CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, ES, I/ME/MYSELF, PERCEPTION, ROMANTIC, SOUL, SUBJECTUNCONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUSNESS
| FRENCH | inconscient, inconscience | ||
| GERMAN | unbewusst, Unbewusste; Unbewusstheit, Unbewusstsein |
CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, ES, I/ME/MYSELF, PERCEPTION, ROMANTIC, SOUL, SUBJECT
Unlike other terms from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, the term “unconscious” has never posed any particular problems of translation. French and English were already equipped to receive the German noun das Unbewusste and to render it using the equivalent terms “the unconscious” and l’inconscient. Similarly, das Vorbewusste is translated without difficulty in French as le préconscient and in English as “the preconscious.” Does this mean that the “unconscious” has effectively been understood exactly as Freud conceived it? It is important to emphasize first of all that the term only really acquires its meaning in his first topographical theory, which made a distinction among three systems: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. This theory is unrivalled in its rigor in the psychology of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is perhaps precisely this rigor that causes problems for translators. Thus, Freud is led to reject the term “subconscious,” which was very much in vogue in France and in English-speaking countries, or to put aside “unconsciousness” ( die Unbewusstheit, l’inconscient ). The translation of das Unbewusste as “the unconscious” is perhaps not sufficient to fully grasp its meaning. In order to understand what is at stake in this question, one has to tease out the threads of several successive moments in its history.
I. “Non-Conscious Representations” and Unconsciousness
The problem of “non-conscious representations” is posed in the wake of Leibniz and his “small perceptions.” For Leibniz it is a matter of affirming, against Descartes, that if the soul is always thinking, it is not always conscious of its thoughts: “at every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection; that is, of alterations in the soul itself, of which we are unaware because these impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying” ( New Essays, preface ). These perceptions are said to be “insensible,” this adjective thus corresponding in classical language to the future “unconscious” ( cf. also Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 12–15 ). To be conscious is, in effect, to sense oneself ( from the Latin sentire ).
The question that continuously haunts philosophical and psychological debates is the question of degree. If full, complete consciousness has a status determined by clarity and consciousness of self ( which Leibniz calls awareness; see CONSCIOUSNESS and PERCEPTION ), how does one then go from simple perception to insensibility? Kant took the Leibnizian principle of continuity to its furthest consequences, and thus proposed an infinite number of degrees between the fully conscious and the unconscious, in a text that is part of a psychological, nontranscendental perspective:
Just as between consciousness and the fully unconscious ( psychological darkness ) [zwischen einem Bewusstsein und dem völligen Unbewusstsein ( psychologischer Dunkelheit )], yet smaller degrees occur; therefore no perception is possible that shows a complete absence, e.g., no psychological darkness is possible that could not be regarded as a state of consciousness that simply is outweighed by another, stronger one, and thus it is in all cases of sensation.
( Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, §21 )
Ever faithful to Leibniz on this point, Kant therefore affirms, in Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, that “the field of obscure representations is the largest in the human being” ( Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 25 ).
Philosophically, there is a great deal at stake here, since the adversary is not Descartes, but rather Locke, the founder of empirical psychology, who cannot admit that a representation is unconscious ( ibid., 23–24 ). We can also see that Kant is in no way interested in clearing the way for a particular topos, which would have specific laws ( what das Unbewusste will be for Freud ), but simply in articulating the negative of consciousness ( das Unbewusstsein ), that is, a “negative state of consciousness”: what darkness is to light. Translating this as “unconsciousness” seems inevitable.
II. Substantivizing the Unconscious: Romanticism and von Hartmann
With Romanticism, a wide range of terms were adopted in German, English, and French, joining a privative prefix to the lexical field of consciousness, such as unbewusst, “unconscious,” and inconscient, and the nouns Unbewusstheit, Unbewusstsein, “unconsciousness,” and inconscience. The substantivized adjective das Unbewusste was less common, even though it is found, for example, in the opening lines of a work by the Romantic philosopher and doctor Carl Gustav Carus ( 1789–1869 ), in a first edition dating from 1846:
The key to the knowledge of the nature of the conscious life of the soul is to be sought in the reign of the unconscious [des Unbewusstseins]. Hence the difficulty, if not impossibility, of understanding fully the secret of the soul. If it were absolutely impossible to find the unconscious [das Unbewusste] in consciousness, man would be left to despair of ever being able to attain knowledge of his soul, that is to say, knowledge of himself. But if this impossibility is merely apparent, then the first task of a science of the soul will be to determine how man’s mind can go down into these depths.
( Carus, Psyche, 1 )
Generally speaking, and as this extract testifies, the importance of this trend is in the recognition that this unconscious realm has a positive quality: far from being the lowest degree of consciousness, the darkness of the unconscious is a guarantee of its richness and its truth value.
A third stage occurred when one work, Philosophie des Unbewussten by Edouard von Harmann ( 1870 ) definitively established the substantivized adjective das Unbewusste as a noun in its own right. Its title reveals how fully accepted and recognized the term was philosophically, since in this text das Unbewusste refers to the metaphysical basis of all things, which Schopenhauer had named der Wille, “the will.” The choice of term is significant: in Schopenhauer the will is set in opposition to representation ( die Vorstellung ), which excludes the idea that there can be unconscious representations. The Freudian unconscious would itself be inseparably made up of affects and representations. Hartmann’s work made a considerable impact and was soon translated into French ( Philosophie de l’inconscient, translated by D. Nollen, 1877 ) and English ( Philosophy of the Unconscious, translated by W. C. Coupland, 1884 ). Dictionaries, notably the French Littré ( RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française ), refer to this translation as full recognition of its use as a noun.
III. The Subconscious and Psychophysiology
Shortly before Freud there was a huge growth in scientific psychology from about the middle of the nineteenth century ( in particular the Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie by Wilhelm Wundt or the works of Alexander Bain in England and Théodule Ribot in France ), as well as research into multiple consciousness in somnambulism and hysteria. The intellectual context of these debates is no longer Romanticism but Positivism, which returns to the classical question of the degrees of consciousness. One can locate an effect of this vocabulary of the unconscious in the translation of texts in which the term was not present. Thus, in an early twentieth-century English translation of Leibniz’s La Monadologie, the term “unconsciousness” is used to render the French étourdissement, which refers to the states of apparent death. The first sentence of paragraph 23 thus introduces into the translation a vocabulary of consciousness and unconsciousness that was altogether absent in Leibniz:
Therefore, since on awakening after a period of unconsciousness we become conscious of our perception, we must, without having been conscious of them, have had perceptions immediately before.
( Donc, puisque réveillé de l’étourdissement on s’aperçoit de ses perceptions, il faut bien qu’on en ait eu immédiatement auparavant, quoiqu’on ne s’en soit aperçu. )
( Leibniz, Monadology, 1902 )
But it was the term “subconscious” ( in French, subconscient; in German, unterbewusst ) that came to designate that which is just below the threshold of consciousness. In an article entitled “Consciousness and Unconsciousness,” for example, the psychologist G. H. Lewes defended the thesis of the psychic nature of the unconsciousness and of the subconsciousness against the partisans of “unconscious cerebration,” that is, of the purely reflex nature of unconscious mechanisms. But in any case, it is merely a question of complexity: “All of the arguments thus tend to show that between conscious, subconscious and unconscious states, the difference resides solely in the degrees of complication in the neural processes.” In the field of psychopathology, Pierre Janet accords great importance to “subconscious acts” ( actes subconscients ), or “actions having all of the characteristics of a psychological fact except one, which is that the person who performs it is unaware of it at the very moment at which he or she performs it” ( Janet, L’automatisme psychologique ). These acts are due to “psychological weakness” ( faiblesse psychologique ), to the narrowing of the field of consciousness, which thus allows automatic acts to be expressed.
IV. The Freudian Moment
If we turn now to Freud, we can see that he himself uses the term “subconscious” ( subconscient ) in an article written in French in 1893, “Quelques considérations pour une étude comparative entre les paralysies motrices organiques et hystériques” ( “Some Points for Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 160–72 ). Freud had been commissioned by Charcot to write this article, and we find him using the French terminology that was current at the time. It is from the Interpretation of Dreams on, however, and in the final chapter devoted to the “psychology of dream processes” ( Strachey ) that we find the first elaboration of the first topological theory, which is explained in the metapsychological article entitled precisely “Das Unbewusste” ( 1915 ). The unconscious—das Unbewusste—is therefore one of the three psychic systems. It follows its own laws ( the primary process: condensation, displacement, etc. ), which enable Freud to account for the formal particularities of dreams and the mechanisms for interpreting them. The Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse ( Language of Psychoanalysis ) summarizes neatly the characteristics of the “unconscious system” as follows:
a. Its “contents” are “representatives” of the instincts.
b. These contents are governed by the mechanisms specific to the primary process, especially by condensation and displacement.
c. Strongly cathected by instinctual energy, they seek to reenter consciousness and resume activity ( the return of the repressed ), but they can only gain access to the system Pcs.-Cs. in compromise-formations after having undergone the distortions of the censorship.
d. It is more especially childhood wishes that become fixated in the unconscious.
( Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, London: Hogarth, 1973 )
Freud materializes this topological aspect by using abbreviations to refer to the different systems: Ubw, Vbw, Bw ( in English Ucs, Pcs and Cs, and in French Ics, Pcs, Cs ). This is a strange thing to do: the epistemology is on the face of it positivist, but Freud breaks away from any differentiation by degree ( the differences between the Pcs-Cs and the Ucs are natural differences ), and he appears to return to the Romantic proposition concerning the unconscious foundation of being. He only “appears” to, however, since on the one hand the unconscious “in itself” remains inaccessible, and on the other hand it is not endowed with any metaphysical attributes. We might well wonder whether the specificity of the unconscious “system” is duly conveyed by the term das Unbewusste, burdened as it is with the Positivist and Romantic double origin.
■ See Box 1.
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Unconsciousness and the unconscious as a system We find an interesting example of the linguistic and theoretical stakes of the unconscious as Freud understands it, and of his perspective on the term itself, in an article he wrote in English that was almost certainly translated into German by Hanns Sachs, although Freud would have proofread it. The article is “A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis” ( Einige Bemerkungen über den Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psychoanalyse ), originally published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research ( 1912 ). The final paragraph of this text presents the transition from the quality of that which escapes consciousness, simple unconsciousness, to the properly Freudian unconscious, characterized by its systematic dimension. The German text, curiously, does not take into account this shift, nor do the first French translations, up to and including 1968. Ultimately, only the English and French ( in its final version, that of the OCFIP ) are in this respect faithful to Freud’s theoretical operation. Unconsciousness [das Unbewusste] seemed to us at first only an enigmatical characteristic of a definite psychical activity. Now it means more to us. It is a sign that this act partakes of the nature of a certain psychical category known to us by other and more important characteristics and that it belongs to a system of psychical activity which is deserving our fullest attention. The index value of the unconscious [der Wert des Unbewussten als Index] has far outgrown its importance as a property. The system [das System] revealed by the sign that the single acts forming parts of it are unconscious [unbewusst] we designate by the name “the unconscious” [“das Unbewusste”], for want of a better and less ambiguous term [in Ermangelung eines besseren und weniger zweideutigen Ausdruckes]. In German, I propose to denote this system by the letters Ubw, an abbreviation of the German word Unbewusst. And this is the third and most significant sense which the term “unconscious” has acquired in psycho-analysis [dies ist der dritte und wichtigste Sinn, den der Ausdruck “unbewusst” in der Psycho-analyse erworben hat]. ( Freud, Standard Edition, 12: 266; Gesammelte Werke, 8: 438–39 ) |
An interesting example of the way in which Freud’s “unconscious” was received in France can be found when we look at its fate in the first issues of the Revue française de psychanalyse ( RFP ), the official journal of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, founded in 1926. The translations of Freud’s texts are characterized by a scrupulous respect for the transition from the German das Unbewusst to the French l’inconscient and by the disappearance of the vocabulary of the “subconscious.” There are traces nonetheless of the gap left by the word “subconscious.” A significant example surfaces in Édouard Pichon’s review of Traité de psychologie by Georges Dwelshauvers, a psychologist from the neo-Thomist school, an important school at the time. We find the following:
L’inconscient, ce n’est que l’insu. Il est toujours virtuellement sujet aux atteintes de la conscience. . . . Ainsi se complète pour moi la définition de l’inconscient: l’ensemble des choses actuellement étrangères à la conscience du je, mais que cette conscience peut être éventuellement amenée à saisir sous l’espèce des siens états d’âme.
( RFP, no. 2 [1928]: 369–70 )
( The unconscious is only what is unknown. It is always virtually subject to the reach of consciousness. . . . For me, then, the definition of the unconscious is to be completed as follows: the set of all things presently outside the consciousness of the self, but which can eventually be accessed as consciousness through states of feeling associated with self. )
We see, then, that it was that much easier for French psychoanalysts to get rid of the subconscious since the term inconscient retained what was most essential, that is, the negative relationship to consciousness. Pichon, who was a good grammarian, must have been satisfied with a term that was constructed as a privative. Freud would perhaps have preferred a term that was not simply the negative of consciousness. We remain uneasy about the fact that English and French both lack a positive term to refer to this other psychic place. But is this not simply a linguistic problem?
Freud in effect chose the term das Unbewusste by default, no doubt because he was afraid of the many misunderstandings to which a term laden with dual Romantic and psychophysiological history lent itself. Since German has no term that clearly designates the “systematic” character of the new unconscious any more than it has a term for its conceptual character, there are gaps of reference. This was no doubt what Jacques Lacan noticed when, in the introduction to a lecture on the unconscious delivered at a conference in Bonneval, he declared: “The unconscious is a concept forged from the trace of what is at work in constituting the subject. The unconscious is not a type that defines within psychic reality the circle of what has no attribute ( or virtues ) of consciousness” ( “Position de l’inconscient,” in Ecrits, Seuil, 1966, 830; “Position of the Unconscious,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton, 2006, 716 ). And Lacan would in turn “invent” a term, not a translation but a transcription of the German into the French: the unconscious is “l’une-bévue” [lit. “one-slip”], or that which produces an unexpected meaning, not that which is outside of meaning, or which would contain the essence of all meanings ( Le Séminaire, 24, L’Insu qui sait de l’une bévue s’aile à mourre, 1976–77, unpublished ).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Calich, José Carlos, and Helmut Hinz. The Unconscious: Further Reflections. London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 2007.
Carus, Carl Gustav. Psyche: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele. Foreword by Friedrich Arnold. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975. First published in 1846. Translation by Renata Welch: Psyche: On the Development of the Soul, Part One: The Unconscious. New York: Springer, 1970.
Descartes, René. “First Meditation.” In Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited and translated by John Cottingham. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
Ey, Henri, ed. L’Inconscient [6e Colloque de Bonneval, 1960]. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966.
Frankl, George. The Social History of the Unconscious. London: Open Gate, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. Gesammelte Werke. 18 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968–78.
. Nachtragsband ( 1885–1938 ). Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987.
. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–66.
Hesnard, Angelo. L’Inconscient. Paris: Librairie Doin, 1923.
Janet, Pierre. L’automatisme psychologique. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998. First published in 1894.
Kant, Immanuel. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Robert B. Louden: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
. Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1783. Translation by Gary Hatfield: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science; Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Gary Hatfield. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, Monadology. Translated by George Montgomery. Introduction by Paul Janet. Chicago: Open Court, 1902.
. New Essays on Human Understanding. Edited and translated by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Lewes, George Henry. “Consciousness and Unconsciousness.” Mind 2 ( 1877 ): 156–67.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.
Münsterberg, Hugo, Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, Joseph Jastrow, Bernard Hart, and Morton Prince. Subconscious Phenomena. Boston: R. G. Badger, 1910.
Ribot, Théodule. Les mouvements et l’activité inconsciente. Paris: Cariscript, 1991.
Whyte, Lancelot Law. The Unconscious before Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1960.
UNDERSTANDING
| FRENCH | entendement | ||
| GERMAN | Verstand, Verstehen | ||
| GREEK | nous [νοῦς] | ||
| ITALIAN | intelletto | ||
| LATIN | intellectus | ||
| SPANISH | intendimiento, intelecto |
BEGRIFF, CONSCIOUSNESS, GEMÜT, I/ME/MYSELF, INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, INTUITION, LOGOS, PERCEPTION, REASON, SENS COMMUN [COMMON SENSE], SENSE, SOUL
Now philosophically obsolete ( we speak rather of “reason,” “mind,” or “intelligence” ), the term “understanding” was used to refer to the activity of the mind for two centuries in what corresponds to the classical period ( seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ), before disappearing, or rather, being transformed. As a translation of the Latin intellectus, it inherits a long conceptual history that contrasts it, as an act of intuition ( Gr. nous [νοῦς] ), with rational discursive acts ( Gr. dianoia [διάνοια] ), and it is defined in contradistinction to reason ( Lat. ratio ). But these words, being defined in terms of one another, exchange characteristics several times: the more prestigious one becomes ordinary, the ordinary one is reevaluated. The peculiar interest of these conceptual shifts derives from the clear impact of the different languages and conceptual schemes in virtue of which they redefine themselves. We can thus discern an analogy of distinctions between nous/dianoia, intellectus/ratio, entendement/raison, as well as, later, between Verstand/Vernunft, as long as we notice immediately that they are never interchangeable in their use. For between classical rationalism, which speaks French or Latin, and the thought of the Enlightenment, which is based on the English notion of human understanding, there is a conceptual break, just as there is between these two universes and that of German idealism. With the dilution of the latter, contemporary philosophy has reappropriated the term for a kind of grasp or comprehension: das Verstehen.
I. From Ouïr to Entendre and Comprendre
The reinterpretations of the word “understanding” rely on the resources of language and of individual languages. Arsène Darmesteter even used this complex term a century ago to illustrate the phenomena of semantic adjustments between words:
Take the group ouïr, entendre, and comprendre. Ouïr ( Lat. audire ) gradually falls out of usage towards the 16th-17th centuries and is replaced by entendre, which only had the figurative sense indicated by its etymology: intendere ( animum ); from the idea of intelligere, entendre changed its meaning to that of audire; but how could it be replaced in the sense of intelligere? The language went and found comprendre, which, to the meanings of grasp and contain within itself ( cumprehendere ), added that of intelligere.
( La vie des mots )
The medieval Latin intellectus, which Saint Thomas had etymologized as inte-lectus intus-legere, “to read in” by the vision of the intellect ( see INTELLECTUS ), was followed in vernacular European languages by entendement in French, which associates intellection with acuity of hearing and the mental grasp of words and things, by “understanding” in English, and finally Verstand in German, coming from stehen ( to stand up ), which is more clearly related to material representation—vor-stellen/ver-stehen ( see Bréal, Essai de sémantique ). Italian preserved intellectus with intelletto, which in a way transcends the displacements of the concept at the mercy of languages ( intendimento remained rare, although Carl Friedrich Flögel’s Geschichte des menschlichen Verstandes, from 1765, was translated in 1835 as Istoria dell’intendimento umano ). Spanish, however, adopted entendement and dropped intelecto/intendimiento. The equivocity of the terms differs from language to language: entendement does not mean either “listening” or “agreement,” whereas “understanding” can, for which German uses Einverständnis.
II. A Complex Prehistory: Nous/Dianoia and Their Translations
Entendement, rather than intellect, is the standard French translation for intellectus ( see INTELLECT ); intellectus is the standard translation of nous [νοῦς] ( see INTELLECTUS ). We would be wrong, however, to believe that entendement is the standard translation of nous or that the Greek pairing of nous/dianoia, even mediated by the intellectus/ratio, can ever be translated into French by the pairing of entendement/raison.
The pairs are similar in that they all contrast something on the order of immediate intuition with something on the order of discursive rationality, as is suggested by dia and its implication of process. Thus, Plato distinguishes intellectual vision and intuition ( noêsis [νόησις] ) from discursive knowledge, dianoia [διάνοια] ( Republic, 6.511d–e ). Anaxagoras’s earlier usage was of a different scope, since there it involved a function of cosmic organization, a “governing intelligence” as Leibniz would translate it in his Discourse on Metaphysics ( §20 ), referring to the Phaedo ( 97b–c: nous . . . ho diakosmôn kai pantôn aitios [νοῦς . . . ὁ διαϰοσμῶν ϰαὶ πάντων αἴτιος]; see WORLD ). Nous is characterized by the power of immediate contemplation of ideas: it is intuitive knowledge, whereas dianoia moves by way of hypotheses and demonstrations. Immediate knowledge is superior to mediated knowledge. In the “plain of truth,” the souls of the gods ( and any soul who seeks the appropriate nourishment ) are in direct contact with ideas: “dianoia [pensée, Robin, Brisson] of a god, nourished by nous [intellection for Robin, intellect for Brisson] and knowledge [epistêmê ( ἐπιστήμη )] without mixture . . . rejoices, and, contemplating the truths, is nourished and feels good” ( Phaedrus, 247d ).
However, no contemporary translator has had the thought of translating nous by entendement, either for Anaxagoras or Plato. How can we account for these distortions?
In part, they result from the fact that the paradigm brought into play by the Greek nous is neither that of hearing ( entendement ) nor of vision ( intuition ), but rather that of smell. In addition, with regard to the entendement/raison distinction, the word raison is preempted by logos and thus cannot be used to translate dianoia ( see LOGOS ).
■ See Box 1.
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Scent: The origins of nous Noos [νόος] ( or nous [νοῦς] ) is the complement of thumos in the description of the “mind” of the Homeric man; as Bruno Snell puts it, in terms that can only be inadequate: “Thumos means that which is the source of movements, reactions, and emotions; noos, that which gives rise to representations and ideas.” Even though their semantic fields partially overlap ( noein implies, as von Fritz shows, a situation with genuine emotional impact and engages the specific attitude of the individual ), noos refers, according to Chantraine ( RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ), to the “intelligence, the mind,” insofar as it “perceives and thinks.” Noein [νοεῖν] gives substance to the link between perception and thought, not in the sense of empiricism ( in which nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses ) but rather in the suddenness, the immediacy of a perception. It is thus that noein is related to “to sense” in the sense of “to scent”—von Fritz mentions an almost Cratylian etymology in English, which Chantraine does not even bother to consider, from the root “to sniff” or “to smell.” It is true that Odysseus is “recognized” ( enoêsen [ἐνόησεν], Odyssey, 18.301 ) under his rags by his old dog Argos, who then dies on his pile of manure. It is related, equally, to sight, “in the eyes” rather than “with” or “through” them ( e.g., Iliad, 24.294 ), and describes in particular the way in which one “intuits” the god behind the man or not ( Odyssey, 16.160 ). Noein also means “to put oneself in mind of” ( to perceive, understand ), “to have in mind” ( to consider, project, to have good sense, to be intelligent and prudent ). Perfectly congruently, noein ( in contradistinction to gignôskein [γιγνώσϰειν], 2.2 and 2.7 ) in Parmenides’s poem expresses the immediate relation to being and saying, in the triad that constitutes the “Way of Being” ( 3, 6.1, 8.34–36 ). In later usage, allegedly intellectualized ( Anaxagoras’s Nous, the noêsis noêseôs [νοήσις νοήσεως], or Aristotle’s god, and up to the noêma [νόημα] of rhetoric, “concept” or “meaning” rather than the word ), this relationship to intuition, and more precisely to scent, is probably never forgotten. Barbara Cassin BIBLIOGRAPHY Fritz, Kurt von. “Noos and Noein in the Homeric Poems.” Classical Philology 38 ( 1943 ): 79–93. . “Nous, Noein, and Their Derivatives in Presocratic Philosophy ( Excluding Anaxagoras ).” Classical Philology 40 ( 1945 ): 223–42; and 41 ( 1946 ): 12–34. Reprinted in The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alexander Mourelatos. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Snell, Bruno. Die Entdeckung des Geistes. 2nd ed. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1975. First published in 1946. Translation by Thomas G. Rosenmeyer: The Discovery of the Mind. New York: Dover, 1982. |
Despite its various determinations, there is a constant in what French translates as entendement: its intuitive and preeminent character in contrast to the discursive character of knowledge based on chains of reasons. It is interesting to note that the shift to vernacular European languages leads to an attenuation of the foundational Platonic distinction. We may see in effect that 1 ) The use of entendement is restricted to a single meaning; and 2 ) entendement ends up referring to the power of thinking in general.
III. From Human Understanding to Good Sense
The translation of intellectus by entendement is an interesting exception in relation to Romance languages such as Italian and Spanish, which use a calque ( intelletto, intelecto ). Although Descartes does not specifically identify cogitatio with entendement, but also associates it with mens, animus, intellectus, and ratio ( Méditation seconde ), he does adopt a rather ordinary distinction in the Principes de philosophie between “perception de l’entendement” and “action de la volonté” ( art. 1, §32 ), which involves a more or less passive view of entendement, insisting on its finitude and the limits of its comprehension. From that point on, entendement mostly falls within the domain of logic and takes on the discursiveness of its procedures, distinguishing true from false. And thus, the difference between entendement ( intellectus in philosophical Latin ) and raison ( ratio ) becomes blurred. This tendency, which becomes cemented in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, has one notable exception, namely Spinoza, who harks back to the intuitive aspect proper to the medieval notion of intellectus. The four modes of knowledge described in his Tractatus de emendatione intellectus ( Treatise, §19–24 )—1 ) by hearsay or arbitrary sign, 2 ) by vague experience undetermined by the intellect ( entendement ), 3 ) by inference that is not adequate, and 4 ) adequately by the essence or proximate cause—establish a contintuity between the third and the fourth. The third allows us to formally infer the essence of one thing from that of another, and the fourth is this same inference extended intuitively in the knowledge of proximate causes. Spinoza’s example shows how his intellectus ( entendement ) reconciles mathematical discursiveness and the intuition of the mind: the intellect may be able, on the basis of knowledge of a series of three numbers, to “invent intuitively without any operation” ( intuitive nullam operationem facientes; ibid., §24 ) the fourth term.
In English, “understanding” does a better job than French or German of preserving the idea of comprehension; thus in Hobbes, it is the capacity “in a man, out of the words, contexture, and other circumstances of language, to deliver himself from equivocation, and to find out the true meaning of what is said” ( Human Nature, chap. 5, §8 ). Similarly in Locke, although the more general sense of “power of perception” is dominant ( Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 5 ), it can be analyzed as 1 ) perception of ideas in our minds, 2 ) perception of the meaning of signs, and 3 ) perception of the agreement or disagreement between our ideas. The semiotic dimension remains, even if the dichotomy between understanding and will tends to mask it. Furthermore, while Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz consider finite understanding by distinction with, but also with reference to, infinite understanding, for Locke it is rather a matter of a direct inspection of the understanding as a specifically human capacity, as the title of the Essay itself reveals. The same is true for Hume ( Enquiries concerning Human Understanding, 1758 ). The understanding, in English, is decidedly human, and it is also as a finite power that it appears in Germany ( see Tonelli, “La question des bornes” ). We may note that Kant’s teacher in Königsberg, Martin Knutzen, had Locke’s essay translated into German by the orientalist Georg David Kypke, whose house Kant shared ( Anleitung des menschlichen Verstandes, 1755 ). This inflection leads to a trivialization of the notion of understanding, which is thenceforth not only always human, Menschenverstand, but is also often qualified as “healthy,” gesunder Menschenverstand; in other words, “good common sense.” The insistence on the finitude of understanding leads to a defense of common sense, as is often the case among “popular” German philosophers. This is a far cry from the universally shared common sense mentioned by Descartes at the beginning of Discours de la méthode.
IV. Verstand or Vernunft, Understanding or Reason?
A new twist comes with Kant that leads to a devaluation of the understanding ( Verstand ) in favor of reason ( Vernunft ), even though one could take much of the Critique of Pure Reason ( 1781 ) as an analysis of understanding. Understanding is defined as the faculty of rules; it knows through concepts ( discursively ) and synthesizes the data of the senses into a unity. It is reason ( Vernunft ), however, the faculty of principles, that makes it possible to order them into a whole. The one is governed by the other. Kantian understanding is a superior faculty of the mind ( see GEMÜT ) that is synthetic and spontaneous even though it is only legitimately exercised with regard to sense data. That which performs the synthesis is the “transcendental I” ( see I/ME/MYSELF ), which unifies the categories or concepts of the understanding. Although the understanding is a “power of judgment” just as much as reason is, it is assigned to singular judgments rather than to reasoning. Although the post-Kantian idealists ( Fichte, Schelling, Hegel ) criticized Kant for his servitude to finite understanding and the proscription it entails against metaphysical knowledge, it is with Kant that the change takes place. The conception of the understanding as something finite, discursive, and analytic that draws distinctions ( in contrast to reason, which is able to reach principles, synthesis, and syllogisms ) is a legacy of German idealism, especially notable in Hegel ( Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §14 ). With the notion of intellectual intuition ( intellektuelle Anschauung ) championed by Fichte, but especially by Schelling, we move beyond the complementary pair of Verstand/Vernunft and return to the intuitive intellectus of the medievals ( see Tilliette, L’intuition intellectuelle ).
It is instructive to see how this reversal could, with regard to terminology, be used to the advantage of the enemies of idealism. Jacobi, the great attacker of rationalism, was thus able to pit reason ( Vernunft ) against understanding ( Verstand ), arguing that the latter cannot acquire unconditioned knowledge but must always depend on principles it cannot demonstrate. Reason, on the other hand, which Jacobi considers a faculty of reception ( Vernunft being related to vernehmen, “to perceive” [see PERCEPTION] ) is passive and open to revelation ( Jacobi, preface, in David Hume on Faith ). In the context of the controversy over pantheism started by Jacobi, it is common to appeal to Spinoza to underwrite the intellectual intuition banished by Kant ( Tilliette, L’intuition intellectuelle ). The understanding is placed by Schlegel, however, above reason, which knows all things, insofar as it interprets ( deutet ), and thus allows for a historical recapitulation ( “Transcendentalphilosophie” ).
V. Hear, Listen, Understand: Hermeneutic Understanding, das Verstehen
German romanticism rehabilitates “understanding,” in a way, by effecting a radical redefinition. In the letter “On Philosophy,” published in the Athenäum ( 1799 ), Friedrich Schlegel begins a reformulation of the understanding, which is characterized as being “the highest of human faculties,” as against the recent usage of “contemporary philosophy,” which privileged reason. The reversal called for by Schlegel expresses his rejection of absolute idealism:
It is entirely natural that a philosophy which progresses towards the infinite rather than presenting that infinite, which mixes and binds everything together rather than completing the particular, should prize no part of the human mind so much as the power of attaching representations to each other [im menschlichen Geiste, als das Vermögen, Vorstellungen an Vorstellungen zu knüpfen] and should ceaselessly pursue the train of thought concerning infinitely numerous modes . . . everything takes on meaning for [the understanding], man sees each thing justly and truly [alles wird ihm ( dem Verstand ) bedeutend, er sieht alles recht und wahr].
Schlegel moves imperceptibly to a hermeneutic meaning of “understand,” replacing the “power of knowing” that was understanding ( Verstand ) with “the act of understanding” ( Verstehen ): “An absolute understanding is denied by a philosophy which denies an absolute truth” ( “Transcendentalphilosophie,” §12 ). By shifting from the noun to the nominalized verb ( das Verstehen ), the understanding reclaims its link to interpretation, even though the analytic understanding of the classical age had broken it. Nevertheless, German retained the equivalence between Sinn and Verstand in expressions like “in the proper sense” ( im eigentlichen Verstand ) and “in the figurative sense” ( im bildlichen Verstand ) all through the eighteenth century, as in Chladenius or Herder. The abandonment of speculative claims on the part of idealism that had magnified the importance of reason ( Vernunft ) to the detriment of the understanding ( Verstand ) had the effect of a historicist reevaluation of the latter as “hermeneutic understanding,” Verstehen. Schleiermacher’s ( 1819 ) hermeneutics thus presents itself as the “art of understanding,” Kunst des Verstehens. Wilhelm von Humboldt insists equally on this historical and linguistic dimension of understanding, which is related to the possibility of misunderstanding as to its shadow. Through Dilthey and his students ( J. Wach, G. Misch ) and then in Gadamer’s hermeneutics ( Truth and Method, 1960 ), Verstehen is distinguished from the formal procedures of method and explanation in order to defend an individual approach that is situated in a history and indefinitely revisable. Only English retained “understanding” throughout these inflections with its prior importance, while Verstand, entendement, and even intelletto have given way to other terms. The rise of cognitive science and artificial intelligence encourages the appeal to the terminology of intelligence ( Intelligence, Intelligenz ), whereas the critique of rationality, on the other side, gives preference to interpretation, to Verstehen.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Apel, Karl Otto. Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective. Translated by G. Warnke. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
. “Das ‘Verstehen.’ Eine Problemgeschichte als Begriffsgeschichte.” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 1 ( 1955 ): 142–99.
Berner, Christian. “Understanding Understanding: Schleiermacher.” In The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy, edited by Simon Glendinning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Bréal, Michel. Essai de sémantique. Paris: Hachette, 1924. First published in 1897.
Darmesteter, Arsène. La vie des mots. Paris: Champ Libre, 1979. First published in 1887.
Descartes, René. Méditation seconde. In Meditationes, vol. 7 of Œuvres completes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Cerf, 1904.
Hobbes, Thomas. Human Nature. In The Elements of Law, edited by J. C. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. First published in 1651.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, a Dialogue ( 1815 ). In Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” translated by G. di Giovanni, 537–90. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. First published in 1689.
Plato. Phèdre. Translated by Léon Robin. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1970. Translated by Luc Brisson. Paris: Garnier, 1989.
Schlegel, Friedrich. “Transcendentalphilosophie.” In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 12. Paderborn, Ger.: Schöningh, 1964. First published in 1801. Translation by Frederick C. Beiser: “Philosophical Lectures: Transcendental Philosophy.” In The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, edited by Frederick C. Beiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
. “Über die Philosophie: An Dorothea.” In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 2. Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958. Translation by J. Schulte-Sasse: “On Philosophy, to Dorothea.” In Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, edited by J. Schulte-Sasse et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Hermeneutics and Criticism” and Other Writings. Translated by A. Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Schneiders, W. “Vernunft und Verstand—Krisen eines Begriffspaares.” In Aufklärung und Skepsis: Studien zur Philosophie und Geistesgeschichte des 17. und 18 Jh., edited by Lothar Kreimendahl, 199–220. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995.
Scholz, Oliver R. Verstehen und Rationalität. Frankfurt: Kostermann, 1999.
Spinoza, Baruch. Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, translated by E. M. Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Thouard, Denis. “Verstehen im Nicht-Verstehen: Zum Problem des Hermeneutik bei Humboldt.” Kodikas/Code. Ars Semeiotica 21 ( 1998 ): 271–85.
Tilliette, Xavier. L’intuition intellectuelle de Kant à Hegel. Paris: Vrin, 1995.
Tonelli, G. “La question des bornes de l’entendement humain au XVIIIème siècle et la genèse du criticisme kantien.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 65 ( 1959 ): 396–427.
Wach, Joachim. Das Verstehen. Tübingen: Mohr ( Siebeck ), 1926.
Zovko, Jure. Verstehen und Nichtverstehen bei Friedrich Schlegel. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1990.
| GREEK | to katholou [τὸ ϰαθόλου] to koinon [τὸ ϰοινόν] | ||
| LATIN | universale |
ABSTRACTION, ANALOGY, ESSENCE, LOGOS, MIMESIS, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, RES, TO BE, TROPE
The term “universal” has a wide range of uses: one can speak of linguistic universals, logical universals, mental universals ( in the sense of “translinguistic categories of thought” ), or social universals. In its contemporary philosophical use, the “problem of universals” comes down to asking whether one should allow their ontology to include properties and nonparticular relations outside of individual substances. As an important confrontation point, although not the only one, between nominalism and realism, the problem of universals has a long history. A correct approach to the problem of universals, of its difficulties and its vocabulary, entails more than a description of current theories. It requires an archeological investigation back to the very source of the debate via Porphyry and Alexander. The “problem of Porphyry” is in fact conceptually saturated, by a distinction made upstream, as it were, by Alexander between the common ( to koinon [τὸ ϰοινόν] ) and the universal ( to katholou [τὸ ϰαθόλου] ), and downstream by a distinction made by Ammonius between three “states” of the universal, popularized through the Scholastic triad of ante rem/in re/post rem. In his vocabulary, Porphyry’s set of questions indicates the same level of saturation, formulated in the Stoic language of “incorporeals” ( see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, II ), which carries an opposition between Platonism and Aristotelianism, itself overlaid by a grid of readings initially set out by the Neoplatonic commentators of Aristotle, in order to determine the object ( skopos [σϰοπός] ) of the Categories: words, things, or concepts. The history of the problem of universals thus presents itself, right up to the modern oppositions of nominalism, realism, and conceptualism, as the ongoing fusion of two sets of questions and two different lexicons, one Aristotelian-Stoic, the other Neoplatonic, with the latter replacing the former to such an extent as to entirely obscure the Stoic dimension of the problem.
I. The Questionnaire of Porphyry
The history of the “problem of universals” usually starts with Porphyry’s celebrated questionnaire beginning at the second paragraph of the Isagoge.
About genera and species—whether they subsist, whether they actually depend on bare thoughts alone, whether if they actually subsist they are bodies or incorporeal and whether they are separable or are in perceptible items and subsist about them—these matters I shall decline to discuss, such a subject being very deep and demanding another and larger investigation. Here I shall attempt to show you how the old masters—and especially the Peripatetics among them—treated from a logical point of view, genera and species and the items before us.
Introduction, trans. Barnes
This set of questions, which Porphyry refrains from answering himself, has passed through various transpositions and simplifications over the course of time. By a sort of feedback of the traditional discussion of the subject ( skopos [σϰοπός] ) of the Categories of the Isagoge, the Greek commentators, conveyed by the medieval ones, came to ask themselves whether the genera and species were words or voiced ( phônai [φωναί] ), concepts ( noêmata [νοήματα] ), things ( pragmata [πϱάγματα] ), or beings ( onta [ὄντα] ), which opens the way to those responses—vocalism or nominalism, conceptualism, realism—and their ongoing confrontation down through the centuries. In our day, the principal formulations set the partisans of “primitive natural classes” ( Quinton ) against the proponents of “Resemblance nominalism” ( Price ), or of “universals” in the strict sense ( a thesis that is invoked, but without a representative ), of “natural classes of tropes” ( Stout ), or “resemblance classes of tropes” ( Williams )—and some philosophers try to combine the theory of tropes with the acceptance of universals ( Wilson ).
■ See Box 1.
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Six contemporary responses to the problem of universals D. M. Armstrong sets out the six contemporary positions by considering how each would deal with the property of whiteness. 1. Primitive natural class view: The class of all the white things forms a natural class, a class with a reasonable degree of naturalness. That is all that can be said about what makes a white thing white. 2. Resemblance nominalism: The white things form a natural class in virtue of the objective fact that they all resemble each other to a certain degree. Resemblance is an objective but unanalyzable fact. 3. Universals: All white things have an identical property in common ( or a set of slightly different properties to correspond to the different shades of white ). 4. Natural classes of tropes: Each white thing has its own, entirely distinct, property of whiteness. But the class of the whitenesses forms a primitive natural class. 5. Resemblance classes of tropes: Each white thing has its own property of whiteness. But the members of the class of whitenesses all resemble each other more or less closely, resemblance being a primitive. 6. Tropes plus universals: Each white thing has its own property of whiteness. But these particular properties themselves each have a universal property of whiteness. David Malet BIBLIOGRAPHY Armstrong, David. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. |
The medieval debate on universals is often presented as an opposition between Platonism and Aristotelianism. Contemporary philosophers use the term “Platonism” to refer to transcendent realism, that is to say, any theory that admits the existence of universals or “uninstantiated properties”; and they assign to Aristotle the attempt to “bring universals back to earth,” by attributing to him, as does Armstrong, the theory of universals in things, “whose Latin tag is universalia in rebus” ( Universals ). Rather than directly confronting the Platonic theory of Ideas and its Aristotelian critique, it would seem more fruitful to start from the construction of the problem by an author who, even more than Porphyry, set the framework for the questions, concepts, and strategies of argument: Alexander of Aphrodisias and his collection of Quaestiones. We will then follow the course of Alexander’s theses through the Neoplatonic and medieval tradition and trace the genealogy of the distinction between the universals ante rem/post rem/in re to which the modern lexicon is deeply indebted.
II. Alexander’s Construction: Community and Universality, To Koinon and To Katholou
Alexander’s Quaestio, 1.11 consists of an “exegesis” of Aristotle’s “to de zôion to katholou êtoi outhen estin ê husteron [τὸ δὲ ζῷον τὸ ϰαθόλου ἤτοι οὐθέν ἐστιν ἢ ὕστεϱον]” ( De anima, 1.1.402b7 ). Alexander’s question is rendered by Sharples as “What is meant by the saying in the first book On the Soul [that] ‘the living creature that is universal is either nothing or posterior’?” This question has been handed down in two versions: the shorter one, Quaestio, 1.11a, which proposes a single answer to the question ( S2 ), and a longer one, Quaestio, 1.11b, which proposes two answers ( S1 and S2 ) ( 402b7 ). The Arabic versions of the text include slightly discordant titles that draw our attention to the central problem of the Alexandrian theory and lexicon of the universal ( the Arabic tradition includes two documents of 1.11a ). In the inventory of Arabic Alexandrian texts drawn up by Abdurrahman Badawi, the two versions appear under the French title: Traité d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise: Des choses communes et universelles, qu’elles ne sont pas des essences existentes ( Alexander of Aphrodisias: On common and universal things, which are not existing essences ).
The problem posed by the title of the first Arabic version is clear, if not easy to resolve: is the expression “common things” when added to the original formula of De anima ( 1.1.402b7 ) ( “the universal animal” ) itself a synonym? Or, to put it differently, should one distinguish between “universal” and “common” in Alexander? In short, should one distinguish between to katholou [τὸ ϰαθόλου] and to koinon [τὸ ϰοινόν]?
A first part of the answer is provided by S2, which can be paraphrased thus:
S2 [1.11a, Bruns = 1.11b, Bruns]: Aristotle is correct in saying that the universal animal is “posterior,” because he speaks of the universal in the sense of a “generic” universal, which is a concept engendered from individuals. On the other hand, this thesis cannot apply to the universal animal “in the sense of the common animal.” To be fully rigorous, one must distinguish between commonality [Fr. communauté] and “universality.” The latter is an “accident” that arrives from outside of “nature,” from the fact that it is realized in a number of individuals. The former is not. In fact, a “nature” is in itself common. As soon as an individual exists, this nature—which is in itself common—also exists, even when only instantiated or realized in that individual, and reciprocally, an individual exists only “because” this nature is instantiated in it.
The distinction between to katholou and to koinon that S2 demands, and which has been discussed by various commentators, is fundamental for understanding the difference between the universal in re and the universal post rem, whose paternity historians like to attribute to Alexander.
■ See Box 2.
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The grasp of the universal according to Alexander of Aphrodisias In the Peri psuchês Alexander presents the perception of the universal as follows ( see ABSTRACTION ): [The intellect] that perceives ( labôn [λαβών] ) the form of something ( to eidos tinos [τὸ εἶδός τινος] ) apart from matter ( chôris tês hulês [χωϱὶς τῆς ὕλης] ) possesses the common and the universal ( echei to koinon te kai katholou [ἔχει τὸ ϰοινόν τε ϰαὶ ϰαθόλου] ) since what grasps the form of man aside from material circumstances ( chôris tôn hulikôn peristaseôn [χωϱὶς τῶν ὑλιϰῶν πεϱιστάσεων] ) possesses the common man ( echei ton koinon anthrôpon [ἔχει τὸν ϰοινὸν ἄνθϱωπον] ). Indeed, the differences between individual men in relation to each other ( pros allêlous diaphora [πϱὸς ἀλλήλους διαφοϱὰ] ) is engendered by the fact of matter ( para tês hulês ginetai [παϱὰ τῆς ὕλης γίνεται] ) since their forms, thanks to which they are men, are not at all different one from another. But [the intellect] that grasps what individuals have in common ( ho te to koinon to epi tois kath’ hekasta sunidôn [ὅ τε τὸ ϰοινὸν τὸ ἐπὶ τοῖς ϰαθ’ ἕϰαστα συνιδών] ) also perceives ( lambanei [λαμϐάνει] ) the form apart from matter. In fact, this is what is common and identical ( to koinon te kai tauton [τὸ ϰοινόν τε ϰαὶ ταὐτόν] ) to them. Alexander, Peri psuchês, based on Bruns, ed. BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexandri Aphrodisiensis praeter commentaria scripta minora. De anima liber cum Mantissa. In Supplementum Aristotelicum 2.1. Edited by Ivo Bruns. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1961. |
III. The Universal In Re
Even if the formula itself is the result of a series of reworkings, starting with Alexander, by the “Greek” commentators of Aristotle, which were further pursued by Avicenna and culminated in Albertus Magnus and the Scholastics, the notion ( but not the expression ) of the “universal in re” can still be traced back to Aristotle himself. In fact, in De anima, he maintains that since the notion is the “form” of the thing, it is “necessarily inherent in any given matter if it is [real]”: ‘O μὲν γὰϱ λόγος εἶδος τοῦ πϱάγματος, ἀνάγϰη δ’ εἶναι τοῦτον ἐν ὕλῃ τοιδί, εἰ ἔσται ( De anima, 1.1.403b2–3 ). No notion, no logos [λόγος]—for example, that of an animal, that is to say, an “animated essence endowed with sensation”—can be, which is to say be the eidos [εἶδος] of anything at all, if it is not realized in some matter. What Alexander adds to Aristotle is the idea that such a notion, even while it needs realization, is still distinct from the universal that corresponds to it, which is to say that it remains distinct from itself as a universal, by virtue of the fact that universality is for it a mere accident. Alexander’s thesis is thus that the animal—or as Aristotle calls it, the logos-form of animal—only exists insofar as it is realized “in at least one individual,” but that universality is not part of its “essence.” Thus there is nothing “universal” in the notion of an ousia empsuchos aisthêtikê [οὐσία ἔμψυχος αἰσθητιϰή], that is, in the notion of the animal ( to zôion [τὸ ζῷον] ). But this notion is not real; it only “exists”—as the ousia ( essence ) which it is—as realized in a body. Despite a few superficial dissonances, the Alexandrian lexicon of the universal is quite settled: the logos-form for an ousia, in itself a commonality—in other words, communicable to more than one—must be ( and is in fact ) realized in a matter ( an individual ) at least. Its realization in more than one accidentally confers the status of universal upon it. Such a logos-form for an ousia is, insofar as it is realized in more than one, what commentators and many modern philosophers would call a “universal in re.” The concept that can be drawn by “abstraction” from the individual in which the logos is realized is what one calls a “universal post rem.” It is this concept that Aristotle refers to in De anima ( 1.1.402b7 ) when he ( problematically ) qualifies it as “posterior” ( husteron [ὕστεϱον] ). In the terms of Alexander’s language, the difference between the “universal post rem” and the “universal in re” can be defined by a weighty thesis that implies a certain difference between “being” and “existing” ( in the sense of “being subject to oneself” [Fr. se subjecter, having hypostasis]: “the universals have ‘being’ [einai ( εἶναι )] in thought and hupostasis [ὑπόστασις ( Quaestio, 59, 7–8; In topicorum Aristotelis libros )]/[ὕπαϱξις ( De anima, 90 )] in the particulars.”
Alexander’s distinction between to katholou and to koinon, and his formulation of the difference between “being in thought” ( epinoia [ἐπίνοια] ) as the product of an “abstraction” and “having hypostasis” in particulars are the epochal foundations of several important theories, the tracks of which can be followed to the end of the Middle Ages, and in some cases beyond. We will limit ourselves here to the two most important. The first is the distinction of “three types of universals.” The second is the “indifference of the essence.” The following section deals with the typology of universals.
IV. Universal Ante Rem/Post Rem/In Re
In their search for a “harmonic” or “concordant” reading of the two “great philosophies” of Aristotle and Plato, the Neoplatonic commentators of Aristotle and Porphyry formulated a scholastic division between three types of universals. In a sense, this division does not take into account the Alexandrian distinction between nature common in itself and universal by accident. But it is also clear that in another sense this division is required, even if tacitly, in order to be able to think that a “same entity” can assume different states of “being” in different substrates or “hypostases” without paradox or contradiction.
The first great source for the doctrine of the three types of universals is Ammonius, in his commentary on the Isagoge. Here one finds its two main features: the distinction between universals pro tôn pollôn [πϱὸ τῶν πολλῶν] ( anterior to the multiplicities ), universals en tois pollois [ἐν τοῖς πολλοῖς] ( in the multiplicities ), and universals epi tois pollois [ἐπὶ τοῖς πολλοῖς] ( posterior to the multiplicities ); and the reuse of a metaphor, of the seal, the wax, and the imprinted image, which derives from the Timaeus, 50c–d ( also mentioned by Aristotle in his critical account of Plato’s doctrines in the Metaphysics, 1.6, 987b–988a with the help of the term ekmageoin [ἐϰμαγεῖον], “seal,” to explain the multiplication of the one in the many ). The desired objective is clearly to reconcile the three points of view: the theological ( in Plato ), the physical ( in both Plato and Aristotle ), and the logical and noetic ( in Aristotle ). The universal en tois pollois provides a form of synthesis, based on a certain understanding of the middle term, between the Platonic theory of Ideas and the Aristotelian theory of abstraction.
■ See Box 3.
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The Neoplatonic theory of the three states of the universal Ammonius follows the “trajectory” of the universal from the Platonic Idea to the abstract concept as follows: In order to clarify what the text [of Porphyry] means, let us present it by means of an example, for it is not true that [philosophers] designate simply and by chance some things as corporeal and some others as incorporeal. Rather, they do so according to a reasoning, and they do not contradict each other, as each of them says reasonable things. Let us imagine a ring, with an imprint [that represents] Achilles, for example, along with a multitude of sticks of wax; let us suppose that the ring is used to mark each piece of wax with its seal; now let us suppose that someone comes afterward and that he looks at all the pieces of wax and observes that [the marks] come from a single imprint: he himself will also have the mark imprinted in his discursive faculty [dianoia ( διάνοια )]; we can thus say that the seal on the ring is “anterior to the multiplicity,” that the mark in the blobs of wax is “in the multiplicity,” while the mark that is in the discursive faculty of the person who made the imprinted seals is “posterior to the multiplicity” and “posterior in the order of being.” Well, this is what one needs to understand in the case of genera and species. Ammonius, In Porphyrii Isagogen, based on Busse, ed. The Syriac Christian commentator Sergius de Reš‵ayn completes the process undertaken by Ammonius by transposing the universal anterior to the multiple into the “divine idea.” [This is how] species and genera of things are divided. Some are close to the creator, and they are called simple and primary. Others are in materials and they are called material and natural. Still others are in the intellect, and they are called last and intellectual. These are the teachings of Plato and the other members of the Academy regarding genera and species, which state that each and every thing which is naturally in the world is its own or proper species and also has a proper species near its creator—a species that subsists by itself—through which [the thing in the world] has been imprinted and has come down here to existence. And when someone sees it, he takes its species into memory, and it subsists in his thought, such that this species exists in three ways, that is: near by the creator, in the thing itself, and in the memory of the person who has seen it, the one who knows it. Sergius de Reš`ayn, Treatise on Categories “to Philotheos,” based on Fr. trans. by H. Hugonnard-Roche, §5 BIBLIOGRAPHY Sergius de Reš‘ayn. Traité sur les Catégories “à Philotheos.” Translated into French by H. Hugonnard-Roche. In “Les Catégories d’Aristote comme introduction à la philosophie, dans un commentaire syriaque de Sergius de Reš‘ainā.” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 8 ( 1997 ): 339–63. |
Ammonius’s theory had a long afterlife. One finds it of course in the commentaries of David and Elias, but also in Simplicius—when he denounces “those certain people” who only see “the second sort of genres,” who do not rise up to the level required for contemplating the transcendent ( extrinsic ) genres, and who believe that “common natures” only subsist in the singular; it could be found as well in the Syriac Christian Sergius de Reš‵ayn ( d. 22 April 536 )—who clearly locates the genera and the species anterior to the multiples in the spirit of a God the “creator.” But it is also the source of the mereological doctrine of the universal and of the whole by the Byzantine Eustratius of Nicaea, who presented it through the prism of the Alexandrian theory of homeomeric and nonhomeomeric wholes ( cf. Alexander, Problem, 28 ); of the Avicennian doctrine of the three states of the universal; and through the latter to the Scholastic distinction imposed by Albertus Magnus and his contemporaries between universale ante rem, in re, and post rem.
Each different kind of universal that emerged from this system has had its own series of problems, but these concern the history of doctrines, not the languages of philosophy.
The Albertian triad has been subject to various adaptations. Although most authors until the end of the fifteenth century reproduced it unchanged, some of them focused on Avicenna’s binary distinction between logicalia and intellectualia and a distinction between an abstract “logical” universal ( or “universal of predication” ) and a separate “theological” universal ( or “universal of production” ) imbued with elements of Proclus’s theory of “precontent” ( praehabere, praehabitio, praecontinentia ). This is the case of the Germans Dietrich of Freiberg ( De cognitione entium separatorum, 10, 1–4 ) and Berthold de Moosburg ( Super elementationem theologicam Procli, prop. I A ); and it is also the case of some Oxonian realists of the fourteenth century, such as Wycliff ( Tractatus de universalibus, II, 2 ), who opposed “logical” universals to “metaphysical” universals. In the fifteenth century, the “Albertists” of Cologne and Paris added a fourth type of universal, which allowed them to inscribe the ensemble of “modern” philosophies into a four-part structure inherited from Albertinian philosophical doxography. In this new arrangement, the nominalists, who proposed reducing all universals to the status of universal post rem, hold the role of a kind of “Epicurism” they called “literal” ( epiccurei litterales ).
If modern and contemporary philosophy has largely abandoned the thematic of the universal ante rem, modern forms of nominalism and realism have helped extend the perennial debate between Plato and Aristotle as orchestrated by antique and medieval commentary. The contemporary lexicon holds few problems for the ( Continental ) reader, outside of some expressions specific to English, with its own ellipses and shortcuts—such as the expressions “predicate nominalism” and “resemblance nominalism” ( see Box 1 ), which are difficult to render into French ( for example ) without recourse to inelegant periphrases such as nominalisme réduisant les universaux à des prédicats, or nominalisme fondé sur la resemblance. “Predicate nominalism” ( directly transposed into French as nominalisme du prédicat ) is defined as a doctrine that maintains that some individuals can be grouped together insofar as they have the same relation to the token ( SIGN; cf. PROPOSITION, Box 4 ), either written or spoken of a same linguistic type ( “some individuals, ordinary or relation instances, are related to a shared entity—i.e. to a spoken or written token of a linguistic type”; cf. Mertz, Moderate Realism and its Logic ). “Concept nominalism” is understood as a doctrine that replaces the idea of “linguistic type” by that of “mental construct” in the role of type—and both doctrines agree on the rejection of universals, understood as properties common to several individuals, and “instantiated” or “exemplified” in them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abelard, Peter. “Glosses on Porphyry from His Logica ‘ingredientibus.’ ” In Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994.
. Logica “ingredientibus.” In Peter Abaelards philsophische schriften. Edited by B. Geyer. Münster, Ger: Aschendorff, 1919–27.
Ammonius. Ammonii in Porphyrii Isagogen sive V Voces. Edited by Adolf Busse. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1891. CAG, IV, 3.
Armstrong, David M. Universals and Scientific Realism. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989.
Bergman, Gustav. Realism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.
Boethius. Boethius’s “De topicis differentiis.” Translated by E. Stump. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
. Boethius’s “In Ciceronis topica.” Translated by E. Stump. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
. In Porphyrii Isagogen commentarium editio duplex. Edited by S. Brandt. Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, 38. Vienna, 1906.
. “The Second Commentary on Porphyry.” In Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994.
Brakas, George. Aristotle’s Concept of the Universal. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1988.
Ebbesen, Sten. “Philoponus, ‘Alexander’ and the Origins of Medieval Logic.” In Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influences. Edited by R. Sorabji. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Küng, Guido. Ontology and the Logistic Analysis of Language. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1967.
Libera, Alain de. La Querelle des universaux: De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996.
. L’Art des généralités: Théories de l’abstraction. Paris: Aubier, 1999.
Lloyd, A. C. Form and Universal in Aristotle. Liverpool, UK: Francis Cairns, 1981.
Loux, Michael, ed. Universals and Particulars: Readings in Ontology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976.
Mertz, Donald W. Moderate Realism and Its Logic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Porphyry. Introduction. Translated with commentary by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
. Isagoge. Translated into French by Alain de Libera and Alain-Philippe Segonds. Introduction and notes by Alain de Libera. Paris: Vrin, 1998.
. Isagoges translatio Boethll accedunt Isagoges Fragmenta M. Victorino interprete. Edited by L. Minio-Paluello. Aristotles Latinus, I, 6–7. Bruges, Belg.: Descleê de Brouwer, 1966.
Price, H. H. Thinking and Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Quine, W.V.O. “On Universals.” Journal of Symbolic Logic 12 ( 1947 ): 74–84.
Quinton, A. The Nature of Things. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953.
Sergius de Reš‘ayn. Traité sur les Catégories “à Philotheos.” Translated into French by H. Hugonnard-Roche. In “Les Catégories d’Aristote comme introduction à la philosophie, dans un commentaire syriaque de Sergius de Reš‘ayn.” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 8 ( 1997 ): 339–63.
Stout, G. F. “The Nature of Universals and Propositions.” In The Problem of Universals, edited by C. Landesman, 154–66. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Williams, D. C. “The Elements of Being.” Review of Metaphysics 7 ( 1953 ): 3–18, 171–92.
Wilson, John Cook. Statement and Inference, with Other Philosophical Papers. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.
Wolterstorff, N. On Universals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Wycliffe. John. Tractatus de universalibus. Edited by I. J. Mueller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
UTILE
The French utile derives from the Latin uti ( “to use” ). This study traces a network of meanings via the English language, as inflected by Jeremy Bentham’s invention of “utilitarian” as something different from “useful”: see UTILITY; cf. FAIR, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD.
It should be compared to the network of “availability” which has recently been marked by the Heideggerian notion of Vorhandenheit: see VORHANDEN, and DISPOSITION, I.
BEAUTY, ECONOMY, ENTREPRENEUR, PRAXIS, VALUE, VIRTUE, WORK
UTILITY, UTILITARIAN, UTILITARIANISM
UTILE, and BEAUTY, ECONOMY, FAIR, HAPPINESS, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, VALUE, VORHANDEN
One starting point for the widespread incomprehension among the French vis-à-vis the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick can probably be found in a problem of translation. When the first French translators of Bentham and his friends sought an equivalent for the English neologism “utilitarian,” which Bentham had created to describe his new philosophy of the general interest ( in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, first appearing in 1780 and published in 1789 ), they invented a French neologism: utilitaire ( 1831 ). But by 1802, Bentham was aware of the perjorative sense that his term had gained through hostile reactions to his doctrine, and he proposed another term, utilitarien, in order to distinguish the technical term from everyday usage. But this new word met with no success or acceptance, and in 1922, the French word utilitaire was belatedly replaced with utilitariste to render the English “utilitarian,” a term that has retained a pejorative connotation in addition to its philosophical content, and which is distinct from the more positive term “useful.”
In French, utilitarisme, which had appeared in 1842, ultimately supplanted utilitairianisme ( 1845 ) or utilitarianisme ( 1872 ) to render the original English term “utilitarianism,” but the expression philosophie utilitaire persisted, contributing to the misunderstanding of utilitarianism over the course of the nineteenth century. In his celebrated reference book La Morale anglaise contemporaine, morale de l’utilité et de l’évolution ( 1885 ), Jean-Marie Guyau described his objective as “the history and critique of la morale utilitaire.” Likewise Élie Halévy would write in 1901 ( La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, vol. 1 ) that “to the spiritual philosophy of the rights of man ( in France ), corresponded ( in England ) the utilitarian philosophy [philosophie utilitaire] of the identity of interests.”
I. “Utilitarian” and “Expedient”
It is fascinating to see how quickly the neologism “utilitarian” fell in public esteem and took on such a negative meaning. In Hard Times ( 1854 ), Dickens caricatured the “utilitarian” mentality as an attitude hardened toward moral feeling and concerned only with the facts, the eponymous “Gradgrindism” of the novel’s main character. The problem is to understand whether this negative reading derives from the hostility of the spirit of the time—the rejection of burgeoning capitalism by romanticism, and subsequently by Marxism—or whether it derives from a weakness internal to utilitarianism that should then be subject to question. The philosophical meaning of the term, the criterion of benefit or harm based on “the greatest happiness for the greatest number, each one counting equally” ( Bentham, Introduction, 1789 ), needs to be critically unpacked.
As Mill remarks at the beginning of Utilitarianism, the adjective “utilitarian” has come to designate only that which is instrumental or advantageous, that which dispenses with any concern for pleasure, for the beautiful, or for the “useless.” The philosophy of utilitarianism has come to be identified with the shopkeeper and his or her short-term interest. “Freedom, equality, property and Bentham,” proclaims Marx in Capital. In order to dispel this confusion and to defend utilitarianism against these accusations of immorality, Mill proposes to distinguish between “utilitarian” and “expedient.” This latter term is identified with that pejorative sense of a pure means to an end, of short-term advantage, of an easy or effective means, of utility without any notion of morality. The simply expedient is a means to an end of which we may not necessarily approve, but that we accept because it functions efficaciously. Utility, on the other hand, is useful only in relation to a good end. Mill explains it thus:
[The doctrine of] Utility is often summarily stigmatized as an immoral doctrine by giving it the name of Expediency, and taking advantage of the popular use of that term to contrast it with Principle. But the Expedient, in the sense in which it is opposed to the Right, generally means that which is expedient for the particular interest of the agent himself; as when a Minister sacrifices the interests of his country to keep himself in place. When it means anything better than this, it means that which is expedient for some immediate object, some temporary purpose, but which violates a rule whose observance is expedient in a much higher degree. The Expedient, in this sense, instead of being the same thing with the useful, is a branch of the hurtful.
( Utilitarianism, chap. 2 )
Utilitarianism, on the other hand, seeks a fundamental moral principle that can be used to define the morally right and wrong: the quantity of happiness that results from an action, from a decision, from a political system, from a redistribution of goods, material and social benefits, and so forth. In short, it proposes an objective and impartial method for evaluating justice and injustice, benefit and harm, in the place of criteria based on opinion, personal interest, or power. It takes the side of Socrates against Callicles.
II. “Utility” and “Usefulness”
So why the pejorative meaning? Why not link utility and the Good instead of saying that utility is a moral criterion only if it leads to a good end, only if it is useful? Because this would lead to an uncomfortable circularity, already observed by G. E. Moore ( Principa Ethica, 1901 ), which is that in order to ground the distinction proposed by Mill, we would need to know what constitutes a good end in itself, independent of our immediate advantage: an independent criterion of the Good. This is precisely what utilitarianism rejects in defining the Good as utility or happiness. As Hume already wrote before Bentham,
Usefulness is only a tendency to a certain end; and it is a contradiction in terms, that anything pleases as means to an end, where the end itself no wise affects us.
( “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,” §V, part 2 )
From here we understand Hume’s insistence on agreement and approval in defining utility, and his conclusion that “Everything that contributes directly to the happiness of society directly recommends itself to our approbation and well-meaning” ( ibid. ). This is the crucial point that Mill should have insisted upon if he had really wanted to release the utilitarian from the instrumental, and it is to Hume, in fact, that we owe the solution to our problem. What defines the useful as a good for the utilitarians and differentiates advantage from the useful is the general consensus, the approbation of universal suffrage, as Kant would say. Herein lies the essential point of the doctrine: utility, according to Hume, is collective; if it is not, then it is not utility:
Usefulness is agreeable, and engages our approbation. This is a matter of fact, confirmed by daily observation. But, USEFUL? For what? For somebody’s interest, surely. Whose interest then? Not our own only: For our approbation frequently extends farther. It must, therefore, be the interest of those who are served by the character or action approved of.
( Ibid. )
The useful can only be understood in reference to the happiness and the reduction of pain for all, in relation to human happiness in general. This is why Bentham ultimately called the principle of utility the “principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, each counting equally.” The utility of the British philosophers is thus not to be confused with the simply expedient—for it must lead to a good end, to that which has real value to us, to our happiness and satisfaction. It is not a matter of egotistical personal interest, but can be evaluated only by a general consensus, by what Halévy called an identité des intérêts ( a community of interests or common interest ). For the utilitarians, it is impossible to separate the individual from the whole. And it is precisely this universalist dimension that offers utilitarianism a way out of the confusions besetting its current usage.
The philosophical use of the term “utility” broadens its scope to mean that which procures a satisfaction for the greatest number. It thus loses any instrumental connotation or neutrality in relation to the desired end. Like Kantian morality, as a moral principle, it relies on a principle of impartiality. The happiness to be maximized is the happiness of all, with each and all treated in equal manner:
The good of a specific individual, whoever he may be, has no more importance, from the point of view of the universe, if I can put it that way, than the good of any other individual, unless there are some special reasons to think that a greater Good is to be attained in one case rather than another.
( Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics, bk. 3, chap. 13 )
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Audard, Catherine, ed. Antologie historique et Critique de l’utiliarisme. 3 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
Bentham, Jeremy. Of Laws in General. Edited by H.L.A. Hart. London: Athlone Press, 1970.
Halévy, Élie. La Jeunesse de Bentham 1776–1789. Vol. 1 of La Formation du radicalisme philosophique. Paris, 1901. Translation by Mary Morris: The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955.
Hume, David. “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.” In Moral Philosophy, edited and with an introduction by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Vol. 10 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Rosen, Frederick. Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill. London: Routledge, 2003.
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 7th ed. Preface by John Rawls. London: Hackett, 1981.