N

NAROD [народ] ( RUSSIAN )

ENGLISH			people
FRENCH			peuple
ITALIAN			popolo
LATIN			gens

  PEOPLE, and CULTURE, GENRE, MIR, PRAVDA, RUSSIAN, SOBORNOST’, SVOBODA

The Russian noun narod [народ] is derived from rod [род], “family line, species, genus.” Narod, exactly like “people,” signifies both the population of a country and “the lower classes, the common people.” For Slavophiles, narod has the elevated sense of the “spiritual unity” of the nation, and a large part of the Russian intelligentsia idealizes it as a natural and organic element, the “authentic life” of the people. Although it was a cliché in both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, narod took on a less ideological meaning in the work of Bakhtin, who related it to the notion of narodnaja kul’tura [народная культура], popular culture.

I. Narod and Gens

The root rod [род], which in Slavic languages has supplanted the Indo-European radical *gen, essentially signifies “birth.” In modern Russian the term has the different senses of “clan, tribe, parents”; “family, line, generation”; “species, genus” ( or “gender” in the grammatical sense ) ( RT: Slovar’ russkogo iazyka [Dictionary of the Russian language] ). All these meanings refer to entities ( things or individuals ) that have been created or put into the world together. In the derived term narod [народ] ( people ), the prefix na- still connotes more the totality of the individuals ( put into the world together or unified ).

In The Russian Religious Mind, Georgi Fedotov highlights the importance of the continuing veneration of the rod—a veneration that goes back to paganism and more particularly to the “cult of the dead as the ancestors of an eternal kinship community.” “The Latin people and the Celtic clan,” Fedotov writes, “are only pale images of social realities that were once alive. In Russian language and life, the rod is full of vitality and vigor.” A typical linguistic manifestation of this vitality is the use of family names as polite forms of address: “The terms ‘father,’ ‘grandfather,’ ‘uncle,’ and ‘brother,’ as well as the corresponding feminine terms, are used in the language of Russian peasants to address both known and unknown individuals.” In this way “all moral relationships between individuals are raised to the level of blood kinship.” In Russian, family relationship is rendered by rodstvo [родство], an abstract nominalization of rod.

This linguistic habit of extending kinship relations to everyone sheds a particular light on the roots of Russian communalism and explains the importance of notions like mir [мир] ( village community ), sobornost’ [соборность] ( conciliarity ), obščestvo [общество] ( community ), etc.: for Slavophiles, the archaic cult of the rod, to which narod clearly refers, is one of the characteristics of Russian civilization.

II. Natsija, Narod, and Narodnitčestvo

Observers of nineteenth-century Russian society repeatedly emphasized that the nobles ( dvorjane [дворяне] ) and the people ( narod ) often seemed to be two separate nations: their clothes, their manners, even their language—everything was different. The Russian word natsija [нация] ( nation ), which comes from the Polish nacja ( RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka [Etymological dictionary of the Russian language], vol. 3 ), was created during the time of Peter the Great, whose reforms produced a sharp division within Russian society between cultivated people and the narod. In its contemporary acceptation natsija signifies “a community of people unified by a language, territory, economy, and a common mentality, developed historically” ( RT: Slovar’ russkogo iazyka, vol. 2 ). As for narod, it means “the population of a state” but also “the lower classes, the common people” ( RT: Tolkovyĭ slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka [Explanatory dictionary of the living language of Great Russia], vol. 2 ).

For Slavophiles, narod has an elevated sense, whereas natsija is neutral in value. Slavophilism is essentially an ideological reaction to the modernization of Russia and particularly to the gap between the nobles and the narod. Slavophiles have concentrated on the Russian way of organizing life in the village community ( mir ) and on the interpretation of the law as truth and justice ( pravda [правда] ). This way of living was contrasted with Western standards of formal law ( cf. Kireevski, Polnoe Sobranie Sočinenii [Complete works], 1: 115–16 ). The patriarchal Russian village was considered the true origin of the nation’s life and strength, the incarnation of traditional national virtues. Slavophiles regarded themselves as full participants in this patriarchal life and did not want to detach themselves from the narod, which for them expressed the spiritual unity of all Russians.

The idealization of peasants is connected with guilt feelings on the part of the intelligentsia, whose privileges depended chiefly on the maintenance of serfdom; the term itself ( intelligentsija [интеллигенция] ) appeared around 1860 in the work of Piotr Boborykin and passed from Russian into other European languages ( RT: Great Soviet Enyclopedia, vol. 10 ). The idea that intellectuals have a duty to the people found its practical development in the narodničestvo [народничество] movement. Narodničestvo is usually rendered in French, very inexactly, as populisme, and in English by “populism.” An English translator of Berdyayev explains narodničestvo as “the movement that in 19th-century Russia was based on the feeling of an obligatory devotion to the general interests of the common folk” ( Berdyayev, Slavery and Freedom ). A narodnik [народник] is someone who “believes in the narodničestvo and practices it” ( ibid. ). During the 1860s and 1870s many narodniks “went to the people.” They took up residence in the countryside in order to devote themselves to bringing civilization to the people and improving their lives, seeking to overcome the gap between the intelligentsia and the narod. The ideals of narodničestvo inspired a few generations of passionate advocates who became physicians and schoolmasters in the villages.

Narodničestvo found expression in Russian literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, notably in the work of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. For Tolstoy, the simple, everyday life of the common people was endowed with a high moral and religious value: only in the common people was there true life, the life that allows the individual to arrive at salvation and “Resurrection” ( voskresenie [воскресение] ), to borrow the title of one of his well-known novels. Similarly, Dostoyevsky, exploring the nature of the “Russian character” ( russkij xarakter [русский характер] ), believed, in an almost religious way, in the Russian narod as the ultimate moral value.

III. Berdyayev, Narod, and Ličnost’

Berdyayev, on the contrary, adopts a personalist point of view and disapproves of the excessive cult of the narod, which he considers an obstacle to the development of subjectivity and individuality. Narodničestvo, he writes, “does not exist in the West, it is a specifically Russian phenomenon. Only in Russia can one find this perpetual opposition between the intelligentsia and the people [narod], this idealization of the people that becomes almost a religion, this quest for truth and God in the people” ( Berdyayev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo ). According to Berdyayev, narodničestvo reveals a weakness rather than a strength among the cultivated Russian elite:

[T]he intelligentsia’s tendency to seek its integrity solely in the “organic life” of the narod shows its lack of spiritual autonomy. Russian kollektivizm [коллективизм] and sobornost’ have been considered a great advantage of the Russian people ( russkogo naroda [русского народа] ), the one that has raised it above European nations ( nad narodami Evropy [над народами Εвропы]. But in reality this means that the person ( ličnost’ [личность] ) and the personal spirit have not yet been awakened in the Russian people ( v russkom narode [в русском народе] ), and that the person is still too immersed in the natural element of the life of the people.

IV. Narod, Carnival, Laughter: The Notion of Narodnaja Kul’tura in Bakhtin

It is not surprising that narod plays the role of a major ideological cliché. In Soviet ideology narod was the general term that served to designate the workers, kolkhozians ( workers on collective farms ), and the “working intelligentsia” ( trudovaja intelligensija [трудовая интеллигенция] ). Its abstract nominalization, narodnost’ [народность], was inscribed in the two famous trinities of Russian cultural history: along with autocracy ( samoderžavie [самодержавие] ) and orthodoxy ( pravoslavie [православие] ), it composed the formula of official nationalism in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, and along with ideological conviction ( partijnost’ [партийность] ), it constituted the dogmatic definition of “socialist realism” as an artistic genre. The cliché “socialist realism” was created in the USSR in the 1930s to define in an official way the method of Soviet literature. Socialist realism is “an aesthetic expression of the socialist conception of the world and of man” ( RT: Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 24/1 ).

In Mikhail Bakhtin we find a counterideological use of the term narod. Bakhtin introduces the notion of “popular culture” ( narodnaja kul’tura [народная культура] ) or “comic popular culture” ( narodnaja smexovaja kul’tura [народная смеховая культура] ). Popular culture gives people a specific view of the world that is opposed to official or serious culture. For Bakhtin the twofold, serious/comic view of the world is an intrinsic characteristic of human civilization. The paradigmatic event of popular culture is the popular festival, the carnival. Carnival is a universal event, democratic and egalitarian. During the festival “life is subject only to [carnival’s] laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom [zakony svobody ( закοны свободы )]” ( Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World ). Carnival “does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators,” Bakhtin writes, “because its very idea embraces all the people [on vsenaroden ( он всенароден )]” ( ibid. ). The adjective vsenarodnyj [всенародный] poses a real problem of translation: it has been rendered in French by the expression “fait pour l’ensemble du peuple,” and also by “qui est le bien de l’ensemble du peuple” ( L’Œuvre de François Rabelais ). In a sense, both translations are correct; vsenarodnyj, formed on the basis of narod and the prefix vse- ( omni- ), which expresses universality, means literally “omni-popular, shared by all.” We must understand this term by putting it on the same level as Solovyov’s sobornost’ ( uni-totality ) and vseedinstvo [всеединство] ( omni-unity = uni-totality ).

However, Bakhtin turns the Slavophile vocabulary away from its ideological aim. As an actor in the carnival, the narod is a natural element, no longer a “mysterious, foreign, and seductive” force, as it is in Berdyayev ( Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 169 ). It is gay and joyous. It is a spontaneous element in which the individuality and subjectivity of the modern period have not yet been separated from each other. It involves neither a person opposed to society nor a difficult shaping of personality that requires a return to the narod, as is the case in the narodničestvo of the nineteenth century. The person is unified with the narod in an organic manner: Bakhtin speaks of the “body of the rod [rodovoe telo ( родовое тело )]” in Rabelais ( Bakhtin, Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable ). The expression rodovoe telo, in which the adjective rodovoe is derived from rod, is in fact another untranslatable expression: the French translator renders it as “corps procréateur” ( Bakhtin, L’Œuvre de François Rabelais ) and the English translator as “ancestral body” ( Rabelais and His World, 19, 322–24 ). In fact, Bakhtin writes that in Rabelais’s work, Pantagruel is the image of the “people’s body [vsenarodnoe telo ( всенародное тело )]” ( Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable, 359, Rabelais and His World, 341 ). Carnivalesque culture is a spontaneous element that undoes all seriousness, including official ideology.

As opposed to the official feast, one might say that the carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.

( Rabelais and His World, 10 )

Bakhtin underscores the indissoluble and essential connection between the extra-official laughter of the popular feast and freedom ( svoboda ) ( Rabelais and His World, 71–73 ). Thus, under the Stalinist regime humanism took the form of an anti-autocratic narodničestvo:

Growth and renewal are the dominant motifs in the figure of the people ( narod ). The people ( narod ) is the newborn child fed on milk, the newly planted tree, the convalescent and regenerated organism.

( Ibid., chap. 6 )

If we now return to the twofold meaning of “people” ( see PEOPLE ), both the body of citizens and the mass of the excluded, we see that it is more the second term of this opposition on which thinking about the narod is based. The history of the intelligentsia connects the word with the diverse strategies deployed for getting closer to or distinguishing oneself from the narod ( insofar as it has neither the same education nor the same culture )—unless it is, as in Bakhtin, to foil the ideological instrumentalization that these strategies themselves imply.

Zulfia Karimova
Andriy Vasylchenko

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia i Renessansa. 2nd ed. Moscow: Khudozh, 1990. Translation by Helene Iswolsky: Rabelais and His World: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Translation by A. Robel: L’Œuvre de François Rabelais et la Culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.

Berdyayev, Nicolai. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo [World of Dostoyevsky]. Moscow: Zakharov, 2001. Translation by Donald Attwater: Dostoievsky. New York: New American Library, 1974.

   . O rabstve i svobode čelovka. Paris: YMCA, 1972. First published in 1939. Translation by R. M. French: Slavery and Freedom. New York: Scribner, 1944.

Fedotov, Georgii. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.

Kireevski, Ivan. Polnoe Sobranie Sočinenii. Vol. 1. Moscow: University of Moscow, 1910.

Klechenov, Gennadii. “The ‘Narod’ and the Intelligentsia: From Dissociation to ‘Sobornost’.’ ” Russian Studies in Philosophy 31, no. 4 ( 1993 ): 54–70.

Kovalev, Vitalii. “The ‘Narod,’ the Intelligentsia, and the Individual.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 31, no. 4 ( 1993 ): 71–82.

NATURE

GERMAN			Natur, Aufgang
GREEK			phusis [φύσις]
LATIN			natura
RUSSIAN			priroda [природа], natura [натура]
SPANISH			naturaleza

  ART, CULTURE, ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, ESTI, FORCE, LIGHT, MIMÊSIS, TO BE

The Latin translation of the Greek phusis [φύσις] by the Latin natura, from which are derived most of the words designating “nature” in European languages, can be considered an inconsequential event in Western history—or, on the contrary, a major event—with great historical import. Heidegger never ceased to problematize this translation as it had never been problematized before, though that led him to render the Greek phusis as Aufgang, “opening up,” “emergence,” rather than by Natur, “nature.” To gauge the significance of Heidegger’s gesture we must, however, move beyond the pseudo-opposition between a supposedly Greek nature-growth and a supposedly Roman nature-birth. Setting himself the task of determining phusis as the movement of a thing’s coming to be by itself ( whence physics ), Aristotle turns first to etymology to make this term signify in its original sense:

“Nature” [phusis] means ( 1 ) the genesis [genesis ( γένεσις )] of growing things [tôn phuomenôn ( τῶν φυομένων )]—the meaning that would be suggested if one were to pronounce the u in phusis long.

( Metaphysics, 5.4. 1014b 17–19 )

Aristotle explicitly connects phusis with phuô [φύω], phuesthai [φύεσθαι], “to grow, raise, cause to be born, to develop,” the verb coming from the Indo-European root *bhu-, from which also come the Latin fui, the French fus, the English “[to] be,” and the German bin, bist, in the conjugation of the verb sein in the present indicative, which until the fourteenth century included forms that have now disappeared, <wir> birn, <ihr> birt, replaced respectively by sind and seid, which, like the Latin sum, come from a different Indo-European root.

This connection of phusis with the idea of “growth” may nonetheless seem as insufficient as it is incontestable, for we must still ask how “growth” is understood. Heidegger proposes to move back from the idea of “grow” to the allegedly more originary idea of “flowering” ( Ger. das Aufgehen ), which can itself be traced back phenomenologically to an “appearance”:

The other Indo-European radical is bhu, bheu. To it belong the Greek phuô [φύω], to emerge [aufgehen], to be powerful [walten], of itself to come to stand and remain standing. Up until now this bhu has been interpreted according to the usual superficial view of physis [φύσις] and phuô [φύω] as nature and “to grow” [wachsen]. A more fundamental exegesis, stemming from preoccupation with the beginning of Greek philosophy, shows the “growing” to be an “emerging,” which in turn is defined by presence [Anwesen] and appearance [Erscheinen]. Recently the root phy- [φυ] has been connected with pha- [φα], phainesthai [φαίνεσθαι]. Physis [φύσις] would then be that which emerges into the light [das ins Licht Aufgehende], phyein [φύειν] would mean to shine, to give light therefore to appear. ( Cf. Zeitschrift für vergl. Sprachforschung, vol. 59. )

( Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 59 )

Heidegger problematizes, in an unprecedented way, the age-old translation of Greek phusis by Latin natura and its different derivatives in European languages, in contrast, for example, to Husserl, who declared at the beginning of his Vienna lecture that in Greek antiquity nature is “what the ancient Greeks considered nature [was den alten Griechen als Natur galt].” Nonetheless, the Slavic languages constitute a notable exception: while Russian uses natura [натура] in the sense of “the essence of a being,” natura rerum, natural phenomena taken as a whole are designated instead by the term priroda [природа], from rod [род], which is close to the meaning of German Geschlecht: “generation, line, race, species” ( see GESCHLECHT ). Breaking with a long tradition, or rather a long obstruction, Heidegger proposes, then, to reinterpret phusis not as “nature” ( from Latin nasci, “to be born” ), but as Aufgang, an “opening-up” or “emergence.” But contrary to a commonly held view, Heidegger does not oppose a natura-“birth” to a phusis-“growth” that he considers more originary; rather, the line of demarcation runs between phusis on one hand, and natura as birth and growth combined on the other. While nature designates a sector of the existent ( in pairs of oppositions in which the other term may be culture—nature/culture—history, art, super-nature [grace], etc. ), phusis names instead the “how” ( desinence-sis: phu-sis ) in accord with which everything appears. It is a name for Being, not for the existent. In short: “nature” is ontically oriented, and phusis is ontological. Reinterpreted in its original acceptation, the term phusis seems to Heidegger to be “das Grundwort des anfänglichen Denkens ( the basic word of beginning thought )” ( Heraklit, 101 ).

See Box 1.

1

Homer, phusis and pharmakon

  LOGOS

The first known occurrence of phusis is found in Homer. The word, a hapax, is uttered by Hermes in an enigmatic passage that deals especially with the pharmakon [φάϱμαϰоν] and the language of the gods:

So spoke Argeïphontes, and he gave me the medicine ( pharmakon ), which he picked out of the ground, and he explained the nature of it to me ( kai moi phusin autou edeixe [ϰαὶ μоι φύσιν αὐτоῦ ἔδειξε] ). It was black at the root ( rhizêi [ῥίζῃ] ), but with a milky flower ( anthos [ἄνθоς] ). The gods call it moly. It is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods have power to do all things.

( Odyssey, 10. 302–306 )

The word pharmakon ( from *pharma, which it is tempting to connect with pherô [φέϱω], “plant that grows in the earth,” RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. ) means both “remedy” and “poison” ( “medicinal herb, drug, treatment, philter, potion, spell, dye, color, cleaning agent, reagent, tanner,” etc.; the pharmakos [φαϱμαϰός, accent on the omicron] is a scapegoat, an expiatory victim, whereas the pharmakos [φάϱμαϰος, accent on the alpha] is a poisoner, a magician ). This ambivalence allows the word to designate in a perfectly appropriate way the logos [λόγος] that causes pain or enchants, produces terror or courage ( Gorgias, Eulogy of Helen, 82B 11 DK, §14 ), and also writing, as a remedy/poison for memory ( Plato, Phaedrus, 274e; see Derrida ). But in Homer, Hermes’s pharmakon is a pharmakon esthlon [φάϱμαϰоν ἐσθλόν] ( v. 286, 292, a “plant of life,” says Bérard, “good,” “courageous,” like a Homeric hero ), capable of saving Odysseus from Circé’s pharmakon, which transforms men into swine—but brings Odysseus into her bed. Among the gods this good pharmakon is called môlu [μῶλυ], which sounds like a “loan-word of unknown origin,” but later designates a kind of garlic ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ). It is this pharmakon whose phusis Hermes explains to Odysseus. By translating kai moi phusin autou edeixe as “il m’apprit à connaître” ( “he taught me to know” ), Victor Bérard skillfully uses an elision to avoid the difficulty, whereas Homer says “and he explained the phusin of it to me.” Wolfgang Schadewaldt, on the other hand, renders phusis in this passage by Wuchs, a word from the same family as the verb wachsen, “to grow,” and thus goes back to the idea of growth ( Die Odyssee, 176: “und wies mir seinen Wuchs” ). In any case, phusis is, like the idea of pharmakon itself, contradictory or ambivalent: the root is black, the flower white. Language of the gods, language of humans, difficult to understand for mortals, but easy for the all-powerful; black but white; remedy and poison: the textual terrain of phusis requires careful attention.

Barbara Cassin and Pascal David

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derrida, Jacques. “La pharmacie de Platon.” In La Dissémination. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Translation by Barbara Johnson: “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, 61–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–1974. Translation by Victor Bérard: L’Odyssée, edited by Victor Bérard. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974. First published in 1924. Translation by Wolfgang Schadewalt: Die Odyssee. Zurich: Artemis, 1966.

Rather than Homer, it is Heraclitus who constitutes the source on which Heidegger constantly drew for the meaning of phusis, and notably fragment 123: phusis kruptesthai philei [φύσις ϰϱύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ]. This fragment has often been translated as “Nature likes to hide itself.” Heidegger renders it this way: “Das Aufgehen dem Sichverbergen schenkt’s die Gunst,” or “Das Aufgehen schenkt die Gunst dem Sichverbergen” ( Heraklit, 110 )—“It is to withdrawal [to the movement of withdrawing] that unclosing grants its favor.” Or, in Jean Beaufret’s French translation of the German translating the Greek: “Rien n’est plus propre à l’éclosion que le retrait” ( Dialogue, 1, 18 ). Here it is no longer a matter of “nature” but of an internal tension, an “unapparent harmony,” in the Heraclitean sense, between veiling and unveiling, occultation and disoccultation, or between sheltering and unsheltering. That is probably why Heidegger notes that the term phusis is “perhaps untranslatable” ( vielleicht unübersetzbar ), following this passage:

We still leave untranslated the fundamental word: phusis. We do not say natura and Nature, because these names are too equivocal and loaded—and, in short, because they acquire their nominative force only from a very special and very slanted interpretation of phusis. We have in fact no word for conceiving in a single expression the mode of deployment of phusis as it has been clarified up to this point. ( We try to say Aufgang—the rise of what rises by opening—but we remain powerless to give to this word, without intermediary, the plenitude and determination it needs. )

( Heidegger, Wegmarken, 259; Questions II, 208–9 )

See Box 2.

2

Supernatural

  GRACE, SVET ( Box 1 )

At the beginning of his commentary on Book II of Aristotle’s Physics ( in Questions II ), Heidegger mentions, among the antithetical oppositions in which “nature” is one of the terms, “nature/grace,” adding between parentheses: “Über-natur” ( super-nature ). Although the adjective surnaturel has become common parlance in French, the same is not true of the substantive surnature, and the least one can say is that it is hardly used outside the vocabulary of theologians, so that we are more inclined to nominalize the adjective and speak of the “supernatural,” at the price of an abusive confusion, in ordinary usage, with the “paranormal.” A mystery remains to be explained: why is there this strange absence? To understand it, we have to examine the history of the “supernatural.” This history has been written, from the point of view of the history of dogma, by Henri de Lubac, in his classic study Surnaturel—Études historiques, which forms a trilogy with two other works: Augustinisme et théologie moderne and Le Mystère du surnaturel. According to Augustinisme et théologie moderne ( 315n2 ), it was Scheeben who introduced the word Übernatur ( “super-nature” ) in a technical sense, distinguishing it from the supernatural, but de Lubac adds: “Although this distinction does not appear to have been widely adopted, one cannot, in our view, make Scheeben entirely responsible for the currently widespread usage that incorrectly replaces surnaturel by surnature.” The appearance of the term Übernatur seems to go back, in the German language, to Rhineland mysticism: “Suso once speaks of an ‘übernatur’ ( Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit [A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom], Part 2, chap. 24 ), but it does not seem that this word came into widespread use” in German ( Surnaturel, 405 ). It appears to have been in the ninth century, in “the Carolingian translations of Pseudo-Dionysius by Hilduin and John Scotus Erigena, that supernaturalis made its true entrance into theology,” an entrance that was to be followed by a long eclipse: “Its use, which remained rare until the middle of the thirteenth century, became widespread only after St. Thomas Aquinas” ( ibid., 327 ). The word seems to have been shaped by the Greek huperousios [ὑπεϱоύσιоς] ( Didymus the Blind, Pseudo-Dionysius ), and thus has a very distant origin in the equation phusis = ousia [оὐσία] mentioned by Aristotle ( Metaphysics 5.4, 1015a 12–15 ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lubac, Henri de. Augustinisme et théologie moderne. Paris: Aubier, 1965. Translation by Lancelot Sheppard: Augustinianism and Modern Theology. London: Chapman, 1969.

   . Le mystère du surnaturel. Paris: Aubier, 1965. Translation by Rosemary Sheed: The Mystery of the Supernatural. London: Chapman, 1967.

   . Surnaturel: Études historiques. New ed. Edited by Michel Sales. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991.

Milbank, John. The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005.

Suso, Henry. A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. Translated by Walter Hilton. Norwood: Angelus, 1910.

Pascal David

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. The Metaphysics. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Heidegger, Martin. “Alétheia ( Heraklit, Fragment 16 ).” In Vortrage und Aufsätze. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Gesamtausgabe. 7: 249–74. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000. Translation by David F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi: “Aletheia ( Heraclitus, Fragment B 16 ).” In Early Greek Thinking, 102–23. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

   . Einführung in die Metaphysik. Edited by Petra Jaeger. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 40. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt: Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

   . Heraklit. Edited by M. S. Frings. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 55. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979.

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

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

Husserl, Edmund. “Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie.” In Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Ein Einleitung in die phänomentologische Philosophie. Edited by Walter Biemel. Husserliana. 6: 314–48. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954. Translation by David Carr: “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity.” In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 269–99. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Schoenbohm, Susan. “Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis in Introduction to Metaphysics.” In A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. Edited by Richard Polt, 143–60. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

NEGATION

The word “negation”—like the Latin negatio, from nego, negare ( “to say no” and “affirm that [. . .] not [. . .],” “deny,” “reject” )—designates both the term, particle, or negative operator ( “not,” “no,” “nothing,” “no one” ) and an utterance or proposition that is opposed to assertion, or to a given assertion, and whose truth value is thus the inverse of that of affirmation.

I. Negative Words and How to Designate What Is Not the Case

1. See NOTHING ( ESTI ) for the formation and meaning of negative terms in various languages See also PERSON, II.4.

2. On the relationship to being, see OMNITUDO REALITATIS, REALITY; cf. TO BE ( ESTI ).

3. On the relationship to the Other, see NEIGHBOR; cf. TO TRANSLATE, Box 1.

4. On the experience of negation and the relationship to nonbeing, see ANXIETY; cf. DASEIN, MALAISE.

II. The Operations of Negation

1. On the logical procedure that makes possible the construction of an assertion or a negation, and on their truth value, see PROPOSITION and TRUTH; see also NONSENSE, PRINCIPLE ( in particular PRINCIPLE, I.C on the principle of noncontradiction ) and SENSE; cf. FALSE, IMPLICATION, LIE, SPEECH ACT. Concerning the fact that two negations are not necessarily equivalent to an assertion, see PORTUGUESE and ESTI I, IV.

2. On the procedure of extenuation and the passage to the negative, especially in theology, see ABSTRACTION, Box 1.

3. On the dialectical force of the negative and of negativity, see AUFHEBEN; cf. ATTUALITÀ, PLASTICITY, PRAXIS.

4. On the procedure of denial, in which negation leads to an awareness of a content, see VERNEINUNG; cf. DRIVE, ENTSTELLUNG, and more generally ES, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH.

5. On erasure and oblivion, see MEMORY; cf. AIÔN, ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY.

  ABSURD, FICTION, MATTER OF FACT

NEIGHBOR

ARABIC			jar [جار]
FRENCH			prochain
GERMAN			Nächste
GREEK			plêsion [πλησιον]
HEBREW			re’a [רֵעַ ]
ITALIAN			prossimo
LATIN			proximum
SPANISH			prójimo, vecino

  AUTRUI, and ACTOR, I/ME/MYSELF, MENSCHHEIT, MITMENSCH, PARDON, SUBJECT, WELT, WORLD

The English word “neighbor,” based on the prefix “nigh-” ( denoting proximity in time or space ) and the suffix “boor” ( a dweller or place of dwelling, as in “bower” or “abode” ), brings three distinct but overlapping conceptual clusters into philosophy and critical theory. First, and most important, is the religioethical register of the Neighbor, which derives from the biblical injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” ( originally found in Lv 19:18, and quoted and referred to elsewhere, e.g., Mt 22:39, Mk 12:31, Lk 10:27, Jas 2:8, Rom 13:9 ). This Neighbor connotes an unspecified category of fellow human beings ( and sometimes animals ) whom we are obligated to “love,” usually understood as implying responsibility or care. Islam too refers to “the neighbor” ( al-jar ) as a figure of special obligation and ambiguous determination ( see Qur’an, Surah Al-Nisah 4:36, and the Maariful commentary by Mufti Muhammad Shafi ); the Arabic jar [جار] is closely related to the Hebrew gar ( to dwell ) and thus to ger ( a proselyte, resident Gentile, or stranger ). The religious figure of the Neighbor passes readily into secular culture and ethics, where it is often presented as the emblem of a universal ideal, and sometimes as equivalent to the “other” of the so-called Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is a weak parallel, however, since the Levitical injunction does not necessarily imply reciprocity, and some interpreters ( such as Kierkegaard and Levinas ) have insisted on its asymmetry. The figure of the Neighbor as a privileged object remains very active in philosophy and psychoanalysis, as well as in vernacular ethics.

Second, we can distinguish a more general sociopolitical concept of neighbors, based on propinquity, spatiotemporal proximity, or contiguity. If the Neighbor is the embodiment of a religioethical ideal, neighbors are transient figures who contingently occupy that position. The modern discussion of sociopolitical neighbors and the neighborhood begins with Weber, Tönnies, Durkheim, and Simmel and continues in contemporary sociology, political theory, public policy, and urban planning. In his first inaugural address in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his administration’s Good Neighbor Policy, which was intended to improve relations with Latin America in the reflexive logic of the Levitical commandment. For Roosevelt, the good neighbor “resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.” Robert Frost’s famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” with its problematics of the border, could serve as the sociopolitical neighbor’s motto. If the “good neighbor” at minimum is one who observes boundaries and respects obligations, neighbors may also provide mutual assistance or share conviviality—but unlike the religioethical Neighbor, the value of reciprocity here remains paramount. Positive, negative, and ambivalent representations of neighbors can occasionally be found in modern literature ( e.g., Rilke, Kafka, Thomas Berger ), whereas in popular culture, from Donald Duck to David Lynch, the figure of the “bad neighbor” ( whether merely annoying or downright threatening ) is much more common. The sociopolitical idea of neighbors implies the existence of a neighborhood, usually a territorial vicinity or social grouping based on shared resources, interests, or problems; the neighborhood is an informal mode of association situated between the intimacy of the family and the public concerns of the polis. A neighborhood may involve no more than a vaguely defined geographical area, or it can organize itself as a quasi-political entity, a “neighborhood association,” for the sake of common issues or goals. Moreover, the rise of the Internet has allowed for the easy development ( and even easier dissolution ) of virtual “neighborhoods” that fulfill neighborly functions such as the exchange of information, opinions, and phatic gestures.

Third, we can identify a mathematical set of meanings of neighboring, which is often associated with the derivative terms “neighborhood” and “nearest neighbor” and is current in topology, set theory, graph theory, systems theory, cellular automata theory, game theory, and various branches of information technology. The mathematical concept of the neighborhood was introduced by David Hilbert in his definition of planes in Foundations of Geometry ( app. 4 ) and developed by Felix Hausdorff in his foundational work on set theoretical topology. Generally speaking, the neighborhood of a given point is defined as a collection of elements or points with certain specific properties in relation to that point, depending on the particular axiomatization. The mathematical notion of the neighborhood describes modes of place and proximity but is not limited to classical Euclidean, or “metric,” models of space. The neighborhood of a point in metric space involves those points that are less than a certain distance from it, whereas in topological space, a neighborhood can be specified without such metrics, allowing for concepts such as “being near” and “infinitesimal closeness” and producing a much more general theory of abstract spaces. If distance is a key idea in the theory of metric space, the neighborhood has an analogous function in topological space, which can be deformed without altering the structure of its neighborhoods. Several branches of social and biological sciences make use of theories of neighborhoods in their models, including social network analysis, mathematical sociology, and a branch of molecular embryology known as topobiology. And several philosophers, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Manuel DeLanda, have used mathematical neighboring for political, social, and other conceptual functions.

In all three of these contexts, the Neighbor and “neighboring” involve a degree of ambiguity or indeterminacy. The question of who is included in the category of the Neighbor is vigorously argued in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In social theory and political discourse, neighbors constitute a zone of indistinction between friends and enemies, the familiar and the strange, where alliances are contingent and hospitality easily slips into hostility. In popular culture, such neighbors are often represented as social irritants or comic foils, symptomatic of the permeability of private and public space, of real and virtual neighborhoods. Religioethical and sociopolitical concepts of the neighbor tend to be nonsystematic and informal in their fundamental concepts, and this is one reason why the neighbor has occasioned such complex and controversial histories of hermeneutical, ethical, and philosophical speculation. Mathematical accounts of neighboring, on the other hand, strive to formalize concepts such as adjacency, connectedness, and approximation by means of such fundamental set theoretical distinctions as that between parts or regions of a set, on the one hand, and groups of particular elements or members of a set, on the other.

These three meanings fused ( some would say confused ) in the English word “neighbor” are distinguished by two or more terms in other European languages. The religioethical Neighbor of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is usually translated as prochain in French—“Tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-même” ( Ostervald, Traduction de la Bible, 1724 ) and Nächste in German—“Du sollst deinen Nächsten lieben wie dich selbst” ( Luther, Biblia, das ist, Die gantze Heilige Schrifft, Deudsch, 1545 ). Prochain derives from proche, meaning “close” or “nearby,” from the vulgar Latin propeanus and the classical prope. In the New Vulgate translation, the neighbor of Leviticus 19:18 is proximum, the “closest” ( although in earlier Latin editions amicum, “friend,” was used ). The Greek term used already in the Septuagint is plêsion [πλησιον], also signifying nearness. The German Nächste is the substantive of the adverb nächstens, meaning “soon” or “near,” again implying physical proximity or temporal imminence. In German, der Nächste means generally “the next one” ( as in Du bist der Nächste, “You’re next” ), and specifically the neighbor to whom one is obligated, but it is not used to refer to the sociopolitical neighbor. This next-door neighbor is der Nachbar ( masc. ) and die Nachbarn ( fem. ), terms very close to the English “neighbor.” The French equivalents are le voisin ( masc. ) and la voisine ( fem. ), which come from the Latin vicinus, meaning “near” and derive from vicus, meaning “a quarter or district of a town.” The mathematical concept of neighboring often borrows the language of sociopolitical usages, so in French the word for a topological neighborhood is voisinage ( in German, however, a distinct word is used, Umgebung, meaning “surroundings” or “environment” ). In comparison with French and German, the English word “neighbor” may appear promiscuous in its condensation of three distinct semantic fields; but it also suggests the possibility of productive conceptual interimplications among the three ideas.

The original formulation “love your neighbor as yourself” ( v’ahavtah le’re’akha kamokha [וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ] ) in the Hebrew Bible ( Lv 19:18 ) has led to a complicated history of interpretations and a polemic between Judaism and Christianity. The verse is lexically and grammatically ambiguous: Who is referred to as “neighbor” ( re’a )? What is meant by “love” ( ahav )? And what is implied by the reflexive term “as yourself” ( kamokha )? The use of the preposition ל here, indicating “love to” rather than “love of” or “for” the neighbor, is unusual; and the particle ו that connects this line to the previous verse can imply equally conjunction ( and ) or disjunction ( or ), each involving distinct, even opposed, interpretive consequences. The word re’a [רֵעַ ]—usually but not invariably translated in this context as “neighbor”—derives from the primitive root ra’ah, which means to “pasture,” “tend,” “graze,” or “feed,” without the connotations of proximity that emerge in European languages. Re’a is used in a variety of senses in the Torah, and its reference in Leviticus 19:18 is unclear—does it apply exclusively to fellow Jews, or are other people included? The dominant strand of Jewish interpretation of the commandment, from Onkelos ( second century CE ) through Maimonides ( twelfth century ) up to the Emancipation ( 1848 ), has argued that re’a is limited here to other Jews; and indeed, in some of its other biblical appearances, the word seems to refer exclusively to fellow Israelites. But at still other points re’a is not confined in this way: in Exodus 11:2, for example, re’a refers to the Jews’ Egyptian neighbors; elsewhere it seems to figure idolaters or even idols ( Jer 3:1 ), and in Psalm 139 it seems to signify “thought” or “will.” Modern Jewish commentators ( cf. Simon ) have argued for a broader understanding of Leviticus 19:18, often citing the thirteenth-century French rabbi Menachem Ha-Meiri as evidence of a universalist ethics of the neighbor in Judaism, but this may in part be due to pressure from competition with Christianity.

It is not surprising that Christianity, in its Pauline mission to the Gentiles, presents an expansive interpretation of the Neighbor. Already in the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke ( 10:25–37 ), the question, who is my neighbor? ( kai tis estin mou plêsion [και τις εστιν μου πλησιον] ) seems controversial: in contrast with the Kohen and the Levite, who pass by without helping a “half dead” man in the road ( perhaps due to religious prohibitions against priestly contact with a corpse? ), the Samaritan—an Abrahamic sect with heterodox beliefs and practices, hence similar to Christianity—assists the injured man with unlimited generosity, instituting an almost saintly paradigm of the good neighbor, one that is implicitly opposed to Jewish legalism and tribalism. Beyond its polemical function, the parable has significant philosophical implications: first, it poses the neighbor as a question—that is, as a topic for debate, a problem, or idea—moreover, one with political implications, in the suggested politico-theological opposition of Judaism and Christianity as particularist and universalist communities. Second, the neighbor here is now a subjective position, which is expressed as the imperative of becoming a neighbor rather than treating others as neighbors—a dialectical inversion of earlier biblical references, where the neighbor was invariably presented as a grammatical and ethical object. If the question at the beginning of the parable is, who is the neighbor ( whom I should love )? by the conclusion, the question is implicitly reframed as, who am I ( who should love my neighbor )?

While Christianity tends to expand the inclusiveness of the category of neighbor, it also limits or focuses the sense of “love” in the Levitical verse by translating it into Greek as agape ( caritas in Latin; both words are often translated into English as “charity” ), which does not have the sexual implications of eros or the philosophical sense, beginning with Aristotle, of philia. The Hebrew word that appears in the injunction, ahav [אְַהָב], is used for all kinds of love, from erotic to spiritual, from the most illicit to the most hallowed. The rabbinic tradition has been especially elaborate in its accounts of the vast number of particular duties implied by “love” in Leviticus 19:18, including acts intended to alleviate the suffering of others, to increase other people’s enjoyment, and to minimize the friction of everyday social relations. It is worth noting, too, the unexpected uses made of the commandment as a proof text in a number of Talmudic contexts, including discussions of sexual relations and capital punishment. In Tractate Niddah, for example, it is argued: “A man is forbidden to perform his marital duty in the day-time, for it is said, But thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But what is the proof? . . . He might observe something repulsive in her and she would thereby become loathsome to him” ( 17a ). And the imperative of establishing the least painful methods of execution is asserted in Tractate Kethuboth and elsewhere by citing the commandment: “Scripture said, But thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself—choose for him an easy death” ( 37b ). Although these references to Leviticus 19:18 are not presented as interpretations of the commandment, they suggest that the neighbor can accommodate both the most intimate and the most public interpretations and that ambivalence and even death are by no means foreign to its account of neighbor love.

In the Gospels, the injunction to love the neighbor is always paired with that to love God ( from Dt 6:5 ), and the two commandments are frequently linked in later Christian accounts of neighbor-love, as well as in numerous Jewish sources, as the supreme religioethical principle. Saint Augustine argues that the naturally occurring love of self must be transformed or corrected by love of God, and only then can we love our neighbor appropriately. Hannah Arendt points out that for Augustine it is only from the perspective of a self-love that has passed through self-denial that authentic neighbor-love is possible: “It is not really the neighbor who is loved in this love of the neighbor—it is love itself” ( Love and Saint Augustine ). Arendt argues that for Augustine, neighbor-love does not establish the natural community of a neighborhood but instead isolates both the neighbor and the self, who are alone together with God.

For philosophy the most important Christian account of neighbor-love, however, is Saint Paul’s: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments . . . are summed up [anakephalaioutai ( ανακεφαλαιουται )] in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling [plêrôma ( πληϱωμα, )] of the law” ( Rom 13:8–10 ). In calling neighbor-love the “summation,” or literally, “recapitulation” of the law, Paul is repeating the rabbinic commonplace, associated as well with Jesus, that it represents the moral essence of Judaism, as it will in Christianity. But when Paul calls neighbor-love the “fulfilling” of the law, he is saying something much more radical. This notion of plêrôma has often been taken as a key statement of Christian supersessionism, the assertion that Jewish “law” ( and Judaism as such ) is replaced by Christian “love,” as the conclusion of an earlier moment and the imminence of a new one. According to Giorgio Agamben, Paul’s account of neighbor-love as plêrôma is a process that leads not to epochal transformation but rather to the fulfillment of the law in each moment, “a messianic recapitulation, something inseparable from the messianic fulfillment of times.” Alain Badiou argues that Paul reduces the multiplicity of the law to the single injunction to love the neighbor insofar as it avoids the law’s dialectics of prohibition and transgression in its pure positivity and because “it will require faith in order to be understood . . . because prior to the Resurrection, the subject, having been given up to death, has no good reason to love himself.” For Badiou, self-love, in its fidelity to the event of the resurrection, instantiates a subject; to love the neighbor “as yourself” thus is the work of a faithful subject whose love enacts the “force of salvation.” In his 1987 lectures on Paul, Jacob Taubes emphasized Paul’s disconnection of the commandments to love God and the neighbor in this passage; Paul’s exclusion of love of God, Taubes argues, must be understood as an “absolutely revolutionary act,” the critique of the function of God the Father, anticipating both Nietzsche and Freud and opening a new political theology of the neighbor.

From the eighteenth century, philosophy has taken up the biblical tradition of the Neighbor, often as an emblem of ethical reason as such. In The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ( 1785; in Practical Philosophy ), Kant presents neighbor-love as a paradigm of practical reason based on the will, rather than mere inclination. In the Critique of Practical Reason ( 1788 ), he claims that neighbor-love is not only a particular “law of love” but also the “kernel of all laws,” the expression of the asymptotic goal of “the moral disposition in its complete perfection”—the “love for the law” ( 5:83–84 ). And in the Metaphysics of Morals ( 1797 ), echoing the common complaint that love cannot be commanded, Kant argues that neighbor-love must be understood as a practice of “benevolence ( practical love ),” not an affective state. Nevertheless, Kant grants the injunction to love the neighbor the status of a metaethical principle and calls it one of the fundamental “subjective conditions” of the concept of duty ( 6:399 ). As “the duty to make others’ ends my own ( provided only that these are not immoral ),” neighbor-love for Kant expresses the duty of Duty itself, beyond any particular religious conviction or ethical objective ( 6:450 )—indeed, Kant barely mentions the neighbor in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone ( 1793 ), as if the topic rightfully belongs to philosophy.

For Hegel, however, Kant’s account of ethics and neighbor-love, remains, we might say, “too Jewish.” In The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate ( 1799; in On Christianity ), Hegel criticizes “Kant’s profound reduction of what he calls a ‘command’ ( love God first of all and thy neighbor as thyself ) to his moral imperative.” For Jesus, Hegel argues, neighbor-love is “a command in a sense quite different from that of the ‘shalt’ of a moral imperative.” Kant’s imperative, like the notion of a commandment in Judaism, implies a split between an “is” and an “ought” ( as well as “reason” and “inclination” ); neighbor-love, however, is purely an is ( ein Sein ), or what Hegel calls, in a remarkable phrase, “a modification of life” ( eine Modifikation des Lebens ), and is formulated as a commandment only because life requires form in order to be expressed. In the subsection on “Observing Reason” in Phenomenology of Spirit ( 1807 ), Hegel returns to neighbor-love as an example of reason’s claims for “immediate ethical certainty” ( parallel with his earlier discussion of consciousness’s “sense-certainty” ): “Another celebrated commandment is ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ It is directed to the individual in his relationship with other individuals and asserts the commandment as a relationship between two individuals, or as a relationship of feeling [Empfindung].” But this “feeling” must involve an act, and this act must be reasoned, in the service of my neighbor’s well-being [Wohl]: “I must love him intelligently” ( ich muß ihn mit Verstand lieben ). The immediacy and necessity claimed for the commandment are imperiled by the impossibility of knowing the conditions of my neighbor’s well-being with any certainty; indeed, Hegel argues, only the state can determine the nature of “intelligent, substantial beneficence” ( verständige wesentliche Wohltun ), and the individual’s act of neighbor-love is both trivial in comparison with the state’s and always potentially in conflict with it. Hence, as a commandment, neighbor-love is merely an empty, formal universality; any content given to it is contingent and uncertain. But while the commandment cannot claim concrete universality, Hegel insists that “in its simple absoluteness, it represents immediate ethical being [unmittelbares sittliches Sein],” prior to and in excess of the empty oppositions between subject and object, content and form, as well as individual and state.

This tension between formal universality and immediate ethical being is played out in the nineteenth century and later. Of special note is Kierkegaard’s lengthy discussion in Works of Love ( 1847 ), which is organized into three inflections of the commandment: “You shall love,” “You shall love the neighbor,” and “You shall love the neighbor.” For Kierkegaard, neighbor-love is the only form of love that is essentially free, paradoxically, because it is commanded. Whereas erotic love and friendship are bound to the compulsions of desire and the vicissitudes of affection, the imperative to love the neighbor liberates the subject, who must make a radical and existential decision, either “preferential love” or neighbor-love. This choice, moreover, is the condition of possibility of any authentic form of love, including “self-love,” which is limited by neighbor-love rather than by its foundation. In its uncanny proximity, the neighbor questions the self-identity of both subject and object. The neighbor, Kierkegaard writes, “in itself is a multiplicity,” unlike the necessary individuality of the friend or the lover; the neighbor, moreover, is generic, without the particularity that characterizes the object of preferential love. Hence some commentators ( including Adorno ) have accused Kierkegaard of eliminating the neighbor as a living person altogether, leaving only the abstract idea of “the human”; indeed, Kierkegaard argues that the most unselfish and freest love is for the dead, who have none of the distracting traits of living individuals. In an essay from 1940, Adorno argues that the “impotent mercifulness,” “severed from social insight,” of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of neighbor-love reflects the failure of social relations in modernity, “the deadlock which the concept of the neighbor necessarily meets today. The neighbor no longer exists.”

In later modernity, we find increasing suspicion of the injunction to love the neighbor—that it is an ideological ruse, the very motto of bad faith. For Nietzsche, neighbor-love is symptomatic of the failure of self-love: “Your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves,” both narcissistic and self-loathing. Rather than love of the neighbor, Nietzsche follows philosophical tradition by urging love of the friend—not, however, because the friend is “closer” to the subject than the neighbor—indeed, if anything the neighbor is too close: “Do I recommend love of the neighbor to you? I prefer instead to recommend flight from the neighbor [Nächsten-Flucht] and love of the farthest [Fernsten-Liebe]. . . . I wish you were unable to stand all these neighbors and their neighbors [allerlei Nächsten und deren Nachbarn] . . . [T]hose farther away pay for your love of your neighbor; and even when you are together five at a time, always a sixth one must die” ( Thus Spoke Zarathustra ). Nietzsche argues that neighbor-love is unjust: to love this neighbor is always to sacrifice some other neighbor who happens to be farther away; but even more, neighbor-love gives up on “the farthest”—the possibility of encountering the new, the unknown, the yet to come. As if reformulating the Levitical injunction, Nietzsche writes, “Let the future and the farthest be for you the cause of your today: in your friend you shall love the overman as your cause” ( in deinem Freunde sollst du den Übermenschen als deine Ursache lieben ). In its distance, the friend is the locus of the coming “overman,” who is not an idealization of the specular “self” but rather the “cause” of what the subject may become.

If for Nietzsche the neighbor is too close, for Freud, the neighbor is too distant, not near enough to one and one’s interests, and thus undeserving of love. In his impassioned critique of neighbor-love in Civilization and Its Discontents, he writes, “My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. . . . If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. . . . He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him” ( Standard Edition, 21:109 ). Love is narcissistic for Freud, hence one both can and must love only those with whom one can identify, insofar as there is a limited economy of love and to squander it recklessly would be irresponsible and at the expense of those with a rightful claim to it. Moreover, the call to neighbor-love conceals the truth of civilization’s “discontents,” the aggressivity in excess of any self-interest or economy: “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that . . . their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him” ( Standard Edition, 21:111 ).

For Freud and Nietzsche, the injunction to neighbor-love emblematizes the ethical and social contradictions that fret the project of Enlightenment and hence requires ironic unmasking as ideology. But the intensity of their critical attention and the striking degree of animus that fuels it suggests that the neighbor is not merely one more moral cliché among many but instead a special source of anxiety and trauma, to be returned to as a resource for thinking. For a series of philosophers and psychoanalysts in later modernity, including Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Lacan, this disturbing element in the neighbor and the injunction to neighbor-love exceeds the dialectics of religion and secular reason precisely as the residue of those logics and as something caught up in them but not fully explainable in the terms of either.

In his seminar of 1959–60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests that Freud’s critique of neighbor-love reveals a fundamental truth about jouissance, the traumatic enjoyment that the subject both repudiates and secretly treasures. Lacan connects Freud’s discussion of the Neighbor in Civilization and Its Discontents with his account of the Nebenmensch—literally the “next person,” the first other encountered by the subject—in his early Project for a Scientific Psychology ( Standard Edition, vol. 1 ). At the heart of the Nebenmensch is what Freud calls das Ding, the unsymbolizable “thing” that constitutes the kernel of exteriority, the other’s jouissance, at the heart of subjectivity. Lacan argues that Freud repudiates the commandment to love the neighbor not merely as naïve or impractical but also as a manifestation of the “obscene” demands of the superego for excessive enjoyment. It is this account of the neighbor that allows Lacan to formulate an ethics of psychoanalysis that avoids the problematic ( discovered by Saint Paul ) that the moral law itself produces desire and transgression in its very attempt to limit them. In this ethics, to love the neighbor’s jouissance as one’s own would be to encounter the strangeness of one’s desire. More recently, Lacan’s account of the neighbor has been a recurrent topic in the work of Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. Žižek’s numerous essays, talks, and chapters on the topic express his ambivalence: “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face”; “Love Thy Neighbor? No Thanks!”; “Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself”; and “The Only Good Neighbor is a Dead Neighbor!” For Žižek, as well as for Santner and Reinhard, however, the neighbor persists as a key locus of political theological insight even after its disenchantment and death in modernity.

In this work on the political theology of the neighbor, Lacan is supplemented by that of the German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. The figure of the neighbor is an exemplary locus for what Rosenzweig calls “the new thinking,” which is in excess of the dialectic of faith and reason. In The Star of Redemption ( 1919 ), Rosenzweig sees neighbor-love as the purely human means of enacting redemption according to the two paths represented by Judaism and Christianity. The “Jewish” mode of neighbor-love involves the instantaneous transformation of love of self into love of the neighbor, which thereby immediately realizes eternity; the “Christian” mode is the world-historical expression of redemption through the progressive expansion of local congregations into universal empire. In each case, the neighbor is the “anyone” whose proximity is coordinate with the imminence of redemption, which is always “not yet” and ever unfolding “from one neighbor to the next neighbor.” Rosenzweig’s ideas on the neighbor respond to those of his teacher, Hermann Cohen, one of the founders of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. In Religion of Reason ( 1919 ), Cohen tried to reconcile Jewish legalism with Kantian ethics. Cohen had already vigorously defended the universalism of the Jewish account of the neighbor in 1888, when he testified in a defamation suit against an anti-Semitic school teacher who had claimed that Judaism authorizes discrimination against Gentiles; this testimony along with three other essays of Cohen’s on the neighbor were collected and published by Martin Buber after Cohen’s death.

Buber’s own reflections on the neighbor and the “I–Thou” relationship were in turn influential in Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the neighbor ( although Levinas was critical of the reciprocity of Buber’s model ). The neighbor is a crucial topic in both Levinas’s “Jewish” and “philosophical” writings, including his major work, Otherwise Than Being ( 1974 ), in which it represents an originary proximity that determines the subject as responsible and fundamentally indebted to the other: “Proximity is thus anarchically a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality. What concretely corresponds to this description is my relationship with my neighbor. . . . [I]t is an assignation of me by another, a responsibility with regard to men we do not even know.” For Levinas, the neighbor figures the preontologically ethical constitution of the subject in its nonreciprocal relationship to the other. According to Levinas, the obligation to love the neighbor is a debt that can never be amortized and for which I am unjustly persecuted: no person can take my place and assume my ethical burden, but I am called to assume the place of all other neighbors. For Levinas, the radical asymmetry of the relationship to the religioethical Neighbor must be distinguished from the equality and interchangeability that define sociopolitical neighbors; in this sense, the injunction to love the neighbor is both descriptive and prescriptive—it is both the condition of subjectivity as such and an imperative to sociopolitical action.

Levinas’s account of the neighbor can be understood as a critique of Heidegger’s notion in Being and Time of Mitsein, or “being-with,” which, many critics have argued, is not for Heidegger a social or ethical relation but rather the originary structure of Dasein. In his later work, the proximity of Mitsein develops into a discourse of nearness, the neighbor, and the neighborhood—concepts that do not readily correspond to the ideas of the neighbor we have described so far but which we might call ontological neighboring. As Derrida points out, whereas in Being and Time the “nearness” of Dasein to being is ontic, in Heidegger’s later writings proximity is ontological: “Whence, in Heidegger’s discourse, the dominance of an entire metaphorics of proximity . . . a metaphorics associating the proximity of Being with the values of neighboring, shelter, house, service, guard, voice, and listening” ( “The Ends of Man” ). In the “Letter on Humanism” ( 1946 ), for example, Heidegger writes that “man is the neighbor of being” ( Der Mensch ist der Nachbar des Seins; Basic Writings ), and in “The Nature of Language” ( 1957 ), he writes that “Thinking . . . goes its ways in the neighborhood of poetry. It is well, therefore, to give thought to the neighbor, to him who dwells in the same neighborhood” ( On the Way to Language ). Derrida criticizes Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s proximity as merely one more version of humanism, the “proper” of man, and asks, “Is not this security of the near what is trembling today?” The theme of the neighbor persists in Derrida’s writings, including his posthumous The Animal That Therefore I Am ( 2006 ), where he criticizes the tradition, from Aristotle to Heidegger, of regarding animals as “all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers.” Derrida suggests that animals epitomize the uncanny otherness of the neighbor: “[N]othing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbor or of the next ( -door ) than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.”

The mathematical concept of the neighborhood is central to a series of key oppositions that run through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, including that between “striated” ( or metric ) and “smooth” ( or nonmetric ) spaces in A Thousand Plateaus ( Mille plateaux, 1980 ). These oppositions derive in part from Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot’s distinction between hierarchical “arborescent” societies ( which they describe via the so-called friendship theorem, where, for any group of “friends,” there is exactly one “dictator” who coordinates the system and is everyone’s “friend” ) and “acentered,” or nonmetric “rhizomatic” systems based on neighbors, “in which,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, “communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment.” Unlike the static system of “friends” ( which Deleuze and Guattari associate with the classical “philo-sopher” ), a neighborhood is a becoming, “a zone of proximity [zone de voisinage] and indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity [le voisinage] of the other—and the border-proximity [voisinage-frontière] is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance.” In What Is Philosophy? ( 1991 ), Deleuze and Guattari propose a “geophilosophy” of neighbors: if the Greek philosophical society of “friends” leads to the capitalist society of “brothers,” geophilosophy organizes itself in terms of neighbors: “a concept is a heterogenesis—that is to say, an ordering of its components by zones of neighborhood.”

If for Deleuze and Guattari a concept as such is a “neighborhood,” a loose assemblage of valences and vectors, for Badiou the neighborhood is a particular concept, with precise mathematical and political implications. In Theory of the Subject, Badiou develops the mathematical idea of the neighborhood into a dialectical materialism through the distinction between algebra and topology ( 1982; from seminars delivered in 1975–79 ). For Badiou, materialism involves two types of dialecticity drawn from mathematics: the algebraic disposition, based on identity, belonging, and reflection; and the topological disposition, based on the asymptote, adherence, and the remainder. Algebra, which is a “combinatory materialism,” studies the relations between the elements of a set according to laws of “composition” ( such as association or commutativity ) in terms of the belonging or membership of elements. Topology, according to Badiou, arises from the need to grasp movement and place in order to specify concepts such as location, approximation, continuum, and differential. Rather than individual elements, topology examines parts or subsets; it aims at “what happens when one investigates the site of a term, its surrounding, that which is more or less ‘near’ to it. . . . If the master concept of algebra is that of the law ( of composition ), topology is based on the notion of neighborhood.” Whereas algebra is a science of identifying and naming a particular element, topology involves dis-identification or de-particularization: what applies to one point in a topology must also apply to other neighboring points. Topology does not describe individual elements but rather collectives; in a “neighborhood,” Badiou writes, “the element is the point of flight for a series of collectives. The individual has no other name than its multiple adherences” ( Theory of the Subject ). The notion of locating elements in overlapping clusters as “neighborhoods” tends toward the “expansion of the local” as more and more elements are potentially each other’s “neighbor.” Badiou makes the political implications of this model explicit: “the working class may be the first neighborhood—already very vast—of a factory revolt. You will thus obtain . . . wider neighborhoods. . . . The intersection of these two neighborhoods is nothing less than the form of internationalism immanent to the term ‘revolt’ ” ( Theory of the Subject ). The topological concept of a neighborhood thus suggests a principle of political collectivization other than citizenship ( whose models are paternal and fraternal and based on genealogy and friendship ): the neighbor is not a “member” of a state defined by socioeconomic coordinates but is, instead, a part of a loosely aggregated neighborhood.

Badiou’s account of the potentially infinite expansion of the neighborhood involves Paul Cohen’s concept of a “generic” set produced by the technique known as “forcing” ( ideas that are central in Badiou’s Being and Event. ) By “forcing” a “generic extension” of a set, a new set is produced that is nonconstructable, that is without external unifying predicates—thus not a proper set at all under Gödel’s criterion of constructability. As its name suggests, a generic set is only minimally described: “[T]he generic essentially resembles the topological, which . . . disindentifies the element in favor of its neighborhoods” ( Theory of the Subject ). In political terms, Badiou associates such a “forced” generic neighborhood with the possibility of the proletariat itself. If a generic set is a neighborhood in which individual elements are indiscernible and the limit function is approximate, the authentically political neighborhood is essentially generic, an open collective whose parts are always in excess of its members. In the final chapter of Theory of the Subject, “Topologies of Ethics,” Badiou proposes an ethics of exposure, of openness, where “justice” and “courage” are presented as functions of the neighborhood: justice relativizes the law—it arises from the “topologization of algebra,” in which “the neighborhood subordinates the elementary to itself. Justice is the blurring of places, the opposite, therefore, of the right place.” Courage, on the other hand, interrupts the relativized law for the sake of the excess, the remainder, “thus dividing the prescription of the place by completely investing its neighborhoods. All courage amounts to passing through there where previously it was not visible that anyone could find a passage.” Finally, Badiou’s topological concept of the virtues of the neighborhood provides a precise model for the political idea called communism: the neighbor is the subject of communism, subtracted from the state—the common or generic subject, whose adherences are minimally specified and infinitely expansive.

Kenneth Reinhard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor. “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences. 8 ( 1940 ): 413–29.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

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

Arendt, Hannah. Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998.

Augustine, Saint. On Christian Doctrine. Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 2009.

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

   . Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009.

Berger, Thomas. The Feud. New York: Little Brown, 1989.

   . Neighbors. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

Cohen, Hermann. Der Nächste: Vier Abhandlungen über das Verhalten von Mensch zu Mensch nach der Lehre des Judentums. Saarbrücken, Ger.: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2006.

   . Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Atlanta: American Academy of Religion, 1995.

DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Athlone Press, 2002.

   . A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

   . What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louis Mallet, translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

   . “The Ends of Man.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Edelman, Gerald. Topobiology: An Introduction To Molecular Embryology. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey et al. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74.

George, Nick, and Milt Schaffer. The New Neighbor ( a Donald Duck cartoon ). Directed by Jack Hannah. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Productions, 1953.

Hausdorff, Felix. Set Theory ( Grundzuge der Mengenlehre ). Berlin: Springer, 2002.

Hegel, Georg W.F. On Christianity: Early Theological Writings. Translated by T. M. Knox. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961.

   . Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Modern Classics, 2008.

   . “The Nature of Language.” In On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper Collins, 1982.

Hilbert, David. The Foundations of Geometry. Translated by E. J. Townsend. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1910.

Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong. Vol. 16 of Kierkegaard’s Writings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998.

Lynch, David, director. Blue Velvet. Wilmington, NC: De Laurentis Entertainment Group, 1986.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Reinhard, Kenneth. “The Ethics of the Neighbor: Universalism, Particularism, Exceptionalism.” The Journal of Textual Reasoning 4 ( November 2005 ). http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/tr/volume4/TR_04_01_e01.html

Ricœur, Paul. “The Socius and the Neighbor.” In History and Truth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910.

   . Das Stunden-Buch; Geschichten vom lieben Gott. 1900/1904. In Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Vol. 2, Gedichte II. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag 2003.

Rosenstiehl, Pierre, and Jean Petitot. “Automate asocial et systèmes acentré.” Communications 22 ( 1974 ): 45–62.

Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. “Assessing ‘Neighborhood’ Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 ( 2002 ): 443–78.

Shafi, Maulana Mufti Muhammad. Maariful Qur’an. Translated by Mufti Taqi Usmani. 8 vol. Karachi, Pakistan: Maktaba Darul-Uloom, 1998–2003.

Simmel, Georg. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1908.

Simon, Ernst. “The Neighbor ( Re’a ) Whom We Shall Love.” In Modern Jewish Ethics: Theory and Practice, edited by Marvin Fox, 29–56. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975.

Sorkin, Michael, and Joan Copjec. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity. New York: Verso, 1999.

Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988.

Weber, Max. “The Neighborhood: An Unsentimental Economic Brotherhood.” In Vol. 1 of Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 360–63. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Žižek, Slavoj, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

NEUZEIT / MODERNE ( GERMAN )

ENGLISH			modern times, modern age, modernity
FRENCH			temps modernes, âge moderne, modernité

  BAROQUE, BILDUNG, CLASSIC, HISTORY, PRESENT, ROMANTIC, SECULARIZATION, STATO, TIME

In contrast to the antiqui/moderni pair, the German Neuzeit is part of an idea of historical periodization that divides history into three ages: antiquity, Middle Ages, and Neuzeit. Since the nineteenth century the term has designated the period that follows the Middle Ages, a period that is fundamentally open to the present and whose temporal limits seem ill defined. Unlike die Moderne ( which French and English translate, as they do Neuzeit, by modernité, “modernity” ), which generally refers to the nineteenth century and more particularly to its aesthetics, Neuzeit, which was coined at the same time, indicates first of all the feeling of a profound change in all domains of life such as might have been experienced by the humanists of the “Renaissance” who were made the pioneers of this “modernity” ( Burckhardt ). The chronological extension of the term ranges, with many variations, from the Italian Renaissance to the century of industrialization, and indeed down to our own time.

Since Ranke proposed the historiographic practice and theory known as Historismus, the notion of Neuzeit has undergone additional differentiations ( into subperiods such as Frühe Neuzeit, jüngere Neuzeit, neueste Neuzeit ); on the other hand, Neuzeit correspondingly has lost its initial connotations and has become simply a term of historical periodization. It is in that form that the notion of Neuzeit was definitively established ( in the middle of the twentieth century ) in history, sociology, and the history of philosophy. It is also increasingly argued that this historical period should be closed by assigning it an end. Here, however, the debate becomes philosophical, and German then prefers to use the term Moderne, which usually shifts the discussion to the value of modernity. French has no way to render this shift in emphasis.

The first use of Neuzeit is found in the Grimm brothers’ dictionary ( 1884 ), where it is opposed to the Vorzeit ( literally, “the earlier period” ) and illustrated by a verse written by the young revolutionary Freiligrath in 1870, in which he describes himself as “a feverish and impassioned child of the Neuzeit who still longs a little for the older [time] ( die alte [Zeit] ).” Here the word expresses a feeling of renewal ( Neu-zeit, literally, “new time” ), an upheaval affecting all life and all people, contemporaries’ excitements and fears; it is applied to the present time, but it also situates the individual in the dynamics of history that carries everyone along with its forward thrust, that is, in general progress. In French this is rendered by the expression les temps modernes rather better than by the word modernité.

I. Neuzeit: The Historiographical Determinants

A series of events traditionally marks the beginning of the Neuzeit: the discovery of America in 1492, that is, the opening up of a closed world to a potentially infinite universe; Luther’s proclamation of his ninety-nine theses and the beginning of the Reformation in 1517; and the invention of the printing press. The interpretation of some of these events has given rise to intense debates, particularly in the case of the Reformation, in which Nietzsche saw a regressive protest against the Italian Renaissance ( The Antichrist, §61 ), and on which Troeltsch offered a more qualified judgment balancing the Reformation’s traditional ( that is, for him, Lutheran ) elements against the innovative ( Calvinist ) ones ( Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt, 1911 ).

However, a consensus among historians has emerged, defining the Neuzeit on the basis of a certain number of dominant traits inchoately emerging well before 1500, that enables us to discern a long-term historical configuration ( longue dureé ). Among these traits is the invention of printing and the consequent opening up of a “public space” ( Öffentlichkeit ): the communication media that were developed starting in the sixteenth century are described in German as neuzeitlich and not modern, the latter word being reserved for the technical innovations of industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this is usually added the transition from feudalism to a capitalist economic model, the development of a new social class—the bourgeoisie—and the formation of modern states. Various concepts have been tried out, associated, and opposed to provide a more complete explanation of this process of turning societies into states: in addition to the well-known processes of absolutism and “disciplinarization” ( Zivilisationsprozess, with the different nuances introduced into it by Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias ), the pair formed by the concepts of secularization and confessionalization ( Säkularisierung, Konfessionalisierung ) ( see SECULARIZATION ) characterizes the whole of historical writing about the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and establishes itself as one of the most remarkable components of thinking about the Frühe Neuzeit.

II. Frühe Neuzeit, Neuere Zeit, Neueste Zeit: Problems of Periodization

Economic and political historians differentiate Neuzeit into three or four phases. The first, that of the Frühe Neuzeit, goes from about the time of the first Italian city-states to the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and led to a new order in Europe ( 1350–1650 ). The second phase is described as neuere Zeit or jüngere Neuzeit and is marked by the formation of a modern subject and the ideals of the Enlightenment. It is generally said to extend as far as the French Revolution, emphasizing the advent of the bourgeoisie as a historical actor. Industrialization and its effects constitute the essential trait of the third period, designated as neueste Zeit. This tautological redundancy ( neu, Neuzeit, neueste Zeit, etc. ) shows that the notion of Neuzeit always implies an awareness of the historical relativity of every period ( R. Vierhaus, “Vom Nutzen,” 14 ). Of these expressions only Frühe Neuzeit, which designates the period between about 1450 and 1650 and is sometimes extended as far as 1800, has been unanimously adopted.

The problems of defining and delimiting a Neuzeit period have led to extensive historiographical reflection. Thus, this concept has been connected with the notion of crisis ( Aston, Crisis in Europe ) and with the suggestion, made by Hans Blumenberg and others, that well-defined historical periods are separated by transitional periods. The idea of a “threshhold between periods” ( Aspekte der Epochenschwelle ) or even of a “threshold century” ( Vierhaus, ibid., 21 ), allows us to abandon the search for the exact limits of the Neuzeit and conceive it instead as a set of diverse changes and as a plural, open process ( ibid., 23 ). The same can be said of Reinhard Koselleck ( in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1: xiv–xv ); introducing the idea of a time when modernity was “getting into the saddle” ( Vorsattelzeit ), in which the “process of translating” “classical topoi” into “modern [neuzeitlich] conceptuality” took place, he makes a differentiation that other historians have adopted in their periodizations of German history ) ( cf. H. Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise ).

III. Neuzeit, Nature, and the Divine

The historiography of the Neuzeit accords a large place to the transformations of science. For Romano Guardini, the change in the notion of nature and the philosophy of nature is the essential characteristic of the Neuzeit ( Das Ende, 35ff. ). Drawing on Goethe, he considers modern man a stranger in the midst of nature, which no longer is, of course, in any way divine. Ernst Cassirer went so far as to make central to his thinking about the Neuzeit the idea of a modern individual who has to resituate himself in relation to this unknown universe ( Individuum und Kosmos ). For Cassirer, the Neuzeit begins somewhere between Nicolas of Cusa’s theory of knowledge and ignorance and Giordano Bruno’s materialism. Bruno is also one of the main figures of the Neuzeit for Hans Blumenberg ( Die Legitimität ), even though Blumenberg chooses the name of Copernicus to mark the turning point of modern times and the “pathos” of this revolution ( Die kopernikanische Wende and Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der Neuzeit, 343 ). Man is no longer at the center of the world; his “ex-centricity” entails his cosmological and theological deracination ( Entwurzelung ), compensated by a theoretical “curiosity” ( curiositas, theoretische Neugier ) that constitutes, as it were, the signature of the Neuzeit. The notion of Neuzeit is thus paired with that of secularization, which Blumenberg, in opposition to Carl Schmitt, seeks to liberate from a long tradition of interpretation that makes of it a “category of historical illegitimacy” ( Kategorie geschichtlichen Unrechts ).

See Box 1.

1

Vor tid, nutiden ( Danish )

These terms, which are rendered as “our time,” “the present time,” “the epoch,” and other analogous expressions, appear in almost all the works in which Kierkegaard characterizes his period. The latter is subjected to criticism for having lost the sense of the individual man’s ( Enkelte ) concrete possibilities because it has not undertaken the task of the “subjective existent thinker.” The “epoch” is dominated philosophically by speculation and socially by mass culture ( the press ). This also affects Christianity, Denmark’s official religion. Being aware of one’s times to the point of denouncing their vices is to confront the incomprehension of the present generation and abandon all hope of being admired.

The tactic to be adopted consists in deceiving one’s surrounding world ( “Mundus vult decipi, decipiatur ergo”: 2: 229, 9: 313, 16: 33 ), making them hear the voice of the isolated man who stigmatizes the failings of the epoch. Kierkegaard might have said, like Hamlet, “The time is out of joint.” But he would have done so without believing that he was called upon to “set it right.” For his “time,” he wants to be only a “corrective” ( correctiv ) ( 17: 276, 19: 43 ). Whether it is a matter of thought, literary mores, or religion, the task of the subjective thinker is simply to describe the stages of existence, their specific temporality, in order to make the reader “attentive” ( 14: 79, 86 ) to the dangers of “leveling” ( Nivellering ) ( 5: 153 ) and of jealousy that levels ( 8: 184, 202, 225 ). This is not unrelated to Heidegger’s analysis of mediocrity ( Durchschnittlichkeit ) or of “one” ( man ) and leveling ( Einebnung ) ( Sein und Zeit, §27 ).

Jacques Colette

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit.Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1963.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Skrifter. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. 26 vols. Copenhagen: Gad, 1997–. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. 26 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–1998.

IV. Neuzeit, Moderne

Although in German the adjective modern is replacing Neuzeit with increasing frequency, the substantive Moderne remains uniquely applicable to the historical period that begins around the middle of the nineteenth century. In addition, the concept of the Moderne appears along with the art and literature of this period, and its theorizations are always aesthetic in nature—from Friedrich Vischer, who sees in it “the union of the ancient and the romantic” ( Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft, §467 ), to Theodor Adorno, who describes modernity as “the art of the most advanced consciousness” ( Ästhetische Theorie, 57; on Baudelaire’s “beau moderne” and the philosophical interpretation of modernity, see Vincent Descombes, Philosophie, and Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs [1988] ). On the other hand, after World War II the word Neuzeit seems to have lost its optimistic connotations and has been reduced to a neutral historical term, whereas the word “modern” still reflects the idea of a positive progress. In the debate over postmodernity and neo-structuralism that flourished in Franco-German philosophical dialogue during the 1980s, it was the term Moderne that was used. The Moderne, setting aside the notions that are associated with it ( subjectivity, autonomy, self-foundation ) and the criticism that has been directed at them, is conceived fundamentally as a project, and this introduces into it a component of reflexivity that is absent in the notion of Neuzeit, at least in its current usage ( cf. Habermas, “Die Moderne,” 1980 ); this might be the philosophical specificity of Moderne in relation to Neuzeit. At a time when the project of modernity is being challenged, the fate of the notion of Neuzeit thus seems to have dwindled in philosophy and to retain its pertinence only in historiographical debates about the periodization of modernity. However, given the richness of these debates, it could be that the speculative power of the concept of Neuzeit will remain. Moreover, the originality of Blumenberg’s philosophical project can also be gauged by the maintenance of the term Neuzeit, which signals a different periodization of modernity by taking as its starting point the Renaissance rather than the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, unlike thinkers concerned with the Moderne. The difference between Blumenberg and Habermas thus begins with their choice of words. The problem of French modernité would then be that it cannot account for this bifurcation.

Gisela Febel

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. Ästhetische Theorie. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. In Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor: Aesthetic Theory. Edited and with introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Aston, T. H., ed. Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660. Introduction by Christopher Hill. New York: Basic Books, 1965.

Blumenberg, Hans. Aspekte der Epochenschwelle: Cusaner u. Nolaner. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976.

   . Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975. Translation by Robert M. Wallace: The Genesis of the Copernican World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

   . Die kopernikanische Wende. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965.

   . Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der Neuzeit. Mainz, Ger.: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1965.

   . Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. Translation by Robert M. Wallace: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.

Brentano, Franz. Geschichte der Philosophie der Neuzeit. Edited and with introduction by Klaus Hedwig. Hamburg: Meiner, 1987.

Brient, Elizabeth. The Immanence of the Infinite: Hans Blumenberg and the Threshold to Modernity. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002.

Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch. Edited by Konrad Hoffmann. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1985. Translation by S.G.C. Middlemore: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Introduction by Peter Gay. Afterword by Hajo Holborn. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Cassirer, Ernst. Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. 5th ed. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977. Translation by Mario Domandi: The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Introduction by Mario Domandi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963.

Descombes, Vincent. Philosophie par gros temps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989. Translation by Stephen Adam Schwartz: The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. “Postmoderne und das Ende der Neuzeit.” Vortrag 1992. Heidelberg, 1996. Audiocassette.

Guardini, Romano. Das Ende der Neuzeit: Ein Versuch zur Orientierung; Die Macht: Versuch einer Wegweisung. Mainz, Ger.: Matthias-Grünewald, 1989. Translation by Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke: The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation. Edited and with introduction by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen. Chicago: Regnery, 1968.

Habermas, Jürgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Translation by Frederick G. Lawrence: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Introduction by Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

   . “Die Moderne—ein unvollendetes Projekt.” In Kleine politische Schriften 1–4, 444–64. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980. Translation: “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” In Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Edited by Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, 38–58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

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

Koselleck, Reinhart. Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese des bürgerlichen Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.

   . “Neuzeit.” In Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. Translation by Keith Tribe: “Neuzeit.” In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 222–54. Introduction by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Der Antichrist. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 6. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980. Translation by Judith Norman: “The Anti-Christ.” In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 1–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

   . “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben ( Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung II ).” In Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen 1–4. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980. Translation by R. J. Hollingdale: “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life ( Second Untimely Meditation ).” In Untimely Meditations, 57–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Schilling, Heinz. Aufbruch und Krise: Deutschland 1517–1648. Berlin: Siedler, 1988.

   . Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1992.

Troeltsch, Ernst. Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1928. First published in 1911. Translation by W. Montgomery: Protestantism and Progress: The Significance of Protestantism for the Rise of the Modern World. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986.

Vierhaus, Rudolf. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil des Begriffs ‘Frühe Neuzeit.’ Fragen und Thesen.” In Frühe Neuzeit—Frühe Moderne? Forschungen zur Vielschichtigkeit von Übergangsprozessen. Edited by Rudolf Vierhaus. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1992.

Vischer, Friedrich Theodor. Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1975. First published in 1848.

NONSENSE

FRENCH			non-sens, absurdité
GERMAN			Unsinn, Sinnlosigkeit
SPANISH			disparate, sinsentido

  ABSURD, and ENGLISH, INGENIUM, NEGATION, PRINCIPLE, PROPOSITION, SENS COMMUN [COMMON SENSE, SENSUS COMMUNIS], SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPEECH ACT, TRUTH, WITTICISM

Why is it generally difficult to translate “nonsense” as the French expression non-sens? Why has it not been possible, until recently, to bring the “positive” dimension of “nonsense” into French or German? To answer these questions we have to examine the development of the expression, particularly in contemporary English, and the gradual explication and even philosophical rehabilitation of nonsense: to determine, so to speak, the different senses of non-sense. For the analytical tradition, it is particularly important to distinguish radical nonsense or the absurd ( cf. the German adjective unsinnig ) from a nonsense that is the absence of meaning or emptiness ( cf. Ger. sinnlos ) and which accordingly raises the question of a ( normative ) definition of the meaningful. But we can also try to move beyond this distinction, as did, in various ways, Wittgenstein’s grammatical philosophy.

I. Natural Conception / Philosophical Conception of “Nonsense”

We can distinguish, following Cora Diamond in her essay “What Nonsense Might Be,” two conceptions of nonsense. They are defined superficially by what “nonsense” is opposed to: “good sense” and “sense.” The English word “sense” has precisely these two uses ( cf. Jane Austen’s title, Sense and Sensibility, which is rendered in French by Raison et Sentiments, but which refers to both sense and the sensible; also recall the adjective “no-nonsense,” which means “solidly reasonable” ). “Sense” is thus the exact opposite of “nonsense,” and the identification of these two conceptions of nonsense in a single expression is no doubt characteristic of English.

Among the British empiricists, notably Hume, nonsense is opposed first of all to reason ( in the sense of “good sense,” “common sense” ); it is associated with the absurd and the ridiculous and sometimes simply with an absence of seriousness. Hume is fond of the expression “talking nonsense,” which he occasionally uses in a critical way:

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of witches or hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew any one that examined and deliberated about nonsense.

( Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, no. 188 )

Or again, in a letter to Strahan:

Since Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason; though indeed no particular Species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another; and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.

( Ibid., vol. 2, no. 455 )

The “natural” sense of nonsense is thus at first sight something like “absurd” or “contradictory.” In Leviathan, Hobbes identifies absurdity and nonsense: man has not only the privilege of reason, he writes, but also “the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject, but men only. And of men, those are of all most subject to it that profess philosophy” ( chap. 5 ). But Hobbes also develops an initial, quite elaborate linguistic theory of nonsense. He distinguishes between two types of nonsense in expressions:

One, when they are new, and yet their meaning not explained by definition; whereof there have been abundance coined by Schoolmen and puzzled philosophers. Another, when men make a name of two names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent. . . . For whensoever any affirmation is false, the two names of which it is composed, put together and made one, signifie nothing at all.

( Leviathan, chap. 4, §21–24 )

For example, the expressions “round quadrangle” or “incorporeal substance” are meaningless, “meere sound”; here we are dealing with radical nonsense, since Hobbes does not limit himself to saying that the expression refers to no object, that it has no meaning ( it is a “senselesse and insignificant word” ); it is empty, it signifies nothing.

Here we have a first glimpse of the transition from the natural conception ( nonsense = absurdity ) to a philosophical or linguistic conception of nonsense, the two conceptions remaining closely linked:

And therefore if a man should talk to me of a round quadrangle . . . or of free-Will, I should not say he were in an Errour ; but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, Absurd.

( Ibid., chap. 5, §22 )

For Hobbes, nonsense is a capacity of the human species ( “the privilege of Absurdity” ) that is as distinctive as the capacity for laughter ( cf. Leviathan, chap. 6 ); we will see that the two are not unrelated.

II. Philosophers and the Natural Conception of Nonsense

The natural conception is developed in Annette Baier’s article “Nonsense,” which presents six categories:

1. what is obviously false, and “flies in the face of the facts”;

2. semantic nonsense, that is, the case in which one doesn’t know what one is talking about, in which the utterance is “wildly inapposite”;

3. phrases that imply category mistakes; e.g.: “This stone is thinking about Vienna,” or this passage from Lewis Carroll: “He thought he saw a Garden-Door / That opened with a key; / he looked again, and found it was / A Double Rule of Three”;

4. word sequences that are composed of familiar terms but have an “oddball and unclear syntactical structure.” Thus the expression Carnap cites in the classification of nonsense he offers in his famous essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language”: “Caesar is and”;

5. statements that are produced by taking a “respectable” statement and replacing one or more of its words ( but not too many ) with meaningless words that cannot be translated into the familiar vocabulary, while at the same time retaining a recognizable structure. An example proposed by G. E. Moore: “Scott kept a runcible at Abbotsford”; another, by Carnap, in his Logical Syntax of Language: “Piroten karulieren elatisch”; and by Frege, in his Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie: “Jedes Anej bazet wenigstens zwei Ellah.” We see that these examples of nonsense arouse a certain creativity among philosophers, even those who are the least imaginative. The literary examples of this kind of nonsense are countless: obviously Lewis Carroll, or, in German, Christian Morgenstern ( what commentators call “nonsense lyrics” inspired by Mauthner; see Jacques Bouveresse, Dire et ne rien dire );

6. “Mere gibberish.”

Obviously it is conception 5, which was broadly exploited by Lewis Carroll, that is the most fascinating one from the translator’s point of view. The translations of Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” no doubt vary more than those of “normal” sentences, but they can be made without difficulty and in accord with well-defined rules, as is shown by the following example:

All mimsy were the borogoves.

( Tout flivoreux vaguaient les borogoves. )

( Parisot )

( Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux. )

( Warrin, in The Annotated Alice )

In reality, this category of nonsense illustrates the independence of meaning from syntax, as is shown by Chomsky’s ultrafamous example, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which, though nonsensical, can still be translated.

But category 4 is equally central for contemporary philosophical reflection: it is used in the philosophy of language to distinguish two types of nonsense, one radical ( category 6 ), and the other, a syntactical or categorical nonsense, which consists in putting together words that do not go together.

III. The Battle over Philosophical Nonsense

A. The substantial conception of nonsense

Philosophical nonsense is inseparable from the idea of linguistic rules that determine the limits of meaning, of what can be said. Many interpreters think they find such an idea in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus. But this is instead a later conception that can be found, for example, in the work of Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell, and it is radically different from the natural conception. It assumes that we have to mark off nonsense, that is, pseudo-propositions ( Scheinsätze ), from meaning, from what can be said.

In “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” Carnap distinguishes two kinds of meaningless pseudo-propositions:

i. those that contain one or more words without meaning;

ii. those that contain only words that have meaning but are arranged in such a way that no meaning emerges from them.

According to Carnap, metaphysical nonsense can sometimes be reduced to nonsense of type ( i ). But usually a metaphysician knows perfectly well what he means by each of his words, and the critique of metaphysics bears on nonsense of type ( ii ). Type ( i ) is pure nonsense; it is literally unintelligible. Type ( ii ) nonsense is substantial nonsense: we know what each part of the proposition means—the problem is the composite that they form.

In saying that the so-called statements [Sätze] of metaphysics are meaningless [unsinnig], we intend the word in its strictest sense . . . a sequence of words is meaningless if it does not, within a specified language, constitute a statement. It may happen that such a sequence of words looks like a statement at first glance; in that case, we call it a pseudo-statement.

( “Elimination of Metaphysics” )

For Carnap, logical syntax specifies which combinations of words are acceptable and which are not. The syntax of natural language allows the formation of nonsense ( ii ), in which there is a “violation of logical syntax.” Here we see the emergence of a specific, philosophical conception of nonsense:

Let us take as examples the following combinations of words:

1. “Caesar is and”

2. “Caesar is a prime number.”

Since ( 2 ) looks like a statement yet is not a statement, does not assert anything, expresses neither a true nor a false proposition, we call this word sequence a “pseudo-statement.” . . . This example has been so chosen that the nonsense is easily detectable. Many so-called statements of metaphysics are not so easily recognized to be pseudo-statements. The fact that natural languages allow the formation of meaningless sequences of words without violating the rules of grammar, indicates that grammatical syntax is, from a logical point of view, inadequate.

( Ibid. )

The nonsense thus obtained is not due to one or another word’s lack of meaning but rather to the meanings themselves that these words have and that fail to combine to “make sense.” The rules of ordinary language are different from the rules of logical or philosophical syntax. Thus for Carnap there are “varieties” of nonsense—not only the absurd or radical nonsense but also the logically impossible.

This so-called substantial conception of nonsense, apparently inspired by Wittgenstein and his idea of the “limits of meaning,” is in reality profoundly opposed to his conception of nonsense as sense.

B. Sinnlos/unsinnig

Frege and Wittgenstein have a conception much closer to the natural one and recognize only one kind of nonsense. This is what is called the austere conception of nonsense, and it can be opposed to Carnap’s substantial conception. Wittgenstein’s conception, particularly in the evolution from his earlier to his later philosophy, provides interesting perspectives.

The question of nonsense, including the question of the different kinds into which nonsense may be divided, becomes central in the philosophy of language starting with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his use of Frege’s definition of sense ( see SENSE, V ). Nonsense understood as an absence of meaning is at the center of the contemporary conception of logic. Frege identifies sense and thought ( Gedanke ), a thought being a special kind of sense, a propositional sense. The important point for Frege is not to conceive the sense/nonsense distinction on the model of the true/false distinction. There are true or false statements and thoughts: a statement is true ( or false ) when it expresses a true ( or false ) thought; but there is no thought without meaning nor a statement that is meaningless because it is supposed to express a meaningless thought. For Frege, there are no logically faulty thoughts: they are not thoughts at all. This idea is picked up by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, where it plays a central role in the definition of nonsense and the illogical: “Thought can never be of anything illogical [wir können nichts Unlogisches denken], since, if it were, we should have to think illogically [unlogisch denken]” ( 3.03, trans. Pears and McGuinness ).

Let us recall that the Tractatus’s goal is to determine the limits of language by the limits of nonsense:

Die Grenze wird also nur in der Sprache gezogen werden können und was jenseits der Grenze liegt, wird einfach Unsinn sein.

( It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. )

( Tractatus, preface, trans. Pears and McGuinness )

Scientific propositions alone are meaningful ( sinnvoll ). Tautologies and contradictions are meaningless ( sinnlos ) because they do not represent a given state of affairs, but they are not nonsense ( Unsinn ) because they are part of language and symbolism.

Tautologie und Kontradiktion sind sinnlos.

( Tautologies and contradictions lack sense. )

( Tractatus, 4.461, trans. Pears and McGuinness )

Tautologie und Kontradiktion sind aber nicht unsinnig.

( Tautologies and contradictions are not, however, nonsensical. )

( Ibid., 4.4611 )

Metaphysical propositions, however, are radically nonsensical ( unsinnig ):

Die meisten Sätze und Fragen, welche über philosophische Dinge geschrieben worden sind, sind nicht falsch, sondern unsinnig. Wir können daher Fragen dieser Art überhaupt nicht beantworten, sonder nur ihre Unsinnigkeit feststellen.

( Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. )

( Tractatus, 4.003, trans. Ogden and Ramsey )

As is shown by the enigmatic passage that ( almost ) concludes the Tractatus, it is of the utmost importance to understand that these propositions are not nonsensical, which does not mean that we must understand them: precisely, it is radically impossible to understand them. This is Wittgenstein’s text:

Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie—auf ihnen—über sie hinausgestiegen ist. ( Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist. )

Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.

( Ibid., 6.54 )

Here is the Ogden and Ramsey translation into English:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless [unsinnig], when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. ( He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed on it. )

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Compare Pears and McGuinness:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. ( He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it. )

He must transcend these propositions, then he will see the world aright.

For Wittgenstein, then, surmounting these propositions means recognizing them to be metaphysical and without meaning ( unsinnig ). Whence the temptation that long guided the reading of Wittgenstein’s work: it was thought that there was a kind of understanding of nonsense that showed itself instead of saying itself and that metaphysics had its paradoxical place in this “showing.” We cannot ignore the deliberately Kantian side of the Tractatus’s project. The goal is to set a limit ( Grenze ) to thought, in a project similar to that of a critique of pure reason: a resumption of the Kantian project ( drawing a line of demarcation between science and nonscience ), expressed here in terms of nonsense: setting the limits of sense ( see Strawson’s book on Kant’s first critique, The Bounds of Sense ) by delimiting the domain of what can be said. But such an approach falls far short of Wittgenstein’s project and his conception of nonsense, as the preface to the Tractatus shows:

[T]he aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thought: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable ( i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought ).

It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

( Trans. Pears and McGuinness )

One cannot set a limit to thinking because in order to do so, one would have to specify what cannot be thought, nonsense, and thus grasp it in some way in thought. But there can be no statements regarding what one cannot speak about, not even meaningless statements that might mean something if they had sense. Hence the limit will be set “within” language ( that this can be done is what the book is going to show ). Once this limit has been set, what remains beyond directly intelligible statements ( beyond scientific propositions ) will be pure nonsense. This means that Wittgenstein excludes precisely the idea that certain statements are nonsense but might nonetheless indicate something that cannot be said. There is therefore only one kind of unsinnig nonsense: it is the “austere” conception of nonsense.

What is the source of nonsense? Wittgenstein warns us against “the most fundamental confusions of which the whole of philosophy is full” ( 3.324 ). The philosopher often allows himself to be hypnotized by the existence of a single sign ( Zeichen ) for two objects. But the fact of sharing a sign cannot be considered characteristic of the objects themselves ( 3.322 ). What matters is not the sign itself, but rather that of which the sign is the perceptible side ( 3.32 ), namely, the “symbol” ( Symbol ), which determines the meaning of the proposition ( 3.31 ). Then how can the possibility of access to the symbol be conceived? Wittgenstein’s response is very important and constitutes the connection between his earlier and his later philosophies: “In order to recognize the symbol in the [am] sign we must consider the significant use [sinvoller Gebrauch]” ( 3.326 ).

This “significant use” is the only experience we have of meaning, and it is the criterion of what is and what is not nonsense. Thus, as early as the Tractatus, the borderline between sense and nonsense is determined by neither the “empirical content” of logical positivism nor a kind of transcendent authority that is supposed to set the limit of thought: it is determined by usage. In reality, the theory of usage that characterizes all of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is already present in the theory of nonsense in the Tractatus. An expression without meaning is an expression to which I, myself, do not give meaning.

Thus Wittgenstein explains “the correct method in philosophy”:

The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.

( Tractatus, 6.53, trans. Pears and McGuinness )

A statement without meaning is not a particular kind of statement: it is a symbol that has the general form of a proposition and that has no meaning because we have not given it one. This reduces the distinctions between sinnlos/bedeutungslos/unsinnig—which is nonetheless philosophically central. Here is Wittgenstein again: “Wird ein Zeichen nicht gebraucht, so ist es bedeutungslos. Das ist der Sinn der Devise Occams” ( 3.328 ). The standard French translation of this proposition, by Pierre Klossowski, renders nicht gebraucht as ne pas utilisé ( not used ). Etienne Balibar’s unpublished, much more careful translation has instead: “Un signe dont on n’a pas l’usage, n’a pas de signification non plus” ( A sign whose usage one does not have or know, also has no meaning ). Ogden and Ramsey translate Wittgenstein’s proposition this way: “If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam’s razor.” And Pears and McGuinness: “If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam’s maxim.” In translation, the range of senses covered by “Wird ein Zeichen nicht gebraucht,” extraordinarily, runs from “not used” to “use not known” to “not necessary” to “useless.”

We come back once again—both in Wittgenstein’s argument, and in our understanding of the different ways in which the Tractatus has been translated—to meaningful use ( sinnvoller Gebrauch ). But usage is not prescribed by anything other than usage itself. “We cannot give a sign the wrong sense” ( 5.4732, trans. Pears and McGuinness ).

No sense can be illegitimate ( unrecht ) once it is given, that is, as soon as we give sense to this or that sign. As for metaphysical nonsense, when the sign ceases to be used in conformity with its habitual usage, that does not mean that what has been said has defined a new use for it. It is in this absence of definition, not in the sense of a formal definition but in the sense of a factual absence of giving meaning, that nonsense arises.

That, as we have seen, is what Tractatus 6.53 ( trans. Ogden and Ramsey ) underscores: “[W]hen someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he has given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions.”

Nonsense as such then produces an elucidation: the person who understands the author of the Tractatus understands that his propositions are nonsense, and it is in understanding this that he is illuminated.

Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt. . . . Er muss diese Sätze überwinden.

( My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless. . . . He must surmount these propositions. )

( Ibid., 6.54 )

We must note here a slight strangeness in expression: we always think we remember this conclusion of Wittgenstein’s as “the person who understands these propositions understands that they are nonsense.” But what Wittgenstein wrote in a last-minute evasion is “he who understands me” ( welcher mich versteht ) ( our emphasis ). He thus chooses to draw attention to the difference between understanding someone and understanding what he says. It is a matter not only of understanding that Wittgenstein’s propositions are nonsense, but also of abandoning the idea of understanding them “qua nonsense.” The elucidation provided by this nonsense is the comprehension of their author—Wittgenstein.

C. Nonsense and language games

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein develops his conception of nonsense by concerning himself with another kind of nonsense that is connected with the fitting ( treffend ) character of an utterance in its context. It is important to situate this conception, as Diamond does, in relation to the earlier one. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy seeks to define “nonsense” by the absence of a “language game” ( Sprachspiel ) in which the expression can be used. “Nonsense” is thus defined once again but in a new sense, by usage.

When a statement is called senseless [ein Satz . . . sinnlos], it is not as it were its sense that is senseless [so ist nicht sein Sinn sinnlos]. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.

( Philosophical Investigations, §500 )

Or in a 1935 lecture ( in English ):

Though it is nonsense to say “I feel his pain,” this is different from inserting into an English sentence a meaningless word, say “abracadabra,” and from saying a string of nonsense words.

( Wittgenstein’s Lectures )

And thus we are tempted to see an evolution in Wittgenstein toward a more pragmatic conception of nonsense, defined no longer by rules of logic, but by rules of usage. In reality—and that is what is shown by the predominance and centrality of the idea of nonsense in his later philosophy as well—an expression that is misused, and hence is excluded from language, is nonsense; it is not a sense used in a way that is wrong, absurd, or inadequate. That is what some commentators ( like Charles Travis in The Uses of Sense ) define in the later Wittgenstein as sensitivity to significance in usage ( S-use sensitivity ): the meaning of a word is also defined by its later and possible uses. For Wittgenstein, whether in his early or his later philosophy, there is no intermediary between sense and nonsense, even if there are diverse kinds of nonsense, just as there are diverse kinds of meanings or ways of meaning.

IV. “Nonsense,” Witz, Philosophical Grammar, and Ordinary Language

Up to this point, we have examined nonsense in its “logical” and grammatical sense; it remains to consider poetic and comic nonsense, which we have already touched upon in relation to Lewis Carroll. How can we define the comic quality of nonsense? Specialists in nonsense as a literary genre generally resist the tendency to identify nonsense with an absence of sense: nonsense is instead the absence of a certain sense, for example, common sense or reason, that is subverted in nonsense.

In this context we can distinguish, following Wittgenstein, three uses of the notion of sense: ( 1 ) the primary notion of sense; ( 2 ) the notion of a secondary sense, proposed by Wittgenstein in §11 of the second part of the Philosophical Investigations ( e.g., the use of “fat” or “yellow” in the statements “Wednesday is fat” and “the vowel ‘e’ is yellow” ) and derived from the primary sense; ( 3 ) the complex of Sinnerlebnisse or Bedeutungserlebnisse ( experiences of meaning, which are central in the later Wittgenstein ) that accompany use and that, despite their name, are seen as nonlinguistic experiences. However, Bedeutungserlebnisse do not play a major role in the definition of poetic or comic nonsense. Thus we can define poetic or comic nonsense in the framework of a sensitivity to meaning and of a lived experience of meaning ( “das Erleben der Bedeutung,” that must be distinguished from Bedeutungserlebnisse ) ( see ERLEBEN )—which Wittgenstein has in mind in speaking of someone who is “meaning-blind,” incapable of feeling ( appreciating ) the humor of jokes. “If you didn’t experience the meaning of words, then how could you laugh at puns [Wortwitze]?” ( Letzte Schriften, vol. 1, §711 ).

The meaning-blind person ( Bedeutungsblind; cf. Remarks [Bemerkungen], vol. 1, §202 ) is indeed blind to nonsense—in any case to the specific type of nonsense that we find in poetry and humor and that thus has more to do with meaning than is commonly thought.

Wittgenstein remarks that “even a nonsense-poem [ein Unsinn-Gedicht] is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child” ( Philosophical Investigations, §282; Klossowski translates Unsinn-Gedicht into French as “un poème de ‘non-sens’ ” ).

Wittgenstein compares three statements—“a newborn child has no teeth,” “a goose has no teeth,” and “a rose has no teeth”—and notes that even if the last seems truer or more certain that the other two, it seems less meaningful. However, there is always a way to give it meaning by imagining adequate conditions of use ( Philosophical Investigations ). In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, there are no inherently meaningless expressions or ones to which we cannot give meaning, only expressions to which we do not want to give meaning: we can give them one, someday, and include them in a language game. Every combination of words can, if we wish, be “put into circulation.” From this point of view, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy no longer has anything to do with a normativism of meaning and opens the way toward a positivity of nonsense.

The new attention Wittgenstein gives to the ordinary facts of grammar and language makes him particularly sensitive to nonsense, to Witz and wordplay, and to their meaning. He notes: “Aptitude for philosophy resides in the ability to receive a strong and lasting impression from a fact of grammar” ( Big Typescript ).

This aptitude also determines the capacity for humor, and more particularly for wit, because it draws our attention to curious properties of language. Wittgenstein cites Lichtenberg in this connection and takes an interest in how we understand Lewis Carroll’s poems.

Let us consider the witty meaning [witzige Bedeutung] that we give to Carroll’s grammatical games. I could ask: why do I think a grammatical word-play [Witz] is profound in a certain sense? ( And this is naturally philosophical profundity. )

( Wiener Ausgabe, vol. 3, quoted in Bouveresse, Dire et ne rien dire )

Wittgenstein discerns the proximity between Witz and philosophy in their common ability to appreciate, as it were, the salt of language. He is supposed to have once said that one could imagine a philosophical work consisting entirely of jokes ( without, for all that, being facetious ). The Witz is another, more amusing way of “knocking one’s head against the barrier of language”—a task that defines philosophy. This is how Jacques Bouveresse puts it:

A philosophical proposition and a grammatical Witz both have a direct relation to the question of the limits of meaning, and seem to be opposed to each other a little as the pleasure of nonsense is to what might be called by contrast the pain, impotence, and frustration of nonsense. It has been said that the witticism, as analyzed by Freud, could be considered a successful lapsus. Wittgenstein sometimes seems to suggest that a philosophical proposition might resemble an involuntary witticism.

How can Witz draw our attention to language and yet have a profundity of the same kind as that of grammar itself? It is because it is characterized precisely by the impossibility of determining what constitutes the comic—the container or the content, thought or language:

We receive from joking remarks a total impression in which we are unable to separate the share taken by the thought-content from the share taken by the joke-work. . . . We do not know what pleases us and what we are laughing about.

( Freud, Jokes, 8:94 )

The Freudian theory of wit maintains that the joke, which begins as simple play, is rapidly put into the service of the inclinations and drives of psychic life that have to overcome obstacles and inhibitions to express themselves. It is clear that this has something in common with philosophy, particularly when it becomes grammatical and shows the inseparability of thought and language. This transition to grammar is inseparable from a certain nonsense or even buffoonery: we find with pleasure in Wittgenstein efforts to transgress the rules of the grammar of language in the broad sense ( of its usages ), which draw our attention precisely to these rules. “Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest?” ( Philosophical Investigations, §250 ). Another example Wittgenstein gives is that of someone who writes at the top of an official document: “Place: here. Date: now.” Here again this attention to nonsense and the equivocal may remind us of Freud. Freud observes that “Jokes do not, like dreams, create compromises; they do not evade the inhibition, but they insist on maintaining play with words or with nonsense unaltered,” presenting it as meaningful. “Nothing,” he continues,

distinguishes jokes more clearly from all other psychical structures than this double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech. From this point of view at least the authorities come closest to an understanding of the nature of jokes when they lay stress on “sense in nonsense [Sinn im Unsinn].”

( Freud, Jokes )

For Freud the “joke-work” ( Witzwerk ) consists precisely in finding sense in nonsense and thus in giving a meaning, not discovering it. Freud defines Witz as “sense in nonsense” ( see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED and INGENIUM, Box 3 ). Superficial nonsense is used in the Witz to express a thought that is important but that one does not necessarily want to, or cannot, approach. The Witz is thus never radical nonsense ( Unsinn as defined above ). An explicit contradiction or obvious falsity cannot constitute a witticism: “The scandal begins when the police put an end to it” ( Kraus ); or, to take a recent example, “In the interest of our relationship, let’s not have one” ( Ally McBeal ). In taking an interest in the traps set by language, and also in its profoundly and naturally ordinary character, Wittgenstein’s philosophy ( and later Austin’s, which is fertile in wit and nonsense ) specified an essential relationship that Witz maintains with philosophical grammar: that is, their ability to express both a problem and its solution as already present before our eyes: we simply hadn’t looked or listened carefully enough to recognize them.

Sandra Laugier

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baier, Annette. “Nonsense.” In vol. 5 of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Bouveresse, Jacques. Dire et ne rien dire: L’illogisme, l’impossibilité et le non-sens. Nîmes, Fr.: Chambon, 1997.

Carnap, Rudolph. “Die Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.” Erkenntnis 2 ( 1932 ): 219–41. Translation by Arthur Pap: “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.” In Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer, 60–81. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Edited by Selwyn H. Goodacre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

   . The Annotated Alice ( Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass ). Introduction and notes by Martin Gardner. New York: Meridian Press, New American Library, 1960.

   . The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, In Eight Fits. Edited by Barry Moser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

   . Œuvres. Translated by Henri Parisot. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1990.

   . Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Edited by Selwyn H. Goodacre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Cheung, Leo K. C. “The Disenchantment of Nonsense: Understanding Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” Philosophical Investigations 31, no. 3 ( 2008 ): 197–226.

Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. Translation by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale: The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Diamond, Cora. “Throwing Away the Ladder.” In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

   . “What Nonsense Might Be?” In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Edited by Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

Freud, Sigmund. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. Studienausgabe, vol. 4. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970. Translation by James Strachey: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In vol. 8 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953–74.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations. Edited by Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Hume, David. The Letters of David Hume. Edited by J.Y.T. Grieg. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932.

Leijenhorst, Cees. “Sense and Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” edited by Patricia Springborg, 82–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Mulhall, Stephen. Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in “Philosophical Investigations,” Sections 243–315. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007.

Schulte, Joachim. Wittgenstein: Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989. Translation by William H. Brenner and John F. Holley: Wittgenstein: An Introduction. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.

Strawson, Peter. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” London: Routledge, 2002.

Travis, Charles. The Uses of Sense. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie / Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Translated by C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue, edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

   . Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung = Tractatus logico-philosophicus: Kritische Edition. Edited by Brian McGuinness and Joachim Schulte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Translation by C. K. Ogden and F. P. Ramsey: Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. Translation by D. F. Pears and B. McGuinness: Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge, 1974. First published in 1961. Translation by Pierre Klossowski: Tractatus logico-philosophicus, suivi de Investigations philosophiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

   . Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

   . “Philosophy.” In The Big Typescript, TS 213, edited and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue, §86–93. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005.

   . Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright, and H. Nyman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press / Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Vol. 1, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Vol. 2, translated by C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue, edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman.

   . Wiener Ausgabe. Edited by Michael Nedo. 8 vols. Vienna: Springer, 1993–.

   . Wittgenstein’s Lectures ( 1932–1935 ). Edited by A. Ambrose. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.

NOSTALGIA

A certain number of terms that serve to designate uneasiness or malaise, experienced as characteristic of a culture or a national genius, find an equivalent in the word “nostalgia”: nostalgie ( Fr. ), saudade ( Port. ), dor ( Rom. ), and Sehnsucht ( Ger. ). The component of quest and exile, including existential exile outside oneself, displacement in all senses of the word, is in fact predominant in the term “nostalgia,” whether it is linked to solitude ( saudade ), to the suffering connected with an impossible desire ( dor ), or to an aspiration to something entirely different ( Sehnsucht ). See DOR, SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, and, more broadly, MALAISE ( ACEDIA, ANXIETY, MELANCHOLY ).

On the Greek model of nostalgia as “suffering of, or for, the return,” see SEHNSUCHT, Box 1.

  HEIMAT, PORTUGUESE, STIMMUNG, STRADANIE

NOTHING, NOTHINGNESS

The expressions designating what does not exist are constructed in different ways, both within a single language and from one language to another. French, for example, immediately sets in competition a positive term and a negative term. The positive term, rien, derives from Latin rem, the accusative of res, rei, which originally designated a good, property, or personal effect ( see RES and THING ). The negative term, néant, also derives from Latin, but it is composed of a negative particle ( nec, ne ) applied, depending on the hypothesis, to the positive entem ( the accusative of ens, “not a being” ) or to the positive gentem ( the accusative of gens, “not a living being” ).

I. Positive Nouns / Negative Nouns

1. The main positive nouns designating what does not exist are, in addition to the Iberian nada—derived from Latin ( res ) nata, the past participle of nasci, meaning “to be born” ( see PORTUGUESE and cf. SPANISH )—the French words rien and personne. The positive use of the feminine noun une rien has been gradually replaced by the nominalization of the pronoun and the adverb that commonly serve as negative auxiliaries, rien, un rien: “The word offers a short version of the evolution of the etymological meaning of chose inverted as néant ( c. 1530 )” ( RT: DHLF ), which did not fail to have a philosophical impact: see RES; cf. REALITY, TO BE, VORHANDEN. In an analogous way, personne, formed on the basis of the positive persona, or the actor’s mask ( which is certainly not an anodyne entity ), designates any given human being a “person,” and, in correlation with ne, acquires the negative value of “no one”: see PERSON. Consult MÊTIS, Box 1, “Odysseus: My name is No-One,” for an example of a pun on personne that implies both the difference, which is fundamental in Greek, between negation and privation ( ou/mê ), and the connection in French between the expression of negation and the so-called ne explétif; on the latter, see ESTI, Box 4.

2. The majority of the terms designating what does not exist are composed of a negation bearing on a positive term that does not, moreover, designate the same thing, depending on the languages concerned ( Gr. ouden/mêden, Lat. nihil, Fr. néant, Ger. Nichts, Eng. “nothing”; cf. Gr. outis/mêtis, “not someone,” Lat. nemo, “not a man,” Eng. “nobody,” and so forth ). Thus in Greek it is hen, “one,” that is negated ( see MÊTIS, Box 1 ); in Latin it is supposed to be the hilum, a minuscule black dot at the end of a broad bean ( ni-hil; RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine citing Festus ); in German, it may be a Wiht ( little demon ), unless it is Wicht, from Wesen ( essence ) ( cf. ESSENCE ); in English, it is “thing.”

3. Further reflection takes into consideration the degree of freedom in certain languages that construct, by means of an erroneous division, a new positive on the basis of the negative compound: that is what happens in Democritus’s Greek ( 68 B 56 DK [see RT: DK] ), which proposes den ( a false division of ouden, which is normally divided into oude-hen, “not even one” ), an amalgam of the last letter of the negative particle and the negated positive. German can render Democritus’s den in a similar way, reactivating a term used by the Rheinland mystics, das Ichts ( “Das Ichts existiert um nicht mehr als das Nichts,” RT: DK translation of Democritus’s fragment whose French equivalent would be “Le éant n’existe pas plus que le néant” ). See ESTI, IV.B.

II. Derivations and the Combinatory System

We find here and there a certain number of remarkable disparities that give rise to major translation problems.

1. In some languages and in some cases, a term ( noun, adjective, or verb ) may be negated in several ways that stipulate different modes of nonexistence and refer to different paraphrases: this is the case in particular for the difference between negation and privation, which is fundamental in Greek, for example ( ouden, mêden; see ESTI, II, IV.A, and MÊTIS, Box 1 ), and the different ways of indicating presence and the possession implied by privation ( absence of something, through lack [“a-logical”], defect [“il-logical”], exteriority [“de-mentia”], extenuation, and so forth ). On the way in which a negative or privative term is formed by means of a particle or a prefix, see—in addition to ESTI, and COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION—GERMAN and the study of the Lust-Unlust pair under PLEASURE, II.C ). See also TRUTH ( particularly for the Greek alêtheia, which Heidegger renders by Unverborgenheit ), UNCONSCIOUS, and cf. MADNESS.

2. The rules of derivation, combination, and syntax related to negative terms produce texts that are characteristic of certain languages and particularly difficult to translate into other languages; this is the case, for example, of the German derivation that moves from the adverb nicht to the substantive Nichts. Regarding this set of problems, particularly illuminating examples will be found under ESTI. See also PORTUGUESE, and cf. ANXIETY, AUFHEBUNG, PRINCIPLE.

See also NEGATION and, in particular, VERNEINUNG.

  FALSE, NONSENSE