DSM III-R ( 1987 ), and then DSM IV ( 1994 ), which sees a modification of the diagnostic signs of melancholy, as well as in the CIM ( Classification internationale des maladies de l’OMS ), known as the ICD in English, which practically eliminates it.
The problem is not a new one, and Jean-Étienne Esquirol, in his work De la lypémanie ou mélancolie ( On lypemania or melancholy ) ( 1820 ), already wrote that “the word melancholy, widely used in ordinary language to express the habitual sadness of a few individuals, must be left to the moralists and poets, who do not have to be as rigorous as doctors with their expressions. This term can be retained and used to describe the temperament in which the hepatic system is predominant, and to refer to the disposition to obsessive ideas and sadness, while the word monomania expresses an abnormal state of physical or moral sensibility, with an unconscious and permanent delirium.” Esquirol adopted the word lypemania ( lupê [λύπη], “sadness” ) in place of “melancholy,” and used the latter term to refer on the one hand to a disposition of the temperament—a permanent state ( hexis [ἕξις] ), a predisposition ( proclivitas )—and on the other, to the open manifestation of the illness, a punctual, accidental state ( diathesis [διάθεσις] ), the manifestation of the ill ( nosos [νόσος], nosêma [νόσημα] ).
The interest of this ambiguity particular to “melancholy” as a term is expressed throughout the history of psychiatry, whose origin can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century with the practice of “moral treatment,” via two paradoxical semiological forms, made up of contradictory traits, such as the signs of genius and of madness on the one hand, and the signs of what was permanent and accidental on the other. The dispositional characteristics of genius were thus manifestations of a humor that could just as easily lead to madness, as a result of a momentary disturbance of thymic equilibrium. Although European psychiatry is still relatively young, it does not for all that challenge the traditional historical sources from which it emerged, both medical and philosophical, however attentive it appears to be to international ( for the most part originally American ) systems of diagnosis. As testimony to this, we might take current debates, often inspired by psychoanalysis, about the meaning of the term “melancholy,” in other words, about the specific signs that guide its classification in the three main traditional nosographic groups ( neuroses, psychoses, and perversions ). Already in 1915, at the beginning of his article “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud wrote: “Melancholia [Melancholie], whose concept [Begriffsbestimmung] fluctuates even in descriptive psychiatry, takes on various clinical forms the grouping together of which into a single unity does not seem to be established with certainty; and some of these forms suggest somatic rather than psychogenic affections.” The study of the concept is further complicated if we take into account another tradition, in parallel with the medical history of the shifts in its uses and meanings, that is, the ethological tradition ( ethos [ἔθος], “custom,” but which also designates a set of cultural characteristics; see MORALS ), which is no doubt more literary, but which still has an influence on the psychiatric approach. This is the very tradition that Esquirol advised leaving to the moralists and poets, and which draws on the mythical resources particular to different groups.
II. The Humoral Conception of Melancholy
The word “melancholy,” as its etymology indicates, locates the affection it refers to within the Hippocratic theory of the four humors ( black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood ), which persisted into the nineteenth century, even though interest in humoral theory waned in the second half of the seventeenth century as scholars and others switched their focus toward mental alienation, understood increasingly as a form of distraction or wandering. Indeed, around this time a number of works appeared which, imbued with the scholarship of the Renaissance, itself built upon Greek and Arabic sources, progressively made way for a more mentalist conception of obsession or idée fixe, the therapies for which took the form of purging and amusement or distraction ( see CATHARSIS ). So starting with the conception of a complex chemistry in which heating and fermentation were the main agents of transformation of natural elements, the Hippocratic description of temperament ( one could be melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, or sanguine ) understood as a combination ( krasis [ϰϱᾶσις] ) of the four humors ( chumoi [χυμοί] ), depending on how much of each of them was present in different organs, would be integrated into an already more modern conception of a pathology centered on mental disorders, and in relation to which humor would only be one cause among several others.
The first definition of melancholy is to be found in aphorism 23 of book 6 of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates: “If a fright or despondency ( dusthumia [δυσθυμία] ) lasts for a long time, it is a melancholic affection” ( The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, Eng. trans. Francis Adams ). And Galen, who resurrected humoral theory in the second century CE and can serve as a representative of Greco-Roman medicine, completed Hippocrates’s definition as follows: “Melancholy is a sickness that damages the mind ( gnome [γνώμη] ), with a feeling of malaise ( dusthumia ) and an aversion toward the things that are most cherished, without a fever. In some of those who are ill, an abundant and black bile also attacks the esophagus, so much so that they vomit and at the same time their mind is considerably affected” ( Galen, Medical Definitions, 19 K 416 ). One could not express better than in this description of melancholy, which is both etiological and semiological, the reciprocal influence of the soul and the body, as if, in this case, temperament ( krasis ) suffered from an excess of black bile which, damaging the stomach ( stomachos [στόμαχος] ), affected the soul in its vital energy. Melancholy indeed suggests a mental pathology with a double cause, in humoral chemistry and in an organic dysfunction. But Galen’s definition does further work still. Although it is the excessive vapors of back bile that most often cloud the brain, the same result can be seen with the combustion of the other three humors, to such an extent that the term “melancholy” ends up referring not only to the harmful effects of black bile, but also to those of the other three humors when they are affected in the same way. So “melancholy” became a generic and representative term for madness, which comes from a complexion or temperament that, even though it remains natural, nonetheless predisposes an individual to this kind of distraction.
It was for this very reason that other writers, and in particular Aretaeus of Cappadocia, extended the semiology of melancholy well beyond the simple effects of black bile, to include a more multiform disorder of the understanding. Cicero, who favored this extension of the term, went as far as to translate the melancholy of the Greeks using the term furor, thus reducing melancholy to a “deep anger” or to a “fury,” as J. Pigeaud explains in his seminal work La maladie de l’âme. In book 3 of his Tuscalanae, Cicero wrote: “The Greeks, indeed . . . have no one word that will express it: what we call furor, they call μελαγχολία [melagcholia], as if the reason were affected only by a black bile, and not disturbed as often by a violent rage, or fear, or grief. Thus we say Athamas, Alcmæon, Ajax, and Orestes were raving [furere].” And according to R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Cicero’s intention was to “describe a convulsion of the soul which could not be gathered from the mere concept of ‘atrabiliousness’ ” ( Saturn and Melancholy ).
This extension of the term “melancholy” still lies at the heart of the problematic in contemporary psychiatry, in the sense that some psychiatrists like to keep “melancholy” within the category of psychoses, whereas others prefer to consider it as a specific structure, and yet others still are keen to eliminate it from the nosology—but it does not originate with the Neo-Stoics ( Hippocrates, Galen, and their followers ). It was already present in Plato and Aristotle, who compared melancholy to the state of inebriation, and considered that the multiple forms of melancholy reproduced drunkenness’s different degrees of distraction. Plato writes in The Republic: “Then a precise definition of a tyrannical man is one who, either by birth or by habit or both, combines the characteristics of drunkenness, lust, and madness ( melagcholikos [μελαγχολιϰός] ).” And in the famous Problem XXX, Aristotle, or Pseudo-Aristotle, maintains that the word “melancholy,” following the variety of manifestations of inebriation according to the nature of the individuals, designates the excessive and incomprehensible changes they undergo whenever too great a quantity of black bile is acting upon them, or whenever some external occurrence stimulates it too aggressively: “In most people then black bile engendered from their daily nutriment does not change their character, but merely produces an atrabilious disease. But those who naturally possess an atrabilious temperament immediately develop diverse characters in accordance with their various temperaments.”
III. “From Humor to Mood”: The Age of Quantitative Measure
As a result of these successive shifts in the meaning, then, the word “melancholy” does not refer to a precise pathological entity, and in this respect, its overwhelmingly diverse and extensive semiology makes it impossible to establish a definitive and stable nosology. It suggests an “essentially polymorphous” temperament, to borrow J. Pigeaud’s expression from his commentary on Problem XXX, which possesses in their potential state “all the characteristics of all men.” The numerous attempts at a psychiatric classification of melancholy have accordingly relied on privileging some aspect or particular mechanism. This has meant isolating such aspects or mechanisms from the whole range of manifestations of the illness so as to make them a distinctive sign that corresponds to a system of classification, whose relevant criteria can then be shared in advance. But the experimental studies that were conducted with a view to achieving this aim did not confirm the hypothesis of differential biological reaction, so researchers then focused their efforts on somatic treatments, in particular, medication using antidepressants. These positive studies are part of an active attempt to establish the meaning of the word “melancholy,” retrospectively as it were, since it is according to how patients respond to the different treatments administered to them that researchers hope to confirm whether they can be classified as melancholic or depressive. In any case, we are forced to return to the need to determine international assessment criteria, one of whose manifest paradoxes is that they give renewed credibility to a humoral theory by trying to understand and measure melancholy according to a quantitative assessment scale.
Given the inherently variable nature of the nosography of melancholy, we cannot but be skeptical a priori of the many ventures nowadays to isolate analytically the symptoms of the identified affection in order to then evaluate them using a comparative scale of measure. Furthermore, to proceed in this way one would have to envisage a nosographic category sufficiently broad to cover all of the apparently characteristic signs of melancholy according to their intensity. This was the category of depression, and the debate surrounding the distinction between melancholy and depression, far from disappearing, has grown even more complex as a result.
It would also be worth looking more closely at diagnostic classifications, as well as the assessment scales of the intensity of the symptoms, in particular, those relating to the psychomotor disorder that is seen increasingly as an indication of melancholy. This is because they show, on the one hand, the mobility of the semiology of melancholy—and this is far from insignificant when it is sometimes assigned psychotic characteristics—and on the other hand, the interest there is in retaining the notion of humor ( or mood, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition ). Humor or mood in this sense is obviously different from the humoral theory of Hippocrates, and more closely resembles the Greek notion of thumos [θυμός], understood as the way in which one feels oneself, the self-perception of one’s own relationship to the world, a kind of psychic coenesthesia ( see CONSCIOUSNESS, Box 1 ). Anglo-Saxon psychiatry is most explicit in this regard, and uses the word “mood” for this “coenesthetic” humor. We are now far removed from the physical register in which the humors operated, however; no longer would the word “moisture” be in any sense applicable to this “coenesthetic” humor, though “moisture” is indeed related to the liquid humor in the Hippocratic sense and, for someone like Ben Jonson, already referred metaphorically to the general character of a man when all of his humors flowed in the same direction:
So in every human body,
The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of humours. Now thus far
It may, by metaphor, apply itself
Unto the general disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour.
( Every Man Out of His Humour, I.1 )
In the same way, spleen would be considered as that vague and sad humor which, as in ancient times, comes from an accumulation of humor/moisture in the spleen, which was where black bile was to be found, according to many physicians ( R. Blackmore, 1725 ). ( See INGENIUM, Box 2, and SPLEEN. )
While contemporary psychiatry attempts to assess the intensity of certain characteristic signs of humor, or mood, with a view to establishing a psychiatric nosography that is intended to be universal, it approaches melancholy in a number of different ways. These alternative approaches include, on the one hand, phenomenological psychiatry, with its notion of endogeneity, which goes back to clinical observation of the behavior of the patient, and the description he himself gives of his mood, and on the other hand, psychiatry inspired by psychoanalysis, which identifies within the patient’s discourse the psychic mechanisms underlying the formation of the symptoms. Here again, the meaning of the word “melancholy” will be subject to many modifications and shifts, depending on the methodological approach adopted. So phenomenological psychiatry will refer to melancholy as an illness of endogeneity by emphasizing its generic nature, and psychoanalytically inspired psychiatry will describe it as a narcissistic illness and will consider the nosological question as secondary. If the former approach is still attached to the notion of humor, this time in the sense of the inner sentiment of the unfolding of a personal history ( innere Lebensgeschichte ), the latter approach is attached to the various figures of melancholy, understood as formal models of psychic function, some of which are already to be found in the annals of modern psychiatry, dating from the end of the eighteenth century.
IV. The Clinical Tradition: The Age of the Great Classifications
A. Endon, Stimmung, Schwermut
Endogeneity, then, might provide a new interpretation of modern humor, as useful to positivist psychiatry ( with the category of “endogenous depression” ) as it is to phenomenological psychiatry, which attempts to account for the notion of melancholy itself. Hubertus Tellenbach, heir to the great German phenomenological psychiatric trend of the first half of the twentieth century ( with, among others, E. Strauss, V. E. von Gebsattel, and L. Binswanger ), proposed a definition of endogeneity accompanied by its substratum: the endon, which we should no doubt understand as a formal schema that is useful for the overall configuration of the notion. The term “endogenous” appeared around the beginning of the twentieth century ( A. Mechler ), and was often a synonym for “constitutional,” which did little to explain the nature of melancholy since other affections could also be related to it, in particular, psychoses and neuroses, which were said to have a “depressive basis.” The term concerned the “disorders of the humor,” or even the “vital feelings” in their stuporous or maniacal disturbances. This is where some located those affects whose anomalies derived from a primary organization of drives, and which were thus relatively independent from external events and psychological motivations. This simply indicates how vague the notion still was, and how it seemed to call out for a third etiological field alongside the somatic and the psychic. Indeed, Tellenbach’s definition of melancholy is more an overall description than an actual definition: it emphasizes the importance of vital rhythms, and the coherence of their combination, in other words, their historial aspect:
By endogeny, then, we mean what emerges as the unity of the basic form in any life event [als Einheit der Grundgestalt in allem Lebensgeschehen]. The endon is by its origin the phusis, which opens out and remains within the phenomena of endogeny.
( Melancholie )
The word “melancholy” thereafter refers, in a phenomenological context, to an endokinesis, to a movement of the endon, or even a rupture with the endon, understood as a blockage of the basic manifestations of life ( stupor, despondency, despair ), a blockage that the individual endeavors to prevent by a defensive behavior focused entirely on a respect for, and conformity to, an established order ( Ordentlichkeit ). If Tellenbach’s phenomenological approach to melancholy still reflects the relevance of German psychiatric thought, in spite of the pressure exerted by the obligation to apply international classificatory norms, it is because the humoral tradition has its roots not only in a clinical practice that attempts to analyze its manifestations, but also in a philosophical tradition that psychiatrists are not averse to exploiting in elaborating their theoretical models.
Like psychiatrists from the English-speaking world, German psychiatrists use an original term to designate modern humor: Stimmung, whose meanings have an even wider resonance than the corresponding English term, “mood” or “humor” in the nonphysical sense. Stimmung comes from stimmen, to make one’s voice ( Stimme ) heard, to establish, to name ( bestimmen, “to determine” ), and to play an instrument in order to tune it. This latter meaning, when extended to humor, suggests the fact of putting oneself in a certain frame of mind ( see STIMMUNG ). The lexicon of the French translation of Tellenbach’s work retains the following composite nouns: Gestimmtsein ( being-in-a-mood ); Gestimmtheit ( color of the mood ); Verstimmung ( change of mood ); and Stimmbarkeit ( suppleness, affective mobility ). The richness of this vocabulary ( beyond its application to melancholy, which makes melancholy not so much a morbid entity as a frame of mind, or even a typus, as Tellenbach puts it ) echoes in this sense the great movements of German psychiatry from the end of the nineteenth century. This tradition, beyond the clinical and nosographic conception of someone like Kraepelin in particular, was still very much in line with the work ofJ. Herbaert: a dynamic of associations of ideas in which the antagonisms between representations were related analogically to intracortical antagonisms. As far as melancholy specifically was concerned, the German classification made a distinction between a simple melancholy ( melancholia simplex ) and a stuporous melancholy ( melancholia errabunda, melancholia agitans sine active ); relative to these two forms, there were then a melancholy without delirium; a precordial melancholy; a delirious melancholy, which was also still called religious; and a hallucinatory melancholy, which was still called hypochondriacal. W. Griesinger, for example, follows this classification of melancholy ( Mental Illnesses, 1845 ), and places melancholy properly speaking ( Melancholia ), along with hypochondria, in the more general category of “states of mental depression. Melancholy ( Schwermut ).” This latter term, a synonym for despondency or depression ( schwer, “heavy, weighty,” and Mut, “feelings, qualities, or states of mind” ), conveys the main quality of humor, much as does the term “tristimania,” coined by the American B. Rush in 1812, or lypémanie ( lypemania ), coined by J.-É. Esquirol in France in 1820, or L. Delasiauve’s dépression ( 1860 ). From this perspective, and in order to distinguish Melancholia from simple Schwermut, R. Krafft-Ebing and H. Schüle would emphasize the accidental or nonaccidental nature of the etiological factor, as well as the presence or lack of anxiety. But it was E. Kraeplin who would foreground most explicitly the difficulty of establishing a stable semiology of melancholy, and of putting it in a relevant classificatory category.
B. Manic depression
French psychiatrists before Kraepelin had included melancholy in the group of thymic psychoses broadly named “manic depressive” ( or what Farlet in 1851 called folie circulaire [circular madness], and Baillarger in 1854 called folie à double forme [double-formed madness] ). Kraepelin, however, distinguished it clearly from manic depression up until 1913, when he included it in the eighth edition of his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, emphasizing the identity of the clinical symptoms of the two illnesses, even if the variations of mood in melancholy often remain very slight, to the point of being imperceptible. From that point on, manic depression constituted a disease in the same way that paranoia and schizophrenia did, and it encompassed all of the symptomatic variations of melancholy, of mania, and of the different combined states, as well as pure mono-symptomatic forms. The interest of such a classification as regards melancholy lay in what would henceforth appear to continue to distinguish it from other simple forms, that is, the integrity of ideation. From psychomotor inhibition to the state of stupor, from delirious ideas to confused states, three types of pure melancholy emerge, all characterized by an aggravation of what we might call a fullness of the idea, from the point of view of the mechanism; and by moral suffering and psychomotor inhibition, from the point of view of the classic syndrome.
Kraepelin’s nosography remains a key reference point in the history of psychiatry, not just in Germany, but in Europe more generally, insofar as, according to a detailed semiology, all the simple forms of the illness are grouped under more general forms ( so, for example, “pure melancholy” is under the form “manic depression” [maniac-depressive Psychose] ), and thus retain their characteristics almost autonomously. For this reason, melancholy is still nowadays classed as manic depression or neurotic depression depending on the assessment of the disturbances of ideation, of the intensity of sadness and anxiety, as well as of the degree of psychomotor slowing, to use the modern expressions. The second half of the nineteenth century, and the start of the following century, witnessed an explosion of great German treatises in psychiatry, which were vast systems of classifications of mental illness that relied on the most detailed of semiological methods, drawn up during close clinical observation. The mechanisms of the different ideas, the very ones brought to light and favored by the organo-dynamist approach that would be developed in France, and even more so by psychoanalytically inspired psychiatry, could already be glimpsed as a number of metaphorical figures at work in these treatises. For melancholy, for example, one finds in the figures of the hole and of the cavity ( T. Meynert, Freud ), as well as the figure of the whirlwind and the spiral movement ( H. Schüle, H. Emminghaus ), characteristics of the loss of psychic investment, and of the flux of thought. After this, the psychosomatic or psychic mechanisms underlying the symptomatic manifestations would enter the definitions of mental affections at the expense of a semiology, whose endless reworkings made the establishment of a universal nosology extremely difficult.
V. Melancholy as a Paradigm of Narcissistic Illness
A. Melancholic discourse
In spite of the delirious or confused appearance that certain forms of melancholy can take, the illness that corresponds to this name is said to be distinguished from manic depression in that it preserves the integrity of intellectual processes, even if the full weight of the obsession often causes a patient to sink into extreme pathological behaviors, such as total mutism or systematic negativism. German psychiatry and French psychiatry attach a similar importance to the discourse of the patient through the repetitive figures he presents, and which is said to translate the nature of the affections from which it derives. In 1891 G. Dumas, in his medical thesis Les états intellectuels dans la mélancolie [Intellectual states in melancholy], makes a distinction between an organic melancholy and an intellectual melancholy, depending on the whether the state prior to melancholy was affective or intellectual, and according to the possible variations of the causal order, conceived as follows: organic facts, mental productions, and confused perceptions of these facts, or melancholy. Melancholy is thus less a pathology than a psychic operation whose aim is to justify the organic or affective disorders of which the patient continues to be aware. Melancholy would not simply have an organic etiology—which neither the Germans nor the French were yet able to do without—but also a rational logic. This logic prompts the patient to translate his impressions of diminution and of weakness into a type of discourse and behavior, which then precisely becomes part of the definition of melancholy. “In all cases,” writes G. Dumas, “the affective effect, melancholy, appears to be merely the awareness of the movements made, the confused idea of the body. We are no longer in the presence of an ill-defined power succeeding an idea, and being expressed by physical organs; we are only ever dealing with intellectual states, ideas, images or sensations, and with physiological states.” W. Griesinger, to whom G. Dumas refers in his thesis, had already emphasized this impression of great coherence that emerges from melancholic discourse. For Griesinger, this is a testimony to the mind trying to understand cenesthetic states or apparently inexplicable movements of the body, and which, in order to do this, conceives of logical arguments that are more or less removed from the lived context, more or less artificial in relation to the still uninterpreted affective base.
B. The mechanism of melancholy
We find in Germany as well as in France, besides an interest in nosology, a continued and no less powerful interest in the study of the particular forms of discourse of the patients, insofar as these forms might reveal the underlying etiological mechanisms of the different types of affections. Alongside the descriptive semiological description of melancholy, then, a morphological definition explaining the illness is also elaborated, in both Germany and France, whose medical traditions are nonetheless distinctly different: German alienists remained attached to the theory of the association of ideas since J. Herbart, who attributed to representations a force of attraction and repulsion, and French alienists remained attached to the organo-psychic approach of the Greco-Latin tradition. This organo-psychic influence is still largely present not only among French psychiatrists, but also more widely across the Mediterranean, insofar as it determines two otherwise unrelated directions for research and treatment of melancholy: the neuro-pharmacological approach, and the psychodynamic approach, whose essentially psychoanalytic points of reference are still very much alive in France. Melancholy then comes to be discussed in terms of mechanisms, and in this it follows Freud, who drew this conclusion from V. Tausk’s lecture on melancholy on 30 December 1914:
The essential criterion by which we must circumscribe the symptoms ( which, in practice, never appear in their pure form ) and the forms of illness is its mechanism. The observation of benign cases, offers, as Hitschmann mentioned, the only possibility of drawing up a chart of pure symptoms. If this is true, there is only one melancholy, which has the same mechanism, and which should be curable by psychoanalysis.
Freud’s call for circumscribing and unifying the concept of melancholy was followed, however, in a less-than-unified way by psychoanalytically inspired psychiatrists. The result is a vast nosographic panorama within which melancholy shifts from being a manic-depressive psychosis to a major depression, and even a narcissistic illness ( still described as an “illness of the ideal” ). The 1914 formulation comes close to the category of “narcissistic neuroses” that Freud, in 1924, would distinguish from psychoses and neuroses, and of which for him melancholy was the paradigm: “We may provisionally assume that there must also be illnesses which are based on a conflict between the ego and the super-ego. Analysis gives us a right to suppose that melancholia is a typical example of this group; and we would set aside the name of ‘narcissistic psychoneuroses’ for disorders of that kind” ( “Neurosis and Psychosis”; see ES ). Psychiatric practice, while necessarily distinct from psychoanalytic practice in the sense that its primary aim is the medical objective of the disappearance of the symptom, through well-established therapeutic knowledge, nevertheless shares with psychoanalysis a recognition of those unconscious mechanisms identified by Freud, which it finds at the heart of the melancholic patient’s discourse. Three such mechanisms are commonly encountered in psychiatric literature. They attach respectively to the figure of mourning, understood as an impossible psychic resolution; to the figure of a generalized negativism, which results in a logical, hyper-formalized discourse; as well, finally, as to the figure of a narcissistic rift, whose consequences would manifest themselves through a devalorization of one’s self-image.
C. The figures of melancholy: Lovesickness
It is curious to note how similar contemporary figures of melancholy are to those that were already present in the history of the illness, from antiquity up through the seventeenth century, in the form of different kinds of melancholy, such as “divine melancholy” ( Marsilio Ficino ), “white melancholy or white bile” ( Agrippa of Nettesheim ), and even “amorous or erotic melancholy” ( Jacques Ferrand and the authors of the various “Treatises on Lovesickness” of the seventeenth century ).
If the ancients had already provided a good description of these different manifestations of melancholy, the Renaissance and the classical age established them as almost autonomous models. In this regard, “erotic melancholy” offers one of the most instructive examples, insofar as it provides the raw material for a number of specialized treatises written by doctors, as well as philosophers and theologians. We find many allusions in antiquity to the discomfort of the state of being in love ( Hippocrates, Caelius Aurelianus, Rufus of Ephesus, Aretaeus of Cappadocia ), either from erôs [ἔϱως], or from epithumia [ἐπιθυμία], passionate longing, lust, desire ( the latter, provided that we understand the transcendental movement that epithumia leads to as the overcoming through love of simple covetousness or bodily desire ). And it is indeed the state of being in love, and its crisis of passion, which causes unreliability of judgment, as well as languor and the stupor that accompanies it when the absence of the object is felt all too cruelly. Aretaeus of Cappadocia tells of one such case when he describes an adolescent boy who, having sunk into melancholy and been abandoned by his doctors, was cured by the love of a young girl: “But I think, he added, that he was in love from the beginning and that, having been disappointed in his advances on the young girl, he became languorous, which made him appear melancholic to his compatriots” ( quoted in J. Pigeaud, De la mélancolie ). This passion thus gave way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a particular category of melancholy: “erotic melancholy,” which was compared to a kind of “fury of love” or “amorous folly,” an expression that a doctor such as Jacques Ferrand translates using the word erôtomania [ἐϱωτομανία]. It could certainly be considered as an “illness of desire,” an expression that would not really be anachronistic since the author specifically makes desire an efficient cause of the malady:
We therefore say that, according to this doctrine [the doctrine of Hippocrates], love or erotic passion is a kind of reverie, which is caused by an excessive desire to enjoy the loved object. Now, if this kind of reverie is without fever, and accompanied by ordinary fear and sadness, it is called melancholy. Res est solliciti plena timoris amor [Love is a thing that is filled with fear and worry].
( Ferrand, Traicte de l’essence et guerison de l’amour et de la mélancolie érotique )
Ferrand, following his master du Laurens, classifies melancholy as a kind of hypochondria, attaching to it the symptoms of the latter, such as stomach upsets and disorders associated with the organs. While he claims that the heart is the seat of the cause of the illness, the liver the seat of love, and the genitalia the seat of combined causes, the symptoms are said to be in the brain, which is responsible for the general alteration of one’s mind and temperament. His contemporaries, in particular, A. de Laurens, J. Guibelet, T. Bright, and R. Burton, also respected this classification, and while none of their works was devoted to lovesick melancholy, they did discuss it in particular chapters. These authors, and especially Burton, talk in this regard of “heroic melancholy,” an expression that is also mentioned by Ferrand, who traces it back to Arabic writers:
Avicenna, and the whole Arabe family, call this illness Alhasch or Iliscus in their language: Arnaud of Villanova [de Villeneuve], Gordon, and their contemporaries call it heroic or lordly Love, either because the ancient heroes or half-gods were greatly affected by this ill, as the Poets recite in their fables, or because the great Lords and Ladies were more prone to this illness than the people, or finally, because Love dominates and masters the hearts of lovers.
( Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour ou mélancolie érotique )
Now, the term “heroic melancholy” no doubt comes from a semantic confusion of the Greek erôs ( love ) with herus, heroycus, or hereos ( words whose meaning has long eluded lexicographers ), if not even with the Greek hêrôs [ἥϱως] ( hero ), Arnaud de Villeneuve in the thirteenth century, in his Liber de parte operativa being the first to make this mistake, which was later adopted by Burton. Lovesick melancholia, the object of many specific treatises, is thus offered, from the point of view of mood or affect, as the model for a behavior characterized by a withdrawal of investment in the outside world, a turning in upon oneself, and a moral suffering fueled by feelings of self-deprecation and guilt. Mourning or separation merely provides melancholy with an opportunity to manifest itself; the illness is here understood as a constitutive mode of psychic structuration for some, and a physic-chemical anomaly for others, which are present well before any precipitating event. The fact remains that, as the works on “lovesickness” show so clearly, melancholy is affirmed as an “illness of desire,” in the sense in which desire, attacked at its core, gives way as it collapses to a number of different expressive formulations, such as, for example, Seneca’s taedium vitae, close to boredom, or even nostalgia ( see SEHNSUCHT ), understood in the seventeenth century as an illness of exile, or homesickness ( J. Hofer, 1688 ).
To classify melancholy as a specific category of psychiatric nosography seems, then, to be an impossible task, given the different epistemological contexts that govern such a classification on the one hand, and the variability of symptomatological descriptions that work against any precise semiology on the other. However, alongside these descriptions, phenomenological and psychoanalytical trends continue to inform a different kind of practice, which is based on an approach toward the illness that, for phenomenology, focuses on the nature of the patient’s temperament and on an awareness of his or her biographical history, and for psychoanalysis, focuses instead on unconscious mechanisms and psychic structuration. What is understood by melancholy is therefore understood in terms of the symptoms themselves which, first identified in antiquity, would nowadays be defined by a metaphorical displacement: mood and moral suffering, obsession and partial delirium, lovesickness and mourning, as well as the characteristic of genius, and the hyper-lucidity of a discourse reduced to a pathological authenticity. We might say that desire can no longer be sustained by narcissistic projection, for want of a sufficiently stable specular image, and that this originary failure points to a fundamental anomaly in the relationship to the other, the advent of which psychoanalytic metapsychology tries to reconstruct. Melancholy is a narcissistic illness, an illness of desire and of truth, in the sense that, as Freud states, the melancholic subject has come so close to this truth that it falls ill as a result ( Mourning and Melancholia, 1915 ). Beyond the seduction of an eminently protean philosophical and literary discourse, melancholy defies any attempt at reductive classification in the field of psychiatry. It is thus held captive by the Aristotelian kairos [ϰαιϱός], if we are willing to understand this kairos as the opportunity offered to the temperament to manifest itself as a structural effect.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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. Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger. Translated by Jacob Needleman. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
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MEMORY / FORGETFULNESS
| FRENCH | mémoire, oubli | ||
| GERMAN | Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Vergessen | ||
| GREEK | mnêmê [μνήμη], mnêmosunê [μνημοσύνη], memnêmai [μέμνημαι], lêthê [λήθη], lêsmosunê [λησμοσύνη] | ||
| LATIN | subvenire, menini, obliviscor |
CONSCIOUSNESS, DICHTUNG, HISTORY, IMAGE, MADNESS, MIMÊSIS, PARDON, PRESENT, SOUL, TIME, TO TRANSLATE, TRUTH, UNCONSCIOUS, VERNEINUNG
The specialized words denoting the faculty of mastering and actualizing the past, that is, memory-thought, split off from a group encompassing the activity of the mind in the broadest sense, and opening out onto many different associations, including warlike violence and delirium. The root men- covers everything to do with the mind in general, with men in menos [μένος] ( force ), and man in mania [μανία] ( delirium ), and for memory in Greek: mimnêskomai [μιμνήσϰομαι], mnêmê [μνήνη], mnêmosunê [μνημοσύνη], and in Latin: memini and memor, memoria.
Memory has a double status: it can be referred to and invoked, or it can be experienced. There are different models for thinking memory. First and foremost of these is writing ( Gr. graphê [γϱαφή] ), with a trace that is left and then found again; imprinting ( Gr. tupos [τύπος] ); and a trail ( Ger. Spur ) that can be followed. We find, relatedly, the notion of a “treasure” trove, present in various models of thought ( see the connotations of the Ger. Gedächtnis ). When this memory-treasure is possessed, it lends itself to the progressive work of internalizing the world ( see the Ger. Erinnerung ), which is more dynamic than the different models of memory in the Romance languages. The close association of memory with gratitude is prefigured in the German language ( Dank, “thanks,” alongside Gedanke, “thought” ), and thought is concentrated into acknowledgment ( reconnaissance ), to the point where knowledge ( connaissance ) becomes nothing more than a fixation on history ( Denken as Gedenken, commemoration ).
French clearly marks the duality between effective action and sudden, almost involuntary memory, by making a distinction between se rappeler ( to recall ) and se souvenir ( to remember ).
Forgetting has a constant relation to memory, which is not-forgetting, or a form of counter-forgetting, which then becomes a natural state, established through a selective effort of the mind. The English ( forget ) and the German ( vergessen ) suggest a kind of fluid power that carries away the traces of an experience, which is then out of reach. The effacement in the French word oubli ( Low Lat. oblitare, “to erase, to efface” ) conveys the idea of a more controlled relation: here, effacement is an object of analysis in itself; forgetting ceases to be the counterposition of a methodically selective process of remembering or recollecting, and in artistic creation, it characterizes the condition of a decisive transition to another order of meaning.
I. Memory-Thought
A. The Greek and Latin roots: “Memory” and “mental”
Memory perhaps does not exist by itself, as a distinct intellectual faculty. The support it offers to man in his life is so central that it cannot be separated from the manifestations of thought in several of its forms. Thought represents to itself the choices it makes and endlessly recalls the paths and values it sets for itself. It becomes attached to what it knows, to what it knows it must not lose from sight, or to what one could not think, that is, what one could “forget.” Memory and warlike force are thus closely related in language, and converge as two forms of concentration. Where they diverge is when action splits into two and becomes, in the language of tales and songs, the object of an autonomous reminiscence.
“I remember” is memini in Latin and memnêmai [μέμνημαι] in Greek, but historically these do not express the same thing. Both are perfect tenses, expressing a state, and are closely related through their linguistic genealogy. In Latin we find the same, rich root men- ( all that is “mental” ), denoting in a wider sense “the movements of the mind.” The corresponding words in Greek, menos [μένος], “force,” or the perfect tense memona [μέμονα], took on somewhat different meanings. In “to think forcefully,” the object and intensity of a commitment was retained, and as a result one could hear a passion in it, and above all the ardor of being in combat, a will which, when one has it, is irresistible. One would like to have it when one encounters it in the enemy, and one can never acquire it when the primary and spontaneous manifestation of the fundamental value of courage is lacking. The force that is thereby revealed lays claim to its superiority; it creates the social order of the heroic world, and of the world before it.
The Latin words memor, “remembering,” and memoria, “memory”—which has become a catch-all term in several languages—are based on the supplemental intensifier of yet another root, but which is also attached to men-, and which we find in memini. It highlights no less forcefully how closely interconnected, outside of any specialized sense, the art of “remembering” and the contents of “thought” are ( we have the related word in Sanskrit, smarati, “to think,” and in Greek, merimna [μέϱιμνα], “concern,” with the intensification in the adjective mermeros [μέϱμεϱος], “causing concern” ). Ernout-Meillet’s RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine mentions that the expressive value one hears in memor has, according to him, become “attenuated.” It has had to go from a powerful energetic representation to the presence of a system of stabilized memory.
But one can still think differently about the faculty of memory. The Greek language developed an independent group from mna-, another form of the same root, alongside men- ( mimnêskomai [μιμνήσϰομαι], “to recall”; mnêmê [μνήμη], “memory”; mnêma [μνῆμα], “monument”; mnêmôn [μνήμων], “who remembers” ). What happens is unusual. Memory staked out a terrain for itself within the order of spoken language, and it is hard not to connect this fact to the cultural importance of remembering the past, and to the formation of specialized castes who were guardians of a culture’s own language, a language that was inherent in its poetry. This is the key distinction: two core meanings radiate out in different ways, with physical battle on one side and verbal ability on the other, and the overlapping play of these two meanings can be seen clearly in early texts.
B. Force and delirium: Menos, mania
Homer shows that memory in action is put in the service of the social order. The soothsayer instructs the hero, who defends the town and the kingdom. The intrusion of unbridled passions reveals that the order is doubly threatened, whether this order is manifest at home or on the battlefield, by the raw nature that reigns within. Rules against the evasion of forgetting within, and against fleeing from the excess outside, are invoked in consequence.
Rage is concentrated and deployed, as the uses of the verb memona [μέμονα] show in Homer’s Iliad: the hero, Hector, gives in to his passion, which remembers itself as if it had been the sole object of his will, and merges with his force ( “Remember,” he says to the other Trojans, “your irresistible force [μνήσασθε] . . . [ἀλϰῆς]”; 6.112 ). When the Trojans out of cowardice retreat in the face of war, they are embodied in the contrasting figure of Paris, and for a while the pleasures of lovemaking replace the heroic acts of war. Memory is associated with exhorting and actualizing social values, and forgetfulness with not respecting them. Helenos, the Trojans’ soothsayer, exhorts the two leaders, Hector and Aeneas, to stop the warriors from throwing themselves into the arms of their women, to the great delight of their enemies ( 6.80–82 ). He shows that their army is divided; it destroys itself, whereas nothing stops the champion of the Greeks. Diomedes rages like a second Achilles, and no one can measure up to his force ( menos [μένος], which has been transformed into pure delirium; he is mad, mainetai [μαίνεται] ). Achilles is the son of a goddess, but Diomedes is truly delirious ( “all’ hode liên mainetai” [ἀλλ’ ὅδε λίην μαίνεται]; 6.100ff. ); no ordinary force of war can oppose him ( “oude tis hoi dunatai menos isopharizein” [οὐδέ τίς οἱ δύναται μένος ἰσοφαϱίζειν]; 6.101 ).
C. The two forms of forgetfulness: Too much or not enough intensity
Memory, as a creator of values, is implicitly defined in terms of a contradiction. Thought’s freedom disengages itself from, but remembers, the constraints of the social order. The two domains touch and overlap, and it is as if the struggle brings out an inherent tension within language.
1. A thought without limits
Delirium in Greek, or mania [μανία], is always, in another form, “to think” ( the same root men- with a zero vowel pattern ): “the Greek mainesthai [μαίνεσθαι] is dissociated from the general notion and applies to a wild and furious passion” ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. “mainomai” [μαίνομαι] ).
Delirium is freed from rage. Hector meets Diomedes, who is invincible. At the same time, the soothsayer urges him to go into the town so that he can implore the support of the protective goddess there. This is impossible, if not absurd, since Athena, as everyone knows, favors the Greeks.
Helenos had a vision of disaster the moment Diomedes appeared, a vision of an absolute force. With a disregard for all principle, this force makes no pretense of commanding or ordering, and simply prepares for a crushing defeat. Pure delirium, mania, fills the heart of this warrior. No one can do a thing against his rage, which is potentially limitless. Language historians have focused on the way in which passion and madness come together in this text, as if the poet were highlighting their linguistic kinship. Homer’s verses here do reveal a certain excess ( whether this is linguistically correct or inaccurate ), related to what it means to put someone to death, outside of the social bounds that normally circumscribe the power to execute. Force is now helpless when faced with delirium since all the rules have been obliterated: the point of view that the text constructs leads to the discovery of a gaping hole, formed when collective memory is set aside. In its place we find the exorbitance of a form of thought that has no limits, and this becomes the basis on which memory is founded.
Ulysses, in his visit to Achilles, presents in the same way Hector’s omnipotence as victor and conqueror, when he attempts to set fire to the Greek ships. Excess has a new master, and the gods give him free rein according to their will. They are playing with total annihilation, which will go in whatever direction they wish: “He leaves it up to Zeus and goes into a frightening delirium ( mainetai ekpaglôs pisunos Du [μαίνεται ἐϰπάγλως πίσυνος Δύ] ) . . .; the rage which possesses him sweeps everything away ( kraterê de he lussa deduken [ϰϱατεϱὴ δέ ἑ λύσσα δέδυϰεν] )” ( Iliad, 9.237–39 ). The soothsayer’s vision is again overcome by the persuasion of Ulysses the orator. He goes immediately into a delirium. Nothing will now stop Hector, just as nothing stopped Diomedes; he is beside himself, in the grip of an acute fit of madness.
2. The perils of forgetfulness
Forgetfulness ( lêthê [λήθη] ) can come, though not from an excess of intensity, but from a failure to hold on to thought.
When he leaves the battle ( in books 2 and 6 ) and returns to his mother, Hector does not want to drink the wine she offers him ( 6.258–62 ). “Do not break my limbs: I am afraid of forgetting force and combat” ( mê m’ apoguiôsêis meneos, d’alkês te lathômai [μή μ’ ἀπογυιώσῃς μένεος, δ’ ἀλϰῆς τε λάθωμαι] ); to forget is to lose. He does not want to lose his warrior-like force, and knows that he only has this force if he has a clear head, and in his heart, the force to think about it, which is how he constitutes it. Forgetfulness opens the way for the opposite to happen, leading to loss, alienation, and disaster.
II. The Making of the Past
A. Making history and the war of memories
Remembered values concern the life of the cities in their present, but there is another more autonomous form of memory, which integrates the past. It is represented in the epic by a character such as Nestor, who is old and who remembers. He is the indispensable witness, who is present in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Actualizing the past relies on former conflicts and their political dénouements, which serve as models. The action itself verges on excess, and is in danger of being thereby weakened. Memory intervenes in the action, and is focused between these two poles. One of its forms consists of recalling the conditions of its incarnation. The other separates and distances itself from the action by imagining the form of the experiences of the past as if it were a matter first of all of knowing, and then acting.
The creation of meaning implies the distance of a past and of remembered facts. But since the masses are incommensurable and in a sense immemorial, and thus “unmemorable” ( amnêmoneutos [ἀμνημόνευτος], or unvordenklich in German ), as impossible to grasp as the present that passes, small and large societies, states, and communities within states, all construct various horizons, which are all more or less mythical. Through memory they transform what is known, which had already been transformed. What is historical are not facts, which can often be embroidered, but the fact that a tradition was at a certain moment in time rearranged and reorganized, reordered in such a way that the guiding principles, even the finality, are intelligible to us. This is how we can grasp the importance of memory in the world of Greek culture. It takes the form of mastering a tradition, and of a particular mnemotechnic that is necessary because of the extent of the historical corpus, which increases when all of the different regional actualizations of that tradition are added to it.
The stakes are extremely high. The struggles to preserve memory, of such immense importance in our times, are part of these traditions, within and between nations, which redefine their identities. Any event can be accepted, gaining a “right to memory,” or on the contrary be repressed, or challenged, because it is out of place, embarrassing, or burdensome. So while historical knowledge is progressing and attaining a previously unknown degree of precision, it still remains shot through with taboos and things left unsaid, amnesias by command, political constraints, and the need to hold on to mythical beliefs. The past is both unknowable and available, and this is what we might call the war of memories.
B. Nietzsche: Becoming as ontology
Faced with an investigative openness that encompassed all areas and ages of the modern world, which was exposed to their arbitrary nature and forced certain choices, and at a time when historicism was in the ascendant, Nietzsche described history in terms of corresponding periods of superior dominance. While some periods stood out, they were all essentially seen as concentrations of energy. For Nietzsche, knowledge is all the richer for restricting itself to what is essential, which is constantly reborn and returns in identical form in the immensity of becoming.
The dialectical discussion of history and non-history in chapter 1 of the second part of Untimely Meditations ( “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” [Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben] ) only apparently defends forgetting ( das Vergessen ). Nietzsche articulates an aporia: man is condemned to escape the forgetfulness of childhood ( die Vergessenheit ), and destined to know his past, yet this past crushes him. All that counts are the strong concentrations in which life is manifest. Nietzsche broadens the frame of reference, starting with the personal, progressing to the historical, the anthropological, and then to the evolution of all societies. He talks deliberately and insistently about “the creative force of an individual, of a people, of a civilization” ( die plastische Kraft eines Menschens, eines Volks, einer Kultur ) in order to encompass a totality, when he is in fact thinking of the embodiment of these forces in the superior individual, the super-man. The speculative categories of ontology are for him transferred to the history of the triumphant man who abandons himself to becoming. The forces of dispersion and becoming in all its diversity are turned back against themselves, and they produce their own negation. Through an accumulation of vital forces, in an almost biological sense, becoming is pushed to the point where it can acquire the name of “being,” and paradoxically be immobilized at the moment of culmination. This is not so much a triumphant liberation from the weight that inhibits life, as a non-history.
Nietzsche adapts, develops, and reinterprets the historian Niebuhr’s disenchanted conclusion on chance, where the eye of “the most powerful minds turned to the particular structure that commands their vision.” He invests in a supra-historical ( überhistorisch ) perspective, as a science of the past in its totality. For Nietzsche, a lucid analysis should enable us to recognize the conditions in which a particular force was able to become a dominant one within the arbitrary circumstances of history. One immediate consequence of this is that knowledge of the past ( historical phenomena as an object of knowledge, Erkenntnisphänomen ) is no longer the objective; if this were the case, it would be dead ( “Ein historisches Phänomen, rein und vollständig erkannt und in ein Erkenntnisphänomen aufgelöst, ist für den, der es erkannt hat, todt” ). Knowledge is living ( blind power is not wasted “for someone who is alive” [für ihn, den lebenden] ), only when it is applied to the content it is useful to know, for anyone who can use it to his advantage. Science is nothing by itself, it is destined for those in power, and past regimes serve the regimes of the future. Memory is rehabilitated as a site of reincarnation or resurrection ( “in the wake of a powerful new current of life, of a culture which is becoming” [im Gefolge einer mächtigen neuen Lebenströmung einer werdenden Kultur] ). By emphasizing the superior concentration of forces ( “von einer höheren Kraft beherrscht” ), Nietzsche thus eliminates the meaning of history, and moves in the direction of freedom and utopia, although it is true that his vision of what might replace it, since it is overly intellectual, is no less “supra.” It frees itself from and leaves behind the stranglehold of the past, and responds to an expectation and desire to make the future ( “der Blick in die Vergangenheit drängt . . . zur Zukunft hin” ). Nietzsche’s speculation is more realist: it considers the actualization of the forces in the course of a history that does not change and opens itself up to reincarnation. Memory is saved when its brilliance is recovered within this other messianism that he finds in the cyclical culminations of life. The remembered life of history is reaffirmed in the fulfillment of life ( “Historie zum Zwecke des Lebens” ), and individual moments are dissolved in the identity of a force. Memory then relates essentially, if not exclusively, to whatever force has been dominant; there is never anything inferior, and no projection into the future ( see HISTORY ).
C. Poetic memory: Mnemosyne and Lesmosyne
Memory is the mother of Muses, and Immortality is secondary. Remaking the past, conceived broadly as bringing together all human knowledge, was transformed in ancient societies when it was entrusted to specialists who brought the past alive through words and music. Memory became a professional activity, whose function was linked to feasts and celebration, and to a body of knowledge susceptible to invention, and to the reinventions of multiple horizons.
The word mnêmê [μνήμη], which will assume so much importance, is absent from Homer, and only once does he use the word mnêmosunê [μνημοσύνη], which gave its name to Memory, mother of the nine Muses, according to Hesiod’s Theogony ( l. 54 ). In a scene from the Iliad in which Hector, in his delirium ( 8.181 ), dreams of destroying the Greek ships, he again says that he has to keep the fire “in his memory” ( mnêmosunê tis . . . puros . . . genesthô [μνημοσύνη τις . . . πυϱὸς . . . γενέσθω] ). The two forms of delirium, the desire for death and poetic power, are joined together. The poet shows, at this crucial moment of an illusion, that he knew the word and uses it. He makes the delirious hero into a poet like himself, arranging reality in his ecstasy as he likes, and at the same time shows that he has chosen to make him speak in this way.
Zeus, in the Theogony, makes love to Mnemosyne, and fathers the Muses over the course of nine nights, outside of the circle of the gods. When they are born, they find a home in a world apart, close to the summit of Olympus, where they share with the gods ( while being separated from them ) freedom from all cares, at an appropriate distance: this is the condition of song ( vv. 53–67 ). The divine reproduces itself with the daughters of Memory; it re-creates itself within a zone of marvelous and unreal autonomy. The gods have access through voice to the joy that they feel from identifying themselves in this mirror, and men allow themselves, through the intervention of the Muses, to be transported far away; through them, they become part of the divine. Art makes them forget their misfortune, and through a temporary cessation of their cares, tears them away from the normal laws of an everyday temporality.
A second Olympus is established next to the gods, a domain of forgetfulness. After all, the gods themselves are involved in the affairs of mankind, whether they control them or not. Forgetting as a way of repairing evil becomes, more absolutely, the condition of the conquest of another world, where in theory nothing is ever forgotten, nothing good, but also nothing evil.
From the word mnêmosunê, the poet creates in this same passage the antithetical word lêsmosunê [λησμοσύνη] ( v. 55 ), the power of forgetfulness that is communicated. This is not an “intentional paradox” ( as West says of v. 55 [Hesiod, Theogony] ). Forgetting is not the absence of memory, nor its effacement, but more positively, a tearing one away from the avatars of an ordinary alienating existence. Initiating us into the history of the world drives evil out of this world. The word is created not as a negation, but as an analogy and as an active counterpart to memory, a complementary power, which is said to possess the art of driving away misfortune, as Helen’s drugs are able to do in volume 4 of the Odyssey. Lesmosyne provides a respite from sorrows and pains, and forgetfulness is her work of magic. This counter-term to memory is only attested once more that we know of in Greek literature, in the Antigone of Sophocles ( v. 156 ), with the same allusion to an extraordinary overcoming of an ominous reality, the threat of nothingness.
D. The fiction of total knowledge
1. Homer’s Muses
The Muses know everything, and represent the abstraction of an all-powerful art. Totality in space and time, in the world or in history, is part of a limitless superhuman memory.
When Homer asks for the help of the Muses, the daughters of Memory, he mentions a particularly precise knowledge, and above all a superlative distinction—“who was the first?” or “the best?”: see, for example, Iliad, 2.760ff.: “These were the leaders of the Danaans and their lords. But who was far the best among them, do you tell me, Muse—best of the warriors and of the horses that followed with the sons of Atreus?” ( su moi ennepe, Mousa [σύ μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα]; Homer, Iliad ). The information presupposes a choice; the Muses have the advantage of knowing everything, and the poet does not know it. The appeal is made to an absolute authority, and song renders even more problematic the knowledge to which poets lay claim. These invocations, through their forcefulness, confer the evidence of necessity upon the statement. It is flawless, without forgetfulness or simply true; the Greek of Homer’s time has an adjective that expresses what is “true” by saying “that which is not evasive” ( alêthês [ἀληθής] ), that is, small totalities, every time ( see TRUTH ).
During the chariot race, old Phoenix is stationed at the finish line. He will be able to recall the race—in its entirety—and tell the truth ( “hô memneôito dromou kai alêtheiên apoeipoi” [ὧ μεμνέῳτο δϱόμου ϰαὶ ἀληθείην ἀποείποι]; 23.361 ). It is not that he could hide the truth, but that he has to see everything to be able to make distinctions ( this and not that ), and indeed, the author analyzes the nature of his own speech by this means. He knows that the sum of knowledge that it implies is only a fiction or a construction, and thereby demonstrates the two aspects of absolute memory upon which it is itself based. It aspires to be whole, but the poet does not hide the fact that it is a fiction, pointing to its own limits and inadequacy. He knows that his art is an entirely artificial product, something made, precisely, through art.
2. Baudelaire’s Andromache: Suffering considered as a Muse
In the age of modernity, the absolute power of memory as restitution is founded upon exclusion. Baudelaire’s “Le cygne” ( The Swan ) in Les fleurs du mal ( Flowers of Evil ) is an orchestration of the universal fecundity of exile and absence. Assimilation via the grandeur of failure, which is clearly situated within a Christian tradition, provides a new principle of unification. The modern poet confronts the immensity of literary tradition, and prefigures Mallarmé’s Le livre, as well as Paul Celan.
In one of the most far-reaching explorations of the faculty of memory that has ever been undertaken, Baudelaire set out to make the widow, starting with Virgil’s Andromache, and then going farther back to Hector’s wife in Homer, a symbol of absence, welcomed and surpassed in the poetic pathos of a staged allegory. The mind has this power, and overcomes separation because it reconstitutes itself paradoxically in this separation: “je pense à vous,” “je ne vois qu’en esprit,” “je pense à mon grand cygne” ( I think of you, I see only in my mind, I think of my great swan ), then: “Je pense à la négresse” ( I think of the negress ): the movement extends to everything that has ever uprooted, exiled, excluded. This determinate absence retracing the fate of all that has not been, but which could or should have been, spreads its influence across every related language that is connected by similar exclusions. As it recalls in the midst of sorrow, the memory of memories is recomposed once again from one language to another ( see MALAISE [MELANCHOLY, SPLEEN] ). In response to the immense majesté ( giant majesty ) of the widow’s grieving we have the fecundity of a “memory,” which like the earth is already fertile, containing all that could ever have been said and written later on, as in various poetic projects of total synthesis:
Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.
Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m’opprime:
Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous,
Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime
Et rongé d’un désir sans trêve! et puis à vous,
Andromaque . . .
Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s’exile
Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor!
Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île,
Aux captifs, aux vaincus!. . . à bien d’autres encor!
( Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood
Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,
Old neighborhoods, are allegorical for me,
And my dear memories are heavier than stone.
And so outside the Louvre an image gives me pause:
I think of my great swan, his gestures pained and mad,
Like other exiles, both ridiculous and sublime,
Gnawed by his endless longing! Then I think of you,
Fallen Andromache . . .
And likewise in the forest of my exiled soul
Old Memory sings out a full note of the horn!
I think of sailors left forgotten on an isle,
Of captives, the defeated . . . many others more! )
( The Flowers of Evil )
Majesty, although wholly objective, is already the product of an immemorial poetic tradition, and it is this in fact that the poet rediscovers, that he recollects and analyzes. The different levels of the Alexandrine verses transpose the triumph over immediate experience into the most mediated layers of literary culture, whose words the poet allows to resonate in the poem, such as the three syllables of “Helenus.” It is as if the most tragic separations were the source of all poetic creations, and conversely, that absence was only accessible via literature. The poet’s own exile ( “dans la forêt où mon esprit s’exile” [in the dim forest to which my soul withdraws] ) connects him to all those who have ever been exiled. “Un vieux souvenir sonne” ( An ancient memory sounds ); there is only one, and when he has concluded this extended poetic exploration, he is as old as the world, recollecting every loss that has never been gathered in: “Je pense” ( I think ). By the end, it is everything and anything that the poet has fashioned into poetry because he has lost it. It is also a history of poetry, transformed by its Christian past. Suffering becomes a Muse, who knows everything, and the jubilant poet has a key that opens whatever he touches.
3. Mallarmé’s break with tradition: The freeing of forgetfulness
With Mallarmé, the Orphic search for a truth hidden within language leads to a more marked break from previous poetic practices. The transition in his poetry from nothingness to a purer and more autonomous space of language means that he is concerned not only with the forgetfulness that the world has suffered through the ages, nor simply with the forgetfulness of the world as a condition of poetic creation, but with the forgetfulness of false forms of presence in the world, which are nevertheless celebrated poetically. Memory is displaced, and folds back upon itself.
This difference in tone and light can be seen in one of his key sonnets, “Le vierge, le vivace . . . ,” which is almost certainly a programmatic and defining statement of his art, and which makes forgetfulness a condition of poetic song. It is not poetry itself, which could equally well glorify the immediacy of life, as it has done ad infinitum in the past. There exists another language, whose precision is quite different, one that is transferred and refined through rejection and negation. The poetic élan and desire to overcome separation that we find previously are transported elsewhere, into something more absolute. These are still maintained in order to counter forgetfulness in memory, but memory now re-emerges on the other side of the nakedness of effacement, and performs a radical break with the world. Memory traces harden in this Orphic language as it becomes abstracted within a third space, and as it rises up out of this poetry that is stripped bare. The passage through negation was a necessary one.
Poetry in the figure of a swan leaves behind it “ce lac dur que hante sous le givre / le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui” ( Beneath the frost of a forgotten lake / Clear flights of glaciers not fled away; trans. John Holcombe ). The world of life is thus divided, and also leaves behind the raw matter of frozen traces: “Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient” ( In past magnificence of another day / The swan remembers ). It remembers its lost glory as in a mirror: if it escapes, it is because it has resisted and not given in to incantation and celebration. Its poetic means have transported it elsewhere, and forgetfulness is the line that is crossed by verbal transcendence, with art finding a way to create for itself another world.
Forgetfulness is the primary condition of poetic creation. In the same way, Vergessen in German, in Celan’s poetry, is the very movement of words being uprooted, and deliberately becomes part of traditions of language in order to make them say something else. The distant separation from the world of the senses that forgetfulness represents is, then, a rejection of the language that evokes this world; it is a space of both transgression and freedom. All that has ever been said can be said again, and is saved from effacement by a system of references that is each time created anew.
III. Models of Thought
A. Writing
One of the key questions in psychology and gnoseology is that of knowing how memory works. What do we retain, and why do we retain in such different ways, not primarily according to the history of each individual, but when we consider more generally the lesser or greater power of the faculty of memory itself? Plato, before Freud, chooses writing as the model.
1. Plato: Memory and knowledge
All men are different and have their own unique mark. However, when Plato analyzes the error of this proposition, the model proves to be inadequate, and he literally makes signs fly. If inscription was originally engraved, it will subsequently become volatile.
Plato first introduces the psychological or intellectual function of memory, without the recourse to anamnesis, in his Theaetetus dialogue, during the discussion of erroneous judgment. He admits “for the sake of argument” that the “ideas” or impressions formed in our minds leave an imprint on something, like a block of wax that we have within us, on which an impression ( or ekmageion [ἐϰμαγεῖον] ) is made. It is as if we were reproducing the sigil of a ring within our souls. So there is nothing to stop us having such representations, whether true or false, valid or invalid. Plato’s model includes a selection stage—forgetting occurs when the inscriptions are erased and lost ( 191d )—and an explanation of the inequality among men, which he says is due to the volume and quality of the impregnable mass we each possess ( 191c ). He also makes the connection with cultural memory, which we would call collective memory, so we might describe it as the presence of Memory. It is indeed true that everything is written and discussed using memory, and Plato’s model is thus a necessary one ( see EIDÔLON ).
What we still need to consider, however, is the case where an error is not a matter of correctly identifying an object, but of mistakenly making a false substitution in the order of knowledge available to us. The wax tablet no longer works as a model when we imagine the possibility of not representing something to ourselves that we in fact know very well. Knowledge eludes us if we consider that there is such a thing as a false opinion, and that “we are capable of not knowing what we know.” In the dialogue, Socrates introduces an important semantic distinction between having at one’s disposal ( “possessing,” kektêsthai [ϰεϰτῆσθαι] ), and having concretely in one’s hand ( echein [ἔχειν] ), as we would hold a stylus ( 197b ). What we need, more than an erasure or simple virtuality, is a wider effective presence, but a presence that is not actualized. Socrates is thus led, once he presents this deeper understanding of the complex reality of the dynamics of memory in the course of his reasoning, to propose another image. He imagines an enclosure, with a large variety of captive birds that would live in this aviary, whether in large swarms, or in small groups, or even on their own: each has been imagined to conform to the logical structures of thought. The owner tries to catch the one he needs, but does not always succeed. What he wants is there, but he cannot get it—“such that he does not catch and hold in his hands what he had possessed for a long time” ( ha palai ekektêto [ἃ πάλαι ἐϰέϰτητο]; Theaetetus, 198d ).
If Homer, who knew this text well, says kear [ϰέαϱ] ( or kêr [ϰῆϱ] ) for “heart,” instead of kardia [ϰαϱδία], as Plato does, this is because he means “wax,” kêros [ϰηϱός], hiding it by means of the phonic association of poetry: we have to know how to interpret according to the Cratylus, and look for wax ( kêros ) in the word “heart” ( kêr ). Memory figured as wax is the “heart” of the soul ( Theaetetus, 194c ), and receptivity is thus defined and attributed to a fundamental technique, like that of the poets. It retains all impressions and ideas, imprinted as a seal is imprinted: the magic of an infinite number of seals is indeed a gift that memory, the mother of the Muses, has made to the human soul ( 191d ).
2. Freud: Writing within the unconscious
Freud’s great discoveries—infantile sexuality and repression, and the role of the memory attached to them—can be figured as a kind of writing, as Freud himself does. The history of the transmission of this writing resembles that of his texts, with the phases that precede it, and it follows the period of latency that separates us from the dramas of our inhibited early development. It is the impressions of this resistance and the wounds left behind that enable us to go backward in time, to decipher the “text,” and to correct deviations.
The object of the kind of reconstructive memory ( Gedächtnis ) that the psychoanalytic cure attempts to perform exists as a form of writing. For Freud, a language has been primordially engraved in the body, at an age when the infant was merely responding to the urges of its drives and instincts. The infant bears the marks of this phase, like a sigil that has been imprinted, determining its history, or even culture, at a stage that is paradoxically the most vital and energetic of its existence. The deviations from accidents to this natural history set in place an equally primal negation, and they make the body into a text that can be read—or not read.
Freud invokes the model of inscription from the outset, in the founding text of the famous letter to Fliess of 6 December 1896 ( no. 52 = 112 ), written just as he makes his extraordinary discovery. Freud uses the term “writing down” ( Niederschriften ), as if there were within the different layers of the soul a scribe who recorded the perceptions or the accidents and impressions, and put them down on paper, so as to fix them precisely. The basic principle consisted of rigorously separating out consciousness from this memory ( Gedächtnis ), which was buried, and made up of successive inscriptions and different layers. As they are superimposed, there is a process of transcription ( or of translation, Übersetzung ), which is also a kind of rewriting ( Umschrift ), and Freud here also uses the word “transcription” ( Überschrift ). The scribe “transcribes.”
According to the model sketched out in his letter, Freud suggests a transcription of the material that was retained in the first level, and made up of pure signs of perception. This transcription first takes place in a second layer, which is defined by the state of non-consciousness ( Unbewußtsein ), then in a third, which is characterized as “pre-consciousness” ( Vorbewußtsein ). This latter phase is dependent on representations of words, communicating with our official ego, and precedes the subsequent development of a “consciousness of thought” ( Denkbewußtsein ). The work of translation takes place at each moment of transition from one phase of life to another, and it occasionally goes wrong. The inhibitions that it runs up against explain the origin of neuroses. There are “residues” or “surviving” remainders. Freud’s terminology is innovative and bold. It suggests that something “survives” its previous stage ( Überleben ), and that these survivors are thereafter elements out of place. The different modes of writing enter into conflict, and normal development is arrested. Traumas can be understood as “fixations” in the strong sense of the term, hard obstacles that are the result of something that has not passed through or that did not work properly. Repression ( Verdrängung ) is in no sense the same as forgetfulness, but it is rather conceived as a resistance that redirects the “thrust” ( Drang ) of the drive, as if into a blind alley. It is through a kind of rereading, using the verbal representations acquired during the third stage prior to puberty, that one can go back and reactivate the unconscious. This return through memory is reparative, and can possibly bring about a recovery since the earlier repression may not have been firmly established at the following stage and can be eliminated. A partially intelligible memory opens up a path into the registers and archives of the unconscious, and enables a phased interpretation of the amnesia with the help of a memory. Dimly remembered perceptions, which are nevertheless conscious, force open the door leading to the essential mysteries of early childhood life ( see DRIVE and VERNEINUNG ).
3. Bergson: The traces of lived experience in involuntary memory
In the chapter on “The Two Forms of Memory” Henri Bergson draws a distinction between, on one hand, a memory that eludes representation, as if it has been learned, and that is revealed to be a rationalist prejudice, an ideology inhibiting the perception of, on the other hand, another kind of memory, one that is “spontaneous” and “perfect from the outset.” As he says about this second sort of memory, “time can add nothing to its image without disfiguring it” since it is a possession that is properly our own. Although time moves forward in its duration, it retains “in memory its place and date.” The terms Bergson uses here are important since what counts is “a memory” ( souvenir ) that must not become “foreign to our past life,” that is, alienated by everything else, by external influences.
Ernst Cassirer, in the third volume of his Philosophie der symbolischen formen, reproached Bergson for not having considered the intuition of time as a more global functional unity, which would include all of the different directions of our perception and our consciousness, future as well as past. Bergson’s dissociation of the horizon of memory from the horizon of expectation did not seem legitimate to Cassirer, but these are no doubt two equally valid points of view, and one does not necessarily have to absorb the other.
Bergson wrote Matter and Memory at the same time Freud was making his discoveries. What is under debate in both cases is the identity and irreducible experiences of an individual person. Philosophy opens the way for a new form of “self” through the notion of involuntary memory, Proust’s reading of which produced a novelistic exploration that was unprecedented in its psychological depth. The fracturing of perspectives was fruitful, and almost fatal for the chosen domain of investigation ( we might recall Epicurus, who was already attempting to construct intellectually a trouble-free art of living, in his search for ataraxia [see GLÜCK and PLEASURE] ). Knowledge of the past becomes a distinct act; it belongs to us, and is devoid of anxiety. We are ultimately indebted to Freud’s work for this principle.
Bergson isolates spontaneous memory, as distinct from learned memory, which is part of learning the mechanisms that are indispensable to our role as social actors. He analyzes lived experience and discovers the succession of unitary and irreducible monads of which it is made up. The work of memory is not freely organized, but is preformed in the history of the subject, who provides the self with a multitude of “dates,” each one complex. The self tries to find its way among these, hoping to identify the things that count and that he has already retained. His memory will thus be made up of a multitude of memories, which are specifically limited to the experience of the person who lives with them.
4. Benjamin: Layer memory
Walter Benjamin describes the value of Proust’s search in terms of its transcendental dimension. The self, in recollecting itself, discovers its being by recognizing the different stages of awareness of what it is doing. As a translator of Proust, Benjamin in a short text “Ausgraben und Erinnern” ( Excavation and Memory ) retranslates the work of uncovering. He compares it to an archeologist’s analysis of the layers of soil: “he will be like a man who digs” ( wie ein Mann der gräbt ). In doing so, he liberates images, which are the buried treasures of our past, provided the digger, or searcher, can indicate the place and the process of discovery: “being epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, recollection as true Erinnerung has to provide at the same time an image of the person remembering.” The act is illuminated in the silhouette of the digger. The image is elevated to the status of a symbol, and Benjamin breaks down into its constituent elements the German “synonym” for Denkbild ( alongside Sinnbild; the title Denkbild, borrowed from a series of texts, groups together the disparate texts ). By digging down into a word, we learn that what we remember is the image of the “thought” that penetrates this word. The word Denkbild has its tradition, and Herder, for example, wrote: “learn to understand these symbols [diese Denkbilder],” that is, those images in which thought is held fast ( see BILD ).
B. Memory as a storehouse
1. German, between the actualization of the past and accumulation, Erinnerung and Gedächtnis
There are two words in German with quite different values, Erinnerung and Gedächtnis, to which the French terms souvenir and mémoire only partially correspond. The first indicates an action, within the individual confines of a person’s inner self, as if actualizing one of a thousand possible memories. The second, closer to a cerebral capability than to the soul, calls to mind a casket and its treasures because of the suffix and the analogies one could make between Gedächtnis and a word such as Behältnis, a box. An object is enclosed and if one has a “good” memory, it is that much more safely preserved. This intensifier is formed from the root of the verb denken ( to think ), through an apophonic play on words. The basic tenses of denken are the preterite dachte, and the participle gedacht, which one could associate with the idea of a cover and a roof ( Dach ). The faculty of memory is in a sense multiplied in this shelter where everything that has been thought is gathered together.
2. Hegel: The concept and its associations
For Hegel, memory becomes an integral part of the dynamics of the unfolding of Spirit. The dimension opened up by language with the word Erinnerung allows Hegel to situate memory, and to deepen the link that connects it to the successive structures of history. He understands it, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, as a movement toward a superior, and more “inner” appearance, of substance when it is exposed to truth. The movement of interiorization becomes an internal memory, or Erinnerung. As substance acquires greater depth through this attention to the past, the science of memorized history is founded. Elsewhere, the progression of world history is presented as self-examination and self-discovery. Absolute spirit folding itself back upon its own foundation is translated by a turn of phrase borrowed from religious practice: insichgehen, “to enter into oneself.” Interiorization encompasses traditional self-examination and the entire dimension of self-reflection.
3. Poetic memory integrated into the philosophical system: Erinnerung and Andenken
The Phenomenology integrates early Greek poetry into the evolution of self-consciousness. The pathos of the poet enables him to escape from domination by raw nature. This is an effect of developing one’s memory, mnêmosunê, in which a movement of reflexive thought becomes manifest, involving a reconsideration of one’s given state ( Besinnung ) and the acquisition of an internal reference. Interiority includes the interiorized memory ( Erinnerung ) of the immediacy of the previous stage, which is thus overcome. It was still deprived of freedom, and with writing, as well as music, the phase including the liberation of consciousness reaches a second level.
The function of memory brings with it the painful rift of poetry. For Hölderlin, who experiences this rupture as a retreat of the gods of antiquity, his last hymns, entitled Memory ( Andenken ) or Mnemosyne, suggest the primordial role of the poet: it is his “fidelity” ( Treue ) that preserves. Poetry aspires to reconcile the alien with what is properly one’s own, all the while acknowledging concrete differences, and under the threat of memory’s collapse.
4. Heidegger’s double interiorization
The movement traced by Hegel is taken up again by Heidegger. In his Kant from 1929 ( Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik ), Heidegger reinterprets the anamnesis of earlier visions of the soul in Plato in terms of fundamental ontology. He presents it now as a founding act of the human condition of being-there ( Dasein ): “It is indeed a question of remembering again, of anamnesis ( wie der Erinnerung ), as Plato says: but authentic ‘remembering’ ( Erinnerung ) must at all times interiorize the interiorized object.” This doubling of Hegelian interiority may seem surprising ( “das Erinnerte verinnern” ), but the word incorporates an analysis of the concept and moves beyond a tautology by a dimension opened up by the word, which divides the concept. What is “recalled” is not called by consciousness, but comes forth and imposes itself. The object is nothing other than the essential finitude of Dasein; it comes and takes hold of what opens itself to finitude. The movement is thus reversed, and the notable difference is that the interiorization is not properly speaking an interiorization of the self, as it was for Hegel. From a more theological perspective, welcoming the fundamental truth defines the authentic existence of the self. Memory will be a matter, then, of “letting [fundamental truth] more and more come to us,” in its innermost possibility, where innermost means constitutive or foundational. Memory is determined as a form of re-collection. Erinnerung: no other word in any other language would allow one to think and translate this re-collection, and taking it one step further, interiority will be given to the truth itself that encompasses it. German culture based on Lutheranism ultimately focuses on this doubled reintegration of its primary movement.
5. Heidegger’s Hölderlin: Truth concentrated into Andenken and Verdankung, the words for memory
After 1934, Heidegger locates “what thinking is” in the sphere of language. His argument unfolds notably in his meditations on and paraphrases of Hölderlin’s poem “Mnemosyne,” which for him prefigures a source of poetic effusion that relates less to historically determinate memory than to a call emanating from thought itself. In Hölderlin’s poem we see a number of words merge together, like Andenken, or memory in the sense of a thought that is attached to an object ( An-denken ), or a concentrated accumulation, like Andacht des Andenken, where in addition to memory we have, with the apophony, religious fervor or contemplation or, by means of another vector, gratitude in the archaism Gedanc, in Dank and Verdankung: one could easily get lost or go under. It is no doubt as a reaction against Heidegger’s emphatic and expansive call for an original thinking, that Paul Celan, in his own semantic network, so clearly connected the word “thought,” Denken, to the constant memorability of historical truth, assigning to it another kind of origin by playing one “thought” off against another. The title of one of his poems, “Andenken,” refers to the most deliberately personal experience.
C. Paul Celan: The breath of memory
Poetry, like art, can be experimental. A short poem, from Breathturn, presents memory, inherent in the matter of all poetic language, as able to come alive on its own through a particular effect of concentration. It is as if, reproducing itself by a breath, it were the creator of everything.
The text encompasses a singular moment, marked by an exceptional happiness in which everything is sketched out and writes itself. There is nothing supernatural about the effect of this moment of grace, but as always with Celan, it charts a new path. The poem is composed in a process of self-understanding and self-discovery. A fist ( poetry ) closes on the emblematic device it is grasping, though these are only stones or pieces of gravel. Poetic speech is in the stones:
DEN VERKIESELSTEN SPRUCH in der Faust,
vergißt du, daß du vergißt,
am Handgelenk scießen
blinkend die Satzzeichen an
durch die zum Kamm
gespaltene Erde
kommen die Pausen geritten
dort, bei
der Opferstaudede,
wo das Gedächtnis entbrennt
greift euch der Eine
Hauch auf.
( THE SILICIFIED SAYING in the fist,
you forget that you forget,
blinking, the punctuation marks
crystallize at the wrist,
through the earth
cleft to the crest
the pauses come riding,
there, by
the sacrifice-bush,
where memory catches fire,
the One Breath
seizes you. )
The “you” is the poet, and an “I” is addressing him. The hand of the “you” is holding the pen, and it is associated here with the reduction of writing and the rendering-rhythmical of nothingness. The blaze of memory itself is absorbed by the virtuality of a speaking that would conform to it entirely.
The debris has been shaped. A piece of glass calls out and attracts punctuation marks, is given form and structure. The movement of concentration is sketched: the earth cracks open, and a ridge bursts forth. A moment of suspension thus rises up out from the verbal magma. It assumes a figure thanks to the pauses, and absence itself folds back on itself. The expectation of something taking a fixed form condenses the incandescence of memory, so it is no longer either the circumscribed object, or any faculty that is unfolding within language, but it is caught within an involuted movement and lets out a simple breath. This unique breath takes hold of the signs, and at the same time of the poet, who in this instance “forgets to forget,” as he usually does.
The paradox is only an apparent one. The disconnectedness from the horizons that are set out suggests disappearance, followed by a return of everyday meanings. The dead, in their muteness, find a place where they can be “unforgotten” ( unvergessen; see the poem “Still Life” [Stilleben] ). Differentiation is specific: the survivors from the work of selection are exempted from methodical forgetting, they are its raison d’être and its negation. The word “memory” comes alive, and is expressed in its condensation, it speaks to itself.
IV. Forgetfulness as a Condition of Memory
A. The words for forgetfulness and memory: Connotations of different languages
Memory has a double status in modern languages. It is either invoked or experienced. How this duality is translated in each language is essential since it results from the fact that the past, whether lived or imagined, personal or collective, is both always there and absent. It is forgotten, or on the contrary comes to meet us and imposes itself, which is why there is a constant crossover between invocation and visitation.
The range of associations relating to the ways one establishes a past or distant event, in one’s mind or body, covers a broad spectrum beyond the specialized words.
In French, the abstract value of the intensifier rappeler ( to remind; appeler intensément, to call intensely ) appears very early on in the language, in the sense of “to bring to consciousness or memory.” It is the origin of the pronominal expression se rappeler ( to recall; before 1673 ), which then begins to compete with se souvenir de ( to remember ), derived from the Latin subvenire, “to come to the aid of, to help,” then “to come to mind, to occur.” The impersonal expression il me souvient ( I recollect ) and the intransitive are older than the pronominal verb se souvenir ( fourteenth century ), which became established in parallel with se rappeler. In the one case, help comes by itself, it is experienced passively as a gift; the other conveys the idea of effort and the notion of success or of sovereignty, which is perhaps even magical. We can indeed remember the dead, and so enter into the unknown. “Calling” is also expressed in German as in Erinnerung rufen. French, though, emphasizes the act, or actualization, and does not directly link the verbal activity to the site itself of memory, nor to the faculty of memory, nor to a present knowledge. In English, for example, “to remember” is also related more to “remembrance” than the act of memory is to the matter itself that is remembered.
To forget is to not reach, or on the contrary to lose, and can also be an absolute tabula rasa. The etymology of the German word for forgetting, Vergessen, like the English “forget,” expresses failure or falling short. The search or pursuit has amounted to nothing, the prize has eluded us. In fact, the German ear, because of a phonic play of assonances, associates forgetting with a more widespread loss, by way of the verb meaning “to pour,” giessen ( ich vergass, “I forgot”; ich vergoss, “I poured out” ). It is the opposite of the horn of plenty, a current that sweeps us away. The French word oubli does not convey this same dynamism.
The French verb oublier goes back to the popular Latin oblitare, present in all popular Gallo-Roman dialects, though alongside the more eloquent verb desmembrar used in the Southwest ( Sp., archaically, said: desmemorar ), based on memorare, to “unremember.” In classical Latin, oblivisci, along with the participle oblitus, is considered a metaphor borrowed from writing ( see Bréal, then Ernout and Meillet ). The word is related to oblinere, “to efface, wipe out,” and is also associated with levis, “smooth” ( from the Gr. leios [λεῖος] ), implying the absence of any roughness and difference, things being reduced to a white powder. French retains something of this perhaps in the idea of a flat vacuity, and Mallarmé connected the word oubli to aboli ( abolished ), which opens out onto nothingness.
■ See Box 1.
|
French, between thought and dream While other languages, such as English, German, Spanish, or Italian, only have one word for dream ( Ger. Traum, Sp. sueño, Ital. sogno ), French has two: on the one hand, songe ( from the Lat. somnium ), and on the other rêve, derived either from a form of the Latin rabies ( rabies ) or from the popular Latin for “vagabond,” exvagus, or according to others from a form of Gallo-Roman, exvagares, from exvadere, “to go out.” “Delirium” overlaps with “escape” in our imagination, unless one is in fact superimposed on the other. As well as the “interpretation of dreams ( rêves ),” French also has the expression “key to our dreams ( songes ),” and this singular duality has its own history. Songer, the verbal form, has a noble lineage. Its values can be situated in a context of quite wide semantic freedom. The word oscillates between the rigor of focused thought ( songez-y bien, “pay close attention to this, think it over carefully” ), and the vagueness of the imagination ( à quoi songes-tu donc? “what are you dreaming about?” ). The evolution of the language meant that it rather dominated the field, referring on the one hand to the rational operation of “thinking,” derived in Romance languages from the Latin intensive pensare, “to weigh,” which connects reflexive activity to evaluation and appreciation, not present in songer, and on the other hand, suggests the opposite world of dream experiences. The lexical unity became fractured and split off in two different directions. Penser gained the upper hand over songer, pushing songe into the realm of illusory appearance. Rêve, which was used to mean delirium or ecstatic extravagance, has only recently supplanted songe, without eliminating it entirely, however, such that when one is songeant, one is sometimes thinking, concentrating, or recalling, and sometimes one is dreaming, or letting oneself be carried away. |
B. Forgetfulness within memory
Forgetfulness, with its power to tear one away from fullness of meaning, offers a means of perpetuating memory. Memory thinks, but only manages to do so through forgetting if instead of signifying loss, flight, or abandonment, memory allows us on the contrary to reconstitute a reference. We choose what counts.
While in French one thinks about someone ( pense à quelqu’un ), or has a thought for someone ( une pensée ), in German the verb denken also means “to remember,” to the point where no distinction is made between the two verbs, as one does in more formal language with the prefix ge- in gedenken, which denotes the reverence of a solemn and ritual commemoration. Celan, who makes the extermination of the Jews the central focus of his poetry, uses one word for the other, thinking for remembering, and restricts its meaning, binding thought and memory together. This is a limit case, and perhaps an exemplary one. To think is to “enter forgetfulness”—as one enters a religion—in order to recall, to think about nothing but the object, which never moves away and which shapes the form of every content, whatever it may be, which is created by history. “Thoughts” ( Gedanken ) will thus be determined and structured from within by the power of verbal creation. French is unable to say this because thought and memory are not similarly bound together, nor linked to gratitude ( Dank ), as they are in English as well ( “think” and “thank” ). But they were originally, if thought was first of all formed by life returning back to its past, where it was expressed and described. Reflection developed within the autonomy of language which, turning upon itself, masters its own inventiveness.
We can envisage not holding on to one meaning, as a deepening of our understanding of an event in its duration, as if it were a response, an echo, a replica. However, to be free of a ( heavy ) past—something life demands as time progresses: this responds to a very different, and contrary, objective. In this case, the present remains shaped by a choice, and imposes a certain way of doing things, a judgment, a practice, and a politics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck, 1992. Translation by Rodney Livingstone: Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Baer, Ulrich. “Landscape and Memory in the Work of Paul Celan: ‘To Learn the Language of the Place.’ ” In Semiotics, edited by C. W. Spinks and John Deely, 111–23. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Translated by James McGowan. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
. Œuvres completes. Vol. 1. Edited by C. Pichois. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1976.
Benjamin, Walter. “Ausgraben und Erinnern.” In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by T. Rexroth, 4:400ff. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991.
. “Denkbilder.” In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by T. Rexroth, 2:305–438. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Translation by Rodney Livingstone et al.: “Ibizan Sequence” and “Thought Figures.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 553–737. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Bergson, Henri. Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. First published in 1896. Translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer: Matter and Memory. New York: Dover Publications, 2004. First published in 1912.
Bloch, David. Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation, and Reception in Western Scholasticism. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen formen. 2nd ed. 4 vols. Vols. 1–3: Oxford: Cassirer, 1923; vol. 4: Berlin: Cassirer, 1931. Translation by Ralph Manheim: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Introduction by Charles W. Hendel. 4 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–96.
Celan, Paul. “Atemwende.” In vol. 2 of Gesammelte Werke. 5 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. First published in 1967. Translation by Pierre Joris: Breathturn. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995.
. “Stilleben.” In Von Schwelle zu Schwelle. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Translation by David Young: Marick Press, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund. Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1902. Edited by J. M. Masson. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986.
. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1985.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Vol. 3 of Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. “Andenken.” In Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996. 79–151. Translation and introduction by Keith Hoeller: “Remembrance.” In Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Amherst, MA: Humanity, 2000. 101–74.
. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Vol. 3 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991. Translation by Richard Taft: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 5th ed. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Hesiod. Theogony. Edited by M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Homer. Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray, revised by William F. Wyatt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. “La vierge, le vivace . . .” In Œuvres completes. Vol. 1. Edited by B. Marchal. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1998.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen I–IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Vol. 1. Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980. Translation by Walter Kaufmann: “The Birth of Tragedy.” In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Random House, 1967.
. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Ricoeur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Translation by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer: Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004.
Weinrich, Harald. Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens. Munich: Beck, 2005. Translation by Steven Rendall: Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
MENSCHHEIT, HUMANITÄT ( GERMAN )
| ENGLISH | humanity | ||
| FRENCH | humanité, sentiment d’humanité | ||
| LATIN | humanitas |
HUMANITY, and ANIMAL, BILDUNG, GESCHLECHT, MITMENSCH, MORALS, OIKEIÔSIS, PEOPLE/RACE/NATION
Belonging to the human race ( Menschengeschlecht ), the fact of being a human and of being part of humanity ( Menschentum ), does not necessarily mean that one shows one’s humanity, or that one is moved by a sense of humanity ( Humanität ). The relatively recent introduction into German of the term Humanität ( which is not, however, in the Grimms’ dictionary ) answers the need to make an even more rigorous distinction between the quality of a human being ( Menschlichkeit ) and the virtue of “humanity,” since Menschlichkeit and Humanität can quite easily be confused. But mankind ( Menschheit ) considered as an ethical horizon, and ideal, is in its turn distinct from a simple belonging to the human race.
I. Human, Human Nature: From Humanitas to Humanität/Menschlichkeit
The classical Latin humanitas does not refer to the human race, but contrasts that which pertains to human nature to everything animal, and then by extension refers more precisely to what characterizes human nature and its behaviors, and finally, its virtues and distinctive qualities. This broad range of meanings is illustrated by Cicero. Even though we first see with him the emergence of a “universal society of humankind” ( “societas universalis humanitatis,” De finibus 3.19.62 ), humanity is still envisaged from the Aristotelian perspective of the political nature of man as endowed with language. Yet the term also refers to a series of qualities and virtues, to the extent that we can see a convergence of the two meanings in the attempt to bring together rhetoric, philosophy, history, and law in a single educational program. Although Cicero confessed that he did not really know what man was, or what his essence might be ( De finibus 5.33 ), and thus does not strictly speaking allow us to see his thinking as anticipating “humanism,” it would be possible to deduce from it, as Leonardo Bruni did in the fifteenth century, the notion of studia humanitatis.
■ See Box 1.
The medieval Christian tradition emphasizes the opposition between humanitas and divinitas, and makes the first term a synonym for everything that has to do with finitude and imperfection, without putting into question the primary meaning of human nature. Molière can thus have his theatrical pedant, Métaphraste, say, “Si de parler le pouvoir m’est ôté, / Pour moi j’aime autant perdre l’humanité” ( If the power of speech were taken from me / I would just as well lose my humanity: Le dépit amoureux, 2.8 ), in the same sense that Pascal, speaking of Christ, writes, “Sachant que nous sommes grossiers, il nous conduit ainsi à l’adoration de sa divinité présente en tous lieux par celle de son humanité présente en un lieu particulier” ( Knowing how gross we are, he thus conducts us to the adoration of his divinity, present in all places, by that of his humanity, present in a particular place: Provincial Letters, letter 16 ). Furthermore, the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch ( RT ) takes humanitas as its point of reference both for the entry Menschheit and for Menschlichkeit, but it is precisely this dependency on Latin that Fichte challenged in the fourth of his Addresses to the German Nation ( 1807 ), criticizing the use of the term Humanität. His reaction to the importation of a foreign term was based on the argument that the development of the particular language and thought of the German people had in reality nothing to do with imported terms that were grafted on artificially, especially if the languages from which these terms were borrowed could not compete with the German language in their originality. French was, according to him, too dependent upon Latin, whereas German was perfectly capable of thinking the notion of humanity by giving it its own expressions: Menschheit, Menschlichkeit, and Menschenfreundlichkeit ( which subsumes the idea of kindness, benevolence to others, and philanthropy, in its literal etymological sense ). This explicit argument barely disguised the subtext: Fichte was reacting against a French model imported through the Academy of Berlin, which proposed a universalist ideal of humanity, when it was Napoleon’s armies that undertook to impose this ideal, by refusing any German specificity. In addition, Humanität was too directly linked to a Roman Catholic semantic and cultural context, whose “universalism” was opposed head-on to the Lutheranism that founded the German language.
It was all the more surprising that the Grimms’ dictionary, which dates from the first half of the nineteenth century and, as we saw, does refer to the Latin humanitas, does not record Humanität ( RT: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch ). Humanität, after all, was already present, sixteen years before the Addresses to the German Nation, in Herder’s great work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind ( Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit ), book 4, chapter 4: “I would hope to be able to capture in the term humanity [Humanität] everything I have said up until now on the superior formation of man in terms of reason and freedom. . . .” The title of this chapter is explicit: “Man is formed with a view to humanity and religion.” Humanität, moreover, is emphasized throughout this book, and, like humanitas in Cicero, although it is never given a positive definition, Herder’s Humanität includes everything that enables man to rise above his empirical ground, as well as everything that is aimed for in this movement of overcoming, since humanity is the “finality of mankind”: the future of reason is to establish a “lasting humanity.”
II. “Humanity” ( Menschheit ) as an Ethical Ideal?
Kant also draws a distinction between Humanität and Menschlichkeit on the one hand, and Menschheit on the other. In the appendix to the second part of the Critique of Judgment ( §60, “Of the Methodology of Taste,” Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment ), Kant reminds us in discussing the humanities that they are so called “because humanity [Humanität] means on the one hand the universal feeling of participation [Teilnehmungsgefühl] and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate [mittheilen] one’s inmost self universally, which properties taken together constitute the sociability that is appropriate to humankind [Menschheit].” But the problem is no longer one of a semantic differentiation between an originally Latin term and a German term, since Kant introduces a double meaning of the term Menschheit. For animality also exists within man, and is opposed to “the idea of humanity [Menschheit] that he bears in his soul as the archetype of his actions” ( Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Dialectic,” 1.1, trans. Guyer and Wood, 397 ), since one cannot determine “the highest degree of perfection at which humanity must stop . . . however great a gulf must remain between the idea and its execution” ( ibid. ). Humanity is thus both what characterizes man as an “object of experience” and the ideal of his freedom, “humanity raised in its Idea” ( Conflict of the Faculties, §1, General Remark, “On Religious Sects,” trans. Gregor, 105 ). Menschheit, then, referred both to a generic humanity, and to what it is within humanity, and only within humanity, that makes it no longer a fact, but a gradual evolution toward an ethical ideal: it is at the very core of this generic humanity that the driving force of its evolution is situated. Defined as freedom, this driving force is generic humanity’s final cause, humanity perfected and reconciled, humanity having made real the idea that ( by its very nature ) it also is.
Borrowing this double Kantian sense, Hermann Cohen emphasizes that in Kant, the term both is “equivalent to a rational being,” and has a “universalist, cosmopolitan meaning.” Cohen, moreover, links Kant to Herder:
Herder, who was a rebellious and thus ungrateful disciple of Kant, still engaged with his thought . . . through the idea of humanity . . . it is no coincidence that he was also the author of On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. He recognized the spirit of humanity in the earliest texts of the Old Testament. . . . This was an important intuition which guided Herder in his general conception of the spirit of the Bible: he recognized the messianism in the principle of monotheism.
( Religion of Reason, chap. 13: “The Idea of Messiah and Humanity,” §11 )
Three perspectives converge at a sort of future vanishing point: politics has as its ideal the confederation of States, driven by the spirit of cosmopolitanism that ultimately tends toward the disappearance of nation-states, then of sovereign states. The spirit is based on the properly ethical aspiration to the ideal of a reconciled humanity, that is, an ethics that coincides with culture to the extent that it would render religion useless, since religion will have been, as a messianic monotheism, the revelation of the meaning of these ideals in the figure of the Messiah. ( Christianity and Judaism are not fundamentally opposed if Noah is recognized as “the first Messiah,” and if one accepts the essential role played by the prophets in the constitution of the historical and moral ideal of humanity; the real and irreducible point of divergence is, of course, the fact of accepting or refusing Jesus as the Messiah. ) Cohen, who is openly hostile to the idea of miracles, does not imagine the Messiah other than in the secularized and rationalized form of a coincidence between the ideal and the real, between the fieri and the factum; he knows that it is not a matter of a promised effective reality, but of a tendency, of an asymptote. Unified humanity is merely an ideal: monotheistic messianism is its historical expression, and Kantian ethics and cosmopolitanism are its rational formulation. The feeling of humanity—Cohen makes no distinction between Humanität and Menschlichkeit—is an essential virtue since it is thanks to this virtue that humankind ( Menschentum, which is merely Menschengeschlecht as far as science is concerned ) has access to humanity ( Menschheit ), that is, to the true meaning of what would be the progress of humanity.
In Nietzsche’s thought, the potential confusion between the different terms used to designate humanity ( Humanität and Menschheit ) and the human ( das Menschliche and das Humane ) becomes the object of constant critical attention. Nietzsche denounces, in the folding back of Menschlichkeit onto Humanität, one of the most enduring effects of Christianity on the way we conceive of the human, and the most telling sign of how Christianity has supplanted antiquity. Indeed, it is in studying closely what constituted the humanity of the Greeks, from a philological and historical perspective, that the deceptive, cunning ( witzig ) nature of this folding back becomes apparent. This study enables us to understand the extent to which the idea of the human ( das Menschliche ) becomes confused as soon as one banishes everything that Christianity designates as inhumanity ( Inhumanität ):
The human [das Menschliche] which Antiquity shows us should not be confused with the human [das Humane]. . . . The human [das Menschliche] of the Greeks consists in a certain naivety by which, for them, are distinguished man, the State, art, society, the rights of war and of peoples, the relations between the sexes, education, looking after the home; this is precisely the human [das Menschliche] as it manifests itself everywhere, among all peoples, but for them, with no mask and inhumanly [in einer Unmaskirtheit und Inhumanität], which one must not overlook if one is to draw any lesson from it.
( Nietzsche, frag. 3 [12], March 1875, in “Notes for ‘We Philologists’ ” )
III. Man and Inhumanity
This confusion is in essence due to the fact that the idea of Humanität aims to separate man from nature. Reestablishing the meaning of Menschheit assumes that one can show how much “the natural qualities, and the properly called ‘human’ [menschlich] ones have grown up inseparably together” ( Nietzsche, “Homer’s Wettkampf” ). One can thus no longer make any distinction between man and nature. But to get rid of this folding back means taking away from humanity ( Menschheit ) any teleological meaning. Indeed, it is when one considers that humanity ( Menschheit ) is never sufficiently human ( Humane ) that one makes one or the other a goal:
Man, not humanity [die Menschheit]. Humanity [die Menschheit] is much more a means than an end. It is a question of the type: Humanity [die Menschheit] is only material of experience, the enormous excess of what has not succeeded, a field of rubble.
( Nietzsche, frag. 14 [8] )
And also:
In our present humanity [Menschheit] we have attained a considerable degree of humanity [Humanität]. The very fact that we are generally not aware of it is already a proof.
( Nietzsche, frag. 15 [63] )
This attachment to the idea of Humanität in Nietzsche’s late writings, and the regret they express that there is never enough humanity, become a symptom of decadence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cohen, Hermann. Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Leipzig: Fock, 1919. Translation by Simon Kaplan: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Introduction by Simon Kaplan. Introductory essays by Leo Strauss, Steven S. Schwarzschild, and Kenneth Seeskin. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Reden an die deutsche Nation. Edited by Immanuel Hermann Fichte. In Fichtes Werke, 7:257–501. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. Originally published in 1808. Translation by R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull: Addresses to the German Nation. Edited by George Armstrong Kelly. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Edited by Wolfgang Pross. 2 vols. In Werke, vol. 3. Munich: Hanser, 2002. Translation by T. Churchill: Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. New York: Bergman, 1800.
Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited and translated by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
. The Conflict of the Faculties [Der Streit der Fakultäten]. Translated and introduction by Mary J. Gregor. New York: Abaris, 1979.
. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
. Critique of Practical Reason. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
. Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–.
. The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Digital Critical Edition of the Complete Works and Letters. Based on the critical text by Giorgio Colli and Mazzimo Montinari ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967– ). Edited by Paolo D’Iorio. http://www.nietzschesource.org
Osamu, Nishitani. “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being.’ ” In Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, edited by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, 259–73. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006.
Wood, Allen. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
| ENGLISH | mark | ||
| FRENCH | marque distinctive, marque, note | ||
| ITALIAN, SPANISH | marca | ||
| LATIN | nota |
CONCEPT, LOGOS, MOMENT, OBJECT, PREDICATION, PROPERTY, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, RES, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SIGN, THING ( RES ), TROPE
The German Merkmal is generally considered as a term from Gottlob Frege’s philosophical idiolect. Indeed, the word appears in contrast to Eigenschaft ( property ) in the Grundlagen der Arithmetik ( Foundations of arithmetic ) from 1884, when he introduces a new theory of predication ( §53 ). According to this theory—readily reformulated with the help of a standard example in the history of logic—in a proposition such as “man is an animal,” “animal” will not be analyzed in Fregean terms as a property of man, but as a “mark” of the concept of man. However, Merkmal is not only a technical term belonging to a particular philosophy; it is at the intersection of two series, whose initial convergence, and then progressive divergence, are linked to a fact of translation between Greek and Latin that is worthy of a philosopher’s attention. More than its English or French equivalents, the clarity of the oppositions that structure its domain of application in German allow it to describe the aforementioned “intersection,” its sources, its mechanisms, and its philosophical stakes. The first series is the one denoted by the synonymous pair Merkmal-Zeichen ( sign ); the second, which corresponds to Frege’s usage, is the one denoted by the antonymous pair Merkmal/Eigenschaft. These two series do not normally have any necessary meeting point. Their intersection can only be explained by other philosophical languages: before becoming part of Frege’s idiom in opposition to Eigenschaft, the notion of Merkmal had a protohistory, entailing a certain number of shifts in the understanding of what a concept, a judgment, and an object of judgment are, and how they are expressed in “languages.” This is what we will reconstruct briefly here.
I. Merkmal and Zeichen, “Mark” and “Sign”
The synonymous pair Merkmal-Zeichen has its origin in the Latin of Boethius, in this case via the translation of the first chapter of Peri hermêneias ( On interpretation ) ( 16a2–7 ), in which Aristotle puts in place what has come to be known, since C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, as the “semantic triangle.” In the Latin version, Boethius in fact translates two distinct Greek words, sumbolon [σύμϐολον] and sêmeion [σημεῖον], as the same Latin word, nota:
Sunt ergo ea quae sunt in voce earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae et ea quae scribuntur eorum quae sunt in voce. Et quemadmodum nec litterae omnibus eaedem, sic nec eadem voces; quorum autem hae primorum notae, eaedem omnibus passiones animae sunt, et quorum hae similitudines, res etiam eaedem.
( Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. )
( Aristoteles latinus, 2.1–2, p. 5 [4–9]; trans. Edghill )
( See SIGN, and on the current options for translating the Greek original, Box 1 there ). Boethius’s translation doubly modifies the relation of meaning according to Aristotle: first, through the ( relative ) elimination of what was conveyed by the distinction between sumbolon and sêmeion, and second, by bringing signifying and noting closer together. This explains the paired set of terms we find among certain medieval commentators of the Peri hermêneias, between nota and the speaker on the one hand, and signum and the interlocutor or listener on the other. ( Cf. the text by Robert Kilwardby, cited in SIGN: “dicendum quod differunt nota et signum, quia nota est in quantum est in ore proferentis, set signum est in quantum est in aure audientis” ( We will reply that nota and signum are different, because nota is used for what is in the mouth of the speaker, but signum for what is in the ear of the listener ), and the commentary by I. Rosier-Catach ). The replacement of nota by the pair sumbolum/signum in Guillaume de Moerbeke’s medieval translation of the text plays no part in the genesis of the first series of Merkmal; many logicians had become used to reorganizing the semantic triangle with signum well before this translation. So there are two all-encompassing linguistic mechanisms in Latin, based on the neutralization of sumbolon/sêmeion, that account for the alternation between Merkmal and Zeichen in common philosophical usage in German, and that identify a mark and a sign ( as they also do, more or less, in everyday language ): the system of nota, and the system of signum. “To be a mark of” and “to be a sign of” are considered synonymous, by virtue of the simple fact that Zeichen contains, depending on the context, the same dimension of notification as the French signe ( sign; signifier [in French] can have the meaning of “to let know,” “to notify”; “donner un signe de” [to give a sign of] is synonymous in French with “donner une marque de”; and so on; cf. the analogous expression “signify” in English: “I signified my assent . . .”; and the use of “signify” and “signifyin’” in the African American tradition ). To this is added, however, the transitivity of the posited relationship that Aristotle articulates in the “semantic triangle,” and that subsequently acquires a historial dimension. Aristotle’s formulation generally appears among Scholastics in the form of a saying based on signum: “Quicquid est signum signi est signum signati” ( Anything that is the sign of a sign is the sign of its signified )—meaning that the vocal sound ( Aristotle’s phônê [φωνή] ), insofar as it is the sign of the “passions” or the “affections of the soul” ( “pathêmata tês psuchês [παθήματα τῆς ψυχῆς]” ), is therefore also the sign of the things signified ( the pragmata [πϱάγματα] ) by these passions. There is, though, another expression attested as early as the twelfth century, “Nota notae est nota rei” ( The nota of a nota is the nota of the thing ), which initially has the same meaning as the first formulation, since it simply says the same thing in the language of Boethius’s translation. But it will progressively assume a new meaning, explaining how Merkmal becomes part of a configuration we might describe as “pre-Fregean,” which will lead to the opposition between Merkmal and Eigenschaft.
II. Marks of Concepts / Marks of Things
By positing that “animal” is not a property of “man,” but a Merkmal of the concept of man, a Fregean means that animal is a “part” of man, or more precisely, that animal is a “part” of the concept man, whereas, for example, it is a “property” of the concept man to “have n individuals,” and a property of a given individual to “fall under the concept man” ( which is expressed in the single proposition that the concept has an extension: multiple individuals “fall under the concept” ). In a letter published in 1941 ( cf. Unbekannte Briefe Freges, ed. Steck, 9 ), Frege himself explains that the mereological and intensional relation of the marks to the concepts they constitute is comparable to the relation that stones have to the house that they are used to build, and that consists of this building ( “Ich vergleiche die einzelnen Merkmale eines Begriffes den Steinen, aus denen ein Haus besteht” [I compare the individual marks of a concept to the stones from which a house is built] ). In an article from 1903 on “The Foundations of Geometry” ( 373 ), the parts of a concept are presented, in a less visually figurative way, as its “logical parts [logische Teile].” The question that interests us here is not the origin of this new meaning of Merkmal, but rather this: what makes possible, even facilitates, the transition from the pair Merkmal-Zeichen to the opposition Merkmal/Eigenschaft?
A part of the history of Merkmal was traced by Kasimir Twardowski in a essay from 1894, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen ( On the theory of content and of the object of representations ).
■ See Box 1.
|
Merkmal, moment, “trope” Paragraph 13 of Kasimir Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen ( On the content and object of presentations ) is devoted to Merkmal. In referring to the term, Twadrowski does not distinguish between either the level of the concept or the level of things, but between the level of representation ( Vorstellung ) and that of the object of representation. On this point, he mentions the “eminent authorities” who paved the way for our understanding of the “mark.” The first is Kant, and the introduction to his Logic, from which he gives a long quotation: A distinctive mark is, on a thing, what constitutes a part of the knowledge of this thing, or even a partial representation, which amounts to the same, insofar as it is considered as the basis of the knowledge of the entire representation. . . . All thought is nothing other than the fact of representing itself using distinctive marks. ( In Husserl and Twardowski, Sur les objets intentionnels, 171 ) The second authority is the Aristotelian Adolf Trendelenburg, if we accept Twardowski’s rewriting of the definition proposed in his Logische Untersuchungen ( 2:255 ): a Merkmal is “that which forms the concept in the thing [Sache].” Twardowski comments, “Although the meaning of this definition . . . appears to be rather unclear,” it can be justified by “making it more explicit that what is understood by distinctive marks is what ‘in the thing’ provides the necessary material from which the concept of this thing is formed. What corresponds in the thing to the concept are the distinctive marks of this thing” ( in Husserl and Twardowski, Sur les objets intentionnels, 172; it is worth noting the distinction he makes between Sache [thing as affair, matter] and Dinge [thing as object] ). The third authority is Albert Stöckl ( Lehrbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1, §75 ): What we understand by distinctive marks are generally all the moments by which an object is recognized as what it is, and is distinguished from all other objects. ( In Husserl and Twardowski, Sur les objets intentionnels, 172 ) Merkmal is thus a veritable conceptual “exchanger”: with Trendelenburg, it brings together Kant’s “mark,” the world of representation, and Aristotle’s “part of logos [λόγος],” the world of essences; with Stöckl, it opens out onto the Husserlian notion of “moment” ( see MOMENT ), and thus onto the notion of “trope,” since the Rotomomente ( moments of the color red ), the individuelle Röte ( individual reds ) of, or in, a red thing, are defined as Einzelfall ( particular cases ) of the Spezies Röte ( redness species ), and for Husserl ( Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, §§31, 34, 39 ) clearly correspond to the tropes of recent trope theory ( see TROPE ). BIBLIOGRAPHY Husserl, Edmund, and Kazimierz Twardowski. Sur les objets intentionnels ( 1893–1901 ). Translated into French by J. English. Paris: Vrin 1993. Stöckl, Albert. Lehrbuch der Philosophie. Mainz, Ger.: Kirchheim, 1868. Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf. Logische Untersuchungen. Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1964. First published in Leipzig, 1870. |
It is, however, in a text by Adolf Reinach from 1911, Die obersten Regeln der Vernunftschlüsse bei Kant ( The supreme rules of reasoning in Kant ), that we can find the most original indication of the trajectory that Merkmal takes before Frege. This trajectory, however, takes a surprising material form in the radical change of understanding that the Scholastic saying undergoes: “Nota notae est nota rei.” When Reinach presents the two main rules of reasoning according to Kant, he refers to the 1672 text Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren ( The false subtlety of the four syllogistic figures ), and makes a distinction between “the general rule of all affirmative reasonings” and “the general rule of all negative reasonings.” The first, R1, is: “Ein Merkmal vom Merkmal ist ein Merkmal der Sache selbst” ( A mark of a mark is a mark of the thing itself ); the second, R2, is: “Was dem Merkmal eines Dinges widerspricht, widerspricht dem Dinge selbst” ( What contradicts the mark of a thing contradicts the thing itself ). These rules show that, in the “pre-Fregean” use of the term, Merkmal is related to “things,” or rather to “the/a thing,” and not, as in Frege, to “concept” ( Begriff ) as a part of the concept. Moreover, judgment is defined in relation to “things” in Kant’s short text: “Etwas als ein Merkmal mit einem Dinge vergleichen, heißt Urteilen” ( Comparing something as a mark to a thing is called judging ). How should we therefore translate Merkmal? Reinach offers a fortuitous indication for a francophone translator when he makes explicit reference to the “Scholastic sayings adapted by Kant” in his two rules: in other words, for R1, “nota notae est etiam nota rei ipsius” ( The nota of a nota is also the nota of the thing itself ), and for R2, “repugnans notae repugnant rei ipsi” ( What contradicts the nota contradicts the thing itself ) ( cf. Reinach, Die obersten Regeln, 51 n. 2 ). The obvious translation into French of Merkmal would thus be note ( note ), via the Scholastic Latin. This choice, though, was not uniformly adopted, and marques ( marks ) and marques distinctives ( distinctive marks ) are found more commonly. The use of marques in this context has an illustrious precedent. Gottfried Leibniz, writing in French, presents the ( Scholastic ) notion of a “nominal definition” by proposing that it “explique le nom par les marques de la chose” ( explains the name by the marks of the thing ) ( cf. Die philosophischen Schriften, 5:18 ): the German and the French are here in agreement. But we can find other equivalents, pertaining to a different field. In the Logique ( Logic ) of his Cours de philosophie, published in Louvain in 1897, Desiré Mercier uses the term caractères to illustrate an idée inadequate: “L’idée inadequate nous présente l’objet au moyen de caractères qui ne suffisent pas à nous le faire distinguer de tout autre” ( An inadequate idea presents an object to us by means of characters that are insufficient to distinguish it for us from any other object; Cours de philosophie, 83 ). We thus have several pairs expressing the same basic distinction: the distinction nota/res, the German pair Merkmal/Ding, and the French pairs marques/choses and caractères/objet ( see OBJECT ). What in fact is la chose/Ding that Kant as well as Leibniz discuss? It is an open question: la chose can refer either to man ( common or universal ), or to this man ( singular or particular ), or to ∅ man ( man as neither universal nor particular, what Kant himself sometimes calls Gegenstand, in the sense of the “matter” [Ger. Materie] of the concept, in other words, the res that is neutral, or indifferent to particular or universal, as opposed to the individual Gegenstand existing in intuition [Ger. Anschauung] ). If we consider that ∅ “man” refers to the whole set of “marks” taken “in itself” ( Man in himself ), the universe of Merkmal is connected to that of the “triplex status naturae” or the “triplex respectus essentiae” ( in se, in anima, in re ), that of the “indifference of the essence” ( see UNIVERSALS ).
Kant’s rules R1 and R2 open out onto another problematic: the one inaugurated by Aristotle when he postulates in the Categories that “as far as definitions are concerned, the first species include the definition both of the species and of the genera, and the definition of the species includes that of the genus,” and that, “in the same way, species and individuals also include the definition of the differences.” In order to justify this affirmation, Aristotle introduces a rule that recalls R1: “Everything that can be said of the predicate can also be said of the subject [hosa gar kata tou katêgoroumenou legetai, kata tou hupokeimenou rhêthêsetai ( ὅσα γὰϱ ϰατὰ τοῦ ϰατηγοϱουμένου λέγεται, ϰατὰ τοῦ ὑποϰειμένου ῥηθήσεται )]” ( Categories 3b4–5, trans. Cooke ). Besides the paralogisms that are easily dismissed, such as “Socrates is a man, man is a species, therefore Socrates is a species,” the problem for commentators is that of the status of the “predicates of predicates” in Aristotle. ( See, among others, the thirteenth-century Fallaciae ad modum Oxoniae [ed. Kopp, 106–7], which explains that this paralogistic type of reasoning constitutes the third mode of error of the figure of expression, based on a mistaken commutatio of the quale quid—“described,” Greek poion ti [ποιόν τι]—as hoc aliquid, “this something,” Greek tode ti [τόδε τι]; the author of the Fallaciae exposes the error in the analytical language of the suppositio: in the major, homo has a “simply confused [confusa tantum]” supposition, and means something that is described; in the minor, it has a “determinate [determinata]” supposition, and means “this something”; see SUPPOSITION. ) Aristotle touches on the question on several occasions, particularly when he discusses certain predicates of Man in himself ( ∅ man ) that do not apply to man plain and simple ( this man or that man )—for example, “immobile being” ( cf. Topics, Ε.7, 137b3–10 ). The clearest passage is, however, in Metaphysics, Μ.4, 1079b3–11, in which he contrasts the theory of Ideas with a “pre-Fregean” argument: if there is an Idea of the circle, a Circle in itself, the Idea of the circle will have to contain all the marks of the essence of the circle as well as the property of “being an Idea ( of ).” To what part of the essence will this be added? Remarkably, the note by Tricot ( Métaphysique, 2:738 ), based on the commentary by Bonitz, quotes the passage in which Bonitz uses the term nota to refer to the constitutive elements of the Idea.
The “pre-Fregean” thesis is clearly expressed by Leibniz when, faced with the paralogism “animal est genus, Petrus est animal, ergo Petrus est genus” ( Animal is a genus, Peter is an animal, therefore Peter is a genus ) ( of the kind poion ti / tode ti ), he replies that the major is not universal, since ∅ animal is not a genus ( “maiorem non esse universalem, neque enim is qui est animal est genus,” Defensio Trinitatis, in Die philosophischen Schriften, 4:120 ), which, as Angelelli points out, amounts to saying that “ ‘genus’ is not a mark of ‘animal’ ” ( Studies on Gottlob Frege, 149 n. 56 ). We also find this thesis prefigured in Albert the Great, when he explains that in “homo praedicatur de pluribus,” the referents of “man” do not have the property of being the predicates of many ( “nihil est in appellatis ipsis quod de pluribus praedicatur” ), since the predicate “to be the predicates of many” is contingent on the form “man” without being contingent on its referents ( “tale enim praedicatum contingit formae, ita quod non contingit appellatis,” Metaphysica, 7.2.1, ed. Geyer, p. 339, 24–29 ).
III. Merkmal and Urteil, “Mark” and “Judgment”
A recurrent difficulty of the notion of judgment as an act of “linking marks together” ( Merkmalsverknüpfung ), governed by Kant’s rules R1 and R2, is distinguishing between R1, the rule of Categories 3b 4–5, and the rule of the “Dictum de omni.” For some authors, there is no difference between the two: “To say: ‘If A is an attribute of every B, and B an attribute of every G, A is an attribute of every G,’ is the same as saying: ‘Everything that can be affirmed of the attribute must be affirmed of the subject’ ” ( Tonqueduc, Critique, 54 ). Others who regularly use the notion of “mark,” like Husserl, reject the formulation “Nota notae est nota rei” ( cf. Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, §41 ). Starting out from the definition of “judgment” as “linking marks together,” we cannot fail to notice the difference that exists between this approach and the “logical” approach to judgment, as it is discussed in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. There, Immanuel Kant indeed points out that he has “never been able to satisfy [himself] with the explanation that the logicians give of a judgment in general: it is, they say, the representation of a relation between two concepts [die Vorstellung eines Verhältnisses zwischen zwei Begriffen],” because it “fits only categorical [kategorische Urteile] but not hypothetical [hypothetische] and disjunctive [disjunktive] judgments ( which latter two do not contain a relation of concepts but of judgments themselves [als welche letztere nicht ein Verhältnis von Begriffen, sondern selbst von Urteilen enthalten] )” ( Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., §19, trans. Guyer and Wood, 251 ). This implies, among other “troublesome consequences,” that the “widespread doctrine of the four syllogistic figures” in effect “concerns only [betrifft nur] the categorical inferences [die kategorischen Vernunftschlüsse]” ( ibid., 251 n. 1 ). It is also worth noting that this same passage introduces the notion of an “objectively valid” relation of judgment, defining it thus:
Diese beiden Vorstellungen sind im Object d.i. ohne Unterschied des Zustandes des Subjects, verbunden und nicht bloß in der Wahrnehmung ( so oft sie auch wiederholt sein mag ) beisammen.
( These two representations are combined in the object, i.e., regardless of any difference in the condition of the subject, and are not merely found together in perception [however often as that might be repeated]. )
( Ibid., 252 [emphasis added] )
With this Object/Subject opposition, we can see that the idea of “combination in the object,” which up to a point is very close to R1, invests the “thing” ( Ding ) with a new coefficient, which belongs to the universe of the Critique and which assumes the distinction between “empirical intuition” and the “originary synthetic unity of apperception” ( the “unity of transcendental apperception” ). The change in the lexicon of judgment goes hand in hand with a change in the lexicon of the object.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albertus Magnus [Albert the Great]. Metaphysica, Pars II: Libri 6–13. Edited by Bernhard Geyer. In Alberti Magni Opera Omnia, vol. 16, part 2. Münster, Ger.: Aschendorff, 1964.
Angelelli, Ignacio. Studies on Gottlob Frege and Traditional Philosophy. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1967.
Aristotle. The Categories. Translated by Harold P. Cooke. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
. De interpretatione vel Periermenias. In Aristoteles Latinus, vol. 2, parts 1–2, edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995.
. Métaphysique. Translated by Jean Tricot. 2 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1991.
Barnes, Jonathan. “Property in Aristotle’s Topics.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 52 ( 1970 ): 136–55.
Bonitz, H. Aristotelis Metaphysica. 2 vols. Bonn: Marcus, 1848–49.
Cunningham, Stanley B. “The Metaphysics of the Good.” In Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy of Albert the Great, 93–112. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008.
Frege, Gottlob. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl. Edited by Christian Thiel. Centennial ed. Hamburg: Meiner, 1986. Translation by J. L. Austin: The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number. 5th rev. ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980.
. “Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie.” Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 12 ( 1903 ).
. Unbekannte Briefe Freges über die Grundlagen der Geometrie und Antwortbrief Hilberts an Frege. Edited by M. Steck. Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, part 2. Heidelberg: Veiss, 1941.
Gates, Henry-Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen. Edited by Ursula Panzer. Husserliana 19. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984. Translation by J. N. Findlay: Logical Investigations. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Kopp, Clemens. “Die ‘Fallaciae ad modum Oxoniae’: Ein Fehlschlußtraktat aus dem 13. Jahrhundert.” Dissertation. Cologne, 1985.
Leibniz, Gottfried. Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz. Edited by C. J. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1960.
Porphyry. Isagoge: Texte grec, translatio Boethii. Translated by Alain de Libera and Alain-Philippe Segonds. Introduction and notes by Alain de Libera. Paris: Vrin, 1998. Translation by Jonathan Barnes: Porphory’s Introduction. With commentary by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Reinach, Adolf. Die obersten Regeln der Vernunftsschlüsse bei Kant. Edited by Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, 1989.
Rosier-Catach, Irène. La parole comme acte. Paris: Vrin, 1994.
Tonquédec, Joseph. La critique de la connaissance. Paris: Beauchesne, 1929.
Twardowski, Kazimierz. On the Content and Object of Presentations: A Psychological Investigation. Translated and introduction by R. Grossmann. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977.
MÊTIS [μῆτις] ( GREEK )
| ENGLISH | ruse, skill |
RUSE, and ART, DESTINY, DOXA, INGENIUM, MEMORY, PRUDENCE, SOPHISM, TALAṬṬUF, TRUTH, UNDERSTANDING, WISDOM
Mêtis [μῆτις], in ancient Greek, covers a wide semantic field, including the idea of practical intelligence, of astuteness, of a supple mind. This mental category had only sporadically caught the attention of scholars ( Carlo Diano ) before the groundbreaking book by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence. La mêtis des Grecs ( Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society ). The word derives from a verbal root that means “to measure” ( Gr. metron [μέτϱον], mêtra [μήτϱα], “measure”; see LEX, Box 1 ). It is linked to the important root *med-, whose meaning Benveniste defines as follows: “to take the appropriate measures with authority” ( RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes; see RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. “medô” ). This root offers a number of terms signifying measure, moderation, and modality ( Lat. modus ), as well as the attention of someone who “meditates,” dominates, rules, decides ( Gr. medomai [μήδομαι], “to attend to”; but also mêdomai [μέδομαι], “to meditate a plan, to have in mind” ), including in the field of law and “medicine.” Mêtis characterizes—for better or for worse; between omnicompetence and charlatanism—the posture adopted by the Sophists, “at the intersection between the traditional mêtis and the new intelligence of the philosopher” ( Detienne and Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence ). It was destined to become a category in contemporary anthropology, and is associated with the Anglo-Saxon category of the trickster, as well as with Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage.
Through a number of interconnected studies, M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant sketched out a vast panorama that presents the whole range of mental attitudes covered by the term mêtis ( astuteness, flair, shrewdness, foresight, feigning, disguise, resourcefulness, attention, vigilance, etc. ), as well as the role of mêtis in a series of functions and strategies employed by the gods, by men, and by animals.
The book begins by analyzing the figure of the Oceanid Mêtis, “Prudence” ( this is P. Mazon’s chosen French translation in Hesiod’s Theogony ), the first wife of Zeus, who, in an unforeseen move that is more cunning than astuteness itself, grabs her and swallows her while she is already pregnant with Athena ( Theogony, ll. 886–900 ). Mêtis, which is no less fundamental than in the Orphic version, is added to force, and in the case of Zeus, renders him unbeatable.
The semantic field of mêtis is covered by many other notions, such as that of a trap ( dolos [δόλος] ), of disguise, and above all of technê [τέχνη] ( art, skill, and the technical crafts ), of kairos [ϰαιϱός], or “the opportune moment” ( see MOMENT ), of poros [πόϱος] ( open passage ), and of apatê [ἀπάτη] ( ruse, deception; see TRUTH, Box 6 ). It is under the aegis of this vast semantic field that a number of different strategies are developed in hunting, fishing, war, etc., and used by the gods ( especially Athena and Hephaistos ), by men ( blacksmiths, sailors, etc. ), and by animals ( the octopus, the fox, etc. ). A new horizon is thus invented, opening out onto aspects and ideologies of ancient Greece that had been unknown, and that are symbolized by the practical intelligence of Athena, who distinguishes herself from the master of horses and of the sea, Poseidon, precisely because she uses technique, or mêtis, to make the farmer’s plow, the bit for the horse’s teeth, or the tiller to guide ships.
The section of the book dealing with Chronos, Zeus, and the epic heroes, Menelaus, Antilochus, and, above all, Ulysses, is based on the great epic texts and a number of examples from Greek tragedy. For mêtis is essentially a term from the epos, and although the comic theater of Aristophanes is full of ruses, the word never appears, just as we never find it in Herodotus, except in a quotation from Homer, nor in Euripides, and very rarely elsewhere in Greek tragedy. This accounts for the many recent studies devoted to the analysis of mêtis, particularly in the Odyssey, linking the notion to the polytropism of Ulysses, with his “thousand tricks,” as well as to the ironic and treacherous writing of Homer’s text itself ( P. Pucci ).
■ See Box 1.
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Ulysses: “My name is no-one,” the first dramatization of mêtis
Ulysses and his traveling companions are imprisoned on their return journey by the man-eating Polyphemus, who, instead of offering them hospitality, devours them two at a time for his meals. How Ulysses carries out his “finest plan” ( aristê boulê [ἀϱίστη βουλή]; Odyssey, 9.98 ) is well known: he offers wine to Cyclops to get him drunk, blinds him while he is asleep using a stake he has hardened in the fire, and he and his companions escape from the den once he has removed the rock from the entrance, each of them hanging underneath a sheep’s stomach. But this audacious plan, which entails tricking a monster, would not succeed without a preparatory ruse involving words, and which can be read in the Greek text through what Victor Bérard called “a cascade of puns.” All of these puns revolve around the relationship between outis [οὖτις] and mêtis. Outis, from the negative particle ou [οὐ] ( no, not ) and the indefinite pronoun tis [τίς] ( someone ), is the hero’s name that Odysseus declares to Polyphemus to be his own: “Outis [οὖτις], No-one, is my name. I am called Outis, No-one, by my mother, my father, and all my companions” ( 366–67 ). So that when his neighbors the Cyclops, awakened by the screams of Polyphemus, ask him: “Is one ( mê tis [μή τίς] ) of the mortals coming to steal your flock? Is someone ( mê tis [μή τίς] ) killing you by ruse or by force?” ( 406 ), the monster can only reply: “My friends, no-one is killing me ( Outis me kteinei [Oὖτίς με ϰτείνει] )” ( 408 ). However, because of the Greek syntax of negation, the sentence as a whole is to be understood, from the point of view of Polyphemus for whom No-one is the name of someone, to mean: “[It is] No-one [who] is killing me by ruse and not by force” ( Outis me kteinei dolôi oude biêpsin [Oὖτίς με ϰτείνει δόλῳ οὐδὲ βίηψιν] ), whereas the Cyclops, for whom no-one is negative, have to understand it to mean: “No-one is killing me, neither by ruse nor by force.” The negative particle ne in the French “ne … personne” ( no-one ) is particularly useful in translating the Greek here since it is linked to the primarily positive meaning of personne, so if Polyphemus had been a good Frenchman, he might well have made himself understood. The chorus continues: “If no-one uses force on you” ( ei mên dê mê tis se biazetai [εἰ μὲν δή μή τίς σε βιάζεται] ) ( 410 ), it is because Zeus is inflicting an illness on you, and no-one can do anything about it. Now, in this response, just as immediately before in their questions, they rely upon the other negative particle, not ou, a factual negation, but mê [μή], the prohibitive negation, also known as “subjective” negation. This sort of negation is indeed very characteristic of Greek, implying a will or thought, and one finds it essentially in other moods than the indicative as a means of expressing all the nuances of prohibition, of deliberation, of want, and of regret, or, as in this case, of eventuality or of virtuality: ei mê tis se biazetai. This is where, in focusing on this construction that is so attuned to the subtleties of negation, we find the really telling relationship to mêtis. No longer mê ( negative particle ) tis ( someone ), as two words, but mêtis, this time as a single word, the celebrated mêtis of the Greeks, their practical and cunning wisdom, embodied in the figure of Odysseus, who has any number of tricks up his sleeve. When he sees the Cyclops heading away, Odysseus laughs into his beard and rejoices in his heart: “It is my name that tricked him, and my irreproachable wit” ( hôs onom’ exapatêsen emon kai mêtis amumôn [ὡς ὄνομ᾽ ἐξαπάτησεν ἐμὸν ϰαὶ μῆτις ἀμύμων] ) ( 414 ). And he uses the word again in book 20, exhorting his heart to be patient: “How courageous you were, in waiting until the mêtis released me from this den where I thought I would die!” ( 20–21 ). One can understand why the mêtis of Odysseus, like that of Homer, as an effective mastery of speech, and of the very grammar and syntax of language, and as a play on being and non-being, were the heroic models for Sophistic rhetoric, which philosophers considered to be such a deceptive and scandalous art. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bérard, Victor, trans. and ed. L’Odyssée “poésie homerique.” 2 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. |
The word mêtis is sometimes used in its Odyssean sense by modern critics. Thus, James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State ( 1999 ), uses this word to describe the ingeniousness of traditional resourceful peasants who are good with their hands and able to adapt to changing situations, as opposed to rational and scientific technicians, who are abstract and who prefigure industrial agriculture and globalization.
Détienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Les ruses de l’intelligence: La mètis des Grecs. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Translation by Janet Lloyd: Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1978.
Diano, Carlo. Forma ed evento: Principii per una interpretazione del mondo greco. Venice: Pozza, 1952.
Faraone, Christopher A., and Emily Teeter. “Egyptian Maat and Hesiodic Metis.” Mnemosyne 57 ( 2004 ): 177–208.
Ferretto, Carla. “Orione tra ‘Alke’ e ‘Metis.’ ” Civiltà Classica e Cristiana 3 ( 1982 ): 161–82.
Goldhill, Simon. The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Holmberg, Ingrid Elisabeth. “The Sign of Metis.’ ” Arethusa 30 ( 1997 ): 1–33.
Piccirilli, Luigi. “Artemide et la mêtis di Temistocle.” Quaderni di Storia 13 ( 1981 ): 143–46.
Pucci, Pietro. Odysseus Polytropos. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Richlin, Amy. “Zeus and Metis: Foucalt, Feminism, Classics.” Helios 18 ( 1991 ): 160–80.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
Solomon, Jon. “One Man’s Metis: Another Man’s Ate.” In Hypatia: Essays in Classics, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy Presented to Hazel E. Barnes on Her Seventieth Birthday, edited by William M. Calder et al., 79–90. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1985.
Schein, Seth L. “Odysseus and Polyphemus in the Odyssey.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 11 ( 1970 ): 73–83.
Slatkin, Laura M. “Composition by Theme and the Mêtis of the Odyssey.” In Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretative Essays, edited by Seth L. Schein, 223–55. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
MIMÊSIS [μίμησις]
| FRENCH | imitation, représentation | ||
| GERMAN | Nachahmung, nachmachen, kopieren, nachbilden | ||
| ITALIAN | imitazione, rassimiglianze; rittrare | ||
| LATIN | imitatio, similitude |
IMITATION, and ACTOR, ANALOGY, ART, BEAUTY, COMPARISON, DESCRIPTION, DICHTUNG, DOXA, HISTORY, IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], IMAGINATION [PHANTASIA], INGENIUM, PLEASURE, PRAXIS, REPRÉSENTATION, TRUTH
Since the Renaissance, the translation and interpretation of the term mimêsis [μίμησις] have been the source of important philosophical and theoretical debates that have played a crucial role in the history of artistic thought. The development of the theory of art, first in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then in France in the seventeenth century, is fundamentally indebted to the Greek definition of art, in the general sense of techne [τέχνη] and the restricted sense of poiêsis [ποίησις], as a mimetic activity. And that definition, on each occasion, for the French as for the Italians, raised the same questions. In what does artistic imitation consist? What distinguishes it from resemblance, copy, reproduction, and illusion? What is its function: is it in the service of lies or the truth, pleasure, or knowledge? What is its object: is it nature or the idea, the visible or the invisible, the inner world or outer reality? All these questions are inscribed within a problematic largely determined by the semantic ambiguity of the concept of mimêsis in Greek philosophy. They correspond to the dual orientation given to the problematic of mimêsis by Plato and Aristotle, that is, to the opposition between a concept elaborated with reference to a pictorial model, giving mimêsis the meaning of “resemblance,” and a concept elaborated with reference to a theatrical model, giving mimêsis the sense of “representation.” This opposition between two meanings of mimêsis, between Platonic and Aristotelian mimêsis, is in a way constitutive of the theory of imitation that developed starting in the Renaissance and that dominated thinking about art for several centuries. It is found in the idea of imitazione, as well as in those of imitation and Nachahmung, but by way of numerous transformations that affected its meaning deeply. The Italian theorists reinterpreted mimêsis on the basis of the idea of imitatio, transmitted by the Latin that they continued to use. And it was on the basis of the theory of imitatio that they developed a theory of imitazione. It was subsequently on the basis of the idea of imitazione, and in opposition to it, that the French in turn appropriated the Aristotelian theory of mimêsis. And the critique of mimêsis that developed in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century was in fact a calling into question of the French doctrine of imitation that had dominated European thought since the seventeenth century. All these displacements, adaptations, and “translations” from one language to another did no more, in a sense, than develop one of the aspects of the concept of mimêsis and exploit its prodigious semantic richness.
I. Mimêsis in Plato and Aristotle
A. Theater or painting?
Like other words of the same family ( mimêtês [μιμητής], mimeîsthai [μιμεῖσθαι], etc. ), mimêsis [μίμησις] is related to the noun mîmos [μῖμος]. Initially the term referred only to mime, dance, music, in other words, to activities aimed at expressing an inner reality and not at reproducing external reality. Its application to the visual arts was concomitant with the semantic shift that took place in the fifth century when it began to designate the reproduction of the external world. That new use would play a crucial role in the orientation Plato would give to the problematic of mimêsis. The philosophical elaboration of the concept of mimêsis was in fact born of a reflection on painting and sculpture. To be sure, the first sense of mimêsis subsists in Plato, who persisted in applying the term to music, dance ( Laws, 7.798d ), and the theater. We thus find the theatrical origin of mimêsis in the distinction between mimêsis and diêgêsis [διήγησις], mimetic discourse corresponding to the forms of tragedy and comedy, as opposed to a simple narrative in which the poet recounts in his own name, without hiding behind a character ( Republic, 3.392c–394d ). But such uses, which remain traditional, themselves stemmed from the establishment of a new sense of mimêsis based on a reference to the visual arts, and more specifically to painting, that is, a mimetic activity whose characteristic is to imitate outer reality and to do so in an image. The pictorial origin of the concept of mimêsis as elaborated by Plato thus inscribes the analysis of the concept in a field far removed from the one to which it was linked by the theatrical origin of the word. The problem no longer concerns the identity of the subject, the confusion between the actor and the author ( as in the case of theatrical mimêsis ), but the identity of the object, that is, the relation of the image ( eidôlon [εἴδωλον] ) to its model. The fact of connecting the question of mimêsis to that of the image gives mimêsis the sense of resemblance or likeness, and the definition of mimêsis as resemblance allows one to condemn pictorial mimêsis as a false and bad likeness, that is, to reject it in the name of the very criterion that it served to elaborate. To be sure, Plato did not reject all forms of pictorial mimêsis, as is evidenced by the division he establishes in The Sophist between two sorts of mimêsis: a mimêsis eikastikê [μίμησις εἰϰαστιϰή] and a mimêsis phantastikê [μίμησις φανταστιϰή] ( 235d–236c ). The first consists of reproducing the model by respecting its proportions and imbuing each part with the appropriate colors: an art of the accurate copy. The second, on the other hand, involving above all works of large dimensions ( which thus need to be viewed at a distance ), deforms the exact proportions and uses colors that do not correspond to those found in reality. This mimetic does not seek to reproduce the real as it is, but as it appears to the spectator given his point of view—“these artists give up the truth in their images ( tois eidôlois [τοῖς εἰδώλοις] ) and make only the proportions that appear to be beautiful, disregarding the real ones” ( ou tas ousas summetrias, alla tas doxousas einai kalas [οὐ τὰς οὔσας συμμετϱίας ἀλλὰ τὰς δοξούσας εἶναι ϰαλάς] ) ( 236a 4–6 )—and it is there, of course, that we find lodged the art of sophistry, always considered “relativistic” ( 268c–d ). It is a mimetics that does not reproduce being but appearance: a “phantastics,” then, which is translated as the art of the “simulacrum” or of “illusion” ( see PHANTASIA ): it is, in keeping with good Platonic doctrine, to be condemned under the double heading of imprecision and deception, simultaneously because it is at a remove from truth and because it would have us believe its truth. Now there is “a great deal of this kind of thing in painting” ( pampolu . . . kata tên zôgraphian [πάμπολυ . . . ϰατὰ τὴν ζωγϱαφίαν] ) ( 236b 9 ). The quality of the mimêsis is to be gauged by the standard of its reference, evaluated in terms of accuracy and exactitude, that is, as a function of criteria that belong to the realm of knowledge and truth: in the arts of imitation, “it is first of all equality, whether of quality or quantity, that gives truth or rightness ( tên orthotêta [τὴν ὀϱθότητα] )” ( Laws, 2.667d 5–7 ).
This strictly referential conception of mimêsis nonetheless poses several problems with relation to the image—that is, as soon as one applies it to the type of imitation on which the Platonic theory of mimêsis is, in fact, based. The criteria of good mimêsis in the sense of likeness cannot be those of mimêsis in the sense of reproduction. An image that would reproduce the dimensions and all the characteristics of its model would no longer be an image but an identical duplicate of the original. One would no longer have Cratylus and the image of Cratylus, but two Cratyluses:
Then you see, my friend, that we must find some other principle of truth in images ( “allên chrê eikonos orthotêta zêtein” [ἄλλην χϱὴ εἰϰόνος ὀϱθότητα ζητεῖν] ), and also in names; and not insist that an image is no longer an image when something is added or subtracted. Do you not perceive that images are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they represent ( “hosou endeousin hai eikones ta auta echein ekeinois hôn eikones eisin” [ὅσου ἐνδέουσιν αἱ εἰϰόνες τὰ αὐτὰ ἔχειν ἐϰείνοις ὧν εἰϰόνες εἰσίν] )?
Cratylus, 432c 7–d 2
B. Resemblance or representation?
How is the resemblance of an image to be thought? How are we to think that other accuracy that presupposes the existence of a deviation between the product of the imitation and the object imitated? How are we to reconcile the referential definition of mimêsis with the idea that the imitation can be accurate while being inadequate to its model? This properly conceptual difficulty, evidence of a tension between contradictory demands, is already inscribed in the language. As R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot observe in the notes accompanying their translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, whatever the difference between Aristotelian and Platonic mimêsis, there is “a feature common to verbs of imitation in the two authors: the fundamental ambivalence of the accusative of an object—affected ( = model ) or effectuated ( = copy )—constructed with those verbs.” And it is precisely in order to preserve that ambivalence that they chose to translate mimeîsthai by représenter and not by imiter: “unless there be elements in the context allowing one to discriminate, ‘to represent ( représenter ) a man’ offers the same ambiguity as mimeîsthai anthrôpon [μιμεῖσθαι ἄνθϱωπον], whereas the traditional translation by imiter ( to imitate ) abusively selects an interpretation of the accusative as it does that of the model.” This grammatical ambiguity, which allows one to focus the verb on the imitation as well as on the object imitated, is in agreement with the dual descent, both philological and philosophical, of the concept of mimêsis, that is, with the fact that its meaning was constituted to a twofold reference—both theatrical and pictorial. Those two lines of descent determine two distinct ways of envisaging the object of mimêsis. The first, which opens onto a space of fiction, leads one to connect the mimetic activity with its product, the object that Dupont-Roc and Lallot call the “object effectuated,” which is given to be seen and heard in its actual presence—as in a theatrical performance ( représentation ). The second, which opens onto a world of images, connects it, on the contrary, with its model, what they call the “object affected,” an object whose presence is duplicated in paint on an illusory mode—as in a pictorial imitation. It is plainly that second sense that is dominant in Plato, but without annulling the effects of the other line of descent, which continues to affect the Platonic tradition. The tendency is in some sense reversed in Aristotle, who reinserts the meaning of mimêsis into the realm of poetics. As Ricoeur has written, in mimêsis, according to Aristotle, “one should not understand . . . a reduplication of presence, as might be understood of Platonic mimêsis, but the break which opens up the space of fiction” ( Temps et récit ).
■ See Box 1.
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The translation of mimêsis as “representation” in Aristotle One of the strongest aspects of R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot’s translation into French of Aristotle’s Poetics is indeed the way it takes into account the dual philological and philosophical natures of the questions raised by the translation of mimêsis. The reasons they give to justify their choice of translating mimêsis as representation are of course first and foremost philological: “We can now see why, against an entire tradition, we chose to translate mimeîsthai not as ‘to imitate’ but as ‘to represent’: the decision was thus made on the basis of the theatrical connotations of this verb, and above all the possibility, as is also the case with mimeîsthai, of having the complement be either the ‘model’ object or the produced object—whereas ‘to imitate’ excluded the latter, which is the most important.” But this choice also reflects a properly philosophical concern to account for the specificity of the Aristotelian conception of mimêsis in relation to the Platonic one, that is, a concern to resolve the many confusions and misinterpretations produced by the translation of mimêsis in the two authors as “imitation.” Their translation thus has the great advantage of clarifying a conceptual difference by inscribing it into a lexical distinction, that is, of clarifying retrospectively the Greek text itself. But it also adds a further degree of complexity to a history that is already fairly complicated, and the meaning of “representation” nowadays is indeed no less equivocal than the meaning of “imitation” was then. If “imitation” pulls mimêsis towards “resemblance” by conceiving of it as part of a problematic that was based on the paradigm of the image, “representation” draws us on the other hand to a theory of the sign founded on a linguistic model. Its present-day meaning has largely been determined by a history that has its origins in the seventeenth century, notably with the logicians of Port-Royal, and that was extensively developed in the twentieth century in the field of discourse theory. If the theatrical connotation of representation is still there in the everyday usage of the term, it has to a large extent disappeared from theoretical usage, where its connotation is primarily semiotic, including the application of the word to the analysis of the pictorial image. The way in which the term is nowadays used pervasively in art criticism, where it tends to replace the term “image,” is particularly interesting in this respect. To think the image as representation amounts to thinking the image as sign, and thus to obliterating its specifically visual dimension, which is still present in the word “imitation.” It is thus hardly surprising that the translation of mimêsis as “representation” is consonant with certain recent analyses that have been undertaken in the context of the philosophy of language, independently of any philological or historical concern. So Kendall Walton, for example, in the opening pages of his book Mimêsis as Make Believe, is careful to warn his reader that the word mimêsis, as he uses it, has to be understood in the sense of representation, that is, without reference to any theory of resemblance or imitation. He immediately goes on to say, however, that if the meaning of mimêsis corresponds for him to that of “representation,” it is in the particular sense that he himself gives to the term “representation”! It was doubtless in order to avoid all of these ambiguities that Walton preferred to return to the Greek term, but without translating it. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. La poétique. Translated by R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. Walton, Kendall. Mimêsis as Make Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. |
Just as the theatrical genealogy of mimêsis comes to disturb, in Plato, the coherence of a construction based on a visual paradigm, the Aristotelian analysis of poetic mimêsis, in a movement that is similar but reversed, is haunted by the question of the pictorial image, which draws the problematic of mimêsis in an entirely different direction. The comparison with painting invoked by Aristotle on innumerable occasions, and which attests to the underlying ( but active ) presence of the pictorial reference, is not made without raising several difficulties. Poetic mimêsis, as defined by Aristotle, is, as is known, a mimêsis of action: it concerns “the imitation [representation] of men in action ( prattontas [πϱάττοντας] )” ( Poetics, 2.1448a 1 ). Representing action means representing a plot ( muthos [μῦθος] ): “the Plot is the imitation of the action—for by plot [muthos] I here mean the arrangement of the incidents” ( 6.1450a 2 ). This correlation between mimêsis and muthos by way of plot results in giving primacy to plot over characters in the definition of tragedy: “The plot ( ho muthos [ὁ μῦθος] ), then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character ( ta êthê [τὰ ἤθη] ) holds the second place” ( 6.1450a 38–39 ). The comparison with painting, which intervenes immediately following this sentence, justifies that hierarchy by establishing a parallel between outline and plot, on the one hand, and color and character, on the other: “A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait.” But this comparison, which is in some sense structural and which establishes a hierarchical correspondence between the parts entering into the composition of a poem and those entering into the composition of a painting, agrees poorly with the one developed in chapter 2, again on the subject of character. It rests on an entirely different distinction that, in this case, calls into play the idea of resemblance or likeness:
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type . . ., it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life. Now it is evident that each of the modes of imitation above mentioned will exhibit these differences, and become a distinct kind in imitating objects that are thus distinct.
2.1448a 1–9; trans. S. H. Butcher
If the definition of mimêsis as a mimêsis of plot or action links poetry to history—from which it is distinguished, moreover, since actions are represented on stage by characters who are themselves in action—mimêsis of character, on the contrary, leads one to a linkage with painting, and more precisely with a genre of painting that raises in the most pointed manner the question of likeness, namely, that of portraiture. This twofold reference—to history and portraiture—attests anew to the impossibility of giving an unequivocal definition of mimêsis. If the mimêsis-muthos link fully justifies the translation of mimêsis as “representation,” the existence of that other link, between mimêsis and portraiture, attests to the permanence, in Aristotle, of an interpretation of mimêsis in terms of image and thus of likeness, which would justify an occasional return to translating mimêsis as “imitation.” As is the case in chapter 4, in which Aristotle suspends the Platonic condemnation of artistic imitation by assigning from the outset a cognitive function to the pleasure procured by mimetic activity, a tendency said to be inscribed in human nature. This pleasure in recognition, which, for Aristotle, lies at the source of knowledge, is directly linked to the existence of images, that is, to grasping a likeness or resemblance: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness chairousi tas eikonas horôntes [χαίϱουσι τὰς εἰϰόνας ὁϱῶντες] ) is that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he’ ” ( 1448b 15 ).
C. Nature or history?
The definition of art in general and of painting in particular has often received legitimacy, notably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the authority of Aristotle. Even at present, numerous interpreters see clear evidence of the influence of the Stagirite on the constitution of the theory of art. Yet although that theory does indeed borrow its elements from Aristotle, there is no basis for attributing to him such a determination of art. It conflates in a single idea definitions that, in Aristotle, belong to quite different registers. It associates with painting, and more generally with the arts in the modern, artistic sense of the term, that is, to activities that belonged, for Aristotle, to the realm of poetics, the definition that the philosopher gives for techne ( τέχνη ) in the Physics: “Generally speaking, art ( techne ) either executes what nature is impotent to effectuate or imitates it. . . . If, then, artificial things are produced with a view to a certain end, it is clear that this is equally the case for the things of nature; for in artificial as well as in natural things, antecedents and consequences have between them the same relation” ( 2.8.199a.15 ). Poetic mimêsis is referred by Aristotle not to nature but to history; it is an imitation of human actions ( mimêsis praxeôs [μίμησις πϱάξεως] ). Attributing to Aristotle the idea according to which art, in the artistic sense, is an imitation of nature thus implies a transfer of meaning from the realm of physics to that of poetics, from art in the sense of techne to art in the sense of poiêsis [ποίησις]. The translation of techne as ars, then as “art,” the fact that Greek does not possess a term to designate what we call “art” in the sense of the fine arts, that is, the fact that it conflates in a single term two things that European languages, since the Renaissance, have strained to distinguish, namely, the art of the artist, the painter or sculptor, and the art of the artisan or worker ( a distinction renewing one established in the Middle Ages between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts; see ART ) are certainly not unrelated to this transfer. And that in itself would undoubtedly not have been possible if the meaning attributed by Aristotle to mimêsis, mimeîsthai, when those words refer to images and not plots, had not in some way included a space to welcome and incorporate it. The fusion, in a new conception of art, of mimêsis in the sense of an imitation of actions and mimêsis in the sense of an imitation of nature may have received its authority from the secondary sense that mimêsis has within the Poetics itself. We are dealing here with one of the multiple transformations that allowed the Poetics, starting with the Renaissance, to become a foundational text for the theory of painting. It effectively allowed one to reassign priority to the pictorial paradigm in the definition of mimêsis. And also to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the synthesis previously effected in the Middle Ages, by way of the word ars, between the definition of techne given in the Physics, where techne is opposed to phusis [φύσις], and the one found in the Nicomachean Ethics, where techne is distinguished from praxis, those two terms then corresponding to two different modes of regulated and finalized activity: “the disposition to act accompanied by a rule [τῆς ποιητιϰῆς ἕξεως]” ( 6.4.1140a 3–5; see PRAXIS ). The theory of imitation, as it was to develop in the Renaissance and the classical age, would give a new meaning to the link between the idea of art and that of rules by redefining the rule within an artistic realm that affirmed and was intent on defending its autonomy in relation to the domain of “mechanical” activities. The misinterpretation of the Aristotelian idea of mimêsis was thus not the cause, but in fact the effect of the labor of reinterpretation that the transformation of the artistic domain ( and the new stakes with which art was charged ) made necessary.
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Alberti’s window The new definition of painting that was developed during the Renaissance would mean that these different and initially heterogeneous levels of meaning were able to coexist, and this coexistence would sometimes bring with it certain contradictions. Far from being a sign of logical inconsistency, these contradictions in fact attested to the difficulty that the first theoreticians of art had in combining the two senses of mimêsis in a fully unified theory. The definition of a painting as an “open window,” which we find in book 1 of Alberti’s De pictura, is in this respect exemplary, particularly in light of the endless misunderstandings to which it has given rise. For Alberti, this window frames a narrative representation; it does not open out onto nature but onto a story: “First of all about where I draw. I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see the story ( historia ) I want to paint” ( English translation, slightly modified; in the Italian translation of his treatise, Alberti uses the word storia which, like historia, corresponds to Aristotle’s muthos [on the two versions of Alberti’s treatise, see BEAUTY] ). But this definition does not match the one we find elsewhere in the text, where pictorial representation is characterized by its function of showing, that is, its function as an image: “No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing ( repraesentare ) what can be seen.” This explains how this analogy with the window could have been interpreted in a sense that was completely alien to Alberti’s thought, as a window opening out onto the visible world, like those vedute one comes across in so many Renaissance paintings. We find the same ambivalence in Poussin a century later. In one of his last letters, he defined painting as “an imitation, made up of lines and colors on some surface, of whatever is visible under the sun” ( letter to Fréart de Chambray, 2 March 1665 ). But elsewhere he writes that “painting is nothing but the imitation of human actions,” this second definition of imitation conforming to the Aristotelian idea of poetic mimêsis, since it was in fact a translation of a sentence by Torquato Tasso, which Poussin contented himself with copying out by replacing the word “poetry” with the word “painting.” BIBLIOGRAPHY Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Translated by J. Spencer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Poussin, Nicolas. Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin. Paris: Fernand de Nobèle, 1968. |
II. From the Imitation of the Visible to the Expression of the Invisible: The Powers of the Imago
In chapter 1 of his book published in 1637, De pictura veterum libri tres, a veritable summa of humanist thinking about art, Franciscus Junius enumerates the different definitions of imitation. After citing chapter 4 of the Poetics, the preface to Eikones, and book 2 of the Life of Apollonios by Philostratus, he writes: “In any event, for grammarians, image ( imago ) means what proceeds from imitation ( imitago ).” This sentence bears witness to the transformation visited on the idea of imitation through the transition from mimêsis to imitatio, as a result of the connection established in Latin between imitatio and imago. In this sense, the history of imitatio becomes inseparable from that of imago.
Imago belongs to the same semantic field as simulacrum, signum, effigies, and even exemplar and species. Signifying the imitation of a portrait, the word imago was applied to the image of the deceased. It designated the mask made from the imprint of a face. Initially referring to ancestral cults, it also designated, in classical Latin, the image of the gods, associated with terms referring to the realm of the sacred. The transformation of the meaning of imago in the course of the Middle Ages by the theological problematic of the image would simultaneously modify the meaning of imitatio by inscribing it in a new network of signification articulated around the idea of likeness, but a likeness or resemblance that was also thought in new terms, as evidenced by the extraordinarily complex use of “similitude” and its offshoots. The meaning taken on by imitatio in the fourteenth century, for example, in the expression imitatio Christi, illustrates the amplitude and the nature of this transformation. The use of imitatio refers in this case to a problematic of resemblance that developed from a reinterpretation of imago, the relation of son to father and that of man to God, giving a radically new meaning to the term. The idea according to which man had been created in the image of God required one to no longer think of the resemblance of the imago solely in terms of a copy, but also in terms of an analogy.
Under the influence of Neoplatonic doctrines ( Boethius, Scotus Erigenus, and above all the School of Chartres ), analogical thinking would bring about a complete re-elaboration of the meaning of imitatio as applied to artistic activities. To a theorist of the Middle Ages, the artist seeks to imitate the visible world created by God as the creative work of God, to create in the image of God by prolonging the activity of nature. The relations between human creation and divine creation are governed by a principle of concordance and similitude, resting on the application of the rules of harmony, proportion, symmetry, and clarity, which the artist discovers in himself as in nature, and which allow him to attain that beauty which is nothing other than the visible manifestation of the divine splendor. The artist imitates not only natura naturata, but also natura naturans. As Panofsky writes, “the thesis according to which art imitates nature as much as possible or rather imitates according to nature, means that a parallel ( but not a relation ) is being set up between art and nature: art ( under which rubric one must naturally and perhaps principally understand as well the artes that are foreign to the three arts based on drawing ) does not imitate what nature creates, but works in the manner in which nature creates, pursuing, through specific means, objectives that are themselves defined, by realizing determined forms in materials that are themselves determined” ( Idea ). The visible form achieved by the artist is the material expression of a form immanent to his mind or imagination ( fantasia ) that the artist discovers in his contemplation of the visible world. In imitating the visible, art expresses the invisible. Commenting on a sentence of Robert Grosseteste: “Forma est exemplar ad quod respicit artifex ut ad ejus imitationem et similitudinem formet suum artificium” ( The form is the idea that the artist has in sight in order to produce the imitations and likenesses of his art ),” Edgar De Bruyne writes as follows: “The material work does not necessarily and faithfully copy the visible form . . . but inevitably it expresses the representation of what the artist conceives in his soul. It is that spiritual model that the form imitates above all else” ( Etudes d’esthétique médiévale ). As Saint Bonaventure writes, with reference to the classical theories of rhetoric: “Dicitur imago quod alterum exprimit et imitator” ( It is said that the image expresses something other than what it imitates ) ( quoted by De Bruyne ). The transformation of imitatio in relation to that of imago adds to the horizontal definition of imitation as outer likeness a twofold dimension, both vertical and in depth, expressiveness being characterized as a movement from inner to outer and from low to high. The first consequence of this transformation is to allow theologians to resolve in a manner favorable to images the thorny question that had been raised by the iconoclasts and that would be endlessly renewed until the Council of Trent, namely, the question of the worship of images ( see OIKONOMIA ). The second is plainly to furnish a major argument for legitimating artistic activity. The theoretical labor of Scholastic thought consisted of giving substance, an ontological dimension, to concepts such as imago or forma and to confer on them a properly theological function.
III. From Imitatio to Imitazione: Renaissance Theories of Art
It was thus this rather complicated history, extending over several centuries, that the humanist thought of the Renaissance would inherit. It was on that basis that the Italian theoreticians returned to the Greek and Latin texts that they discovered in the original, those of Aristotle, Plato, Horace, and Cicero. They were related to the problematic of mimêsis through the mediation of a field in which the idea of imitatio was gradually inscribed.
A. Hesitations in vocabulary
The definition of art as imitation first developed in the domain of the visual arts, giving to imitare, imitazione, the meaning of likeness, an image faithful to visible reality. The idea that art was to imitate nature appeared among painters and theoreticians of painting at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is found in Alberti ( De pictura, III, 1435 ), Ghiberti ( I commentarii, 1436 ), and even in Leonardo, who stated that the painting most deserving of praise was that which was faithful to the thing imitated ( “conformità co’la cosa imitata” ) ( Trattato della pittura, fragment 411, in Libro di pittura ). It was not until the second half of the sixteenth century and the dissemination of Aristotle’s Poetics that the concept of imitation would be applied to the poetic arts, thus taking on a new meaning. ( The first Latin translation of the Poetics from the original, by Lorenzo Valla, appeared in 1498; the Greek text was printed for the first time in 1503. In the second half of the sixteenth century, numerous translations in the vernacular appeared, accompanied by commentaries, along with poetics of Aristotelian inspiration. )
How is one to reconcile Aristotelian mimêsis with the idea of imitatio and above all with that of imitazione as it is expressed in the realm of painting? That conceptual difficulty first presented itself as a problem of translation. How was one to translate mimêsis? If imitatio, borrowed from classical Latin, finally prevailed in Renaissance Latin, certain translators nonetheless hesitated with regard to that term as an adequate rendering of the sense of mimêsis. It was thus that in 1481, the translator of Averroes opted for assimilatio, while Fracastoro, in the following century, anticipating the solution proposed by Depont-Roc and Lallot, thought that one could opt for either “imitation” or “representation”: “sive imitari, sive representare dicamus” ( Naugerius; sive de Poetica dialogues ). The complete triumph of imitatio and its Italian derivative, imitazione, which would in turn give birth to the French and English variants of imitation, would not be sufficient to remove all those hesitations. The transition to the vernacular would be accompanied by numerous distinctions attesting to the permanence of the difficulties encountered. In his Tratatto delle perfette proporzioni, published in 1567, Vicenzo Danti, basing himself on the Aristotelian distinction between poetry and history, thus proposed to reserve imitare for art and to use ritrarre to designate an imitative likeness, one that reproduces things as one sees them. ( Ritrarre from the Lat. ritrahere, “to pull backward”—as in Fr. retirer [withdraw] or retrait—initially had the general meaning of representing, describing, recounting; applied to painting, it took on the meaning of a representational likeness. ) Already in Ceninni, one encounters the expressions retrarre da natura or ritrarre naturale ( Il libro del arte ). As for Castelvetro, the author of an Italian translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, published in 1570, which would be strenuously challenged by the French during the following century, he chose to translate mimêsis as rassomiglianze, resemblance, and not as imitazione.
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The resemblance of the portrait The use of the word ritratto, derived from ritrarre, to refer to a portrait illustrates the richness of the identification between portrait and resemblance that made the portrait the paradigm of resemblance, and thus of painting as a lifelike image ( just as the words po( u )rtraire and po( u )rtraiture were used in the seventeenth century to mean painting in general ). But this identification also explained why the portrait came to be considered as an inferior genre in terms of the hierarchy of genres elaborated in the light of Aristotle’s Poetics, and which implied the primacy of narrative painting. How could the status of the portrait as a genre be defended from the perspective of Aristotelian criteria? It was precisely in order to resolve this difficulty that an author such as Mancini proposed making a distinction between two types of portrait: il rittrato simplice, or simple portrait, conforming to the Platonic definition of mimêsis eikastikê [μίμησις εἰϰαστιϰή], which “expresses nothing more than the dimension, proportion, and resemblance of the thing it imitates ( similitudine della cosa que imita ),” and il rittrato con azione et espressione d’affetto, or portrait with action and passion, in which there is “besides resemblance ( similitudine ), action and passion, which is imitated ( imitandosi ) by representing ( rappresentar ) the mode of this passion ( il modo di quell’affetto )” ( Mancini, Considerazione sulla pittura ). Of course, the variety of terms used by Mancini—similitudine, imitare, rappresentar—and the link between action and passion, which connects the problematic of action to that of the expression of emotions, attest to the changes that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance brought to bear on Aristotle’s mimêsis, as well as Plato’s. But this distinction between two genres of portrait, as foreign as it is to Aristotle’s thought, was a response to the difficulty that originates with the double meaning Aristotle gives to mimêsis, depending on whether he relates the term to discourse or to the image. Roger de Piles would also invoke Aristotle in describing the portrait genre, yet used a different argument: “If painting is an imitation of nature, it is doubly so with respect to the portrait, which not only represents man in general, but such and such a man in particular” ( Cours de peinture par principes ). BIBLIOGRAPHY de Piles, Roger. Cours de peinture par principes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989. First published in 1708. Hénin, Emmanuelle. Ut pictura theatrum. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Mancini, Giulio. Considerazione sulla pittura. Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1956–57. First published ca. 1620. |
B. Imitate nature or the idea?
These divergences found in the Italian translators, whether translating into Latin or the vernacular, illustrate the extreme diversity of conceptions competing ( and doing so without cease ) over a span of several centuries. The uncontested reign of the idea of imitation from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century would never imply the existence of a systematic and unified theory of imitation.
As previously stated, the problem of imitation was first posited in the realm of painting before being taken up and formulated in very different terms by theoreticians of poetics. Was one to imitate nature or the idea, an external model or an inner model, the real or the beautiful? Ought the painter to seek to render visible reality as faithfully as possible, in its details and with its imperfections, or, on the contrary, to render visible that ideal image of beauty that exists only in the mind or the imagination, on the model of the perfect orator as described by Cicero in a passage of the Orator that all theoreticians of painting would refer to for centuries ( see BEAUTY and DISEGNO )? However important it was, the influence of Neoplatonism and Ciceronianism on thinking about art during the Renaissance is insufficient to explain the existence, or even the meaning, of such a series of questions. Like all questions addressed to painting, they have their source, first of all, in the very history of that art. They refer to what might be called painting stories, in this case to those of two paintings of Zeuxis, recounted by Pliny. In one, Zeuxis had painted grapes that were so well imitated that birds swooped down on the canvas. In the other, he had the most beautiful virgins of Crotona pose for him. Unable to find perfect beauty in a single model, he had borrowed from each what she had that was most beautiful. These two tales would long assume paradigmatic value in reflections on the idea of imitation in the field of painting. The first legitimates a realist interpretation of imitation as likeness, and would be constantly invoked by all those who praised the illusionary powers of painting ( the mirror and the monkey are two traditional emblems of painting ). The second functions in favor of a more intellectualist conception of imitation, submitting imitazione to the idea and the concetto, and whose purpose is no longer to give an illusion of the real through a faithful likeness with things, but to attain perfection and beauty ( see CONCETTO ). Thus did Alberti, referring to the story of Zeuxis and the virgins of Crotona, recommend to the painter to imitate several models because it is impossible to find perfect beauty in a single body. Such was the method used by Raffaello, as he confessed in a letter to Castiglione on the subject of the difficulty he had in finding a model to paint his Galatea: “Since there is a penury of good judges and beautiful women, I make use of a certain idea ( certa idea ), which comes to my mind ( mente ).” It is that certa idea discussed by Raffaello that the artist imitates through his disegno. To defend “il primato del disegno” in painting, as the Florentines did, implies a Platonic ( or rather Neoplatonic ) conception of imitation as imitation of a mental representation to which the painter relates as to a model in his imitation of things. Reviving a theological problematic developed in the Middle Ages, Zuccaro would go so far as to make of the disegno interno an imprint of divinity, a segno di dio, and thus to define painting as an activity that consists not in imitating things but in acting in a way resembling God ( L’Idea de’pittori, scultori, et architetti; see DISEGNO ).
C. To imitate is not to lie: The problem of fiction
Adopted by theoreticians of poetics, the idea of imitation would undergo a certain number of transformations that would affect in turn the pictorial conception of imitation. First, because they often expressed themselves in Latin, and even while writing in Italian, they would think of imitazione as a translation of mimêsis and imitatio. Associated with the translation and interpretation of texts, consideration of the subject took on a more scholarly cast. Moreover, it was inevitable that the application of the principle of imitation to the language arts would inflect its meaning in a new direction. For a poet, imitating does not mean the same thing as for a painter. He imitates with words, not images. His imitation, contrary to the painter’s, cannot be conceived in terms of resemblance. The theory of disegno was in this respect characteristic of the reversal effected by ut pictura poesis, that is, by the comparison between painting and poetry ( see COMPARISON ); by referring image to idea, to concetto, it defined pictorial imitation on the model of poetic imitation.
This dissociation between imitation and likeness is at the origin of most of the problems posed by the idea of imitation in the field of poetics. How is one to reconcile the definition of poetry as imitation with the various licenses that are part of poetic invention? Does not the referential character of the idea of imitation contradict that right to be all-daring that Horace ascribes to the poet? Some did not hesitate to denounce the perils of a theory that imposed far too narrow limits on artistic activity. The poet, Patrizi would say, is not an imitator but a facitor, facitor being in this case a perfect equivalent for the Greek poietes ( Della poetica ). The opposition between imitator and facitor nonetheless raises a genuine problem. The poet does indeed fabricate fictions. Whereas the idea of imitation allows one to ascribe to art a function relating to knowledge and thus to truth, the idea of fiction implies one relating to mendacity and falsehood. In the Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville had labored to distinguish falsum from fictum, but his distinction had barely left a trace. In the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, a number of theoreticians of art would continue to speak of the beautiful lies—or even the innocent lies—of art, thus using for the benefit of art the very argument that had long served, and would continue to serve, to condemn it.
D. Imitating the masters: The problem of invention
The conception of imitation elaborated in the Renaissance on the basis of readings of Aristotle, Horace, and Cicero enabled a partial resolution of the opposition between imitation and fiction. Poetic invention can be legitimated by the authority of ancient authors. But that very authority brought to the fore a new difficulty that radically transformed the elements of the problem of mimêsis and formulated it in new terms. Imitation was no longer conceived solely with reference to nature but also in relation with the ancients, whose works were posited as models of the imitation of nature. The imitation became in a way an imitation to the second degree, the imitation of an imitation: art was to imitate art in order to imitate nature. This notion according to which art was to rest on an imitation of the masters constituted the true novelty of the theory of imitation as it developed in the framework of humanism. But it would also give rise to a number of reservations, particularly among artists and theorists invoking a Platonic conception of art, such as those of the Academy of Florence, who were rather hostile to the principle of imitation. Although they recognized a pedagogical value in the imitation of the ancients, they refused to regard the ancients as unsurpassable models to whom the artist was to submit. The debate provoked by the idea of a model in the realm of poetry was thus in all ways analogous to one previously evoked on the subject of painting, even if it was formulated in different terms. The story of Zeuxis took on paradigmatic value not only for the painter but also for the poet, on the condition that the beauties of art be substituted for those of nature. No model was perfect enough for it to have sufficed for the artist to imitate it in order to achieve beauty. This is why it was necessary to imitate several models and above all to imitate them with discernment, as Pico wrote in the course of the polemic that pitted him against Bembo on the idea of imitation: “Imitandum inquam bonos omnes, non unum aliquem, nec omnibus etiam in rebus” ( I say that one must imitate all good writers, not merely one, and not in everything ). It is not in authors who wrote before him that the poet finds the source of his inspiration, he said, but in a “certain inner idea” ( idea quaedam ), which is not without evoking the certa idea of Raffaello. To the normative conception of imitation defended by Bembo, Pico thus opposed a critical relation to the tradition compatible with the freedom of the poet and his originality: “Inventio enim tum laudatur magis, cum genuine est magis, et libera” ( Since the more an invention is free and original, the more is it worthy of praise ). Conceived as inventio, imitation was transformed into true emulation, allowing the artist to surpass his models and to create works superior to those of the past. In authors writing in Latin, imitatio, moreover, was gradually cast aside to the benefit of inventio. That term, borrowed from rhetoric, did not have the modern sense of inventing. Inventio harmonized with the idea of imitation, as opposed to creatio, which belonged to the lexicon of theology.
IV. From Imitazione to Imitation: French Aristotelianism
A. The ends of imitation
The Poetics played a major role in the birth and development of the theory of art in France in the seventeenth century. Whether defining art in general or various forms of artistic representation, pondering the nature of tragedy or that of historical painting, establishing the rules governing the composition of a dramatic poem or those intervening in the composition of a painting, classical theorists for the most part sought inspiration in Aristotle and borrowed most of their categories from him. They did not, however, have at their disposal a French translation of the Poetics until 1671, the date on which Norville’s version appeared, followed in 1692 by Dacier’s. It was thus initially by way of Italian translations, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, that Aristotelian thinking on art penetrated into France, as well as by way of Italian ( but also Dutch ) exercises in poetics, such as those of Daniël Heinslus ( De tragediae constitutionae, 1511 ) or Gerald Jan Vossius ( De artis poeticae, 1647 ), which would have a great influence on French thought. Even when they read Greek, the French related to Aristotelian mimêsis by way of its re-elaboration via the idea of imitatio and imitazione.
Those translations were the object of a certain number of critiques whose stakes broadly exceeded the framework of a narrowly philological dispute. In contesting the interpretation of mimêsis given by the Italians, what was at stake was also affirming the originality of the French theory of artistic imitation, along with the superiority of French over Latin and Italian. The principal reproach addressed to the Italians was having obscured Aristotle’s text as a result of not knowing anything about the art of the theater. Most interpreters, Corneille wrote, explained it only “from the perspective of grammarians or philosophers. Since they had more experience of study and speculation than of the theater, reading them can make us more erudite, but will not shed much light on which we can depend for success in the theater” ( Discours de l’utilité du poème dramatique ). Corneille’s refusal to dissociate theory from practice attests to a change in perspective that affected the entire range of reflection about art in the seventeenth century. Whether focused on theater or painting, aesthetic theory developed in France on the basis of art and was elaborated principally by artists. The redefinition of the idea of imitation was largely a function of this very specific feature of aesthetic theory in France. If imitation was always posited as a principle, it was above all conceived as a problem, or rather as a set of problems that it fell precisely to artists to solve. Now the nature of those problems ( as of the solutions given them ) was itself determined by the subordination of the principle of imitation to the pleasure principle, which displaced the idea of imitation by integrating it into a problematic that was no longer one of the causes of art, but rather of its effects. Painting is an imitation, Poussin would say, and “its end is delectation” ( letter to Fréart de Chambray, 2 March 1665 ). For the French, if imitation did indeed define the nature of art, it was not its aim. The sole aim of art was to please, and it was always in terms of that aim that the principle of imitation was conceived. Its application was entirely subject to that finality. Defining artistic imitation thereupon consisted in determining the rules through which imitation could achieve that goal: “The principal rule is to delight and to stir the emotions,” wrote Racine in his preface to Bérenice. “All the others have been forged only to satisfy that first one.” Corneille, like many others, did not, moreover, hesitate to ascribe that notion to Aristotle at the beginning of his first Discours on dramatic poetry: “Even though the sole aim of dramatic poetry for Aristotle was to delight the audience.”
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Pleasure: From the cause to the aim In his concern to restore the truth of Aristotle’s text, Dacier would denounce what in his eyes was a completely erroneous interpretation of the idea of mimêsis, particularly in the commentary accompanying the famous passage from chapter 4, which he translated as follows: “There are two main causes, both quite natural, which seem to have produced poetry; the first is imitation, a quality innate to men, since they differ from the other animals in that they are all inclined toward imitation, it is by means of imitation that they learn the first elements of the sciences, and all imitations give them a singular pleasure.” The commentary concerns the final point: The most learned commentators of Aristotle have made a very considerable error here in taking these words as an explanation of the second cause they give for poetry, as if Aristotle said: And the second is that all imitations give them pleasure. Aristotle was incapable of saying something whose meaning was so mistaken, and of giving to one effect two causes that are only a single cause. It is as if one said that two causes make a plant cultivated by a gardener grow: the first is that he waters it, and the second is the pleasure he takes in watering it. There is no one to whom this does not appear absurd. This philosopher says, then, that the first cause of Poetry is imitation, to which men are naturally inclined, and since this inclination, however natural it is, would be useless if men took no pleasure in producing imitations, he adds: and in which they take a singular pleasure. Dacier, La Poétique d’Aristote If the mistake of learned commentators was in believing that pleasure was the second cause that Aristotle attributes to imitation ( when it in fact is the tendency to rhythm and melody ), Corneille’s mistake was even greater since it consisted of turning this cause into an aim, and even of making it the sole aim of art. But this “mistake,” which was the foundation of all classical aesthetics, was an extremely productive one in the field of art. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dacier, André. La poétique d’Aristote: contenant les règles les plus exactes pour juger du poème héroique, & des pièces de théâtre, la tragédie & la comédie. Amsterdam: George Gallet, 1692. |
This definition of imitation in terms of pleasure illustrates the influence exercised by thinking about rhetoric on artistic theory. It effectively has its source in the hierarchy established by Cicero between the finalities of the art of oratory: docere ( to instruct ), delectare ( to delight ), movere ( to move ), and which gives pride of place to movere. The application of the Ciceronian problematic to the realm of the poetic and visual arts would be accompanied in France by numerous debates attesting to the same difficulties as those already encountered by theoreticians of rhetoric in aligning the necessities of docere with the exigencies of movere. If some went so far as to call into question the pedagogical and moral purpose of art, all were in agreement in denying it priority and in affirming with Racine that the principal rule of art was to delight and to stir the emotions. Which does not at all mean that they refused to ascribe to art a value rooted in knowledge. On the contrary, since that value was attributed to pleasure itself, as in La Fontaine, whose art was undoubtedly the best example of that harmonious and perfectly balanced synthesis between the exigencies of pleasure and those of knowledge, which corresponded to the classical ideal of perfection.
B. Imitating according to nature and the true
What is a good imitation? How to distinguish between imitation and likeness? What does it mean to imitate nature? What is the nature of the model to be imitated? Although the French raised the same questions, on the whole, as their Italian predecessors, they nonetheless posed them in a palpably different manner. That difference was not solely a function of the political and institutional conditions in which reflection on art developed in France, but also of the existence of a new theoretical, philosophical, and scientific context; it involved epistemological changes affecting the entirety of concepts around which the theory of artistic mimêsis had always been articulated. And, in the first place, that of the image. The idea of representation, as it was elaborated in France, resulted in calling into question the traditional definition of the image in terms of resemblance, thus necessitating a different manner of conceiving of images. It was indeed the new concept of representation that underlay the comparison frequently invoked by Descartes between idea and image. When he stated that ideas were “like images of things,” or even “like pictures or paintings,” that did not mean that ideas resembled things but that they were related to things in the same manner as images that imitated the appearance of things, that is, through representation. All of this presupposed a radically new conception of the image, based on the idea of the sign and no longer on resemblance. As Descartes writes in La dioptrique, an image does not need to resemble that which it is an image of in order to represent it, and often even “to be more perfect, insofar as they are images, and to better represent an object, they ought not to resemble it, like those engravings which, being composed of but a bit of ink scattered here and there on paper, represent to us forests, cities, men, and even battles and storms.” This problematic of the sign and representation would be broadly developed by the logicians of Port-Royal, who would notably apply it to the problem of the Eucharist: the bread and wine represent the body of Christ but do not resemble it. But it was plainly in the realm of painting that its effects would be most conspicuous, giving a new orientation to the debates that had until then inspired the idea of imitation.
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The resemblance of the portrait ( bis ) It is hardly surprising that the effects of this new concept of representation should manifest themselves most clearly in relation to the portrait. If a good portrait is lifelike, what defines the lifelike resemblance of a portrait? Félibien gave a completely original answer to this question, which the Italians had already asked themselves, and which recalled Descartes’s analysis. “How is it,” Félibien asks, “that a mediocre painter is sometimes more successful in painting a lifelike portrait than an experienced and learned man? . . . Be aware that what often appears as a lifelike resemblance in these mediocre portraits is nothing but that. . . . From the moment, by some sign, an image is formed in our mind which is in some way related to a thing we know, we immediately believe that we find in it a great resemblance, even though, in looking at it more closely, it was often nothing more than a rather weak idea.” Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies BIBLIOGRAPHY Félibien, André. Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987. |
The other transformation clearly concerns the concept of nature, which took on a new sense in the seventeenth century, both on the physical and the metaphysical levels. If the word “nature” continued to designate the visible world for painters, it became charged at the same time with numerous meanings that combined in a more or less confused or contradictory way in the language of artists. It was at times taken in an empirical sense, as a synonym of observable reality, at others in a rational sense, as a synonym of essence, rule, law, at still others in a normative sense, as a synonym of beauty and truth, and most of the time in all those senses simultaneously. It referred as much to the object of artistic imitation as to the effects which that imitation sought to produce. In all cases, it implied the idea of a model, whether the model to be imitated or as a model for imitation.
The re-elaboration of the idea of imitation on the basis of a problematic of representation, like the new significations attributed to the word “nature,” explain the fact that the definition of art as an imitation of nature did not have the same meaning for the French as for the Italians. More Aristotelian than Platonist, the French were less interested in the powers of the idea than in the necessity for rules ( of composition, construction, design, color, etc. ). As Cartesians, they thought that even the most extravagant fictions originate in a “certain mix and composition” of parts that are not “imaginary, but true and existent,” as Descartes puts it in his first Meditation, taking as his example precisely the bizarre and extraordinary forms that painters invent in their works: “This art in general,” Félibien wrote about painting, “extends to all manners of representing entities that are in nature. And although painters occasionally have formed some that are not natural, like the monsters and grotesques that they invent, which are nonetheless composed of parts known and taken from different animals, it cannot be said that they are pure effects of the imagination” ( “Préface aux Conférences de 1667” ). Just as they refused to oppose imitation and imagination, the French did not see a contradiction between a concern for exactitude in the observation of reality and the application of analytic criteria in the elaboration of representation. The opposition between realist imitation and ideal imitation was absorbed into a conception of imitation far less dogmatic than is commonly thought and that submitted imitation to criteria of selection and correction that were no longer ideal but rational. One must imitate nature through reasonable choice, as Le Brun would say. That reasonable choice meant that artistic imitation was to satisfy simultaneously the rules of art, the exigencies of truth ( whence the importance given at the Academy to the study of anatomy, proportion, geometry, perspective ) and those of verisimilitude and decorum.
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Decorum “Decorum” has the same meaning as it does in Latin, that is, appropriateness. In the artistic field, decorum has, like prepon [πϱέπον] in Greek rhetoric, a double meaning; it is determined both upstream and downstream, so to speak. The first determination is referential in nature: the rule of decorum requires that characters are represented in a way that is in keeping with their state, their situation, their nature: a king could not be expressed or be clothed in the same way as a peasant, each passion has to be represented in a manner that befits the state of the person, etc. The second is moral and social in nature. Representation has to be in keeping with the moral sentiments of the spectators, it must not shock them, and it has to respect the rules of propriety. Furetière only mentions this second meaning in his dictionary ( RT: Dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots français tant vieux que modernes, et les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts ): “ Decorum: A Latin, then French word, which is expressed in this proverbial saying: to observe decorum, meaning to respect all the rules of polite society.” |
C. Representing action
If the definition of artistic imitation according to its modalities ( nature and truth ) was, as we have seen, rather flexible, that which defined it as a function of its object was far more normative. It consisted in defining art as a representation of human actions. Taking up the Aristotelian definition of poetic mimêsis, the French applied it to the full range of the arts, not only the poetic arts, but also sculpture, painting, and even ballet. For the French, as for Aristotle, imitating an action meant first of all representing the plot or what was called the fable ( the term with which most translators of the Poetics rendered muthos ). The first effect of that definition of art in the realm of painting would be the establishment of a hierarchy of genres dominated by historical painting, that is, by narrative painting. But imitation was not solely concerned with plot; as in Aristotle, it also took as its object character, the passions, sentiments, what the seventeenth century would call mores ( a term utilized to translate the êthos [ἦθος] of the Poetics ). It was thus that Claude François Ménétrier wrote:
Ballet does not imitate solely actions; it also imitates, according to Aristotle, passions and customs, which is more difficult than the expression of actions. This imitation of the customs and affections of the soul is based on impressions that the soul makes naturally on the body, and on the judgments we make of the customs and inclinations of persons on those inner movements.
Des ballets anciens et modernes
This text also illustrates the transformation to which the classical theoreticians subjected Aristotelian mimêsis. It will be noted that on the subject of actions Ménestrier employs the terms “imitation” and “expression” indiscriminately. The use of the word “expression” as an equivalent of “imitation” conveys the new manner in which the action/passion relation was conceived in the seventeenth century.
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Expression The word expression entered the French vocabulary of painting around 1650, and this new usage remained for a long time without an equivalent term in other languages ( espressione was still absent from Baldinucci’s Vocabulario toscano dell arte del disegno in 1681 ). Expression was used first of all in the general sense of the expression of the subject of a painting, that is, as a synonym for representation. But it quickly took on a second, more restricted meaning, referring to the representation of passions. Le Brun thus made a distinction between general expression, which “is a naïve and natural resemblance of the things one wishes to represent,” and particular expression, “which indicates the movements of the heart, and makes visible the effects of passion” ( Conférences académiques of 7 April and 5 May 1668 on L’Expression des passions ). The first meaning would gradually disappear in favor of the second, making way for the distinction representation/expression. |
The problems raised by the representation of history were the object of numerous debates in the seventeenth century, in the domains of both theater and painting. Such discussions called into play the same distinction between likeness and representation that we have already encountered with regard to portraiture, but in a somewhat different manner. Does the fact of imitating history in accordance with nature and the truth, as required by the principle of imitation, demand of the artist that he faithfully respect historical truth, or can he deviate from it should it enter into conflict with the necessities of representation, that is, with the nature and truth of art? That question led to a rather lively exchange between Philippe de Champaigne and Le Brun on the subject of Poussin’s painting, Eliézer et Rébecca. Whereas Champaigne reproached Poussin for not having “treated the subject of his painting with all the faithfulness of history, since he had eliminated from it any representation of the camels mentioned by history,” Le Brun thought to the contrary that the painter was right to take that liberty with history, “that the camels had not been eliminated from the painting without solid consideration; that Monsieur Poussin, constantly seeking to refine and to unburden the subject of his works and to bring forth in an agreeable manner the principal action being treated, had rejected the bizarre objects that might debauch the eye of the spectator and amuse it with minutia” ( Academic Lecture of 7 January 1668 ).
But it was surely in the realm of poetry that the representation of history raised the most difficulties. For poetry represents history by way of fiction. Faithfulness to history thus poses two problems of a rather different nature for the poet. The first involves the difference between resemblance and representation: as in painting, a faithfulness to history may enter into conflict with necessities imposed by the rules of art. The second no longer brings into play the autonomy of art, but rather that of the artist: a respect for history imposes constraints that may be incompatible with the freedom of the poet, that is, with his right to dare anything. This problem plainly concerned the powers of the artist in general, be he painter or poet. But in France, as previously in Italy, it was envisaged essentially with reference to the activity of the poet, and that precisely because it was born of a reflection on the idea of fiction, and fiction fell under the rubric of poetry and not painting, which raised in turn the question of illusion—dramatic poetry presenting the particularity of bringing into play simultaneously the pictorial question of illusion and the poetic question of fiction.
Reconciling these various exigencies was not always possible, but the freedom of the poet also consisted in casting aside all contradictions, as may be seen in the case of Corneille, who, in his prefaces, did not hesitate to resort to the most disparate arguments, in keeping with the needs of the play in question. It was thus in the name of the rules of art, and consequently the necessities of representation, that he justified the liberties he had taken with history in La Mort de Pompée, where he opted to “reduce to two hours what had transpired over two years.” One rediscovers here the Aristotelian distinction between poetry and history. This did not prevent Corneille elsewhere from invoking historical truth, and thus the necessities of resemblance, but on this occasion to justify freedoms taken with the rule of verisimilitude or plausibility ( “the truth is not always plausible” ) and that of morality ( i.e., of catharsis in the moral sense as understood in the seventeenth century ), which demanded that criminals inspire horror and crime be always punished. That argument from resemblance, which is a pictorial argument, was developed at length in the dedication to Médée, precisely on the basis of a comparison between poetry and painting:
Poetry and painting have this in common, among many other things, that one often makes beautiful portraits of an ugly woman, and the other beautiful imitations of an action that should not be imitated. In portraiture, it is not a matter of wondering whether a face is beautiful but whether it bears a resemblance; and in painting, one should not consider whether behavior is virtuous but whether it is similar to that of the person being introduced; it consequently evokes for us good and bad actions indiscriminately, without offering us the latter as an example; and if it wishes to impose a measure of horror on us, it is not at all because of their punishment, which it does not affect to show us, but because of their ugliness, which it attempts to represent to us naturally.
However different they be, the justifications of Pompée and Médée are not at all incompatible. They both express the same refusal to subject art to extrinsic constraints, whether they be the constraints of historical truth or those that morality and society are intent on exercising over representation.
D. To imitate is not to copy: From the idea of invention to that of originality
This will to autonomy explains the interest brought to the question of the imitation of masters, which had resulted in the polemic between Pico and Bembo. But here too the position of the French was less dogmatic than is often believed. They were unanimous in acknowledging that imitation of the masters played an essential role in the education of a painter, sculptor, or writer. It is in imitating art that one learns to imitate according to nature and truth, that is, that one becomes an artist oneself. But the imitation of art cannot be conflated with artistic imitation in the strict sense; it is its necessary but by no means sufficient condition. It was thus that Philippe de Champaigne lashed out at those he called “copyists of a manner,” who “limit themselves servilely to copying the particular manner of an author, taken as their aim and as the sole model they need consult. They judge on the basis of that author alone the manner of all others and have no eyes to discern the beauties and various agreements that nature offers for our imitation” ( Academic Lecture, 11 June 1672 ). In the image of Zeuxis, one must imitate several models and not one alone, and, as Pico already said, do so with discernment, which meant, for the French, by imposing on oneself nature and truth as a rule. But it was above all another motif that was taken up in the seventeenth century to characterize the artist’s approach: that of the bee gathering from all flowers to produce a honey that is its alone. Like the bee, the artist was to borrow from different masters in order to become finally his own master, that is, in order to find a manner belonging to him alone. This is precisely the manner in which La Fontaine describes what may be called his poetic method. After acknowledging the extreme diversity of his sources of inspiration, he mocks the “foolish herd” of servile imitators who “follow like real sheep the shepherd of Mantua”: “I make use of him in a different manner, and, letting myself be guided, often make bold to strike out on my own. I will always be seen to practice this custom; my imitation is in no way a form of slavery” ( Épître à Mr l’Évêque de Soissons ). This proclamation of independence and freedom is all the more important in the case of La Fontaine in that he was a partisan of the ancients.
The quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, which developed over the last decades of the seventeenth century, did in fact change the nature of the debates over the imitation of masters. The partisans of the moderns did not call into question the idea of imitation, but rather that of the masters, French artists of the century of Louis XIV being for them infinitely superior to those of the past, which included not only the Greeks and Romans, but also the Italians of the Renaissance. Whether partisans of the ancients or the moderns, everyone in the seventeenth century defined artistic imitation in the same way—with reference to nature and truth. They thus all made the same distinction between genuine artistic imitation and that of servile imitators content with merely imitating the manner of someone else. Those who defended the ancients did not present them as models to imitate, but as models in imitating according to nature and truth. And it was precisely for the same reason that the partisans of the moderns refused to consider the ancients as models, because they did not imitate according to nature and the truth, contrary to the French, they claimed, whose success on this point was without example in the past. “Voiture did not model himself on anyone,” wrote Charles Perrault; the art of La Fontaine, he said, “is of an entirely new species,” and there is not a single one of his inventions “which has a model in the writings of the Ancients” ( Parallèle des anciens et des modernes ). The idea of invention, constantly associated since the Renaissance with that of imitation, no longer had the merely rhetorical sense of inventio; it also took on the meaning of novelty, which in turn gave a new meaning to the idea of imitation by inscribing it in a problematic that was no longer, as in Pico, one of emulation, but of originality: “Never has anyone,” wrote Perrault about La Fontaine, “more deserved to be regarded as original and of the first of his kind” ( Les hommes illustres ).
E. From a regulating principle to a normative principle: The idea of imitation in the eighteenth century
Although reflection on the idea of imitation was pursued in the eighteenth century, it no longer aroused the same passions as in the previous century. First, because such reflection now developed outside the sphere of practicing artists, among theoreticians of art approaching the idea of imitation from an exclusively theoretical angle and no longer as in the seventeenth century, under its twofold—theoretical and practical—aspect. Escaping from the artists, reflection about art became more systematic, as may be illustrated by the title of the abbé Batteux’s work, published in 1746: Les beaux-arts réduits à un seul principe ( The fine arts reduced to a single principle ). The generalization of the principle of imitation to the full range of the fine arts was thus accompanied by a theoretical hardening that transformed what was a rather supple regulating principle, intervening in the training of artists, for the classics, into a simultaneously normative and explanatory universal principle, which claimed to account for all forms of art. In addition, the emergence of an aesthetic of sentiment and an aesthetic of nature ( both linked to the rise of new forms of sensibility and to transformations in the idea of nature ) resulted in giving pride of place to a definition of art as the imitation of nature to the detriment of all other definitions, and at the same time giving that definition a sense rather removed from the one it had in the seventeenth century. One no longer thought, as did Boileau, that “there were no longer serpents or odious monsters who, once imitated by art, were unable to please the eyes” ( Art poétique ). The preference now went to imitating the beauties of nature, in pleasing tones of verisimilitude and decorum. This new conception of the idea of imitating nature, accompanied by a disaffection regarding the great genres ( tragedy, historical painting ), plainly rendered most of the thinking of the previous century on the subject of the relations between nature and history out of date. In art as in philosophy, nature would henceforth be opposed to history. One would have to wait for David for the Aristotelian definition of art as the representation of human actions to regain a second wind in painting.
These various transformations affecting the idea of imitation did not prevent the authors of the eighteenth century from voicing the same convictions on a number of scores as their predecessors. And specifically concerning the necessity of distinguishing the imitation of art from all other forms of imitation, resemblance, or reproduction. Developing thought on the nature of the senses and the role of sensations thus led theoreticians of art to radically pit artistic imitation against illusion. As Marmontel wrote in the article “Illusion” in the Encyclopédie, what is called theatrical illusion or pictorial illusion are but “demi-illusions,” “the pleasure taken in art being a function of that tacit and inchoate reflection that warns us that it is but a feint.” The specific nature of artistic imitation is expressed in the specific nature of the pleasure which that imitation procures for us. It was thus through another perspective—that of the analysis of sensations—that the theorists of the eighteenth century rediscovered the Aristotelian idea, which lay at the heart of classical doctrine, according to which the pleasure produced by mimêsis was a pleasure specific to mimêsis.
V. Nachahmung: The Calling into Question of Mimêsis
The use of the term nachahmen ( to imitate ) posed a problem in Germany already in the first half of the eighteenth century, and was the symptom of a lexical malaise that was fueled by the more general crisis of the Aristotelian principle of mimêsis. More and more authors, such as J. J. Winckelmann and J. G. Herder, attempted subtle differentiations in order to rescue the word from any confusion with its pejorative correlates, nachmachen and kopieren ( to copy, to reproduce ). But such subterfuges barely fooled anyone. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was no longer those correlates that were contested, but the word nachahmen itself. Over and again, Jean Paul and F. Schlegel associated Nachahmung ( imitation ) with mere copying, an evolution concluded by A. W. Schlegel with his peremptory refutation of the axiom ars imitatur naturam. Art was not obliged to imitate nature. The word nachahmen, in his view, would henceforth be supplanted by the terms bilden ( to fashion, to give form to ) and darstellen ( to represent ).
A. A latent lexical malaise ( 1700–1760 )
It was only after 1700 that the principle of mimêsis, which had so broadly occupied Italy, England, and France since the Renaissance, began to be debated in Germany. But at the time the discussion began, the formula ars imitatur naturam could no longer be taken for granted since each of the terms in the axiom had been invested with multiple meanings. Imitation could be understood at times as strict reproduction, at others as an inventive recomposition of the real and nature, at times as natura naturata, and at others as natura naturans. As of the 1740s there was thus a deep linguistic malaise regarding the use of the word nachahmen ( to imitate ), with attempts alternately to save it at whatever cost or to burden it with negative virtualities. If, still in the middle of the century, recourse to the word Nachahmung seemed stripped of ambiguity and difficulty for J. C. Gottsched or J. E. Schlegel ( “a poet is a skillful imitator of all things in nature” [ein geschickter Nachahmer aller natürlichen Dinge]; Gottsched, Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst ), such was not the case for J. J. Bodmer, J. J. Breitinger, or G. E. Lessing. “The terms faithful and beautified [getreu und verschönert], used with regard to imitation and nature as subject of imitation [Nachahmung], are subject to many misunderstandings,” Lessing announced in 1768 in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie.
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The critique of the idea of the imitation of nature in Lessing The use that Lessing made of Nachahmung was consistent with his general methodology in art theory: he availed himself of the notion, but in order to point out its internal contradictions. As he said, if one applied literally the principle of imitation of nature that Breitinger and Batteux were so attached to, then the worst deformities would pass for art, and perfect harmony of proportions would be something very unusual: The example of nature which has to justify the connection between the most solemn seriousness and the most frivolous gaiety, could equally well be used to justify any dramatic monstrosity that would be unstructured, disconnected, and lack all common sense. The imitation of nature ( Die Nachahmung der Natur ) should absolutely not be the principle of art ( Grundsatz der Kunst ); or rather, if it had to remain so, art would thereby cease being art, or at least high art. . . . According to this way of thinking, the most artistic work would be the worst, and the most mediocre would be the best. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, §70, 1 January 1768 ( 1769 ) Lessing was not attacking the principle of imitation as such, but the imitation of nature. If the imitation of nature is the essence of art, then one has to follow this to its logical conclusion. A perfect reflection of reality can only reflect back to us representations and images that are often ugly, even hideous. The strict application of the principle of the imitation of nature produces the opposite of what it is aiming for, namely, beauty, and thus loses all validity as an artistic principle. In his essay Laocoön, the word Nachahmung reappeared, but in relation to the modes of representation in painting: “Painting employs wholly different signs ( Zeichen ) or means ( Mittel ) of imitation ( Nachahmungen ) from poetry, —the one using forms and colors in space” ( Lessing, Laocoön ). Lessing retained the word Nachahmung, which seemed the most appropriate to express the quest for the ideality of the beautiful, and thus for the essence of art itself. So Nachahmung was not rejected, but it did not really have the status of an artistic and aesthetic concept. When he discussed painting in Laocoön, he identified more with Darstelling, representation. The other, far vaguer meaning made allusion to the poetic and pictorial models of the ancients. Nachahmung was not yet explicitly opposed to mimêsis; without being actually empty in terms of content, the word expressed at best a concession to the worship of the classical ideal of beauty. In other words, it still had some legitimacy because of the authority of Winckelmann, but its theoretical validity had become so problematic that only the aesthetics that were taking shape in Germany could give it back its productive capacity. Jean-François Groulier BIBLIOGRAPHY Lessing, G. E. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Stuttgart, Alfred Kröner Verlag. . Laocoön. Translated by Ellan Frothingham. BiblioBazaar, 2009. |
At times invested with Aristotelian dignity, at others associated, on the contrary, with the minimally prestigious register of the copy ( nachmachen, kopieren ), the notion of Nachahmung issued in increasingly subtle lexical differentiations, which constitute a problem for the translator. In this regard Winckelmann’s use of the term is eloquent. Whereas he had made of imitation the core and very title of his first essay, “Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst” ( Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and in Sculpture ) of 1755, Winckelmann would use it in his subsequent texts only with increasing embarrassment. In 1759, he undertook to distinguish genuine imitation ( nachahmen ) from mere copying ( nachmachen ):
To personal thought, I oppose the copy ( das Nach-machen ), but not at all imitation ( die Nachahmung ): by the term copy I understand a slavish tracing ( knechtlische Folge ). In imitation, on the contrary, what is imitated, if handled with reason, may assume an other nature, as it were, and become one’s own ( gleichsam eine andere Natur annehmen und etwas eigenes werden ).
Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst
The lexical discomfort is evident. Following Winckelmann, Herder attempted a subtle distinction between nachahmen as a transitive verb, the synonym of slavish copying, and nachahmen as an intransitive verb, designating imitation proper. “Einen nachahmen signifies, in my view, to imitate the subject, the work of others; einem nachahmen signifies, on the contrary, to borrow from an other his manner of treating that subject, or a comparable subject” ( Einen nachahnem heißt, wie ich glaube, den Gegenstand, das Werk des andern nachahmen; einem nachahmen aber, die Art und Weise von dem andern entlehnen, diesen oder einen ähnlichen Gegenstand zu behandeln ) ( quoted from J. and W. Grimm, RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 13, s.v. “Nachahmen” ). Restitution into French becomes complex: one would have to translate the transitive nachahmen as copier, reproduire servilement ( slavish copying ), and the intransitive nachamen as s’inspirer, rivaliser avec ( to be inspired by, etc. ). For Winckelmann and Herder, the strategy was the same: it was a matter of inventing a kind of negatively charged yet extremely close twin of nachahmen, such as nachmachen or einen nachahmen, in order to save the word Nachahmung from its disastrous possibilities. But the lexical ruse barely fooled anyone, and it was the term Nachahmung itself that ended up with the blemish of the slavish epigone.
B. Nachahmen and the decline of the principle of imitation around 1800
Later developments bear this out. In subsequent decades it was not only words of the same family ( kopieren, nachmachen, nachbilden ) that became suspect, but the semantic matrix itself: nachahmen. The attack came above all from the Romantic school and its surroundings.
■ See Box 9.
|
Formative imitation in Karl Philipp Moritz By the end of the eighteenth century, imitation no longer implied the idea of a rational order inherent in nature, or that was particular to a system of artistic rules. It was faced with a dual process: on the one hand, the increasing subjectivization of all aesthetic categories, and on the other, the development of a new concept of nature. Art was seen from that point on as having to produce works in accordance with a principle of autonomy analogous to the autonomy that was immanent to living organisms. So a work of art had to be accomplished as a dynamic, internal, and autonomous process. But for Moritz, this movement was not at all, as it was for Goethe, part of an investigation of nature as such. Or rather, art and nature were connected as part of a whole that was analogous to the cosmos of the Greeks and that closely conditioned them. Art should in effect aim to find the language of nature, either through imitation or through symbolism. The aesthetic orientation of Moritz was thus as far removed from the rationalism of Breitinger as it was from the exclusively artistic vision of Winckelmann or of Lessing. It was the enthusiasm and mysticism of the whole that inspired the thought of Moritz: the essential criterion of beauty could only be something that was perfectly finished or accomplished ( Vollendete ). But this beauty was itself only one moment of a movement tending toward the apprehension of the whole. According to him, if we do not possess the concept of what is right or good in an ethical sense, we cannot grasp in its fullness the idea of a formative imitation ( die bildende Nachahmung ), to the extent that this imitation is immanent to the creative faculty of the beautiful as it is manifest in a work of art: Die eigentliche Nachahmung des Schönen unterscheidet sich also zuerst von des moralischen Nachahmung des Guten und Edlen dadurch, dass sie, ihrer Natur nach, streben muss, nicht, wie diese in sich hinein, sondern aus sich heraus zu bilden. ( So the imitation of what is properly speaking beautiful is first of all distinct from the moral imitation of the good and the noble in that it has to strive, according to its nature to form an image that is not, like this imitation, an image in itself, but to form its image out of itself. ) Moritz, Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen The “aus sich heraus zu bilden” ( to form its image out of itself ) dissipates the ambiguity of the sentence. Formative imitation has nothing in common with imitation as Lessing, for example, understood it; it is a poiesis, inspired by a Bildungskraft, a formative power. Nachahmung is all the more untranslatable since Moritz uses the word by defining it as what it is not, that is, an activity of the creative imagination. The break with the artistic tradition of imitation was thus complete; Moritz envisaged an idealization of beauty involving as much a mystical experience as an aesthetic experience. It was, however, in function of this new and sometimes obscure meaning that the aesthetic orientation of German Romanticism would be determined. Jean-François Groulier BIBLIOGRAPHY Mortiz, Karl Phillip. Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen. In Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik, Tübingen: Niemayer, 1962. First published in 1788. |
In his Vorschule der Asthetik ( Pre-School of Aesthetics ) ( 1804 ), Jean Paul adopted Herder’s lexical distinction between a transitive and intransitive use of nachahmen, but brought it to an abrupt close:
Does the expression die Natur nachahmen mean the same thing as der Natur nachahmen, and is repetition imitation? Verily, the principle that consists in faithfully following nature scarcely makes sense.
( Aber ist denn einerlei, die oder der Natur nachzuahmen, und ist Wiederholen Nachahmen?—Eigentlich hat der Grundsatz, die Natur treu zu kopieren, kaum einen Sinn. )
Vorschule der Asthetik, §3
In 1785, in order the better to disqualify imitation, Jean Paul made of nachahmen a synonym pure and simple of kopieren: “The imitation of nature is not yet poetry since the copy cannot contain more than the original” ( Die Nachahmung der Natur ist noch keine Dichtung, weil die Kopie nicht mehr enthalten kann als das Urbild ) ( Uber natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft [On the Natural Magic of the Imagination] ). More and more frequently associated with the terms wiederholen, kopieren, nachäffen, the word nachahmen has the French reader hesitating between several translations: répéter, copier, singer, or imiter. Between F. Schlegel, who, on the subject of imitation, spoke of “artificial counterfeits” of Greek works ( künstliche Nachbildungen in the first edition, changed to Künstliche Nachahmungen in later editions, Uber des studium der griechischen Poesie [On the Study of Greek Poetry] ), and Novalis, who, in a letter to his brother Karl, probably dating from 1800, stated peremptorily that poetry was at the strict antipodes to imitation, the status of the word Nachahmung continued to be degraded and the span of translations to broaden. In 1801–2, A. W. Schlegel put a radical halt to the discussion. In his Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst ( Lectures on Literature and the Fine-Arts ) delivered at the University of Berlin, he offered a systematic refutation of the Aristotelian principle of mimêsis:
Aristotle had posited as an unchallengeable principle that the fine arts were imitative ( die schöne Künste seien nachahmend ). This was precisely the case on the condition that one meant by it a simple thing: they have something imitative ( es komme etwas Nachahmendes in ihnen vor ); but it was imprecise if it meant, in the sense in which Aristotle himself understood it, moreover, that imitation constituted their entire essence ( die Nachahmung mache ihr ganzes Wesen aus ).. . . Numerous moderns have subsequently transformed this principle into the following axiom: art must imitate nature ( die Kunst soll die Natur nachahmen ). The imprecision and ambiguity of the terms “nature” and “imitate” have provoked the greatest misunderstandings and led to the most diverse contradictions.
For A. W. Schlegel, the symptoms of the inadequacy of the term nachahmen were numerous. In Batteux, for example, who postulates that art ought to imitate beautiful nature, or elsewhere that art ought to imitate it as more beautiful, the word “imitate” is incorrect “since one either imitates nature as it is, in which case it is possible that the result will not be beautiful, or one gives it a beautiful form ( man bildet sie schön ), and one is no longer dealing with imitation ( so ist es keine Nachahmung mehr ). Why not say straightaway: art should represent the beautiful ( Warum sagen sie nicht gleich: die Kunst soll das Schöne darstellen )?” The word nachahmen, an incorrect term that translates in this case the incorrect notion of imitation in Batteux, ought simply to be eliminated. And Schlegel concludes: “A more accurate formulation of the principle would be: art ought to give a form to nature ( die Kunst muß Natur bilden ).” Bilden and darstellen would replace nachahmen. With enough untranslatability, the untranslatable is voided.
VI. Realism or Conventionalism: New Perspectives
The concepts of reference, correspondence, and resemblance, which were at the origin of various theories of imitation, have by now become quite problematical. The idea of imitation, as it functioned for centuries through numerous transformations, assumed that the object was given in experience and that the representation might adequately refer to reality. “To perceive similarities,” wrote Aristotle, “is to give evidence of a sagacious mind” ( Rhetoric, 3.11.5 ). That proposition, which defined resemblance as a condition of the possibility of representation, possessed the value of an axiom in theories of art until the nineteenth century. The naïve realism underlying conceptions of representation based on the idea of resemblance has largely been called into question by the epistemology and analyses developed in particular by various philosophies of language. Nelson Goodman radicalized a conventionalist position, ending up in a relativism. For him, what links A and B consists in a relation between elements that may be totally heterogeneous, and that relation brings about a symbolic productivity every bit as efficacious as traditional resemblance of an Aristotelian sort: “Almost any picture can represent anything” ( Languages of Art ). The principle according to which the representation of reality must rest on resemblance to the thing represented is thus based more on a belief than on logical arguments. This conception of representation was born of an aesthetic reflection on the functions of metaphor, but was extended to the whole gamut of symbolic creations of art by basing itself on a new theory of reference. Ernst Gombrich opposed what he called the “extreme conventionalism” of Nelson Goodman and defended the existence of “a real visual resemblance” with recourse to contemporary research in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy on the subject of perception. Without denying the importance of codes and what Goodman calls “inculcation” in the process of recognizing visual representations, Gombrich rejects the idea that images representing nature would be no more than conventional signs in the same way as linguistic signs. There exist for him relations of similarity between the visual space of the painting and the nature of the object represented ( cf. “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation,” in The Image and the Eye ). But such bonds of resemblance exclude all realist reference to the object since the most realistic representation already presupposes an extended apprenticeship and rigorously determined cultural and social frames of reference. One thus ends up, in most such inquiries, with a paradoxical situation, since the devaluation of imitation as the central concept of aesthetics has given rise to numerous theories on what was at the very foundation of that concept, that is, resemblance, reference, and representation. Contrary to reflection on art in the nineteenth century, contemporary aesthetics no longer rejects imitation in the name of creative freedom or a radical autonomy of artistic invention, but by virtue of a foundational conviction according to which every act of reference—by perception and above all by language—to reality eliminates any possible homology or isomorphism between discourse and reality. Determined in relation with logic, thus disposing of new epistemological and metacritical models, aesthetics sees itself as necessarily implicated in the debate over realism and anti-realism. The question of realism thus conditions the determination of values, the objective properties of a work, the beautiful, and colors as much as it does that of representation, reference, and resemblance, that is, a large part of the field of aesthetics. This does not at all mean that the concept of imitation has lost all validity and that it is presently stripped of all expressive value, including in the domains of pure copying and artistic forgery. It is through a more precise analysis of the functions of reference that the idea of imitation can conserve its meaning.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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MIR [мир, міp] ( RUSSIAN )
| ENGLISH | world, peace, peasant commune | ||
| FRENCH | monde, paix, commune paysanne | ||
| GERMAN | Welt, Friede | ||
| GREEK | kosmos [ϰόσμος], eirênê [εἰϱήνη] | ||
| LATIN | mundus, pax |
PEACE, WORLD, and CIVIL SOCIETY, OIKEIÔSIS, PRAVDA, SECULARIZATION, SOBORNOST’, SVET, SVOBODA
The presence in Russian of two homonyms, mir [мир] ( peace ) and mir [мир] ( world ), raises an etymological problem: Was it a matter of two distinct terms at the outset? Need we imagine one of the two semantic veins as derived from the other, or should we imagine two derivations diverging from a common notion? Moreover, was that homonymy used by writers in order to bring to light or create an intersection between the “peace” field and the “world” field? Finally, how do we situate mir [мир], the name of an institution, the “peasant commune,” in relation to “peace” and “world”?
I. Mir ( World ) and Mir ( Peace ): A Fertile Ambiguity
The Russian language inherited from Old Slavonic two masculine nouns mir—one signifying “peace” ( and translating regularly the Greek eirênê ), the other signifying “world” ( and translating regularly the Greek kosmos ). The two words are perfect homonyms. Insofar as spelling is concerned, the custom—in printed texts and in nineteenth-century cursive—was to distinguish them through use of a normal Cyrillic i for mir [мир] ( peace ) and a “dotted” i ( theoretically reserved for the notation of an i before a vowel ) for mir [мiр] ( world ). That distinction did not survive the spelling reform of 1917, which eliminated a certain number of letters from the Russian alphabet, including the dotted i: the two versions of mir have since been spelled identically, as they had been written in Old Russian texts until the eighteenth century. It happens that Vladimir Mayakovsky published in 1916, just prior to the reform, his great poem against the war that was then ravaging Europe, “Vojna i mir”: the spelling of mir ( with a dotted i ) indicated that the title was to be understood as “War and the Universe” ( which is how Claude Frioux translates it into French ), even though the expression echoes the title of Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace. And in fact, in Mayakovsky’s poem, it is not a matter of contrasting war and peace but of describing the suffering inflicted by war on the world. In editions published during the Soviet era, after the spelling reform, the two titles cannot be distinguished in print.
As a rule, context allows one to distinguish between the two mirs: the two homonyms are indeed two different words, and it is entirely appropriate for dictionaries to treat them in two separate entries. The autonomy of each of the terms is notable in their offshoots: only mir ( peace ) gives rise to a verb, mirit’ [мирить] ( to reconcile ), whence comes smirit’ [смирить] ( to appease, tame ). And although it is true that the adjective mirovoj [мирoвοй], which most often means “worldwide,” can also have the meaning of “relative to peace” ( in the expression mirovoj sud’ja [мирoвοй cyдьᴙ], “justice of the peace” ), and it is also true that the Old Slavonic mrinu and the Old Russian mirni translates tou kosmou [τοῦ ϰόσμου], kosmikos [ϰοσμιϰός], and mundi, as well as tês eirênês [τῆς εἰϱήνης] and pacis, at least the modern Russian form of that adjective, mirnyj [мирньɪй], no longer means anything other than “peaceful.”
It is precisely because the two mir nouns can no longer be confused that one can play on their homophony to produce poetic or rhetorical effects, as in the saying V mire žit’, s mirom žit’ [B мᴎре жᴎть, с ᴍᴎроᴍ жᴎть] ( [If one wants] to live in the world, [one must] live in [observing the] peace ) ( RT: Tolkovyĭ slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, s.v. mir 1 ); or in the poet Yesinin’s line, k miru vsego mira [к ᴍᴎру всеґо ᴍᴎра] ( for the peace of the whole universe ), an appeal dating from 1917 ( see Pascal, Civilisation paysanne en Russie ); or even in the Soviet slogan mir miru! [ᴍᴎр ᴍᴎру!] ( peace to the world! ), which merely takes up the prayer from the Menologion of Novgorod ( twelfth century ): mir vsemu miru podazd’ [ᴍᴎр всеᴍу мᴎру подаздь] ( give peace to the entire world ) ( RT: Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka, s.v. mir ); or even in the translation of the Gospel according to John ( 14:27 ):
Mir ostavljaju vam, mir moj daju vam, ne tak kak mir daët ja daju vam.
[Μᴎр оставляю вам, мᴎр мой даю вам, не так как мᴎр даёт я даю вам.]
[Еἰϱνην ἀφίημι ὑμῖν, εἰϱήνην τὴν ἐμὴν δίδωμι ὑμῖν· οὐ ︅χαθὼς ὁ χόσμος δίδωσιν ἐγὼ δίδωμι ὑμῖν.]
( I leave you peace; I grant you my peace; I give it to you, not as the world gives it. )
The situation of mir, on the linguistic level, is thus entirely different from the one encountered with volja [воля], for example, which at times means “will” and at others “freedom” ( as can be seen in the names of two political groups of the late nineteenth century, Zemlja i volja [3емля и воля], “Land and Freedom,” and Volja naroda [Воля народа], “the Will of the People” ). In the case of volja, we are not dealing with two homonyms, but with a single word, whose semantic range includes notions that, in other languages, are rendered by two distinct signifiers. Moreover, the “freedom” denoted by volja is to be understood as the free exercise or unimpeded deployment of the will. It is distinguished from freedom as personal autonomy, which is denoted by svoboda [свобода]; volja translates thelêma [θέλημα], but svoboda translates eleutheria [ἐλευθερία] ( RT: Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka ). See SVOBODA.
■ See Box 1.
II. The Idea of “Bond”: Mir and Sobornost’
On the linguistic level, however, what requires reflection is not the differentiation of the semantic status of mir ( world ), but the relation between mir ( peace ) and mir ( world ). Although it is true that in the history of Russian ( and even in Old Slavonic ) we are dealing with two distinct terms, one cannot but wonder whether the two mirs are linked by a common etymology. It is generally believed that in the prehistory of common Slavonic there must have existed a mir signifying “peace” that would have split into two terms, one conserving the original sense, the other taking on the sense of “world.” According to Antoine Meillet ( RT: Le slave commun ), the model for this transition from “peace” to “world” was furnished by the administrative Latin of the Roman Empire: pax romana became an expression designating all the territory ruled by Roman peace. Similarly, Old Slavonic translated the Greek kosmos by ( visi ) miru, “( all ) the peace,” the entire domain of peace, and thus the world. The term mir would have been borrowed from mihr in an Iranian language, perhaps Scythian, a form deriving from ancient Iranian *mithra, represented in Avestan by miqra. The Sanskrit Vedic mitra regularly corresponds to the latter term. We are thus confronted with an Indo-Iranian etymon mitra ( RT: Ėtimologicheskiĭ slovarʹ russkogo iazyka, s.v. mir ). In Avestan as in Vedic, the noun can be neutral or masculine. In Vedic Sanskrit, mitra, neuter, signifies “friendship,” “alliance” ( and also, curiously, “friend” ). Mitra is also the name of a major divinity in the Vedic pantheon, the god of friendship, friendship personified. In Avestan, miqra means “contract” and, as a proper noun, designates the god who reigns over all that partakes of the good, of order and light. Meillet ( RT: Etudes sur l’étymologie et le vocabulaire du vieux slave ) and, following him, Benveniste ( RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes ) and Dumézil, maintain that the original meaning of Indo-Iranian *mitra is “agreement, friendship resulting from a contract.” From a morphological point of view, *mitra is the instrument or agent through which the *mi- operation is achieved. The meaning of that verbal root may thus be a subject of speculation. It may be a matter of the Indo-European root *mi- ( to change ) and ( to exchange ), represented notably by the Sanskrit *mi- ( to alter ) and mith- ( alternate ) and the Latin muto ( to change ), mutuus ( reciprocal ): the contract on which the friendship denoted by *mitra- is based is itself the formalization of an exchange of benefits. But the existence of other Indo-European *mi- roots—allowing one to trace other semantic lines of transmission for *mitra- ( and thus for mir )—have been posited: a *mi- ( to attach ) would allow us to understand *mitra- as a “bond,” originally a material bond, and secondarily a bond understood as the constitutive obligation inherent in a contract. The Greek mitra [μίτρα] ( belt ) would be a borrowing from an Iranian form that would have retained that concrete sense ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. “Frisk” ). Certain etymologists acknowledge as well a root in *mi- that would be at the origin of the Sanskrit mayas ( sweetness ), and the Old Slavonic milu ( likable ) ( RT: Etudes sur l’étymologie et le vocabulaire du vieux-slave ). That last etymology would make the Indo-European *mitra a far more affective form of friendship than one resulting from either a binding obligation or exchanges regulated contractually. ( Jan Gonda rejects the notion that mitra- is a term for “contract.” )
These speculations on the ultimate etymology of mitra are not unrelated to the more or less explicit ( or more or less refined ) analyses of the terms mir ( peace ) and mir ( world ) conducted by Russian authors. Florensky ( The Pillar and Ground of the Truth ) states outright that the two versions of mir cannot be dissociated, in the sense that “the idea of mir, of the world, is based on the notion of a concordance of parts, harmony, and unity. The world is a coherent whole; it is the mir of the beings, things, and phenomena it contains.” In other words, with peace and agreement being the condition of the world, and the world being the space constituted by peace, it is the sense of “peace” ( order, harmony, coherence ) that is primary. This idea underlies the doctrines positing that sobornost’ ( solidarity ) is the foundation of the human world, and that sobornost’ is an expression of love as the realization of an inner principle that is supernatural and prevails over empirical nature: it is the principle of divine truth. And inversely:
. . . the principle of truth [pravda ( правда )], which is the foundation of society as community [obščestva ( обществa )], the principle of the submission of human passions and natural tendencies to the will and force of God, is necessarily achieved as love [ljubov’ ( любовь )], total inner unity of the human being, a unity without which the union and coordination that empirically determine the nature of the community are impossible.
( Frank, The Spiritual Foundations of Society )
For Frank, as is known, this genuine community, “this spiritual organism is what is understood—in the deepest and most general sense—by the word ‘church’ ( tserkov’ [церковь] ). Thereby, we arrive at the affirmation that at the foundation of all community, as the means and creative principle of that community, there is necessarily the Church.” Thus, the “world is to melt without residue into the Church. . . . The entire world is to become without residue the world in God, but God cannot take his place without residue in the world” ( ibid. ). He continues:
Social life is constituted by a constant struggle between the principle of solidarity and the principle of individual freedom, between the power [vlast’ ( власть )] that protects the interests of the whole and anarchical tendencies, between centripetal and centrifugal forces. . . . It is only when those two principles find support in a third principle . . . , the service of God, the service of absolute truth, that they achieve agreement and are lastingly reconciled.
The social world becomes a community, the mir of the secular world becomes a church only when that reconciliation, which is a pacification ( primirenie [примирение] ), has completed its work. It may be noted, in taking up the question of the original meaning of mir anew, that if the harmony of the whole is a form and consequence of the love that the constitutive parts of that whole bring to God, then that social bond cannot be interpreted as a system of exchanges regulated by contract.
Thus the ideologues of sobornost’ adopt as their own, and with considerable insistence, Tönnies’s opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft ( see CIVIL SOCIETY, Box 1 ). It is clearly in society as Gesellschaft that the parts are reciprocally adjusted through the effect of laws or forces that are imposed on them and remain, in a sense, external in relation to them. In Gemeinschaft, on the contrary, the unity is internal, and the solidarity organic. But in point of fact, Frank further notes, in the case of a human society, even beneath the external modifications appropriate to Gesellschaft, one detects the presence of an internal solidarity characteristic of Gemeinschaft. Adapting the teaching of Khomyakov on the nature of the unity of the church, Frank, in The Spiritual Foundations of Society, affirms that sobornost’ is based on a relation of love. If the ideal is to act so that the human world might melt into the Church, through the effects of pacification, it must also be recognized that the principle of love or organic solidarity is indispensable, even if it is invisible, for every society.
III. Mir, Peasant Commune and Utopia—Slavophiles and Socialists
The theme of sobornost’, which implies a reflection on the “peace” component and the “world” component in the unitary notion of mir, also includes considerations about a third sense of the word: mir as the name of a specific institution, the peasant commune, also called obščina [община]. The real institution that corresponded to mir taken in this sense was the object, between 1840 and 1930, of various intellectual battles bearing directly on the characteristics ( and thus on the fate ) of Russian society, and that ultimately involved the nature of the social bond and the very status of the political. Before indicating briefly the stakes of those debates, we may note that in all dictionaries, mir as “peasant commune” is presented as an aspect of mir as “world,” a circumstance confirmed by the spelling of the word prior to the reform: each “peasant commune” is a world in itself, a whole whose cohesion is ensured by extremely powerful customs of solidarity. It was this mir as “peasant commune” that Toporov had in view in his remarks ( in “Iz nabljudenij nad etimologiej slov mifologiceskogo xaraktera” ) on the etymology of the term: “The god Mitra is the one who gathers men in a social structure, a mir, it might be said, borrowing a term from Russian social tradition.” This way of defining the group wanted by Mitra takes into account, Toporov says, the “natural [or etymological] bond” between the Indo-Iranian *mitra and the Russian mir.
What sort of totality-collectivity are we dealing with in the peasant mir? Intellectuals became truly aware of the importance of this kind of social organization only after the German traveler August von Haxthausen published the results of his investigation of the Russian agrarian regime. The Slavophiles opted to see in the mir described by Haxthausen the mir mentioned in the juridical texts of Kievian Russia ( notably the Russkaja pravda of the thirteenth century ). By 1856, the Russian political philosopher Boris Chicherin had shown that this was an error: in Kievian Russia, the peasants of a commune ( in the sense of a territorial circumscription ) formed a mir, that is, they met periodically to designate their magistrates, who were responsible for the police and relations between the commune and the outer world, the prince and the lords of the manor ( see Eck, Le Moyen Âge russe ). Although the Kievian mir also had to administer lands not yet assigned, the peasant was free to dispose of the lands he worked as he wished. In contrast, the mir Haxthausen observed was the true holder ( if not the owner ), administrator, and assigner of the land worked by the peasants ( Eck, ibid. ). According to Klyuchevsky, the characteristic features of this mir-obscina—obligatory equalization of the lots assigned to each household, complete power of the commune over the peasant, the commune’s vouching ( out of solidarity ) for the payment of taxes—were not explicitly established until the seventeenth century ( Socineniya, vol. 2 ).
■ See Box 2.
|
History of the mir Whatever its antiquity, and whatever the variations and obscurities of the agrarian codes before and after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the commune appears as the natural form of peasant life. This is a kind of proverb among peasants of the Russian plain: “the land is with the mir” ( zemlja mirskaja [земля мирская] ) ( see Lewin, Making of the Soviet System; and ibid., for an analysis of juridical debates concerning the mir ). The principal function of the mir is the periodic redistribution of land among households, in accordance with the manpower provided by each household or the number of mouths to be fed. A scrupulous concern for egalitarian justice brought the mir, in its allocation of plots of land, to take into account quality of soil, configuration of terrain, and distance from the village. In addition, one had to yield to all the constraints inherent in the practice of triennial crop rotation, applied to all the lands in the commune. Each household thus received a lot composed of narrow strips of land, which were dispersed and frequently impractical to till with a harnessed plow, but the resultant distribution was rigorously and minutely egalitarian. The lands associated with each household did not form a single block, but consisted of parcels surrounded by other parcels belonging to other households. Labor was necessarily and at all times collective. The division of lots resulted from decisions, which were always unanimous, taken after tumultuous discussions by family heads convened in general assemblies ( sxod [сход] ). The mir system was further reinforced after the 1861 reform: it was to the mir that the responsibility fell for buying and administering the lands that large landholders were obliged to cede to the peasants once they were liberated. In the eyes of many economists, however, the mir was an insurmountable impediment to agricultural development and thus to the capitalist modernization of Russia. The Stolypin reforms, after the failure of the revolution of 1905, aimed to break the framework of the commune and to favor the emergence of a class of land-owning peasants, intent, in order to get rich, on taking initiatives, working hard, and employing a salaried workforce. These reforms were largely successful: on the eve of the 1917 revolution, almost half the peasant families of European Russia had left their mir, and the peasants had become individual farmers. But the upheavals of civil war and the changes triggered by the reform of 1918 ( “land to the peasants!” ) resulted in the mir being reconstituted, and a good number of peasants who had left their communes returned. For more than a decade, the Soviet government allowed the mir to subsist, even as it sought to invigorate the class struggle in the villages and to favor soviets of poor peasants. It was only with generalized collectivization ( elimination of the kulaks, establishment of kolkhozes and sovkhozes ) at the beginning of the 1930s that the mir disappeared. ( Concerning the vitality of the mir during the first years of the Soviet regime, see Pascal, Civilisation paysanne en russe; Lewin, Paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique. ) BIBLIOGRAPHY Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. New York: Pantheon, 1985. . La paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique 1918–1930. Paris: Mouton, 1966. Translation by Irene Nove, with John Biggart: Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Pascal, Pierre. Civilisation paysanne en Russie: 6 esquisses. 2 vols. Lausanne: Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, 1969–73. Translation by Rowan Williams: The Religion of the Russian People. London: Mowbrays, 1976. |
The peasant mir was an extraordinarily persistent and fertile ideological ( if not philosophical ) theme in Russian thought of the second half of the nineteenth century. The defense and illustration of the mir was one of the principal motifs of the Slavophile trend.
Thus I. Kireevskij saw in the mir a society whose cohesion was ensured by a fundamentally moral bond. The Russia of times past, “authentic” Russia, unaltered by reforms imitated from the West, was united by that moral bond “into a single vast mir, a nation in which faith, land, and custom were shared by all” ( quoted in Walicki, Slavophile Controversy ). The mir was a unity grounded in the intimate adhesion of individuals and the integrating force of religion and of shared moral convictions. As opposed to this, organization imposed by an external law, where social relations result from rational contracts combined with legal guarantees, was, for C. S. Aksakov, artificial and bad. An autonomous sphere of the juridical and the political existed: it was entirely in the hands of the monarch and the state. It was external to the life of the people as organized, in accordance with its inner truth, in the community of the mir; the freedom to be defended was not the power for the people to intervene in political affairs, but the right to be free from politics ( Walicki, History of Russian Thought ). The mir was, like the church whose counterpart it was within society, a form of common life that combined unity and freedom and whose law was love ( Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, quoting Khomyakov ).
The Slavophiles were not alone in exalting the mir. In the camp of the adversaries of autocracy, those who dreamed of a democratic Russia and were inspired in large measure by the revolutionary doctrines and movements of Western Europe, Alexander Herzen, in 1846, was also discovering first the importance, then the positive value of the mir. The mir was not just a remnant from a precapitalist order. It was also the germ and the model of a socialist organization for the whole of Russia. The hope of Herzen and his “populist” disciples that socialism might come to Russia without necessarily passing through a capitalist phase was based on the existence of the mir. Herzen, like the Slavophiles, was horrified by the disasters that the Industrial Revolution, and more generally capitalism, had inflicted on entire populations, but, unlike the Slavophiles, his aim was not to preserve or restore old structures, but to “preserve the commune and render the individual free.” That combination defined his ideal of “Russian socialism” ( see Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism; Walicki, History of Russian Thought ). It stemmed from a critique, not only of capitalism, but also of the idea that only capitalist society, by engendering the forces that would destroy it, could give birth to socialism and, additionally, that what would follow capitalism would necessarily be socialism. For Herzen, the paths of history were not traced in advance ( see Berlin, Russian Thinkers ).
Among the adversaries of the mir one finds, principally, as of 1861, all the partisans of the transformation of Russia into a modern country: functionaries, economists, entrepreneurs. For them, the mir was one of the principal causes of the economic, social, cultural, and—in a certain sense, moral—backwardness of the Russian peasantry ( see Besançon, Être russe au XIXe siècle ). But the “populist” or ( later ) “socialist-revolutionary” vision of the mir ( which would be criticized as late as the 1920s by the economist Cajanov, the partisan of a society founded on familial peasant property, see Kremnev, Puteshestvie moego brata Aleksei ) was above all attacked by the Marxists. They rejected the utopia of a socialism carried forward by the peasant masses and constructed on the model of the mir; for them, the mission of leading the revolution that would achieve the transition to socialism fell to the industrial proletariat, the product of capitalism. It should be remembered, however, that as of the 1860s, Marx, and then Engels, when questioned by the Russian populists ( notably by Danielson, the translator of Capital ), on several occasions offered answers less categorical than, and more distant from, what was in the process of becoming Marxist orthodoxy. In their preface to a Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1882, they wrote: “If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West, so that the two revolutions complement each other, the current model of Russian common property can become the starting point for a communist revolution” ( quoted in Rubel, Marx, critique du marxisme ). In sum, according to Marx, the enclosed, ahistorical, and specifically Russian “world” that was the Russian peasant mir could be saved and could preserve Russia from capitalism only if it were caught up in the history of a properly “worldwide” revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. London: Hogarth, 1978.
Besançon, Alain. Être russe au XIXe siècle. Paris: Colin, 1974.
Eck, Alexandre. Le Moyen Âge russe. Preface by Henri Pirenne. 1933. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1968.
Florensky, Pavel. Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: Opyt pravoslavnoj teoditsei v dvenadtsati pis’makh. Moscow: Lepta, 2002. Translation by Boris Jakim: The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Introduction by Richard F. Gustafson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. First published in 1914.
Frank, Semen L. Duxovnye osnovy obščestva. New York: Posev, 1988. Translation by Boris Jakim: The Spiritual Foundations of Society: An Introduction to Social Philosophy. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987.
Frioux, Claude. Maïakovski. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961.
Gonda, Jan. “Mitra and Mitra: The Idea of Friendship in Ancient India.” Indologica Taurinensia 1 ( 1973 ): 71–107.
Haxthausen, August, Freiherr von. Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volks-leben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands. 6 vols. Han-over, 1847–52. Translation by Eleanore L. M. Schmidt: Studies on the Interior of Russia. Edited by S. Frederick Starr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Heller, Léonid, and Michel Niqueux. Histoire de l’utopie en Russie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.
Klyuchevsky, V. O. Socineniya. Vol. 2 of Kurs russkoĭ istorii. Ann Arbor, MI: J. W. Edwards, 1948. Translation by C. J. Hogarth: Vol. 2 of A History of Russia. 5 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1911–31.
Kremnev, Ivan ( pseudonym of A. V. Chaianov ). Puteshestvie moego brata Aleksei. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1920. Translation by Robert E. F. Smith: “The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia.” In The Russian Peasant, 1920 and 1984, edited by Robert E. F. Smith, 63–108. London: Cass, 1977.
Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “Vojna i mir.” In Poėmy. Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1974. Translated as: “War and the World.” In vol. 2 of Selected Works in Three Volumes. Moscow: Raduga, 1986. First published in 1916.
Pascal, Pierre. Civilisation paysanne en Russie: 6 esquisses. 2 vols. Lausanne, Switz.: Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, 1969–73. Translation by Rowan Williams: The Religion of the Russian People. London: Mowbrays, 1976.
Rubel, Maximilien. Marx, critique du marxisme: Essais. Paris: Payot, 1974. Translation by Joseph O’Malley and Keith Algozin: Rubel on Karl Marx: Five Essays. Edited by Joseph O’Malley and Keith Algozin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Tolstoy, Leo. Vojna i mir. Moscow: Zakharov, 2000. Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: War and Peace. New York: Knopf, 2007. First published in 1869.
Toporov, V. N. “Iz nabljudenij nad etimologiej slov mifologiceskogo xaraktera [Observations on the etymology of words of a mythical nature].” Etimologija ( 1967 ).
Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979.
. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
MITMENSCH ( GERMAN )
| ENGLISH | fellow human | ||
| FRENCH | autrui |
AUTRUI, and ACTOR, I/ME/MYSELF, MENSCHHEIT, NEIGHBOR, PARDON, SUBJECT, WELT, WORLD
Of recent use in philosophy, the Mitmensch ( literally, the man-with-me ), who is not simply “the other,” but not really “others” per se, is situated at the heart of a complex configuration, where it is caught between an undifferentiated alter ego—an other ( alius ) who is indeed someone, but not just anyone ( that is, the thou or you of the dialogical relation )—and the “neighbor,” in the sense conferred on the term by the Decalogue. The distinct orientations taken by those using the term, and the theological or religious impregnation of the word, have contributed to the difficulty of translation—a difficulty all the more remarkable in that reflection on the Mitmensch has found an echo in France in various debates that oppose diverse conceptions of the functions of autrui ( others ).
Although the term attested to by Adelung in 1777 ( RT: Versuch eines vollständingen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart ) is immediately understandable in common parlance, where it designates simply “any person sharing with me the human condition”—“Meine Glückseligkeit kann ohne Liebe meiner Mitmenschen nicht bestehen” ( My happiness cannot exist without the love of those with whom I share existence ), wrote Schiller, and similarly Voss: “du Frei muß werden sobald zu Vernunft er gelangte der Mitmensch!” ( any other man, as soon as he gains access to Reason, must be free! )—it appears in philosophy from the outset as a concept. The two initial orientations given to the word ( by Hermann Cohen in 1919, then, ten years later, by Karl Löwith ) are different, but it is not their difference that makes for the difficulty of finding an equivalent for the term; the translation of Mitmensch in French as autrui, which is undoubtedly the only reasonable and suitable rendering, in no way allows the term to be shorn of its ambiguities. In addition, there exists, in the historical context in which the concept was formed, a dimension that was from the outset theological, in which the word subsumed simultaneously a “neutral” sense—Mitmensch does indeed signify any other person who shares the same condition as me—and a plainly religious sense. Bultmann, throughout his long career, also employed the word to designate not exactly der Nächste, but the other human being whom my practical behavior must consider not as a Nebenmensch ( literally, the man alongside [me] ), but, precisely, as a Mitmensch, in such manner that I can as a consequence understand the meaning of the commandment that will make of the Mitmensch ( which everyone has the right to be for me ) a fellow human. Conversely, Jesus, the eminent fellow human, is in reality, under the figure of Christ, the paradigm of the Mitmensch.
Two general axes can be described from a historical, as well as a thematic, point of view: on the one hand, the phenomenological lineage initiated by Löwith, a student of Husserl and then of Heidegger, which leads to the French phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and which is continued by Deleuze; on the other, the ethico-religious orientation of Cohen, adapted by Buber to an extent, which emerged in the idea of the “other” in Lévinas. Nevertheless, Deleuze’s critique of the Sartrean alter ego ( see “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui” ) was executed against a backdrop of phenomenology, just as Lévinas’s “other” was similarly rooted in a renewal of phenomenology ( see “La trace de l’autre” ). Thus it is that the notion of autrui, “others,” in French, which confirms, without in any way resolving this foundational semantic duality, can give but an approximate equivalent of Mitmensch, and its principal virtue lies precisely in the ambiguity that is retained in French, even though it remains altogether mute, at least on first hearing, in relation to the religious dimension, which was the initial breeding ground of the notion.
I. From Nebenmensch ( the Man beside Me ) to Mitwelt ( a Shared World ): A Place for the Mitmensch ( Hermann Cohen, Karl Löwith )
The systematic origin of the concept comes from an inflection implemented by Cohen toward the end of his life, when he returned to the arguments he originally put forth in Ethik des reinen Willens ( 1904 ) in order to show its limits and to acknowledge the specificity of religion, which, until then, had not received an independent status. Cohen had shown that there could be no pure morality without the second person, the Nebenmensch. But the Nebenmensch, if it remains captive to the limits of the concept of plurality, does not satisfy the exigencies of the concept of the non-self, “for which reason one prefers to it the more precise concept of the other. The other is not an other; on the contrary, in his precise correlation, he is in a relation of continuity with the I. The other, the alter ego, is the origin of the ego” ( Ethik des reinen Willens, chap. 4 ). This moral conception would undergo a substantial deepening and transformation when Cohen, in 1918, wrote Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums ( published in 1919 ). The initial problem he posed turns on the limits of morality, and it is a matter of showing that there exists, beyond the “it” or “he” that constitutes the exclusive horizon envisaged by the realm of the practical, a “thou” whose singularity escapes the notion of the alter ego. Because it lifts humanity out of all that is empirical and available to the senses, ethics is constrained to look past concrete individuality in order to objectivize the ego at the higher level of abstract humanity. Religion finds the basis of its legitimacy from a systematic point of view, and the basis of its specificity with regard to reason, as soon as it brings to the fore the irreducible singularity of a “thou” that is no longer an alter ego, the Nebenmensch, but rather the Mitmensch. The suffering of others, in its singularity, confronts the “I” with its responsibility for the suffering that it inflicts by sinning, and the particular objectivization of the inflicted harm that is manifested in the suffering of the other is what constitutes self-consciousness—and the source of religion. Moreover, the correlation between man and a God whose uniqueness Cohen emphasizes cannot be sustained logically if that “man” is not understood in his own radical uniqueness—but a uniqueness that is not identical with the absolute unity of the divine. It is thus solely a matter of the individual considered in his or her extreme singularity, that is, of the other ( autrui ), which is at once like oneself and altogether other: the Mitmensch henceforth opposed to the Nebenmensch. It is thus not by chance that the central chapter of Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums ( Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism ) is devoted to the subject of forgiving, the act that exceeds—par excellence—the limits of morality ( a sphere that knows genuine reparation only in the law ) and that reveals the singularity of the relation between “I” and “thou” that operates below the relations between Nebenmenschen and that only functions between Mitmenschen as between “I” and God: “The hypothesis that the alter ego and the other ( autrui ) might be identical is precisely the prejudice of contemporary thought. . . . The alter ego is not at all the other. It is experience itself that rejects that identification.”
For Löwith, in his doctoral thesis “Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen” ( The individual in the role of Mitmensch ), the notion of Mitmensch intervenes in the analysis of the structure of being-together ( Miteinandersein ), which implies that one makes a distinction between a world, an environment ( Umwelt ), and a shared world ( Mitwelt ). “Others do not encounter each other originally as suspended objects whose characteristics would partake of the person, but in a relation of man to the world, thus an ‘intramundane’ relation, a world considered as a ‘shared world,’ in the perspective of the surrounding world” ( Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 1, chap. 2, in which the reference to §24 of Heidegger’s Being and Time is explicit ). It is because humans are so essentially a part of the world that they profoundly determine its nature, and this world that is accessible to me is not only humanly structured in the sense of a world shared by others, it is also my world, and it is first of all with regard to myself that it can be characterized as a world shared, which in turn is oriented as a function of a self for whom other people are others. Thus the shared world, if it is encapsulated in a specific other person, becomes for me a “thou.” Löwith, who examined in particular Feuerbach’s Principles for a Philosophy of the Future, thus sought to account for the equivalence posited by that author: “the world or thou.” And the “thou” does not represent only the shared world, but the entire world. In the conclusion of his thesis, in which Löwith cites Stirner, he reinforces the idea of the uniqueness of every “I” living at the center of its world with its “property,” that is, with what is proper or belonging to it. But he emphasizes still more forcefully that one’s own world is always also a world shared, and that every radical individuality is also, by dint thereof, a personality ( in the Latin sense of persona ), that is, a “role” for others. It is that role that is also defined by the term Mitmensch. The condition of possibility of that duality between the individual and the other that coexists in every human being rests on the modality of being human: he or she is independently an other because he or she is independent of his or her own nature. From one’s being, no specific obligation to be can be deduced other than the obligation to be a Mitmensch, that is, a personality that results from the relation between each individual and the others, a relation from which one can in no way escape. This necessity of the Mitwelt determines that of the Mitmensch, and what results from this phenomenology of being-together is an individual-person duality that is considered as ultimate, but that remains primarily oriented as a function of the ego.
II. Other People between Structure and Transcendence: Legacy of the Mitmensch in France ( from Sartre to Ricœur )
A deepening of this perspective occurred in Merleau-Ponty ( as in Deleuze by way of a critique of the Sartrean theory of the alter ego developed in L’être et le néant ), one that develops an abstract mode of the notion of others that no longer designates a particular modality of the other individual and becomes rather a structure of the field of perception. In a working note of November 1959 ( Le visible et l’invisible ), Merleau-Ponty writes: The self-other relation to be conceived . . . as complementary roles of which neither can be held without the other being held as well: masculinity implies femininity, etc. Fundamental polymorphism in relation to which it is not mine to constitute the other in the face of the Ego: it is already there, and the Ego is conquered from it.” Exactly a year later, one finds—in a note titled “autrui” ( others )—these sentences, which seem to be returning to Löwith’s thesis ( which Merleau-Ponty had not yet read, although he had promised himself to do so ): “Autrui is not so much a freedom seen from without as destiny or fate, a subject competing with a subject, but it is caught in a circuit that binds it to the world, as ourselves, and thereby also into a circuit that binds it to us—And that world is common to us, is an interworld—And there is transitivism through generality” ( Le visible et l’invisible ). The critique of Sartre is quite present in what lies behind these reflections ( ibid. ):
If access to autrui has entered into a constellation of others . . . it is difficult to argue that the other is nothing other than the absolute negation of myself, for when it comes to absolute negation, there is only one, which absorbs into itself all rival negations. Even if we have a principal other . . . the mere fact that it is not a unique other obliges us to understand it not as absolute negation, but as modalized negation, i.e., ultimately, not as what contests my life, but as what gives it form. . . . [T]he problem of others [is not to be posed] as that of access to a different mode of negativization but as that of initiation to a symbolic and typology of others whose being for itself and being for others are reflexive variants, and not essential forms.
Thus autrui would be less related to the Sartrean alter ego, “the gaze of the other that robs me of the world,” and more to a structure.
Similarly, Deleuze granted to Sartre—but in order to immediately strip him of it—the merit of having wanted to make of autrui a structure irreducible to subject or object: “. . . but since he defined that structure by the gaze, he lapsed into the categories of object and subject, by making of autrui he who constitutes me as an object when he looks at me.” Autrui is defined from the outset as a “structure of the field of perception” such that “it is not myself, but autrui as a structure that renders perception possible.” And that structure is not one among others since autrui conditions the whole of the field. The fundamental effect of the presence of others “is the distinction of my consciousness and its object,” a distinction that occurs simultaneously in space and in time ( all quotations from “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui” ). More generally, Deleuze ( ibid. ) contests the manner in which philosophical dualism correctly articulates the categories of the functioning of the field of perception and the variations of objects within that field and the subjective syntheses exercised on perceptual matter:
The true dualism is entirely elsewhere: between the effects of the “structure of autrui” in the perceptual field, and the effects of its absence. . . . In defining autrui . . . as the expression of a possible world, we make of it . . . the a priori principle of the organization of the entire field of perception according to categories; we make of it the structure that permits the functioning as well as the “categorization” of that field.
In 1967, in the re-edition of his En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Lévinas included an unpublished text, “Langage et proximité,” which took its place among a series of texts titled “Raccourcis” [Shortcuts], taking up the essential aspects of the theses developed in his Totalité et infini. One finds in that previously unpublished text the famous passage about the caress, which tends to bring to the fore the gaps in our intentional understanding by distinguishing cognitive understanding from the ethical relation to the real:
Perception is a proximity with being which intentional analysis does not account for. The sensible is superficial only in its role being cognition. In the ethical relationship with the real, that is, in the relationship of proximity which the sensible establishes, the essential is committed. Life is there. . . . The poetry of the world is inseparable from proximity par excellence, or the proximity of a neighbor par excellence. And it is as though by reference to their origin in the other [Autrui], a reference that would obtain as an a priori structure of the sensible, that certain cold and “mineral” contacts are only privately congealed into pure information or pure reports.
Another one of the raccourcis, “Enigme et phénomène” ( 1965 ), quite plainly refers to the legacy of Hermann Cohen, where autrui—understood in terms of the infinite as what refers us to an originary anteriority, which never becomes a presence or is incarnate—“solicits by way of a face, the term of my generosity and my sacrifice. A Thou is inserted between the I and the absolute He.” It will be understood that autrui is what regulates an essential asymmetry between oneself and the other, who is always closer to God than oneself is. Lévinas thus represents a radical attempt to bring into coexistence, in the notion of autrui, a profoundly revised version of the phenomenological tradition and the initial ethico-religious dimension. Paul Ricœur, in showing the limits of that perspective, which grants a radical exteriority to autrui, recalls that:
. . . the theme of exteriority reaches the end of its trajectory, namely, the awakening of a responsible response to the beckoning of the other, only by presupposing a capacity to receive, discriminate, and acknowledge. . . . In order to mediate the openness of the Same to the Other and the internalization of the voice of the other in the same, must not language contribute its resources of communication, and thus of reciprocity, as is attested to by the exchange of personal pronouns . . . which reflects a more radical exchange, that of the question and the answer, in which the roles are endlessly reversed?
( Soi-même comme un autre )
Autrui, then, again becomes the other, and there is an end of hypostasizing, on the basis of the category of alterity, at times as a radical and infinite singularity, at others as a general, originary, and abstract structure of the field of perception. The Mitmensch becomes anew das Andere.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bultmann, Rudolf. Glauben und Verstehen. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1993.
Cohen, Hermann. Ethik des reinen Willens. Introduction by Steven S. Schwarzschild. 5th ed. In vol. 7 of Werke. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1981. Originally published in 1904.
. Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Leipzig: Fock, 1919. Translation and introduction by Simon Kaplan: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui.” In Logique du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969. Translation by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale: The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Gibbs, Robert, ed. Hermann Cohen’s Ethics. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2006.
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.
Husserl, Edmund. 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.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. “La trace de l’autre” and “Langage et proximité.” In En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin, 1967. Translation by Alphonso Lingis: “Language and Proximity” in Collected Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht, Neth.: Martinus Nijhoff / Kluwer, 1987.
Löwith, Karl. Mensch und Menschenwelt. Edited by Klaus Stichweh and Marc B. de Launay. In vol. 1 of Sämtliche Schriften. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l’invisible: Suivi de notes de travail. Edited by Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Translation by Alphonso Lingis: The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Edited by Claude Lefort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Translated by Kathleen Blamey: Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Translation by Hazel E. Barnes: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Introduction by Mary Warnock. London: Routledge, 2003.
MOMENT, MOMENTUM, INSTANT
| DANISH | øjeblik | ||
| FRENCH | moment, instant, occasion | ||
| GERMAN | der Moment, das Moment, Augenblick | ||
| GREEK | kairos [ϰαιϱός], rhopê [ῥοπή] | ||
| ITALIAN, SPANISH | momento | ||
| LATIN | momentum |
AIÔN, AUFHEBEN, DASEIN, DESTINY, FORCE, HISTORY, JETZTZEIT, PRESENT, TIME, WITTICISM
“Moment” has two meanings that are derived from one another: a technical ( mechanical ) meaning and a temporal meaning. The mechanical meaning is the Latin momentum, and refers concretely, via Archimedes, to the small quantity that tips the scales. The temporal meaning is a movement that determines a before and an after that are irreducible the one to the other. This sudden bursting through of time into space is a key to understanding the Greek kairos [ϰαιϱός], which is translated, among other things, as “moment.”
Modern languages are characterized by their tendency to forget the technical meaning in everyday usage, which focuses on the temporal determination of a small lapse of time ( cf. the article “Moment” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie [RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers]: “A moment does not last long: an instant is even shorter” ). They specify the technical meaning differently and in parallel with the temporal meaning.
German has, in addition, differentiated the technical meaning from the temporal meaning by gender: Hegel makes the technical meaning a speculative usage that requires a reorganization of its distinction from the temporal meaning. The philosophical lexicon of the other languages adapts the Hegelian usage ( “moment” as instance, or level of reality ) through translation.
I. Momentum ( Lat. ), Rhopê ( Gr. ), and Their Translations
The technical meaning of the Latin word momentum is prior to the meaning of a small interval of time. Momentum refers then to a particular magnitude linked to movement. The redefinition of the category of movement by Galileo and Newton led to a linguistic distinction being established in modern languages, different from one language to the next, between a dynamic meaning and a static meaning, which are merged together in Latin.
Even in its technical sense, momentum, which is derived from movimentum ( from movere, “to move” ), does not have an univocal meaning. This polysemy reflects a difficulty encountered from the thirteenth century onward in translating the Greek term rhopê [ῥοπή], a term used in Book 4 of Aristotle’s Physics ( 216a13–20 ) and in the Commentary written by Eutocius ( sixth century ) from the book of Archimedes known in English as On the Equilibrium of Planes ( cf. Archimedis opera omnia cum commentariis Eutoccii, 264, 13–14 ).
In Aristotle and in Eutocius, rhopê designates the tendency that a body naturally has to move at a speed proportional to its weight ( or its lightness in Aristotle ). But in the work of Archimedes cited, rhopê has the meaning, when considering a set of scales, of a weight that can tip the scales one way rather than the other. It is still a tendency, but it results then from the combination of the weight and the distance between the fulcrum and the beam of the scales. Some translators who use momentum in order to designate the first meaning of rhopê have to then use another term ( for example, pondus ) when they want to signify the second meaning. Yet this usage is far from being a general one, since Vitruvius, in Book X of De architectura ( 1486 ), describes momentum as the combined effect of the weight and of the distance traveled. What is more, momentum is also used in the Middle Ages to translate the Greek term to kinêma [τὸ ϰίνημα], which is found in Book VI of Aristotle’s Physics ( I.232a9–10, and 241a4 ) and which there designates the indivisible quantum of a movement that has already occurred.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the technical meaning of momentum is thus threefold: ( a ) a natural tendency toward movement as an effect of gravity ( dynamic meaning ); ( b ) the product of weight times distance ( what we might call the term’s statistical meaning ); ( c ) a small quantity of movement. These three senses make only an implicit reference to the movement of the fulcrum of a set of scales when it tips: momentum contains the contradictory idea of a ( static ) equilibrium and its ( dynamic ) rupture as an effect of an infinitesimal cause.
These three meanings can be found, mixed and distributed ( according to the particular distortions of each language ), in the technical usage that many modern European languages make of the derivations of the Latin word momentum, namely the following: moment in French, “momentum” and “moment” in English, momento in Spanish and Italian, and das Moment in German.
In modern French, moment refers to the result of a precise mathematical operation, which consists of constructing the vectorial product of the vector position of a material point by a vector having this point as its origin: one calls this the moment of the vector ( in relation to the origin chosen in order to identify the position ). Since force as Newton defines it is a vector applied to the material point on which it acts, one can define through this operation the moment of a force. Meaning ( b ) is privileged here, as well as a mathematical conception of mechanical quantities, emphasizing their construction. By analogy, the quantity called in French moment cinétique ( kinetic moment ), constructed in the same way with the slight difference that the force is replaced by the quantity of movement ( defined as the product of mass and velocity, a vectorial quantity ), should be called the “moment of the quantity of movement.” This is not the case, however, though the adjective cinétique added to moment is intended to remind one of this link with the velocity of the moving body, and to make the notion of moment a kinetic, even dynamic, one.
In English, there are two words derived from the technical meaning of the Latin momentum: “momentum,” which is imported directly, and “moment,” which is a translation of the Latin term. “Momentum” in English refers to what in French is called the “quantity of movement.” This usage comes after Newton, who discusses what he calls the “quantity of motion” and, in Latin, quantitatis motus. The English “moment,” as in French, refers to the vectorial product of the vector position by another vector. So one finds in English the expression “moment of a force”; in the literature of the time, the expression “moment of momentum” designates what in French is called “kinetic moment.”
The importation of momentum into English comes in response to a conceptual concern to underscore the dynamic connotation that Newton’s second law confers on the “quantity of motion.” This law is still called the “fundamental principle of dynamics,” and states that the variation of the quantity of motion of a moving body is equal to the force applied to this body. The English “momentum” thus denotes an impulse and retains in part meaning ( a ) of its Latin homonym, while modifying it, since the English “momentum” is a result of applying an external force and is not inherent in the body ( because of its gravity ). What is more, the English term introduces a type ( c ) nuance, in that Newton’s law is a differential law and thus deals with infinitely small quantities.
French then makes a distinction between two concepts, one dynamic and the other static, using two clearly different words ( quantité de mouvement and moment ), and thereby emphasizing the mode of construction of the physical quantities concerned, whereas English, which uses two phonetically adjacent terms, retains some trace of the Latin polysemy. We are dealing not only with two conceptions of the relationship between mathematics and physics, but more profoundly with two different intuitive representations of movement: it is not insignificant that movement is a quantum in French, and an impulse in English. The difficulty this distinction had in becoming established will be confirmed by the fact that in classical French ( notably in the aforementioned RT: Encyclopédie ), moment sometimes designates the “quantity of movement.” The Encyclopédie article “Mechanics” even reproduces a strange line of argument that attempts to justify, with regard to the set of scales, the use of a single term for two different notions.
The German das Moment is used more or less identically to moment in French. The moment of a force is das Kraftmoment. Since the term for quantity of moment, however, is Impuls ( previously Bewegungsgrösse, “quantity of movement” ), the kinetic moment is, more logically than in French, called Impulsmoment. Yet das Moment has a more dynamic connotation than moment in French, as can be seen in the expression Drehmoment, literally “moment of rotation,” to refer to the kinetic moment.
The present-day usage of the term momento in Italian is closely related to the usage of moment in present-day French. We should, though, note one meaning of momento that is of fundamental historical importance: the meaning Galileo gives to it between 1593 and 1598 when he establishes a link—which had been unthinkable before then, and that no other language borrowed—between meanings ( a ) and ( b ) above. This convergence of meanings corresponds to an abortive attempt by Galileo to derive the dynamic from the static without the intermediary of the kinematic, based on a parallel between a set of scales and an inclined plane:
Momento e la propensione di andare al basso, cagionata non tanto dalla gravità del mobile, quanto dalla disposizione che abbinno tra di loro i diversi corpi gravi.
( Moment is the propensity to go downwards, caused not so much by gravity as by the disposition that the heavy bodies have between them. )
( Mechanics, 2nd definition, cited in K. Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton )
II. Kairos
The Greek word kairos [ϰαιϱός], which can correspond to the French moment, in the sense of bon moment ( right moment ), moment opportun ( appropriate moment ), occasion ( opportune moment ) ( cf. the title of the novel by Crébillon fils, The Night and the Moment ), refers to a nonmathematizable singularity. Latin rhetoric ( Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria III.6.26; V.10.43 ) thus distinguishes between tempus generale or chronos [χρόνος], a time linked to history and likely to be dated, and tempus speciale or kairos, a distinct time that is either periodically repeated ( a favorable season in a natural cycle, or an auspicious moment that is favorable for a certain kind of action in people’s lives ), or that occurs unpredictably, and it is thus expressed as tempus per opportunitatem ( G. Fabii Laurentii Victorini explanationum in rhetoricam Ciceronis libri duo, ed. Halm, I.21 ) or as occasio ( ibid., I.27 ).
■ See Box 1.
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Longue durée The concept of longue durée was the centerpiece of Fernand Braudel’s writing, and it is intimately linked to his vision of historical time. Precisely because it is a complex concept, it is usually not translated into other languages, including English. Braudel uses durée to signify “temporalities,” for his principal concern is to establish multiple temporalities in the analysis of social reality. He starts from the assumption that for the past 250 years, at least in history and the social sciences, there were really only two possible temporalities: one espoused by nomothetic social scientists who assert that there exist universal general laws about social behavior that hold true across all of time and space, and the other subscribed to by idiographic historians who reject the notion of universal general laws and insist on particular hermeneutic insights into social reality. Braudel argues that both approaches are false and misleading. There exist in his view other temporalities—neither universal nor particular—that provide a better understanding of the past and the present. He names four of them: structure ( or longue durée ); conjoncture ( or moyenne durée ); événement ( or courte durée ); and très longue durée. For Braudel, l’histoire événementielle ( eventual history ) corresponds to the particularist time of idiographic historians and très longue durée designates the eternal time of the nomothetic social scientists. His own work takes place in the space of longue durée—long-lasting but not eternal realities—as well as in the time of conjonctures ( cyclical process within structures ). All of these terms pose translation problems in English, whether as nouns or adjectives. While événement is easily rendered as “event,” there is no English equivalent of événementiel. I have recommended “episodic” as a term that captures the essential element, that of brief, observable phenomena. Conjoncture has cognate equivalents in all European languages, except English. The English term “conjuncture” is primarily used to signal a meeting-point of two phenomena and is close to an “event.” The French ( and other European-language ) meaning of conjoncture is that of a medium-length curve going either up or down ( an A-phase and a B-phase ). “Cyclical” time might be the closest in equivalence. As for très longue durée, it is best left in French. After all, Braudel says of it, “If it exists, it must be the time of the wise men ( sages ).” Immanuel Wallerstein |
The specificity of the Greek word, which accounts for the scope of its application, comes from its originally spatial meaning, referring to a crucial cutting or opening point, as in the adjective kairios [ϰαίϱιος], found only in the Iliad, and which applies to the flaw in a breastplate, hinge, or fitting ( IV.185; XI.439; VIII.326 ), and to the bony suture of a skull ( VIII.84 ), all places where a blow to the body could be fatal and would decide one’s fate. So Euripides speaks of a man “struck in the kairos” ( Andromache, 1120 ). This may perhaps explain how in Latin the skull’s “temple” ( tempus, -oris ), “time” ( tempus, -oris ), and the ( architectural ) “temple” ( templum ) are related to temnô [τέμνω], “to cut” ( cf. temenos [τέμενος], “enclosure, sacred place, altar” ).
According to the hypothesis put forward by Onians, the usual word kairos ( [ϰαιϱός], with an acute accent ) and the technical term kairos ( [ϰαῖϱος], with a circumflex ) are one and the same, with the difference of accents used to mark, as it often does, a semantic specification. Kairos with the circumflex belongs to the vocabulary of weaving and refers to the braid that regulates and separates the threads of a warp, often paired with the mechanism that holds up the top part of the work: kairos determines the spacing between even and odd threads, which allows for the interweaving of warp and weft. In the same way, kairos in the usual sense of the term suggests the opening of something discontinuous in a continuum, the breach of time in space, or of temporal time in spatialized time. In medical vocabulary it is a moment of crisis, and the interlacing or combination of circumstances in politics and history. It expresses timeliness ( thus the [appropriate] measure, brevity, tact, convenience ) and opportunity ( thus advantage, profit, danger ), or any decisive moment that is there to be seized, normatively or aesthetically, as it passes by—and seized sometimes even by the hair, since kairos is often figured as a young man who is bald or has the back of his head shaved, but who has a long forelock in front. Thus, in Pindar, kairos is used to characterize words, both expertly fired and well woven, which hit their mark ( Nemean Odes, 1.18; Pythian Odes, 1.81, 9.78 ).
The attention given to kairos defines a certain type of rhetoric, that of Alkidamas, or of Isocrates and the Sophists, and characterizes rhetorical improvisation ( Greek epi tôi kairôi [ἐπὶ τῷ ϰαιϱῷ], Latin ex tempore ), of which Gorgias was, according to Philostratus, the initiator ( Vitae Sophistarum, I, 482–83 ).
III. Der Moment / Das Moment
German decouples the meanings that are simultaneously present in the Latin momentum, and redistributes them not onto two different words, but onto two genders of the same word, one of which is adapted by the vocabulary of speculative philosophy. Der Moment, in the masculine, refers to a more or less long interval of time, and das Moment, in the neuter, originally has the physical meaning of momentum. The German philosophical lexicon from Kant onward produced an additional meaning based on das Moment, that of cause, or factor, or component of a whole, considered or not in terms of its temporal succession. From there, it became a technical term of speculative philosophy, adopted as such by other languages, including French. This term, created and coined by philosophical language, leads to two questions. The first is the question of the relationship between the mechanical and the speculative meanings of das Moment.
■ See Box 2.
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Moment ( Ger. ) in The Science of Logic The most apposite text here is the commentary on aufheben that concludes the first chapter of The Science of Logic, in other words, the text par excellence in which the generality of a statement feeds on the particularity of an idiom. Its generality is linked first of all to its immediate environment, since this passage concludes the stage of the logic where the most abstract notions intervened, that is to say, being, nothingness, and becoming, and it appears at the moment when becoming both ends and is preserved in its being-there ( Dasein ). Hegel then proceeds to his own objective, analyzing the phenomenon that has just occurred, the Aufheben, saying his intention is to discuss “one of the most important concepts in philosophy,” of which the movement from becoming to being-there is only an example ( see AUFHEBEN ). Hegel here offers a sort of note on the terminology, focusing on the verb aufheben ( rather than the noun Aufhebung ) in its accepted senses and different usages. If aufheben holds our attention, it is because of the “delightful” phenomenon that “speculative thought” observes in a particular language, German: the same verb offers the two opposite meanings of “stop, bring to an end” and “preserve, maintain.” Nevertheless, to be able to think other than “from the lexical point of view,” it is necessary to show how “a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite determinations,” by examining what happens in the thing itself in question. It to this end that Hegel introduces the term Moment: Etwas ist nur insofern aufgehoben, als es in die Einheit mit seinem Entgegen-gesetzten getreten ist: in dieser näheren Bestimmung als ein Reflektiertes kann es passend Moment genannt werden. Gewicht und Entfernung von einem Punkt heißen beim Hebel dessen mechanische Momente, um der Dieselbigkeit ihrer Wirkung willen bei aller sonstigen Verschiedenheit eines Reellen, wie das ein Gewicht ist, und eines Ideellen, der bloßen räumlichen Bestimmung, der Linie. ( Something is sublated only insofar as it has entered into unity with its opposite; in this closer determination as something reflected, it may fittingly be called a “moment.” In the case of the lever, “weight” and “distance from a point” are called its mechanical “moments” because of the sameness of their effect, in spite of the difference between something real like weight, and something idealized, such as the merely spatial determination of “line.” ) ( Wissenschaft der Logik, 114; trans. G. di Giovanni, The Science of Logic, 82 ) It is clearly a matter of comparing two distinct domains: the speculative domain, within which the Aufheben operates, and the mechanical domain, in which one calculates moments of force. Moment is presented here as a borrowing, a “Latin expression” used by “technical philosophical language.” In the Aufheben of speculation, as in the Moment of mechanics, the opposites—elimination and preservation, the real and the ideal—work together. So Hegel uses a Latin word momentum, Germanized simply as Moment, to explain to German readers how a German word works, and what is more, an everyday German word. This is a rather curious operation. The equivalence proposed at the beginning of his commentary between das Aufgehobene ( the substantivized past participle of aufheben ) and das Ideelle, mentioned in the passage cited, ought to suggest the existence of a stronger link between the Aufheben and the Momente—the very one that the conclusion establishes when it mentions “the meaning and the more precise expression that being and nothingness acquire when they are moments.” At this point, Momente can be defined as what the process of Aufheben is composed of. BIBLIOGRAPHY Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Wissenschaft der Logik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1831. Translation by George di Giovanni: The Science of Logic. Edited by di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. |
This process itself, to refer here only to language and mechanics, is still never thought independently of time ( cf. the verbs used by Hegel: “to put an end to” and “to preserve,” as described in Box 2 ). This is what Marx shows, by contrast, in his attempt after the Grundrisse to no longer think in terms of the “moments” of economic processes that should instead be freed from a surreptitious eschatology, and from the correspondence between temporal succession and the movement of the concept as postulated by Hegel.
In philosophical discussion, das Moment thus goes back to the configuration of the Latin momentum and its multiple mechanical and temporal meanings. The problem then is not so much that das Moment has a temporal meaning. ( In French translation one hears this temporal aspect necessarily in moment, even though the translation proves rather awkward in certain contexts in which the speculative meaning prevails, as we can see in this passage from Jaspers: “Der Augenblick hat in sich zum Beispiel ein [neuter] Moment der Angst [the instant contains for example the moment of anxiety]” ( 116 ). The problem is rather one of knowing how to translate der Moment differentially, now that a good part of the temporal meaning is contained within das Moment.
The second question thus has to do with the translation into French or other languages of der Moment and of the system of nouns that are used in German to express the lapse of time in its unequal durations. Whereas French has only the pair instant/moment, German has three terms to work with: der Moment, das Moment with its temporal connotations, and der Augenblick. The “opposition” ( Gegensatz ) between Zeitmoment and Augenblick ( Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 114 ) follows a completely different logic than the opposition moment/instant. Augenblick alone has the sense of “lived instant,” whereas der [Zeit]moment can in some instances refer not to a moment but to an instant as an objective division, a unit of measurement of time ( ibid., 111: der objective Zeitmoment [the objective moment of time]; ein beliebiger, willkürlich gewählter Moment [any moment, chosen at random] ). So the particular translation difficulties of der/das Moment end up revealing the autonomy of the reflection on Augenblick.
■ See Box 3.
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An English Hegelianism? “Moment” in John Stuart Mill It is curious to note that John Stuart Mill, in his System of Logic ( published in 1843, or about ten years after the text by Hegel cited earlier, The Science of Logic ) problematizes the notion of “moment” in more or less the same way that Hegel does. In a chapter discussing the “Conditions of a Philosophical Language,” Mill first of all recalls the dynamic meaning of “moment.” Then, emphasizing the truth it contains and which concerns the conservation of something unknown ( since the product of the velocity of a body and its mass does not refer to anything experientially real ), he assigns it a role that assumes its full importance in the use of fictions, as he conceives it in Book V. This notion, which Mill begins by critiquing, is now reoriented so that it can be accepted on other conditions than those stipulated previously. The whole play of the theory of fictions used by utilitarians lies in the awareness that a term only apparently intends something in experience, but that it should not be rejected for this reason, provided one is no longer deluded about its illusory transcendence, because it retains an indirect power to determine things. It was already a received doctrine that, when two objects impinge upon one another, the momentum lost by the one is equal to that gained by the other. This proposition it was deemed necessary to preserve, not from the motive ( which operates in many other cases ) that it was firmly fixed in popular belief; for the proposition in question had never been heard of by any but the scientifically instructed. But it was felt to contain a truth; even a superficial observation of the phenomena left no doubt that in the propagation of motion from one body to another, there was something of which the one body gained precisely what the other lost; and the word momentum had been invented to express this unknown something. The settlement, therefore, of the definition of momentum, involved the determination of the question, What is that of which a body, when it sets another body in motion, loses exactly as much as it communicates? And when experiment had shown that this something was the product of the velocity of the body by its mass, or quantity of matter, this became the definition of momentum. ( A System of Logic, vol. 2 ) Given its logical and philosophical context, this analysis, rooted in physics and part of a theory of fictions, obviously calls to mind the equivalent of the Moment of the Aufheben in Hegel’s Logic. What is strange about this analogy is that it probably occurs without Mill’s being aware of it himself, despite his interest—a mixture of acerbic critique and restrained admiration—in German philosophy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, ratiocinitive and inductive: Being a connected view of the principles of evidence, and methods of scientific investigation. London: J. W. Parker, 1843. |
IV. Augenblick/Instant
German represents an instant not as an immobile point on a line ( in-stans ) but as an organic movement, the blink of an eye. The German Augen-blick suggests both the quickness of a glance and the light that this look retains ( cf. the poem by Schiller, “Die Gunst des Augenblicks” [The favor of the moment] ). The word literally means both a “look” and a “closing of the eyes”; it is the blinking of an eye staring at its object, then by extension the “short duration” of this closing, which is generally agreed to be “indivisible” ( RT: Versuch eines vollständingen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart, 1792 edition, in the article “Augenblick,” 1:col. 561 ).
This particular metaphor does not necessarily entail any difference in usage with respect to the French: the pair Moment/Augenblick works much like the French pair moment/instant, with the second term in each being reserved for the description of a lapse of time so brief that it eludes measurement. However, while French usage requires the addition of an epithet when instant refers to anything other than an objective division of time ( see, for example, G. Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant [Intuition of the instant], 36: “un instant fécond” [a fertile moment] ), it is the other way round in German, where Augenblick alone refers immediately to a lived instant. Jaspers underlines the fact that “the word Augenblick describes something completely heterogeneous in what remains identical in the formal concepts of time, namely the full and the empty [das Erfüllte und Leere].” This leads to the following terminological distinction: “The atom of time [Zeitatom] is of course nothing, but the instant [Augenblick] is everything” ( Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 108–17 ). In this phrase Jaspers summarizes the entire process by which Augenblick has come to be endowed with a powerful poetic and aesthetic force. Poetry in particular develops the theme of the small bit of eternity contained within an instant ( cf. Goethe, Faust, I.V.73 ), while for Lessing Augenblick becomes an original aesthetic concept, a timely moment that is distinct from kairos in that it crystallizes a temporal sequence, including the future, instead of disrupting it: “Painting, in its compositions in which several times coexist, can make use of only one single moment [Augenblick], and because of this must choose the fullest one, from which what precedes and what follows will be most easily understood” ( G. E. Lessing, Laokoon, in Werke, 2:89 ).
The difficulty comes into sharper focus when a claim is made, so to speak, on all of the particular elements that have been mentioned. In Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, the term first appears in two key paragraphs marking the transition to originary temporality ( §65 and §68 ). Augenblick is then used to determine the characteristics of the “authentic present” insofar as it is maintained in the future and the having-been.
In der Entschossenheit . . . wird [die Gegenwart] in der Zukunft und Gewesenheit gehalten. . . . Die in der eigentlichen Zeitlickheit gehaltene, mithin eigentliche Gegenwart nennen wir den Augenblick.
( In the decision . . . the present is maintained within the future and the having-been. This present maintained within authentic temporality, thus the authentic present, we name the instant. )
( Being and Time, §69, 338 )
In this respect, Augenblick is explicitly distinguished from the Jetzt, the now of derived temporality that understands time as a receptacle, a milieu within which one instant follows another in succession. Instant, by the sheer weight of its etymology, thus appears as an uneasy translation for Augenblick, which indicates a present that is not itself within time, and a present in which nothing happens, since it alone is what can enable Dasein to open itself to a being “in a time.”
We come back, then, to the problem of the metaphoricity proper to Augenblick. The adverbial expression “in the blink of an eye” offers a valid equivalent, but it cannot in any case systematically replace a noun. The meaning of Adelung’s comment that Augenblick should be understood figuratively even though it is never, or hardly ever, used literally, can now be fully appreciated: “instant,” unlike Augenblick, does not translate the metaphor, and designates a different conception of time, while “blink of an eye” translates the metaphor, but does not express time.
■ See Box 4.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archimedes. Archimedis opera omnia cum commentariis Eutoccii [On the equilibrium of planes]. Edited by J. L Heiberg. Leipzig: Teubner, 1972. Teubner edition first published in 1915.
Bachelard, Gaston. L’intuition de l’instant: Étude sur la Siloë de Gaston Roupnel. 3rd ed. Paris: Stock, Delamain, & Boutelleau, 1932.
Friese, Heidrun, ed. The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2001.
Gallet, Bernard. Recherches sur kairos et l’ambiguïté dans la poésie de Pindare. Bordeaux, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1990.
Galluzzi, Paolo. Momento: Studi Galileiani. Rome: Ateneo and Bizzarri, 1979.
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986. First published in 1927. Translation by John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper Row, 1962.
Jaspers, Karl. Psychologie der Weltanschauugen. Berlin: Springer, 1925.
Lasswitz, Kurd. Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Voss, 1890.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoön. In vol. 2 of Werke. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1967.
Sipiora, Phillip, and James S. Baumlin, eds. Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Stephenson, Hunter W. Forecasting Opportunity: Kairos, Production, and Writing. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005.
Trédé, Monique. Kairos: L’à-propos et l’occasion ( le mot et la notion, d’Homère à la fin du IVe siècle avant J.-C. ). Paris: Klincksieck, 1992.
Victorinus, Q. Fabius Laurentius. Q. Fabii Laurentii Victorini explanationum in rhetoricam Ciceronis libri duo. Edited by Carolus von Halm. Leipzig: Teubner, 1863.
Wägenbaur, Thomas. The Moment: A History, Typology, and Theory of the Moment in Philosophy and Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.
Ward, Koral. Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
Wilson J. R. “Kairos as Due Measure.” Glotta 58 ( 1980 ): 177–204.
We say of a musical work that it corresponds to a form made up of Momente, according to the German expression in use since the nineteenth century, whenever the sequence is itself conceived as an accumulation of Momente. This becomes, then, the standard term for a musical unit of time. Stockhausen gave a complex compositional meaning to the term, which has had a determining influence on contemporary music and musical terminology.
For the Germans, particularly Schubert, musical Momente referred to those parts ( Stücke ) that are not composed with the aim of developing a form extended across several different times but that, on the contrary, indicate a brevity that itself constitutes an autonomous unit of time. The notion of Momente in the compositional sense of the term appeared between 1958 and 1960 in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the first case, Momente is translated as “moments,” and the temporal division of the work into moments refers to a distinct musical genre. In the second case, the term Momente is retained as a proper name that is used to conceptualize a unique experience that simultaneously affects melodic structure, timbre, and duration ( Momente in Stockhausen are “individual passages of a work . . . regarded as experiential units”; Sadie, New Grove Dictionary ).
In his work entitled Momente ( finished on 21 May 1962 in Köln ) for soprano, four choral groups, and thirteen instrumentalists and based on the Song of Solomon and songs by Blake and Bauermeister, Stockhausen explains that this notion of Momente slows him to “form”
something in music which is as unique, as strong, as immediate and present as possible. Or I experience something. And then I can decide, as a composer or as the person who has this experience, how quickly and with how great a degree of change the next moment is going to occur.
( Karlheinz Stockhausen on Music )
Stockhausen refers to three clearly distinct types of Momente that, as the work takes form, end up acting upon each other. First of all, in terms of the melody, the Moment has to do with the work on heterophonia, the play that is internal to the arrangement of the pitch of each note. Here, the spoken voice, articulated and not sung, takes precedence. The Moment increases the already equivocal meaning of the voice. Then, in terms of timbre, this reaches its high point in the treatment of the men’s choir and percussion sections so as to produce consonants, hisses, and loud noises; this less discursive Moment is intended to introduce an entropic sequence within a more articulate extension or duration. Finally, there is the Moment that refers to duration as an alternation between polyphonic sequences and silences; the sense of a new Moment is a result of a deliberate break in the musical flow created by the female voices.
I would thus understand by Moment any formal unit that has, in a given composition, a personal and strictly assignable characteristic. I could also say: any autonomous thought. The concept is thus qualitatively determined, taking into account a given context ( as I said, in a given composition ), and the duration of a moment is one of the properties among others of its mode of being.
( Stockhausen, “Momentform” )
This explains the importance of the plural, Momente, which emphasizes the large number of operations and, at the same time, their singularity and function. It is worth noting that this conception of articulated composition in Momente brings forth variables, permutable elements—in short, what the composer calls a polyvalent form. These are variables of dynamics, statistical divisions of sounds in a global duration: the collective form of the Moment. The procedures are there to reveal the mutable functions of the Momente in all their power as inserts. Three other works by Stockhausen take up the question of Moment and of the Momentform: Kontakte ( 1958 ), Carré ( 1959–60 ), and Gruppen ( 1958 ). Momente in the sense in which Stockhausen uses the term would from that point on become part of contemporary musical terminology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. 29 vols. London: Macmillan, 2001.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “Momentform.” Contrechamps 9 ( 1988 ): 111–12.
. Karlheinz Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews. Collected by Robin Maconie. London: Marion Boyars, 1989.
MORAL SENSE
| FRENCH | sens moral | ||
| GERMAN | sittliches Bewusstsein |
MORALS, SENSE, and COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, ENGLISH, PERCEPTION, PRAXIS, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, VIRTUE
We can date the invention and philosophical usage of the term “moral sense” to Shaftesbury, and more particularly to Hutcheson. The tradition of a philosophy of moral sense is more generally constituted within the Anglo-Scottish philosophy of the eighteenth century. Moral sense associates the understanding of morality with a moral sensibility. It consists of a set of innate dispositions. It is also a look of approval or disapproval of a given action. However, the recourse to the term “sense” allows us to envisage practical reason playing some role, a moral activity that is far more than the faculty of perceiving good or evil.
The expression “moral sense” is a relatively recent invention. As a term in the lexicon of philosophical discourse, it is generally attributed to Shaftesbury’s An Enquiry Concerning Virtue ( 1699 ). A hotly disputed notion in the eighteenth century, the moral sense is invoked less often in debates on moral philosophy of the times than in everyday language. We say of someone with very firm principles of good and evil that he is “a man with a developed moral sense.”
If the philosophical and ordinary meanings of moral sense always suggest a certain presence of morality within a man, they refer more to a set of moral questions than to a simple doctrinal position.
“Moral sense” was established as a term primarily in order to take the side of naturalism in morals; “moral sense” refers to a set of dispositions that are innate to morality, a capacity that preexists all conventions. This relation to the discernment of good and evil takes the form of an ability to perceive the moral quality of actions, a sense. According to Thomas Burnet, man has a natural awareness of good and evil, which can be understood as a moral sense: “I understand by natural conscience a natural sagacity to distinguish moral good and evil, or a different perception and sense of them” ( Remarks on Locke ).
The existence of a natural sensibility in morality is in many ways reinforced in the definition Hutcheson gives of “moral sense.” Moral sense is not used to perform a good deed but rather to be sensitive to the moral qualities of an action and to approve of them. Hutcheson proposes a morality of the spectator and not of the agent: moral sense for him designates a perception that becomes an approval or disapproval of an action: “A Determination of our minds to receive the simple Ideas of Approbation or Condemnation, from Actions observ’d” ( An Enquiry Concerning Virtue ).
It nonetheless remains the case that from these perspectives, moral sense is above all linked to a receptiveness of the human mind in practical matters. Does this expression not also hold out the possibility that one may exercise one’s moral reason by intervening in one’s own actions? Thus, in Shaftesbury, moral sense refers to an ability to form adequate representations of good. Sense is not reduced to the faculty of perceiving; it is to be understood as a “reflected sense” ( Characteristics ), an instance of the control and examination of moral representations. “Moral sense” and, more often, “sense of right and wrong” constitute a second-order affection, or even the mind’s disposition to examine sensations, actions, or received passions. Man “is capable of having a Sense of Right or Wrong; a Sentiment or Judgment of what is done through just, equal, and good Affection” ( Characteristics ). Moral sense is reason based on the perceptive naturalness of actions and passions.
In our time, Charles Taylor’s critique of moral naturalism barely mentions the place of moral sense. It is directed, rather, toward the role of naturalist epistemology, whose model incites us to seek “criteria” for morality. In contrast to this approach, Taylor asserts the need to have recourse to moral intuitions, to what motivates us morally, without appealing to moral sense, which is instead a means of apprehending morals independently of science ( “Explanation and Practical Reason” ).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burnet, Thomas. Remarks on Locke. Edited by G. Watson. Doncaster: Brynmill Press, 1989. First published in 1699.
Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, in Two Treatises, I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design; II. Concerning Moral Good and Evil. 5th ed. London: 1753.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Vol. 2, An Enquiry Concerning Virtue. Hildesheim: Olms, 1978. First published in 1711.
Taylor, Charles. “Explanation and Practical Reason.” In Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
MORALS / ETHICS
| FRENCH | morale, éthique | ||
| GERMAN | Sitten, Sittlichkeit, Moralität | ||
| GREEK | ethos [ἔθοϛ], êthos [ἦθοϛ] | ||
| LATIN | mores, moralitas |
BERUF, DUTY, LAW, LIBERTY, MENSCHHEIT, MORAL SENSE, RELIGION, VIRTUE, WERT
“Morals” ( from the Latin mores, “customs” ) and “ethics” ( from the Greek êthos [ἦθοϛ], “character” ), like their equivalents in the other modern languages, generally refer to the rules that make up the norms of human behavior. They are distinguished, both within one language and from one language to another, in terms of two types of problem. The first is the problem of the subject and its conduct, whether as an individual or as a community. The second concerns the nature of what “morals” designate: as a simple description, the designation “morals” refers to nature and to history; as a prescription, it dictates laws, and establishes values, whether good or bad. How these four dimensions ( individual and collective, descriptive and prescriptive ) are linked constitutes the arena in which the differences between languages are played out.
One might think that “morals,” of Latin etymology, is the exact equivalent of “ethics,” of Greek etymology, and that these twin terms coexist with the same meaning in the main modern European languages, including English, even if the Greek term is, as usual, more erudite and more technical ( like “corporeal” and “somatic,” for example ). This is wrong on two counts: on the one hand, however unstable and confused these differences are, “morals” and “ethics” do not nowadays share the same field of application, and their distinction is sometimes even a doctrinal topos; on the other hand ( and this is a paradoxical chiasmus that is often not recognized as such ), it is often ethics that are invoked with reference to mores, as a reflection on social norms and conduct, whereas “morals” refers primarily to the individual—if not to his “character” ( êthos ), then at the very least to the question of his freedom of choice.
We can find in the organization of the Greek terminology as it was first established by Aristotle, as well as in the way in which Cicero justified his choices of translation, two causes that may to some extent account for the paradox of the modern usage.
I. Ethos [ἔθοζ] as “Habit” and Êthos [ἦθοζ] as “Character”: What Are Ethics?
Two competing nouns developed in Greek from eiôtha [εἴωθα], “I am in the habit of” ( Sanskrit svada-, “character, penchant, habit”; cf. Latin suesco, with probably the same root *swedh- as ethnos, a “people” ): ethos [ἔθοϛ] and êthos [ἦθοϛ]. Both have the same original meaning, “custom,” but they evolved in different ways.
Ethos came to mean “habit, custom, usage” and refers, for example, to “the custom of the city [ethos tês poleôs ( ἔθοϛ τῆϛ πόλεωϛ )]” ( Thucydides 2.64 ); ethei [ἔθει] is thus opposed to phusei [φύσει], “by nature” ( so Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics 10.9, 1179b20ff., contrasts the doctrines of those who think we are good “by nature, by habit, by teaching,” cf. 1154a33 ).
Êthos, with an eta [η], refers first in the plural to the places where animals and men habitually stay ( “The familiar places and the horses’ pasture [ἤθεα ϰαὶ νομόν],” Iliad 6.511 ), and in the singular, to one’s habitual way of being, or disposition, or nature. The word falls within the category of what we might therefore call “psychology” ( one is, for example, “sweet-natured [praios to êthos ( πϱᾷοϛ τὸ ἦθοϛ )],” Plato, Phaedrus 243c3–4; or, like Pandora, “of a deceptive character [epiklopon êthos ( ἐπίϰλοπον ἦθοϛ )],” Hesiod, Works and Days 67, 78 ).
■ See Box 1.
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Heraclitus, êthos anthrôpôi daimôn [ἦθοζ àνθρώπῳ δαíμων] The wide range of interpretations proposed for fragment B119 of Heraclitus, êthos antrôpôi daimôn ( variously rendered in English as “The character of man in his guardian spirit” [W. S. Graham], “Character for man is destiny” [Kathleen Freeman], “A man’s character is his fate” [Jonathan Barnes] ), allows us to understand how strange êthos can seem to us, and daimôn [δαίμων] no less so. It is generally understood that man’s fate is engraved in his personality ( sein Eigenart, as Diels-Kranz translates it in German ), whether this is seen as reflecting his destiny ( Antigone is born Antigone ), or indicating his responsibility ( the only fate we have is the one we make for ourselves ). Jean Bollack, basing his analysis on the twin terms ethos-êthos, “habit”-“character,” notes that these two interpretations rely on an anachronistic representation of “character,” of the kind one would find in the thirteenth century, whereas the Greek does not make “character” something virtual that can be dissociated from a way of being ( and he ultimately draws a different conclusion from this, Héraclite, 382ff. ). Martin Heidegger, in his Letter on Humanism ( trans. Capuzzi, 256 ), places so much emphasis on the common etymon that he proposes to read it as: Man dwells in the nearness of god. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bollack, Jean, and Heinz Wismann. Héraclite ou la séparation. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Darcus, S.M.L. “Daimon as a Force in Shaping Ethos in Heraclitus.” Phoenix 28 ( 1974 ): 390–407. Heidegger, Martin. “Brief über den Humanismus.” In Wegmarken, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, 9:313–64. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by Frank Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray: “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 2nd rev. and expanded ed., 217–65. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. |
In Aristotle, êthos becomes part of the terminological language of poetics: the “characters” ( êthê ), which allow us to describe the characters in action, are one of the six elements of tragedy, along with the story, muthos [μῦθος]; expression, lexis [λέξιϛ]; thought, dianoia [διάνοια]; spectacle, opsis [ὄψιϛ]; and song, melopoia [μελοποΐα] ( Poetics 6.1450a5–10 ). It is above all part of the terminology of rhetoric: the “character” ( ethos ) of the orator, along with the passion ( pathos [πάθοϛ] ) of the listener and the logos [λόγοϛ] itself in its persuasiveness, constitute the three “technical proofs,” that is, those which depend on art itself, unlike those, like testimonial accounts, which have an external origin ( Rhetoric 1.2, 1356a ): the good orator indeed not only should study characters ( theôrêsai ta êthê [θεωϱῆσαι τὰ ἤθη], 1356a22 ) as part of his training, as Plato’s Phaedrus had already suggested, so as to adapt his speech to his audience, but also should himself display a character that has been appropriately adapted, and that corresponds to the particular character of the political regime in which he is speaking ( “We should ourselves possess the character particular to each constitution [ta êthê tôn politeiôn hekastês ( τὰ ἤθη τῶν πολιτειῶν ἑϰάστηϛ )],” Rhetoric 1366a12 ), so as to inspire confidence ( pistis [πίστιϛ] ) and to induce persuasion ( pistis, again ). This explains, then, the connection between rhetoric and “ethics” ( proofs—still pistis—come, says Aristotle, “by means of speech that is not only demonstrative, but ‘ethical’ [di’ êthikou ( δι’ ἠθιϰοῦ )],” Rhetoric 1366a9ff. ), as well as the fact that political science, which determines what constitutes the properly human good, can be an architectonic for both rhetoric and ethics ( Nicomachean Ethics 1.1, 1094a26–b7 ).
Where Aristotle is particularly innovative, however, as the title of his Ethics ( en tois Êthikois [ἐν τοῖϛ ’Ηθιϰοῖϛ], Politics 4.1295a36ff. ) by itself indicates, is in using the adjective êthikon [ἠθιϰόν] to mark out an entirely separate area of philosophy. This partition, which has become an accepted part of philosophy programs, was institutionalized in the Stoic description of the parts of philosophy ( see Diogenes Laertius, Proemium 18 ). As a way of defining it, Aristotle chose to reinterpret the two terms, and to make êthos ( character ) a consequence of ethos ( habit ):
Ethical virtue [hê êthikê ( ἡ ἠθιϰὴ ), sc. aretê ( ἀϱετὴ ), literally, excellence of character] for its part [that is, as distinct from aretê dianoêtikê, excellence of thought, intellectual virtue] arises as an effect of habit [periginetai ( πεϱιγίνεται ): is born or comes “around and following from”], which is how its name is formed, as a slight variation of ethos. It is plain from this that none of our ethical virtues arises [egginetai ( ἐγγίνεται ): is born or comes “within”] within us by nature.
( Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103a17–19; cf. Eudemian Ethics 1220a39–b3 )
The stakes here are very high: for Aristotle, it is question of determining as accurately as possible the place of nature in ethics: “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit” ( Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103a23–26 ). The interplay between êthos and ethos anchors virtue in practice, both through the political habits that are contracted because of a good constitution, and through individual exercise of virtue; in other words, virtue is a technê [τέχνη], a “know-how”:
The virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the other arts [technai]. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, for example, men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre.
( Ibid., 1103a31–34 )
This text is often compared to the one in Plato’s Laws: his Athenian, in making his program of education, already joins together êthos and ethos, character and habit, but in stipulating that it is during infancy, and even in the mother’s womb, that “more than at any other time the character is engrained by habit [emphuetai . . . to pan êthos dia ethos ( ἐμφύεται . . . τὸ πᾶν ἦθοϛ διὰ ἔθοϛ )]” ( Laws 7.792e; cf., for example, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Tricot, 87 n. 3 ). This overlooks the fact that what is at stake is deliberately reversed: where Plato comforts the naturalist by arguing that habit is innate, Aristotle neutralizes what is given to us naturally by arguing for a responsible practice.
Most of the difficulties and even confusions between customs and morals, between morals and ethics, stem from this initial chiasmus, which anchors ethics in habit more than in character, in culture and practice more than in nature. The proof of this is that most philosophers who have attempted to define the terms in their own languages, like Cicero or G.W.F. Hegel, have tried to find a set of problematics equivalent to the Greek, thus placing the task of translation at the heart of their reflection.
II. Mores
If the reflection on “ethics” in the Greek language is focused on the close link between êthos and ethos, in Latin the problem of the basis of “morals” is exacerbated by the fact that the same term refers in the singular ( mos ) to habit, and in the plural ( mores ) to character. These two domains are all the more closely interrelated because Latin authors would themselves continually question the relationship between mores and mos. So it would be helpful to begin by clarifying the different meanings of the term, both in the singular and in the plural, and to underline how culturally specific the linguistic usage is in our theoretical reflection.
Mos ( in the singular ) refers in its most widely accepted sense to one’s usual manner, to habit insofar as it characterizes the agent of the action, whether this agent is singular ( thus Chrysippus proceeds, in one work, “in his usual manner,” more suo: Cicero, De republica 3.12 ), plural ( thus Numa respected “the old way in which Greek kings did things [mos vetus Graeciae regum]” in legal matters: Cicero, De republica 5.3 ), or even an anonymous collectivity ( thus Cicero’s grandfather’s house was small, “in the ancient manner [antiquo more],” Laws 2.3 ). The latter two examples cited themselves suggest the slippage in meaning from a characteristic habit to that particular form of habit that “tradition” represents, a meaning frequently conveyed when the term is in the singular, but also in the plural. An example of this would be mos, which tolerates the sort of deception that is proscribed by the law of nature, according to Cicero ( De officiis 3.69 ); likewise, what Cicero in Laws ( 2.23 ) calls “our traditions,” nostri mores, constitutes, along with Numa’s laws, the frame of reference when he elaborates his code of law in religious matters. “Ancestral tradition” thus constitutes the mos par excellence, and the most complete manifestation of habit elevated to a system of reference.
The term as it applies to the characterization of an individual denotes first in the plural all of the habits that define a behavior, what we call someone’s “character,” insofar as it is what this individual’s “morals” are based on. So Latin does not separate exteriority—behavior as objective action—from interiority—the set of dispositions that constitute the motivation for the behavior. This is not to say, however, that Latin authors were unaware of any such distinction. When it is needed, this clarification is generally made by connecting the term mores to other terms that circumscribe the extension of the concept. We might highlight two types of such paired expressions: either mores are considered in terms of the exteriority of the action, and are then associated with terms like vita ( life, way of life; cf. Cicero, De republica 1.10, 16; 2.21 ), instituta ( the principles of life; cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.120 ), or consuetudo ( habit; cf. Cicero, De republica 3.17 ); or “character” is prioritized in the way one understands mores, and in this case the associated terms are ingenium, indolis, and natura, three terms denoting temperament as a natural disposition ( cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.107ff., 3.16; Seneca, De ira 1.6.1, 2.15.1 ). So the Latin reflection on mores constantly brings into play two realms: on the one hand, the realm of habit perceived in terms of its formality, or almost its arbitrariness; on the other, a naturalistic realm prior to any formalization, compared by Seneca ( De ira 2.15.1–2 ) to a land out of which the moral dispositions of a human being emerge.
In a philosophical context, such a dual approach tends to overlap with the classical Greek dichotomy of law and nature ( nomos/phusis ). Two examples of analysis we come across in Cicero will show how the reflection on mores might be structured around these poles. In book 3 of De republica, the character Philus returns to an argument first made by the neoacademician Carnedes asserting that justice does not, in nature, have its foundation in a social instinct. Philus emphasizes in particular that the “morals” of men can in fact be reduced to habits ( consuetudines ) and to instituted forms of behavior ( instituta ) that are based on nothing more than the arbitrariness of a custom passing itself off as a law, as is demonstrated by the multiplication of habits and behaviors into an infinite number of forms depending on the number of different peoples, as well as their variability over time. Conversely, the character Lelius in De amicitia ( the very same person who in De republica responds to Philus’s speech, and who comes to the defense of justice ) continually draws mores and natura closer together, with the primary aim of countering the utilitarian theory of friendship that the Epicureans propose: for Lelius, it is the accord between good natures, manifested by harmony of mores, that founds and sustains the feeling of affection ( caritas ) from which authentic amicitia develops.
The confrontation of these two texts highlights a profound ambiguity in the Latin conception of mores, which is divided between a descriptive approach toward the “morals” noted, and a prescriptive approach aimed at sanctioning “good morals.” The linguistic usage can help us to understand how this division works: one tendency is toward using such terms as consuetudo, usus ( usage ), and instituta, whenever it is a matter of seeing mores in terms of their objectivity and their potential variability, whereas the term mores itself is more often than not used on its own whenever it is a matter of defining a moral norm, or of seeing how one measures up to the proposed norm. Because of this tendency, the polemical use of the term mores in Philus’s speech is intended precisely to disqualify the idea that these “morals” are anything more than instituta. Looking at it from the opposite perspective, the term mores is almost always used from a moral point of view to stigmatize any transgression of an ethical rule: the mores that are thereby denounced are thus not perceived in neutral terms, from a descriptive point of view, but as the opposite or negative of what “good morals” should be. The use of the term thus illustrates the imperative of the norm in the very statement of its negation, as in the speech on the tyrant, presented as a figure who is antithetical to all human and civic values—for example, in book 2 of Cicero’s De republica, or again in Seneca’s De clementia.
Mores thus pose a problem for the principle of “morals,” which results on the one hand from a confusion of the perspectives of ( external ) morals and ( internal ) character, and on the other from the description of what is given, and the prescription of a norm. This confusion can be explained in large part by an ancient conception of the person, the complete philosophical expression of which we find in Cicero ( De officiis 1.107–21 ). This exposition is substantially indebted to the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, but, beyond the particularities of doctrine, reflects an approach to the person that is characteristic of the dominant aristocratic milieux in the Greco-Roman world ( see Gill, “Personhood and Personality,” 169–99 ). The person is thus defined as a synthesis of two pairs of “roles” ( the term persona refers to a mask, and later by extension to a theatrical role: it translates prosôpon [πϱόσωπον] in Greek ): the first pair comprises the “common” persona of a rational being and the “singular” persona made up of our individual temperament and sensibility; the second pair joins the persona that is imposed on us by fate or birth and the circumstances of our life, with the persona given by the deliberate choice of a career. This schema therefore combines on the one hand, without explicitly analyzing their potential conflict, the objective determinations of a given character and the rational imperatives that prescribe a universal morality, and on the other hand, the internal motives related to the natura of each person, and the external behaviors conditioned by institutions and social functions ( see PERSON ).
The relationship to mos as “tradition” provides a key, though, to understanding the Latin conception of mores, as can be judged by looking at three accounts: the political philosophy of Cicero ( De republica, Laws ), the historiography of Titus Livius ( books 1 to 5, from the founding of Rome by Romulus to its symbolic refounding by Camillus ), and the practical morals of Seneca ( De ira, De clementia ). In all three cases, individual or collective mores ( the mores of a people or of a social group ) are conceived with reference to a Roman tradition that provides an evaluative norm through concrete models that embody a mind governed by virtue. Mores, in the plural, are thus intended both to exemplify and to consolidate a singular mos, a historic and cultural reality that has gradually been elaborated and unified through the accumulation of acts of behavior, and of examples of character in the course of historical time. For Roman man, there is no real place for any conflict between fact and norm, outside and inside, singular and collective, and the purpose of the mores is to reproduce within the plurality of experiences the essence of a mos that brings together these opposites. Any conflict is precisely the sign of moral monstrosity embodied by perverse, seditious, or tyrannical figures ( for example, Tarquin the Elder, Spurius Maelius, Appius Claudius the decimvir, the emperor Caligula ), whose singular “character” has the effect of dissolving the cohesion of the social body by their private or political “morals,” which go against the mos.
III. Mœurs, Morals, Ethics: Between Descriptions of Individual or Collective Rules of Behavior, and Prescriptions of Norms
In the French language, the division between les mœurs and la morale seems to become accentuated, and to make a hard and fast separation between the descriptive and the normative. Les mœurs are the rules of behavior of a people or of an individual, and a critical judgment is needed to know whether they are good or bad, accepted or prohibited, since they could equally well be both. La morale, on the other hand, only includes rules of good behavior. They determine and codify, more or less systematically, what is good and what is acceptable ( so for this reason one does not speak of mauvaise morale, but of mauvaises mœurs [bad moral conduct] ). This being the case, the difference between the terms is also part of a broader discursive division, or even a conflict, between disciplines. Mœurs and morale do not only each designate a different content ( whether descriptive or prescriptive ), but also are opposed to each other as two different approaches to human behavior ( anthropological and sociological or theological and confessional ): so the choice of the first term could imply the refusal of any theoretical or normative approach, whereas preference given to the second term could be the sign of a claim to universality.
The growing fortunes of the notion of ethics need to be understood in the context of this dilemma. This notion seems to be reserved for a normative approach toward human behavior that aims to go beyond its description, and is at the same time not based on any official dogma ( particularly religious dogma ), or any moral catechism. The different composite terms derived from ethics, what are known as applied ethics ( bioethics, environmental ethics, professional ethics ), attempt to lend a rational legitimacy to the production of criteria of decisions and rules of conduct in each particular domain.
A. Les mœurs: From psychological analysis to anthropological investigation and sociological study
The description of mœurs is presented initially as a resistance to moral prescription and prediction. However, in the transition from the language of the moralists to the essays of the Enlightenment, the object itself of this description changes, and the meaning of the term modulates.
1. The knowledge of mœurs still plays a part, in the Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales ( 1765 ) of La Rochefoucauld, in drawing a “portrait of man’s heart” ( preface to the 1765 edition, in Lafond, Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, 232 ). Already with La Bruyère’s Les caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle ( 1688 ), however, this knowledge becomes the object of an investigation intended to describe different human types. The more this investigation extends to include the diversity of social classes, and then of peoples, the less possible it becomes to think of this as a prescriptive project. Moral rules and principles are abandoned in favor of the freedom of the reader, who himself draws the lessons from the portrait, the investigation, or the history that are proposed to him. Whereas La Rochefoucauld, in spite of his visible retreat from any Christian moral prediction, presents his maxims as “the summary of a moral code conforming to the thinking of several Church Fathers” ( in Lafond, Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, 232 ), La Bruyère emphasizes: “These are moreover not maxims that I wished to write: they are like moral laws [comme des lois dans la morale] and I confess that I have neither the authority nor the genius to be a legislator. . . . Those who write maxims ultimately want to be believed: I am willing to accept, on the contrary, that people say of me that sometimes I have not observed well, provided that as a result people observe better” ( preface to Les caractères, in Lafond, Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, 695 ). So the proliferation of points of view on human behavior, and the recognition of social and geographical diversity, are not just a question of knowledge. Replacing la morale with les mœurs gives the subject back the liberty to constitute himself as a moral subject, allowing him to move freely between description and prescription. For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, this freedom will become an even more important juncture in their approach to the question of human behavior. One of the principles of the Enlightenment was to relate the constitution of a moral subject to its environment ( geography ); this philosophical principle thus authorized the transition from psychology to anthropology—even if this meant searching for the signs of humanity’s moral unity within the diversity of morals. As Rousseau put it in Émile:
Cast your eyes on all the nations of the world, go through all the histories. Among so many inhuman and bizarre cults, among this prodigious diversity of morals and characters [cette prodigieuse diversité de mœurs et de caractère], you will find everywhere the same ideas of justice and decency, everywhere the same notions of good and bad.
( Rousseau, Émile, 4:597, trans. Bloom, 288 )
2. This search for unity does not preclude, however, understanding morals in their historical context; in fact, quite the opposite. This leads to the second fundamental change that came about as a result of the philosophy of the Enlightenment: moral prescriptions are also derived from a philosophy of history. This is what the link between Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations ( Essay on the morals and customs [or intelligence] of nations ) and his epistemological reflections on history amply demonstrates ( see, for example, the article “History” in RT: Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers ).
3. This does not mean, though, that all constraint disappears. In moving from la morale to les mœurs, what is also transformed is the relationship of politics to human behavior. Examining one’s moral conscience and controlling the conformity of practices to the rules that determine beliefs are replaced by a policing of morals that is not content to discipline the bodies of individuals, to organize and pacify society, but goes further and seeks to control and orient the way in which populations evolve. This policing of mœurs accompanies the diversification of those forms of knowledge that participate actively in the normalization of these regulated behaviors.
■ See Box 2.
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Biopolitics and the policing of mœurs Replacing moral prescription with the description of mœurs is a prominent feature in the emergence of what Michel Foucault called a “society of normalization.” The biopolitics that organizes this society by controlling hygiene, health, the family, and sexuality is made possible by the fact that it is based less on a system of preestablished rules and moral precepts, or on theological dogma, than on a series of forms of knowledge and of controls that not only regulate the lives of individuals, but also conflate themselves in a global subject: the population. The notion of mœurs—which becomes the object of an actual science ( cf. Lévy-Bruhl, La morale et la science des mœurs [Ethics and moral science], 1903 )—thus ensures the articulation between the disciplining of the body ( the singular ) and the normalization or regularization of this population ( the collective ). It is also what allows a part of this population to be designated and identified as outsiders, and to apply a politics of exclusion to them. So the description or caricature of the different moral codes of behavior ( mœurs ) of a given population is a systematic component of racist discourses. This is all the more true in that the naturalization of mœurs—unlike la morale, which is used, on the contrary, as a criterion to distinguish man from animals—allows for a blurring of the borders between humanity and animality. As soon as one can refer to the mœurs of animals, and describe a population in terms of its mœurs as differing, or deviating, from the norm, the comparison with such and such an animal species is easily made. Thus Voltaire writes about albinos in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations: “The only human thing about them is their stature, and their faculty of speech and of thought is far removed from our own.” BIBLIOGRAPHY Clark, Stephen R. L. The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. London: Routledge, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1975–1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Translation by David Macey: Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Picador, 2003. |
B. La morale: Between rational foundation, Christian apologetics, and positivist sociology
Confronted with the domination of les mœurs, of the forms of knowledge to which this domination gives rise, and of the controls that discipline them, the idea of morale can only appear as a resistance to the diversity and the shifting historicity of the rules of behavior. This resistance is likely to assume two opposing forms.
The first form of opposition is that of a rational foundation. We find a conclusive sign of this opposition in the fate that befalls each of these two terms ( mœurs and morale ) in Descartes’s Discourse on Method. Whereas mœurs ( as well as voyages ) are eliminated because of the uncertain nature of the knowledge associated with them, la morale is presented as a set of necessary rules by which one should lead one’s life. In principle, these rules should be obtained following a deductive process that does not draw in any way on experience, but in the absence of an immediate rational foundation, a morale par provision is established, a provisional morale whose essential characteristic is precisely that, far from being reduced to a conformity to les mœurs, it has to include other rules.
The second form of opposition makes la morale the object of an apologetic discourse. It links the defense of la morale to the existence of a dogma. This is why it refuses to come down on the side of either the rational foundation of la morale, or the acceptance of the diversity of les mœurs. Pascal thus makes the relativity of les mœurs an argument against nature as much as against reason: “The corruption of reason is shown by the existence of so many different and extravagant customs [mœurs]. It was necessary that truth should come, in order that man should no longer dwell within himself” ( ed. Lafuma, no. 600, p. 584, trans. Trotter ). There is in consequence no legitimate morale beyond one inspired by religion: “It is right that a God so pure should only reveal Himself to those whose hearts are purified. Hence this religion is lovable to me, and I find it now sufficiently justified by so Divine a morality [une si divine morale]. But I find more in it” ( ibid., no. 793, p. 600, trans. Trotter ). This duality is of major importance, since it means that la morale is always suspected of having the shadow of a Christian God cast over it.
This leads to the temptation to lend the term an unprecedented residual and positivist definition, turning la morale simultaneously into a set of social facts, comparable to religious facts, legal facts, and so on; the science of these facts; and the application of this science. This is what Lucien Lévy-Bruhl proposes in a key passage in Ethics and Moral Science ( 1903 ):
Even if we leave aside the old conception of “theoretical morale,” the word morale still has three senses between which we must carefully distinguish.
1. The term morale is applied to conceptions, judgments, sentiments, usages as a whole, which relate to the respective laws and duties of men among themselves, recognized and generally respected at a given period and in a given civilization. It is in that sense that we speak of a Chinese morale, or a contemporary European morale. The word designates a series of social facts analogous to other series of facts of the same kind, religious, juridical, linguistic, etc.
2. The science dealing with those facts is called “ethics” [morale], just as the science dealing with phenomena of nature is called “physics.” In that way, ethical science is opposed to natural science. But while “physical” is used exclusively to designate the science of which the object is called “nature,” the word morale is used to designate both the science and the object of the science.
3. The applications of the science may be called “ethics” [morale]. By “progress of ethics” [progrès de la morale], a progress of the art of social practice is understood: for instance, a fuller justice realized by men in their relations with each other, more humanity in the relations between the different classes of society, or in those between nations. This third meaning is plainly separated from the two preceding, which differ equally between themselves. Hence there are inextricable confusions, and particularly the result that moral philosophy [la philosophie morale] today, similar in that point to the natural philosophy of the ancients, discusses purely verbal problems, and overlooks real problems.
( Lévy-Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science, trans. Lee, 81 )
What this two-pronged attack ( religious on the one hand, positivist on the other ) renders problematic is the prospect of a rational foundation of practical norms. So it traces the path of a third term, which appears later and which, without restricting the discourse on behavior to a moral catechism or an anthropological and sociological investigation ( and thus subsuming the normative within the descriptive ), does not reject the rational determination of norms for conduct.
C. Ethics
The appearance of the term “ethics,” at first more technical than the terms formed on mors, emphasizes this division between knowledge of nature ( even if it is the second nature of habits ) and the systematization of duties, without collapsing the second into the dogmas of religion. What is significant in this respect is the fact that “ethics” was only used initially to refer to ( to translate ) the philosophical works of antiquity, as opposed to moral catechisms ( thus La Bruyère, for example, in the Discours sur Théophraste, refers to Aristotle’s Ethics ). But the growing ( and recent ) fortunes of the term come above all from the impossibility of using the notions of morale and mœurs to designate the imposition of practical norms in domains that one does not imagine to be governed solely by economic or technical imperatives: the environment, business, enterprise. To speak about bioethics, environmental ethics, or business ethics is thus, in theory, to take into account the need to have available determinate norms by which decisions can be taken in circumscribed domains and in precise circumstances. In theory, this normative register should be based neither on an anthropological or sociological description of the rules of behavior specific to a given domain, nor on an external catechism. The difficulty comes from the fact that such independence is never clearly demonstrable. Applied ethics cannot easily prove that they do not ratify the morals and interests of a given milieu ( professional or otherwise ), or that they do not introduce, in a disguised form, some ( religious or political ) catechism. We can thus legitimately ask whether “ethics,” used so as to avoid saying mœurs or morale, does not in reality say the same thing as one or the other of the two terms. But “ethics” can also refer to the combination of the two, independent of any religious dogma: the universal and abstract dimension of a moral concern that cannot be easily defined, and the diversity of its fields of application.
■ See Box 3.
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La valse des éthiques ( The dance of ethics ) La valse des éthiques is the title Alain Etchegoyen chose for a work in which he analyzed and lamented the contemporary excess of applied ethics: business ethics, whose aim is to propose to employees a system of values that can help boost performance; and bioethics, and its various offshoots. His book is symptomatic of an interplay between ethics and morals, and in effect expresses a nostalgia for a prescriptive and universal morality, Kantian in nature ( die Moralität ), that motivates his critique of these different local ethics: La morale [morality] is a categorical imperative: ethics is a hypothetical imperative. This distinction is a telling one. Either the action is determined by an unconditional imperative that is imposed categorically: conscience in this case acts out of duty. This should be considered morale. Or the action is determined by a hypothesis that imposes a behavior on it, which we might also term an imperative of prudence. In this instance we are dealing with ethics. ( La valse des éthiques, 78 ) What “ethics” designates, then, according to Etchegoyen, is a vague moral concern that has trouble masking a whole series of compromises with the interests of the moment. We might wonder, then, how far the criticism he levels at ethics reproduces, almost as a caricature, the opposition between Moralität and Sittlichkeit—especially given, as Jean-Pierre Lefebvre writes in the glossary accompanying his French translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind, that “this term [ethics] is currently undergoing an evolution in French that collapses the traditional meaning of ethics and that of Sittlichkeit.” BIBLIOGRAPHY Etchegoyen, Alain. La valse des éthiques. Paris: Bourin, 1991. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Translated by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Paris: Aubier, 1991. |
IV. Sitte, Sittlichkeit, Moralität
The German language distinguishes between the descriptive ( nature ) and the prescriptive ( law ), but also between the individual and the communitarian, which are the principles from which philosophy establishes its terms. Thus Kant rigorously separates morals ( die Sitten ) from morality ( Moralität ). This disjunction consecrates and completes the one that rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy had established in the French language, and does not essentially displace its opposition, except to clarify under what absolute conditions the prescriptive is freed from the descriptive, and morality from anthropology. It is for this reason that it does not pose any major problem of translation.
The same cannot be said of the more radical attempt to rejoin what the different languages had so well taken apart, namely in Hegel’s accomplished efforts to think through the conjunction of nature, history, and the law. In the Philosophy of Right, he sets the notion of Sittlichkeit in opposition to Moralität. Moralität is effectively defined first of all by its failures. The term refers less to the set of rules of conduct that an individual gives himself, and in which he realizes his freedom abstractly, than to the very interiorization of these rules, their possession by a free will. Moralität is thus wholly on the side of the law that the autonomous subject gives himself, and it says nothing of the effective laws of conduct shared by a community of men. In the process, Moralität involves two kinds of forgetting: ( 1 ) the necessarily collective or communitarian dimension of the rules of conduct ( the subject of Moralität can only be an abstract individual ); and ( 2 ) what these rules owe to shared habits whose repeated exercise becomes second nature.
The notion of Sittlichkeit reintroduces these two dimensions. Sittlichkeit of course implies morals ( die Sitten ), insofar as they come from habit and constitute a second nature, though Hegel makes it clear that, contrary to the usage the French moralists might have made of it in the seventeenth century, it cannot be a matter of rules of conduct or of individual virtues. So Sittlichkeit has nothing in common with the naturalization of character invoked in the discourse on mœurs of these moralists. But the division of mœurs is part of Sittlichkeit precisely, and only, to the extent that within it, one can realize a concrete freedom, and in that respect it brings together what until then had been separate: Sitten and Moralität.
■ See Box 4.
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Sittlichkeit, das Sittliche: Translating Hegel It should come as no surprise that the translation into French of Sittlichkeit has proved problematic for all who have attempted it, nor that translators have found so many words to convey its absolute singularity. Thus Derathé translates Sittlichkeit as vie éthique ( ethical life: Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit ). Labarrière and Jarczyck ( in Le syllogisme du pouvoir ), like Kervergan ( in his translation of Principes de la philosophie du droit ), use the neologism éthicité ( ethicity ). Fleischmann speaks ( in La philosophie politique de Hegel ) about morale réalisée ( realized morality ). Symptomatically, Lefebvre ( translator of Phénoménologie de l’esprit ) constructs an entire circumlocution to account for the untranslatability of the term, “souci des bonnes mœurs et de la coutume [concern for good morals and for customs],” while he translates the adjective sittlich as éthique ( ethical ). This awkwardness in translation immediately brings to mind the chiasmus between ethics and morals described earlier. The choice of éthicité or of vie éthique is intended to make us hear the ethos ( habit ) in Sittlichkeit that morality, in the Kantian sense of the term, had bracketed off. In the translation of §151 of the Philosophy of Right, which explains the meaning not of Sittlichkeit, but of the ethical element ( das Sittliche ), with reference to the sharing of these same Sitten ( manners and customs ), the French translators Pierre Jean Labarrière and Gwendoline Jarczyck put Sitte in quotation marks, and refer it to the Greek ethos. The ethical element of the habit then becomes “une seconde nature qui est posée à la place de la volonté première simplement naturelle et est l’âme, la signification et l’effectivité pénétrant son être-là, l’esprit vivant et présent là—comme un monde dont la substance n’est qu’ainsi comme esprit” ( a second nature that is put in place of first, simply natural will, and is the soul, the meaning, and the effectiveness penetrating its being-there, the spirit that is living and present there—like a world whose substance is only as it is insofar as its spirit: Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit ). With this second nature, we are well and truly in an Aristotelian register, but with the important difference that the conformity to customs, to manners, to Sitten, is also an entirely conscious act of freedom: it is in terms of this free consciousness that the term Sittlichkeit should be understood. The choice of vie éthique or éthicité to translate Sittlichkeit is thus understandable, even if it is not certain whether these terms are indeed the most appropriate to make us hear the Greek ethos, or whether the Aristotelian meaning is not lost in the adventures and misuses of the term éthique. One would have to pass over and above French and Latin in order to grasp, within the French language, the Greek origin of the term. One would also have to forget about the original confusion between ethos and êthos initiated by Aristotle. It is true that Hegel himself plays around with Aristotle’s categories and gets lost in them, when he translates, in the notes in the margin of his copy of Philosophy of Right—another sign of a complex legacy and of an impossible translation—êthos as Sitte ( mœurs ), and ethos as Gewohnheit ( habit ). BIBLIOGRAPHY Fleischmann, Eugène. La philosophie politique de Hegel. Paris: Plon, 1964. Hegel, Friedrich. Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Translated by J. P. Lefèvre. Paris: Aubier, 1991. . Principes de la philosophie du droit. Translated by R. Derathé. Paris: Vrin, 1982. . Principes de la philosophie du droit. Translated by J. F. Kervergan. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Labarrière, Pierre Jean, and Gwendoline Jarczyck. Le syllogisme du pouvoir. Paris: Aubier, 1989. |
It is this forced conjunction ( a conceptual and semantic tour de force ) that Nietzsche would attack, denouncing in the Sittlichkeit der Sitte the illusion that consists of attributing a new dignity to manners and customs, and of forgetting that at the source of Sitte, one finds in reality nothing other than the sacrifice of the individual for the benefit of the collective whole, and a calculation: the preference for a durable advantage over an ephemeral advantage. So Nietzsche writes in §9 of The Dawn of Day, entitled, precisely, Begriff der Sittlichkeit der Sitte ( Conception of the morality of customs ): “Morality is nothing else ( and, above all, nothing more ) than obedience to customs, of whatsoever nature they may be. But customs are simply the traditional way of acting, and valuing. Where there is no tradition there is no morality; and the less life is governed by tradition, the narrower the circle of morality. The free man is immoral, because it is his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition” ( Dawn of Day, trans. Kennedy, 14 ). It is more than likely that Nietzsche’s text is very closely working away at the Hegelian construction, and he in fact rejects precisely what, for the author of the Philosophy of Right, was the specificity of Sittlichkeit, namely freedom.
V. Ethik
The notion of Sittlichkeit does not allow us, however, to account for the conflicts that can appear in the formation of habits and character ( in the sense of ethos ), between theological principles or prescriptions concerning action, and practical social or professional imperatives. Thus the need, for Max Weber, for another term: Ethik, which he uses throughout his work to account for the precepts that result from this conflict and that determine this particular ethos, and which he uses as well in the title of his book, Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus ( The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism ). In this work, the notions of “ethics” and ethos are clearly articulated in relation to one another. “Ethics” is the set of prescriptive rules that, precisely, lend to the conduct of Protestant capitalists the character of an ethos. This articulation enables Weber to analyze in these terms the idea that it is everyone’s duty to increase their capital:
Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a particular ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us.
( Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, 51 )
So what Max Weber understands by Protestant ethics cannot be reduced to a deduction of pure reason, in the sense of Moralität, nor to the rationality of the State, in the sense of Sittlichkeit. Taken in these terms, Ethik only exists as the systematic reconstruction of an ideal type. It is in this sense that there can be a capitalist ethics, a politico-social ethics, or a “rational ethics of the profession” ( see BERUF ). It is in this sense, too, that we can refer to a bourgeois ethos, or an “ethos of the rational bourgeois enterprise.”
To speak of Ethik is nevertheless ipso facto, and more generally, to go beyond the descriptive stage and to adopt a purely reflective, even systematic point of view. This is particularly true of Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens ( Ethics of pure will ), in which Ethik designates the systematization of Sittlichkeit.
■ See Box 5.
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Cohen’s Ethics of Pure Will In his Ethik der reinen Willens ( Ethics of pure will, 1904 ), Hermann Cohen explicitly critiques Kant’s division between morality ( Moralität ) and legality ( Gesetzlichkeit ): on the one hand, Kant makes law the center of gravity of ethics, but on the other, he makes a distinction between morality and legality. Kant also separated the philosophy of right from ethics: Mann könnte denken wenn die Legalität des Gesetzes so gleichbedeutend wird mit dem Zwange des Rechtes, dass dadurch der Sinn des Gesetzes für die Ethik ausser Zweifel gestellt würde; dass es als das schlechthin allgemeine Gesetz von der Maxime als dem subjektiven Bestimmungsgrunde, unterschieden werde. Indessen wenn sonach das Sittengesetz als das Gesetz der Gemeinschaft und der Menschheit, aller Isoliertheit des Individuums engegentritt, worin unterscheidet es sich alsdann von dem Gesetze des Rechts, bei welchem es sich doch auch um Jedermann handelt? Es entsteht bei dieser Unterscheidung zwischen Recht und Sittlichkeit der schwere Zweifel, dass die reine Sittlichkeit vielmehr leer sei; und dass sie, von der Lehrart abgesehen, in der Hauptsache doch nichts Anderes als die Religion besage und bedeute. We might think that, if the legality of the law becomes synonymous with the constraint exerted by right, the meaning of the law for ethics would thus be guaranteed. . . . However, if the moral law [Sittengesetz], as a law of the community and of humanity, is opposed to any particularity of the individual, how would it be distinct from the law of right, whose competence extends to each and every one of us? Establishing a difference in this way between right and morality [Sittlichkeit] sows a seed of serious doubt: pure morality would then seem to be empty and, in essence . . . , it would be and would mean nothing other than religion. ( Cohen, Ethik der reinen Willens, 254 ) The only other passage in which Cohen uses the Fremdwort ( foreign word ) Moralität emphasizes the fact that he does not consider legality in opposition to morality, but that morality has to be “recognized as being an immanent force of legality,” and that if this link were removed, ethics would remain deprived of what would be, by analogy, the factum of science; the consequence of such a failure would be that ethics would fall either within the domain of psychology, or into the hands of religious exclusivity. For Cohen, the distinction is thus between ethics and morality ( Sittlichkeit ), without it being a matter of a fundamental conceptual opposition; rather, it is first and foremost a problem of the logic of the system. Within the system, precedence is given to reason ( Vernunft ), and thus to logic, since it alone is able to determine the purity needed to clear the principles of thought of all representation, and consequently of ensuring that thought is truly autonomous when dealing with intuition and the data it carries. At the highest level of the system, one could establish an equivalence between reason and rational interest; understanding, which attempts to draw out the rational principles of the natural sciences ( the lower level being the experience of nature ), corresponds to reason, and ethics, from which right ( the analogon of mathematics ) and the law ( the analogon of experience ) are derived, corresponds to the interest of reason. In addition, ethics is the logic of the sciences of the mind ( or the moral sciences ), since the problems that come under its competence are the individual, totality, the will, and action. This is why Cohen is also opposed to Hegel: because his logic would also encompass ethics. Whereas Hegel does consider as distinct the idea of Sollen ( should be ), he establishes an equivalence between the concept and the being. So, for him, the idea would be the development of the concept, and would remain a prisoner of being, which would also then encompass that which should be. Cohen opposes to this form of pantheism an equivalence between ideas ( ideas are the prescriptions of the practical use of reason ) and what should be. Ethics is the science of pure will: the fact that the term comes from the Greek ethos [ἔθοϛ] simply means that this science has not broken free from one of its problems, that of customs and manners ( Sitten ). But these customs are not the content of morality ( that is, Sittlichkeit, as the content of the will, in the same way that nature is the content of thought ), and were this not the case, this morality would seem to have as its basis the nature of the subject—something that Cohen rejects. Morality, rather, has right and justice as its objectives. From the point of view of its relationship with religion, ethics requires that religion be demythologized, since it is simply the historical form through which ethics has gradually found its way into general culture. The level of customs ( mœurs ) thus remains that of particularity and plurality, that is, the level of society; whereas the level of totality—that of the State ( that which enables morality to be realized ), and, further down the line, that of the confederation of States—is only affected by morality under a particular aspect. This aspect is morality, inasmuch as it is assimilated into an ethics whose ultimate horizon, the level of the unity of humanity, that is, the ideal, can only be thought from the perspective of the “pure” interpretation that ethics gives of Hebraic messianism. Cohen indeed refuses to grant religion any autonomy, as he does thought, will, and feeling ( the feeling of the aesthetic ): at most, religion has a “specificity” within the system ( Marc de Launay ). BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohen, Hermann. Ethik der reinen Willens. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1904. |
Aristotle. Organon. Translated by J. Tricot. 6 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1970.
Bobzien, Susanne. Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
Cohen, Hermann. Ethik des reinen Willens. Introduction by Steven S. Schwarzschild. 5th ed. In Werke, vol. 7. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1981.
Ferrary, Jean-Louis. “Le discours de Philus ( Cicéron, De republica III, 8–31 ) et la philosophie de Carnéade.” Revue des Études Latines 55 ( 1977 ): 128–56.
Gill, Christopher. “Personhood and Personality: The Four-Personae Theory in Cicero, De officiis I.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6 ( 1988 ): 169–99.
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Griffin, Miriam T., and Jonathan Barnes, eds. Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
. Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.
Hahm, David E. “Plato, Carneades, and Cicero’s Philus ( Cicero, Rep. 3.8–31 ).” Classical Quarterly, n.s. 49 ( 1999 ): 167–83.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Edited by Klaus Grotsch and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011. Translation by T. M. Knox: Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Edited with introduction by Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Irwin, Terence. The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Kant, Immanuel. Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Originally published 1797. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1907. Translation by Mary Gregor: The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited by Mary Gregor. Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Laks, André, and Malcolm Schofield, ed. Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Levi, Anthony. French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585 to 1649. Fair Lawn, NJ: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Lévy, Carlos. Cicero Academicus: Recherches sur les Académiques et sur la philosophie Cicéronienne. Rome: École française de Rome, 1992.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. La morale et la science des mœurs. Paris: Alcan, 1903. Translation by Elizabeth Lee: Ethics and Moral Science. London: Constable, 1905.
Lafond, Jean, ed. Moralistes du XVIIe siècle: De Pibrac à Dufresny. Paris: Laffont, 1992.
Moriarty, Michael. Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Dawn of Day. Translated by J. M. Kennedy. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924.
. Morgenröthe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 5, vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. Translation by R. J. Hollingdale: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Pascal, Blaise. “Pensées.” In Œuvres complètes, edited by Louis Lafuma. Paris: Seuil-L’Intégrale, 1963. Translation by W. F. Trotter: Pensées. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003. Originally published in 1958. Translation by Roger Ariew: Pensées. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005.
Powell, J.G.F., ed. Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile. In Œuvres complètes, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1969. Translation by Allan Bloom: Emile: or, On Education. Introduction and notes by Allan Bloom. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1991.
Rueff, Martin. “Morale et mœurs.” In Dictionnaire européen des Lumières, edited by Michel Delon. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Translation by Gwen Wells: Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Edited by Michel Delon and Philip Stewart. 2 vols. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.
Striker, Gisela. Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Voelke, André-Jean. L’idée de volonté dans le stoïcisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973.
Voltaire. Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations. Edited by René Pomeau. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1963. Translation by Anonymous: The General History and State of Europe. 3 vols. London, 1754–57.
Weber, Max. Die protestantische Ethik. Edited by Johannes Winckelmann. 6th ed. 2 vols. Gütersloh, Ger.: Mohn, 1981–82. Translation by Talcott Parsons: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Reprint. New York: Dover, 2003. Translation by Stephen Kalberg: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Introduction by Stephen Kalberg. 3rd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury, 2002.
MOTIONLESS
“Motionless” is, along with “silent,” one of the possible translations of the German still, a topos of classical aesthetics: see STILL, and AESTHETICS, CLASSIC, SUBLIME. Cf. SERENITY, WISDOM.
See also, on movement in general and on the immobility of Aristotle’s Prime Mover, ABSTRACTION, II, ACT, DYNAMIC, FORCE, Box 1, MOMENT, STRENGTH.