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Course Reader English 101 Sec 50 and 53 Fall 2012 PROF. HASSAN

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Page 1: HMS 101 Reader Final

Course Reader

English 101 Sec 50 and 53

Fall 2012

PROF. HASSAN

Page 2: HMS 101 Reader Final

HMS 101 F 2012

READER CONTENTS (PDF page numbering)

Author

Title

Aristotle From The Poetics 4

Barthes, Roland “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of

Narrative”

“From Work to Text”

From S/Z

8

32

38

Brecht, Bertolt “Popular and Realistic

On Brecht

55

59

Breton, Andre The Manifesto Of Surrealism 61

Brooks, Peter “Freud’s Masterplot” from Reading for the Plot 84

Coover, Robert “The Babysitter” 97

de Cervantes, Miguel from Don Quixote 108

De Maupaussant, Guy “The Necklace” 111

de Saussure, Ferdinand from Course in General Lingustics

Nature of the Linguistic Sign

Linguistic Value

116

119

Foucault “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punishment

128

Freud, Sigmund from Outline Of Psychoanalysis

I ”The Psychical Apparatus”

II “The Theory of the Instincts”

III “The Development of the Sexual Function”

IV “Psychical Qualities”

V “Dream Interpretation as an Illustration”

146

147

149

152

155

160

Hemingway, Ernest “Hills Like White Elephants” 165

Johnson, Samuel Rasselas, Ch. X 167

Lacan, Jacques “The Mirror Stage” 169

Lukacs, George from “The Ideology of Modernism” 173

Nietszche, Friedrich from Beyond Good and Evil

“Truth And Lie In The Extra-Moral Sense”

178

186

Plato The Republic, VI 189

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The Republic, VII

The Republic, Bk X

192

197

Robbe-Grillet, Alain from Jealousy

“From Realism to Reality”

206

222

Winnicott, D. W. from Psycho-Analytic Explorations

“The Fate of the Transitional Object”

229

Woolf, Virginia “Modern Fiction” from The Common Reader

“The Window” from To the Lighthouse

233

239

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780 / AR l s ro r rn

the age of seventeen but left it when Plato died (347 n.c.s.). He carried on hisresearches (he was especially interested in zoolory) at Varioris places on the Aegean;served as tutor to the young Alexander, son of Philip.Il of Macedon; and returned toAthens in 335, to found his own philosophical school, the Lyceum, where he estab-lished tht world's first research library. At the Lyceum he and his pupils carried onresearch in zoology, botany, biology, fhyrics, piitical science, ethics, logic, muiic,and mathematics. He left Athens when Alsander died in Babvlon (323 s.c.E.) andthe Athenidns; for a while, were able to demonstrate their hatred of Macedon andeVerything connected with it; he died a year later. . l

The scope of. his written work,:philosbphical and scientific, is immense. Even morethan Plato, Aristotle has exerted a decisive influence on the Western philosophicaland intellectual traditions. He is represented here by some excerpts from the Poeti,cs,the first systematic work of literary criticism in the West, and one that has played acentral role in shaping the theory and production of literature there.

From Poeticsr

o o o Thus, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete,and possessing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which isused separately in the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated;and effecting through piry and fear [what we call] the cathanisz of suchemotions. By "embellished language" I mean language having rhythm andmelody, and by "separately in different parts" I mean that some parts of aplay are carried on solely in metrical speech while others again are sung.

The cottstitaent parts of tragedy. Since the imitation is carried out in thedramatic mode by the personages themselves, it necessarily follows, first,that the arrangement of Spectacle. will be a part of tragedy, and next, thatMelody and Language will be parts, since these are the media in which theyeffect the imitation. By "language" I mean precisely the composition of theverses, by "melody" only that which is perfectly obvious. And since tragedyis the imitation of an action and is enacted by men in action, these personsmust necessarily possess certain qualities of Character and Thought, sincethese are the basis for our ascribing.qualities to the actions themselves-character and thought are two natural causes of actioni-and it is in theiractions that men universally meet with success or failure. The imitation ofthe action is the Plot. By plot I here mean the combination of the e1'ents;Character is that in virtue of which we say that the personages are of suchand such a quality; and Thought is present in everything in their utterancesthat aims to prove a point or that expresses an opinion. Necessarily,therefore. there are in tragedy as a uhole. considered as a special form, slxconstituent elements, viz. Plot, Character, Language, Thought, Spectacle,

l. Translated byJames Huttoh, *,ho has added bracketed tqr for clarity. 2, This is probably the mostdisputed pasage in the Westem critical tBdition. There are Mo main schools of interpretation, whichdiffer in th-eir undestanding of the word stharis. Som€ critics take it to mean "purificaiion," implying ametaphor frm the religious.process of,purification from guih; the passions.{e "purified" by. thi nagcperlbmance because the qcitement ol these passions by the perfomance weakens them and reduces themto just proportions ip the individual. This theory was supponed by the Geman critic G. E. [*ssing. Orheretake the meraphor to be medical, reading the word as "purging" ud interpreting rhe phrase ro mean rharthe tragic ; ierforniance eici tes the bmotions only to al lai them, thereby r idding the spectator of the dis-quiering emotions frcim which he or she suffers in everyday life. Tmgedy thus hr o'therApeutic effect,

P o a r r c s / 7 8 1

and Melody. Of these elements, two [Language and Melody) are the mediain which they effect the imitation, orie [Spectacle] is the lnoflrter, and tlrree[Plot, Character, Thought] are the oblects they imitate; and besides thesethere are no other parts. So then they employ these six forms, not just someof them so to speak; for every drama has spectacle, character, plot, language,melody, and thought in the same sense, but the most important of them isthe organization of the events [the plot].

PIat anl characteri For tragedy is not an imitation of men but of actions andof hfe. It is in action that happiness and unhappiness are found, and theend3 we, aim at is a kind of activity, not a quality; in accordance with theircharacters men are of such and such a quality, in accordance with theiractions they are fortunate or the reverse. Consequently, it is not for thepurpose of presenting their characters that the agents engage in action, butrather it is for the sake of their actions that they take on the characters theyhave. Thus, what happens-that is, the plot-is the end for which a tragedyexists, and the end;or purpose is the most important thing o[all. What ismore, without action there could not be a tragedy, but there could be withoutcharacterization. o * o

Now that the parts are established, let us next discuss what qualities theplot.should have, since plot is the primary and most important paft of 'trag-edy. I have posited that tragedy is an imitation of an action that is a wholeand complete in. itself arid of a certain magnitude-for a thing may be aw*role, and yet have no magnitude to speak,of. Now a thing is a whole if ithas a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does notcome necessarily after something else, but after which it is natural foranother thing to exist or come to be. An end, on the contrary, is that whichnaturally comes after something else, either as its necessary sequeJ or as itsusual [and hence probable] sequel, but itself has nothing after it. A middleis that which both comes after something else and has another thing follow-ing it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, r,\rill neither begin at some chancepoint nor end at some chance point, but will observe the principles herestated. - - -

Contrary to what some people think, a plot is not ipso facto a unity if itrevolves about one man. Many things, indeed an endless number of things,happen.to any one man some of which do not go together to form a uniiy,and similarly among the actions one man performs there are many that donot go together to produce a single unified action. Those poets seem all tohave erred, therefore, who have composed aHeracleid, aThcseid, and othersuch poems, it being their idea evidently that since Heracles was one man,their plot was bound to be unified. o o o

From what has already been said, it will be evident that the poet's functionis not to report things that have happened, but rather to tell of such thingsas might happen, things that are possibilities by virtue of being in themselvesinevitable or probable, Thus the.difference between the historian and thepoet is..not that the historian employs prose,and ths:poet verse-the work ofHerodotusa could be put into verse, and it would be no less a history withverses than u'ithout them; rather the difference is that the one tells of thines

3. Purpose. 4, Historian of the Pereian Wan (ca. 48H30/425? B.c.E.). X\'*

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7 8 2 / A R r s r o T L E

that have been and the other of such things as might be. Poetry, therefore,is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry r€ndsrather to express the universal, history rather the particular f'act. A universalis: The sort of thing that (in the circumstances) a certain kind of person willsay or do either probably or necessarily, which in f'act is the universal thatpoetry aims for (with the addition of names for the persons); a particular,.onthe other hand is: What Alcibiadess did or had done to him. + + o

Among plots and actions of the simple type, the episodic form is the worst.I call episodic a plot in which the episodes follow one another in no probableor inevitable sequence. Plots o[ this kind are constructed by bad poets ontheir own account, and by good poets on account of the actors; since theyare composing entries for a competitive exhibition, they stretch the plotbeyond what it can bear and are often compelled, therefore, to dislocate then a t u r a l o r d e r . o o o

Some plots are simple, otheis complex; indeed the actions of which theplots are imitation are at once so differentiated to begin with. Assuming theaction to be continuous and unified, as already defined, I call that actionsimple in which the chahge of fortune takes place without a reversal orrecognition, and that action complex in which the change of fortune involvesa recognition or a reversal or both. These events [recpgnitions a4d reversals]ought to be so rooted in the very structure of the plot that they follow fromthe preceding events as their inevitable or probable outcome; f<rr there is avast difference between following from and merely following after. o o o

Reversal (Peripety) is, as aforesaid, a change from one state of affairs t<rits exact opposite, and this, too, as I say, should be in conformance withprobahitiry or necessity. For example, in Oedipus, the messenget' comes tocheer Oedipus by relieving him of fear with regard to his mother, but byrevealing his true identity. does just the opposite of this. * + o

Recognition, as the word itself indicates, is a change from ignorance tuknowledge, leading either to friendship or to hostility on the parr of thosepersons who are marked for good fortune or bad. The best form of recogni-tion is that which is accompanied by a reversal, as in the example fromOedipus. " " "

Next in order after the points I have just dealt with, it would seem nec-essary to speciff what one should aim at and what avoid in the constructionofplots, and what it is that will produce the effect proper to tragedy.

Now since in the finest kind of tragedy the structure should be complexand not simple, and since it should also be a representation of terrible andpiteous events (that being the special mark of this rype of imitation), in thefirst place, it is evident that good men ought not to be shown passing fiomprosperity to misfortune, for this does not inspire either pity or fear, but.onlyrevulsion; nor evi l men r ising fronr i l l fortune to prr. lsperiN, for this is themost untragic plot of all-it lacks every requirement, in that it neither elicitshuman sympathy nor stirs piry or fear. And again, .neither should anextremely wicked man be seen falling from prosperity into misflortune, for aplot so constructed might indeed call lorth human sympathy, but would not

5- A-brdliant bqtqlslrup-qtogq Atbelrao stalcsllan (c!. a5o{q{ S.q.E.), 6. The Cqri4lhiaahe4lsmq4,in Sophocles' Oedipre tia Kizg.

P o e r r c s / 7 8 3

excite pify or fear, since the first is felt for a person whose misfortune isundeserved and the second for soineone like ourselves-pity for the mansuft'ering undeservedly, fear for the man like ourselves-and hence neitherpity nor fear would be aroused in this caie. We are left with thi nian whoseplace is between these extremes, Such is the man who on the one hand isnot pre-eminent.in virtue andjustice, and yet on the other hand does notfall into misfortune through vice or depravity, but falls because of somemistake;7 one among the number of the highly renowtred and prosperoris,such as Oedipus and Thyestess and other famous men fronr families liketheirs.

It follows ihai the plot which achieves exiellence'will necessarily be singlein outcome and not, as some contend, double, and will consist in a changeof f<rrtune, not from misfortune to prosperity, but the opposite from pros-perity to misfortune, occasioned not by depravity, but by some great mistakeon the part of one who is either such as I have described br better than thisrathet than worse. (What actually has taken place confirms this; for thoughat flrst the poeis accepted whatever myths came to hand, today the finesttragedies are founded upon the stories ofonly a few houses, being concerned;for example, with Alcmeon, Oedipus, Oreites, Meleager, Thyestes, Tele-phus, and such others as have chanced to suffer terrible things or to dothem.) So, then, tragedy having this construction is the finest kind of tragedyfiom an artistic point of view. And consequently, those persons fall into thesame.error who bring it as a charge against Euripides that this is what hedoes in his tragedies and that most of his plays have unhappy endings. Forthis is in fact the right procedure, as I have said; and the best proof is thaton the stage and in.the dramatic contests, plays of this kind seem the mosttragic, provided they are successfully worked out, and Euripides, even if inever''thing else his management is faulty, seems at any rate the rnost tragicof the poets. o o o

In the characters and the plot construction alike, one must strive for thatwhich is either necessary or probable, so that whatever a character of anykind says or does may be the sort of thing such a character will inevitably orprobably say or do and the events of the plot may follow one afier anothereither inevitably or with probabilfty. (Obviously, then, the denouement ofthe plot should arise from the plot itself and not be brought about "fr<-rm themachine,'as it is in Medea and in the embarkati<rn scene in the lliad.e Themachine is to be used for matters lying outside the drama, either antecedentsof the action which a human being cannot know, or things subsequent tothe action that have to be prophesied and anrrouncedl for we accept it thatthe gods see everything. Within the events of the plot itself, however; there

7. ' lhe

Greek.vord is hawrt ia. I t has sometimes been rranslated as "f law" (hence the cxpression "t tagic

f law") and thought of as a moral defect. but comparison with Aristot le 's usq of tbe word in other contexts

s u g g e s t s s r r o n g l y t h a t h e m e a n s b y i t r n i s r a k e o r " e r r o r ' r o [ . ; u d g m e n r ) . 8 . B r o t h e r o f A r r e u s a n d h i sr iv i lo"er the krngship ofArgos. Prctending ro bc recorrci led, Ar ieus-gav< a feast at which he sef ledThycstes'olm so^s to their father. Thyestes' only suwiving son, Aegisthus, later helped murder Atreus's son Aga'

memirdn. 9. 'fhe

refercnce is to arr 'incident

ii the sec6nd book of the llia4 an attempt of the Greek

rank and file to retum honte and abandon the siege is arested by the i.rtepention of Athena. If it were a

dmma; she would appear literally on the &rc a ruchiw ("god, fron the nrachine"), rhe machine. that was

enployed in the theater to show the gods f ly ing in space. [ t has conre to mean ahy imPlausible way ot

solng-coqpliealio4c of th" plo!. !r' tilprdst &y, M"d93 94ap9q ft-or1 Corlrytr "on rhe ruchine'in her

masic chariot .

\K

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should be nothing unreasonable,, or if there is, it sh.ould be kept. outside theplay proper, as is done in the Oedipus of Sophocles.) o o.o

.T\rc chnnts,in trageily. The chorus ought'to be regarded as one of the

actors, and as being,part of the whole and integrated into pertormance, notin Euripides' way but in that of sophocles. In the other poets, the choralsongs have no more relevance to the plot than if they belonged to some otherplay. And so-nowadays, following thl practice introduced"by Agathon,r thechorus merely sings interludes. But what difference is there ietween thesinging of interludes and taking a speech or even an entire episode from oneplay and inserting it into another?

. o

, o +

I . A y o u n g e r c o n t e m p o r a r y o f E u r i p i d e s : m o s t o f h i s p l a y s w e r e p r o d u c e d i n t h e 4 t h c e n t u r y B . c E .

H e s t o o / 7 8 5

During the Hellenistic period (third to first centuries n.c.r.), there were importantdevelopments in religion, especially as.a.resrrlt ofl the Greeks' close contact with non-Greek peoples through imperial domination. Judaism flourished in Alexandria inEgypt as well as in Palestine and elsewhere. There was also at this time a great dealof important activity in philosophy (as well as in literature, the visual arts; and med.icine). The Platonic (Academic) and the Aristotelian (Peripatetic) schools furtherdeveloped their systems of thought and continued to do so long after. Neoplatonislnwould exert an important influenib on.Christianity, as would the witings of Aristotlemuch later (through their synthesis *ith Christian doctrine by Thomas Aquinas inthe thirteenth century c.E.). Other important currents of thought also emerged in theHellenistic period. Besides Cynicism and Skepticism, two in particular were veryinfluential in Roman culture: Epicureanism and Stoicism. Their importanie can beappreciated in (for example) the poetry of Lucretius and the prose writings of Sen'eca.

Finally, during the Roman period especially, certain cults foreigri to Greebe andRome became important within Gieco-Roman poll'theism. To this amalgani; Chris-tianity offered a strong, and ultimately victorious, altemative.

H E S I O Dc a . 7 0 0 B . c . E .

Homer and Hesiod, wote the historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.c.E., "werethe ones who created a theogony for the Greehs and gave them their epithets, distin-guished their domains and special skilli, and described their appearance." We do notknow whether Hesiod composed his poetry before or after Homer, but Herodotusconsiders his contribution to Greek culture to be on the same level as Homer's.Together, the two poets forged a Panhellenic religious system, one that could beshared by all Greela and that eclipsed or subsumed local traditions, There are, how-ever, differences berween the two poets in religious feeling. Hesiodls gods are essen-tially serious, whereas Homer's gods are serious only sporadically.

The Theogotry, or "Birth of the Gods," sets the Olympian religion familiar fromHomer in the context of cosmic evolution. It describes the development of the worldfrom the first elements through a series of divine genealogies that span three gener-ations. Through these genealogies runs a narrative thread: the divine succession myth,the story of conflict within the ruling family of gods, and the overthrow of fathers bysons until Zeus establishes his rule securely by forestalling the birth of the son whois fated to overthrow him. The world order under Zeus is thus the culmination of thetheogonic process. It offers stability under a ruler. characterized by both physicalmight and intelligence, the positive qualities of whose reign are suggested by hismarriages and daughters near the end of the poem. Zeus's triumph can also be seenas validating human institutions: rulership and hierarchies of power, the patriarchalfamily, and gender asy'rnmetry.

BsrIsF Sysrrnrs oF GREEcE AND RoME

Belief systems are the ways, religious and otheruise, that societies and differentgroups within societies organize their understanding ofthe world and human life. Atany.given time,rthere may be_several belief systemi within a society that competewitheach other for credibility or have no contact with each other; in tire latter case. somepeople can subscribe to several at once, even when doing so involves holding contra-dictory beliefs simultaneously. Developments also occur over time; new syitems ofbelief arise, replacing or absorbing some earlier ones; while others continue side byside with them.'.To do full justice to the complexity of a culture's beliefs at any one time or over

time-is impossible, but it is b-otlr possible and useful to pick oui cerrain dominanrtrends, especially when.these form an essential b""kg.o.,.,i to literary texrs (and oftenare articulated by them). So we- can speak of Hesiod;s sysrematization of divine gene-apeig3 an{ olympian religion forming a background to the Greek Archaic worliviewthat Herodotus expresses, in which the gods aie remote butsee to it that human liieis hagile and wrongdoing punished. Thuiydides presupposes a very different.outlook,one shaped'to a great extent by the Sophists, in which m,r"h -o.e.o.,fiderr""."pose,in human capacities (for better or *orse) and the tradititrnal ethical framewirk ischallenged (again, for better or worse) by a secular attitude that relies on humanintelligence and the right of.the-strorrg"i. I., the fourth cenrury r.c.e. philosophfdevelo-ps' partly in continuation of and partly in reaction against this human-centeredview. such a sketch is valid-but we should also remembe-r that throughout the sixthand fifth centuries e.c.e., alongside the Archaic religious worldview,:'pre-socratic"philosophers formed speculative theories'about the llture of the worli and its con-stituent parts that would be. immensely important for plato and Aristotle, especiallywhen they disagreed with those theori€s. bonuersely, religion and traditional pietvflourished in the midst of the Sophistic revolution *a tni growth of phil";;o;;;isystems. Though we often see the collision of these. beiiefi in G.."k tragedy, thecontinued.strengrh of-religion is mosr evident in the building of t"-pl"r'".,h'1".,formal shrines and in the huge number of dedicdtions in all of ihem,

""t. of d"uotioi.,

by the faithful.

- (

r r r r r r r L r u u r r I r l [ i l l i ] l , l 1 l i l l l ' l l l l l l l ! '

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fprsAt r:tiT i1."'wltrJ.F\ T

had beconte Eost Berlin. There lrc founded the Berliner Ensemble, and staged or restaged the workshe had written while on the run. East Berlin was a safer place for Brecht tlnn Los Angeles, artd iron-ically, it wcts safer than Mo.scotv us v't'll. Brecht'.r rtrtistic practices ran well wicle o.f the Stalinisr purryline that dictated naive realisrn in repre,tentution. Brechl's own theory of art rejected realismfor an"eslrangenrcnt-effect" (Verfremdungseffekt), which denied audiences easy sympathy with his charac-ter.s, irtsisting that his vietuers think ratherthanfeel. Afier the r95j death of Stalin, hctwever,farne andhontsrs cdnv to lJrecht ctll at once: A tgsS Pari,s production of Mother Courage starring HeleneWeigel estabLished his international re putatiur, ftl^r' Collected Works began to ernerge from the ntostprestigittus West and East German presses, and he wo.s aworded the Stalin Prize fttr Peace. The fol-Iowing ,-eur he suffered a heart uttack; he died in Berlin in t956. One of Brecht's urtistic rutnifestosis the following essdy, "The Popular ond tha Reali,stic," whit:h wos published in t9 j7.

The Popular and the Realistic

When considering what slogans to set up forGernran l iterature today one must remember thatanything rvith a claim to be considered as Iitera-ture is printed exclusively abroad, and with fewexceptions can only be read there. ' lhis gives apcculiar twist to the slogan of Volksttimli<:ltkeitfor Populurity] in literurure.

The writer is supposed to write for a peoplewithout l iving among it. When one comes to lookcloser, however, the gap between the writer andthe people has not grown so wide as might bethought. All the sarne, it would be wrong, i.c.unrealistic, to see this growth a.s purely "external."Ccrtainly a special cffort is needed today in orclerto write in a popular way. But at the sanre tirne ithas beconie easier: easier and more urgent. Thepeople ha.s clearly separated from its top layer; itsoppressors and exploiters have parted contpanyrvith it and beconre involved in a bloody waragainst it which can no longcr be overlooked. Ithas beconre easier to take sides. Open warfare has,as it were, broken out anlong the "audience."

Nor can the denrand for a realist way of writingany longer be so easily overlooked. It has becclnienlore or less sclf-evident. The ruling strata areusing l ies nrore openly than before, and the l ies arebigger . Tel l ing the t rut l . r seems increasinglyurgent. The sufferings are greater and the numberof sufferers has grown. Compared with the vastsufferings of the masses it seems trivial and even

Translated by John Willett.

despicable to worry about petty diff iculties andthe difficulties of petty groups.

There is only one ally against the growth ofbzubarism: the people on rvhorn it i lnposcs thesesufferings. Only the people <iffer any prospects.Thus it is natural to turn to them, and nrore nec-essary than ever to speak their langr.rage.

The words Popularity and Reulisnt thcreforcare natural companions. It is in the interest of thepeople, the broad working masses, that literatureshould give thenr truthful representations of life;and truthful rcpresentalions of life are in fact onlyof use to thc broad working rnasses, thc people;so that they have to be suggestive and intell igibleto tircm, i.e. popular. None the less these concep-tions need a thorough clean-up before beingthrown into sentences where they wil l get srneltedand put to use. It would be a nristake to treat thernas fully explained, unsull ied, unaurbiguous anclwithout a past. ("We all know what's meant bythat, no need for hairsplitt ing.")

' fhe Certnau

word for "popular," VoLksti lmlich, is itself nonetoo popular. It is unrealistic to intagine that it is.A whole series of words ending in /run need han-dl ing wi th care. One has only to th ink ofBrauchtttm, Kr)nigstum, Heil igtwn,' and it rsrvell known that Vrtlkstum too has a quite specific

IBrecht is gestunng toward words that developed r cerlainideological qualiry under the Natronal Socialist regirne then inpower in Gerrnany and during the Hohenzollent nronarchy fratpreceded ir. Brauchlum, derived frorn brauchen, "to need orrcquire" :urd usually nic:rning "custonts," rteant "iillklLlre";

\r-

r 2 5 o M A R X I S T C R I T I C I S M

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ceremonlous, sacramental and dubious r ingwhich we cannot by any means overlook. Wecannot overlook it, because rve definitely need theconception of popularity or Volksti lmlichkeit.

It is part of that suppo.sedly poetic rvay ofwording, by lvhich the "Volk" -_ nrore folk thanpeople - is prcsented as particularly supersti-t ious, or rather as ar.n object of superstit ion. In thisthe folk or people appears with its imniutablecharacteristics, its t ime-honored traditions, fonnsof art, customs and habits, its religiositv, itshereditiLry enenries, its unconquerable strengthand all the rest. A peculiar unity is conjured up oftonnentor and tonnented, exploiter and exploited,l iar and victim; nor is it by any lneilns a sirnplematter of thc nrany, "l i tt le" working people asagainst those on top.

The history of all the falsif ications that havebcen operated with this conception of Volkstunrisa krng irnd conrplex story which is part o1'the his-tory of the cla.ss war. We shall not embark on itbut shall sinrply keep in mind the fact of suchforgery whenever we speak of our need fbr popu-lar art, meaning art for the broad.rnasses of thepeople, for the many oppressed by the few, "thepeople proper," the ntass of producers that has soIong bccn the object of polit ics and now has tobccome its suhject. We shall remind ourselvesthat powerful institutions have long preventedthis "folk" fronr developing fully, that it has beenartif icially or forcibly tied down by conventions,and that the conception Volkstrimliclr has beenstarnped as a static one, without background ordcveloprncnt. With this version of the conceptionwe shall have no dealings, or rather we shall haveto fight it. Our conception of "popular" refers tothe people who are not only fully involved in theprocess of developnrent but are actually taking itover , forc ing i t , decid ing i t . We have in rn ind apeoplc that is nraking history and altenng theivorld and itself. We have in rnind a fighting pcrr-ple and also a l ighting conception of "popularity,"

"Popular" means intell igible to the broadmasses, taliing over their own forms of expressionand ennching them I adopt\ng and conso\idatrng

their standpoint / representing the most progresslve

sectlon of the people in such a way that it can takeover the leadership: thus intell igible to othersections too / linkrng with tradition and carrying itfurther / handing on the achievements of the sec-tlon now leading to the section of the people that rsstruggling for the lead.

We norv come to the concept of "Realism." Itis an old concept which has been much used bymany men and for many purposes, and before itcan be applied we must spring-clean it too. Thisis necessary because r,vhen the people takes overits inheritance there has to be a process of expro-priation. Literary works cannot be taken overlike factories, or l i terary forrns of expression l ikeindustr ia l n iethods. Real is t rvr i t ing, o l ' rvh ich h is-tory offers many rvidely varying examples, isl ikewise conditioned by the question of how,when and for what class it is made use of: condi-tioned down to the last srnall detail. As we havein nrind a l ighting people that is changing the realworld we must not cling to "well-tried" rules fortell ing a story, worthy nrodels set up by l iteraryhistory, eternal aesthetic Iaws. We lnust notabstract the one and only realism from certarngiven wclrks, but shall make a l ively use of allrneans, olcl and new, tried antl untried, dcrivingfrom art and deriving from other sources, inorder to put l iving reality in the hands of l ivingpeople in such a way that it can be mastered. Weshall take care not to ascribe realism to a partic-ular historical fornr of novel belonging to a par-t icu lar per iod, Balzac 's or Tolstoy 's , f c t rinstance, so as to set up purely formal and liter-ar1' criteria of realism. We shall not restrict t)ur-selves to speaking of realisrn in cases where onecan (e.g.) smell, look, feel whatever is depictecl,rvhcre "atmosphere" is creirted and storiesdevelop in such a way that the characters arcpsychologically stripped dorvn. Our conceptionol' reulism needs to be broad and polit ical, freefrom aesthetic restrictions and inclepertdent ofconvention. Rcali.st2 Ineans: laying bare soci-ety 's causal uetwork / showing t tp the dorninant

tlo G. Lukdcs in particular Dos Wttrt ow(]s sollle Inost

notable essays, which shed light on the concept ot reallsnl

even i f , in my opin ion, thcy def ine i t r l ther. too ni i r rowly

IBrccht ] Bretht is responding to LukScs's. SJt t ' / tcs tn'Europ"in

Realism (t93zj, which celebrated both Balzac and

Tolstoy as realists.

u l

d

Kb;i;f*^ k lg, "k:rng" meant "monarchical pnnciple":

iriliptu^ fronr leiliS, "holy;' meant "shrine" or "sanctuary"'

R R E C H T l T H E P O P U L A R A N D T H F , R E ' A L I S T I C I 25 r

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viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators /writ ing from the standpoirtt of the class whichhas prepared the broadest solutions for the mostpressing problems afflicting human society /emphasizing the dynamics of development / con-crete and so as to encourage abstraction.

It is a tall order, and it can be made taller. Andwe shall let the artist apply all his irnagination, allhis originality, his sense of humor and power ofinvention to its fulf i lhnent. We wil l not stick tounduly detailed literzry models or force the artistto follow over-precise rules for telling a story.

We shall establish that so-called sensuous writ-ing (in which everything can be smelt, tasted, f'elQis not to be identif ied automatically with realistwriting, lbr we shall see that there are sensuouslywritten works which are not realist, and realistworks which are not sensuously wriften. We shallhave to go carefully into the question whethcr'thestory is best developed by ainring at an eventualpsychological stripping-down of chiuacters. Ourreaders may quite well feel that they have not beengiven the key to what is happening if they are sim-ply induccd by a combination of arts to take partin the inner emotions of our books' heroes. Bytaking over the forms of Balzac and Tolstoy with-out a thorough inspection we might perhapsexhaust our readers, the people, just as these wrirers often do. Realisrn is not a pure quesilon offonn. Copying the rnethods of these realists, weshould cease to be realists ourselves.

For tirne flows on, amd if it did not it would bea poor look-out for those '"vho have no golderrtables to sit at. Methods wear out, stimuli fail.New problenrs loom up and dernand new tech-niques. Reality alters; to represent it the means cifrepresentation nrust alter too. Nothing arises fromnothing; the new springs from the old, but that isjust what lnakes it new.

The oppressors do not always appear in thesarne mask. The masks cannot always be strippedoff in the samc way. There are so nr.uy tricks fordodging the mirror that is held out. Their militaryroads are termed motor roads. Their tanks arepainted to look like Macduff's bushes.r Ther.r

' ln Shakespeare's Macbeth, the soldiers of lvlacdufl-siin)ly crrry uec hranches for carrrouflage.

r252 M A R X I S T C R I T ' I C I S M

agents can show horny hands as if they were work-ers. Yes: it takes ingenuiry to change the hunter intothe quarry. What was popular yesterday is nolonger so today, for the people of yesterday werenot the people as it is today.

Anybody who is not bound by forrlal preju-clices knows that there ue many ways of suppress-ing truth and rnany ways of stating it: thatindignation at inhuman conditions can bc stimu-Iated in many ways, by direct description ol' apathetic or matter-of-fact kind, by nanating storiesand parables, by jokes, by over- and understate-rnent. In the theater reality can be represented in atlctual or a fantastic fonn. The actors can do with-out (or with the minimurn ofl) niakcup, appearing"natural," and the whole thing can be a fake; theycan wear grotesque masks iutd tepreserlt the truth.There is not rnuch to argue about lrere: the rneansrnust be asked what tlre end is. Thc peoplc knowh()w to ask th is . Piscator 'sa grcat cxpcr i r r rcr r ls i r rthc theatcr (and my own), wltich rcpoatedlyinvolved the exploding ol' corrventit>nal frlrms,found their chief support in the nrost progressivecadres of the working class. The workers judgedeverything by the arlount of truth contiiined in it;they welcorned any innovation which helpcd tlrerepresentalion of truth, of the real rnechanism ofsociety; they rejected whatever seerned like play-ing, l ike nrachinery rvorking for its own suke, i.e.no longer, or not yet, full'illing a purpose. 'l'he

workers' arguments were never literary or purelytheatrical. "You oan't ntix theater and fi lnr": thatsort of thing was never said. If the fi lrn was notprclperly used the most one heird was: "that bit ofl j lm is unnecessary, it 's distracting." Workers'chr>ruses spoke intricate rhythrtrical verse parts ("ifit rhynred it'd all slip down like butter, and nothingwould stick") and srurg difficult (unaccustonred)conrpositions by EisleP ("it 's got sorne guts in it").But we had to alter particuleu lines whose sensewas wrong or hrud to arrive at. Whcn there wereceflain subtleties (irregularit ies, cornplexities) rn

"German theater d i rector Erwin Piscator ( r893-r966),whose innovative productions often involved free adaptati<_rnof bourgeois plays !o reveal their social truth to thc prolctarirr.

s l1:rnns Eis ler ( I898-1962), Jewish Austr ian composerwho col laborated wi th Brecht in theatr ical p ieccs urr t i l rheywere both forced to leave Germany.

Page 58: HMS 101 Reader Final

marching songs which had rhymes to make themeasier to learn and simple rhythms to ,,put thenracross" befter, then tlrey said: ,,that's amusing,there was a sort of $,ist in that." They had no usefor anything played out, trivial, so ordrnarv thatone doesn't need ro think (,.there's nothing i; if').If an aesthetic was needed, here it *or. Lhullnever forget how one worker looked at me when Ianswered his request to include something extra ina song about the USSR ("lt must go in - what,sthe point otherwise?") by saying that it woulclrvreck the artistic form: he put his heacl on dne sideand srruled. At this polite smile a whole section ofaesthetic collapsed. The workers were not afraid toteach us, nor were they afraid to learn.

I speak from experience when I say that oneneed never be frightened of putting boldand unac_customed lhings before the proletariat, so long asthey have to do with reality. There will alwayi beeducated persons, connoisseurs of the arts, whowill step in with a ,,The people rvon't understandthat." But the pcoplc intpatiently shoves them asidea.nd contes to temrs directly rvith the artist. There rshighly culrured stuff nrade fbr minorit ies, clesisnedto form rninorities: the two thousandth transfoiru-tion of some old hat, the spicing_up of a venerableand now decomposing piccc of meat. The prole_tariat.rejects it ("they'vc got sonrething to worryabout") with an incrcdulous, somewhai reflectiveshake of the head. It is not the spice that is beingrqected, but the nteat; not the two thousan<lth fonn,but the old hat. When they thernselves took to wriring and acting they were con.rpellingly origin:rl.What rvas known as "agit-prop"o art, which a ntlm-ber of second-rate noses were hrrned up at, was amine of novel artistic techniques and ways ofexpression. Magnificent urd long-forgotten ele-ments from periods of truly popular art cropped upthere, boldly adapted to the new social ends.Daring cuts aud compositions, beautiful silnplifica-tions (alongside Inisconceived ones): in all thisthere was olicn an astonishing economy and elt:-gance iurd a feuless eye for complexity. A lot of it

rnay have been pri-rnitive, but it wa-s never pnnlltlve

with the kind of primitivity that affected the sup-posediy vaned psychological pofirayals of bour-geois art. It is very wrong to make a fewmisconceived stylizations a pretext for rejecting astyle of representation which attempts (so oftensuccessfully) to bring out the essential and toencourage abstraction. The sharp eyes of the work-ers saw through naturalism's superficial represen-tation of _realify. When they said in FuhrmannHenschel,' "that's more than we want to knowabout it" they were in fact wishing they could get arnore exact representation of the real social forcesoperating under the inrrnediately visible surface.To quote from my own experience: they were notput off by the fantastic costumes and the apparentlyunreal setting of T'he Threepenny Opera. Theywere not narrow; they hated narrowness (their liv_lng quarters were niuTow). They were generous;their employers were stingy, They thought it possr-ble t<l dispense with some things that the artists feltto be essential, but they were antiable enc-rugh aboutit; they rverc not agaitrst superfluity: they wereagalnst ce(atn superfluous people. They did notn"tnzzle the threshing ox, though they saw to it thathe *rreshed.o "The universaliy-applicable creariventethod": they didn't believe in rhar sort of thine.They knew that they needed rnany different meth-ods in order to reach their objective. If you wzrnt anaesthetic, there you are.

.So the criteria for the popular and the realisticneed to be chosen not only wi th great care buralso wi th an open rnind. They must not be

deduced f ronr exist ing real is t works and exist ing

popular works, as is often the case. Such arlapproach would lead to purely forrlralistic crite-

ria-, and questions of popularity and realisrn

would be decided by form.'One cannot decide if a work is realist or not by

finding out whether it resembles existing, reput-

eclly realist works which must be cottnted realist

for their t i lne. In each individuzrl case tlte picturc

71898 play by Gerhart Hruptmann (1862- l9 '+6) xhout a

waBoner dnvcn to surc ide.' iAn al lus ion to Deuteronomy z5:4 ("Thou shal t not mu?'-

zle the ox that threshes the corn")'eBrechr is alluding to the "social realism" prescribed in

Stulin;r r"git", whicli would ban any expressionistic effects

r

#/v-

6Short for agitation propaganda, texts designed to strmu-

late the masses to revolution.

B R E C I . I T l r H e r o e u l A R A N D T H E R E A L I S T I C r253

given of i i fe must be conrpared^' not rvith n,n"tlTt

i i.ru.., but s' it lr the actual l i fe portrayed And

iikewise where popularity is concerned there ts '

whol ly formal is t ic proccdure that has to De

n"utJ"tf against. The intell igibil i ty of a work. of

tteruture i l nc't ensured exclusively by its being

written in exactly the same way as other works

which people have understood These other

works too *rr" n,,r invaliably written just l ike the

u,o.t , U.fur. theln. Something was done towards

their understanding. ln the satne way we mr'rst do

tot"ttt ing for thi understanding of the new

*orls. B-esides being ltoltular there is such a

t l r ing as bec, ,ming PoPul t t r 'IF*" want a truly popular l i terature' alive and

{iehting, completely gripped by reality.and com-

pietely gnpping reality' then we lnust l(eep pace

ir,t,r.r ,.irlyt f,eacllong development The great

o',,rf<'ine,nnrr", of the people ere on the move The

activitt '"and bnrtality of their enelnies proves lt '

I

il;il

n

1

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2 l l 2 / H r N x a n A n n r o r

vengeance. This, howeve^r, is certain: Upon them and onlv upon them, whoare f i l led rv i th a genuine fear of the inescapable gui l t of the h"-"" , " . " ,

" "nthere be anv reliance when itcomes to fighing f"?.l"rrlv, u.,"";;;;1.;;i;:everywhere againsf the incalculabr"

"ot-l thri -"n u." capable of bring?qg

about.

B e n r o r r B n E c n r / z t t )

In 1929 he married Helene Weigel, an actress who rvorked closelv with himand for rvhom he w,rote manl'leading roles. Together the) rvould direct and makefamous the theater group founded for them in 1949 in East Berlin: tbg-lgl!ry.

Jl;ernblq.l\lost of Brecft's plavs are didactic, either openly or b.v implication. After he became

a fen,ent Marristiil t66G]dlT920s, he .o..iie."i it even more his moral and artistic-- --;:-.--dur l io- i lcourage the audience to remedi socia l i l ls . Th3Threepennl Opera (19281.

a ballad opera witten with composer Kurt Weill ( 1900- 1950) and rii6ililed on JohnGarls T?re Beggar's Opera (I128),_satirizes capitalist society from the point ofyieu'ofoutcasts and romantic thieves. Breihl alio wote a nuritibt-of "lesson" playS intendedto6lt f-tn Co--unist doctrine and to instruct the workers of Germany in the mean-ing of social revolution. The lesson is particularlv harsh in The Measures Taken( I 930), which describes the necessary execution of a young party mgqrler u'ho hasbroken discipline and helped the loiifpoor, thus postponing the revolution. Suchdrama, how,ever doctrinallv pure, was not likelv to win adherents to the cause, andthe lesson plavs were condemned as unattractive and "intellectualist" by the Com-munist press in Berlin and Moscou,.

Brecht's unorthodoxy, his pacifism, his enthusiasm for N{an, and his desire to..""t"

".tl"tiriiipopular theaie]-tGii-world embodv a Mirriir t'ie* of art all put him

at odds with the rising porver of Hitler's National Socialism. He fled Germany forDenmark in 1933 before the Nazis could include him in their purge of left-u'ingintellectuals; in i935 he was deprived of his German citizenship. Brecht rvas to fleeseveral more timgs as the Nazi invasions expanded throughout Europe; in 1939 heu'ent to Sweden, in 1940 to Finland, a.nd in l94l to the United States, where hejoined a colony of German ex?atriates i;sail;fr;;Fa, C"lifoi"i", .rorkirgtJ.th.n i"aGcv. Thi, w.". the plriod of some of hi3 greatest playst The ufe of'Gatileo(1938-39), rvhich attacks societv for suppressing Galileo's discovery that the Earthrevolves around the sun but also condemns the scientist for not insisting openly onthe truth; Mothcr Courage and Her Children (1939), n'hich describes an avariciouspeddler rvho doggedly pursues the profits to be made hom war even though her omthreechi ldrenarevict ims of i t ;TheGoodV'onanof Setzwn (1938-40),pr intedhere,rlhich shows how an instinctively good and generous person can survive in this u,orldonlv by pn111ng on a mask of hardness and calculation; andThe Caucasian ChalkCircle (1944-45), which adapts the legendary choice of Solomon between two moth-ers who claim the same infant and decides in favor of the servant girf-who cared forthe child-over the wealthv mother (the implied comparison is between those whodo the work of society and those u,ho merely profit from their possessions). In Amer-ica. Brecht arranged for the translation of his work into English, and Galileo, vithCharles Laughton in the title role, was produced in 1947. In the same year, Brechtuas questioJred by ths l-louse Un-.{,meric"n .F6TlfriiEil-o-mmirree as parr of a *ide- iranging i"qu$ iilo po..ibl" ilomniuiiisf atiivity in thi: eniiriainment business' No fcharges u'ere brought, but he left for Europe the day after being brought before the ]commlt tee.

After learing the United States, Brecht u,orked for a vear in Zurich before going toBerlin with his rvife, Helene Weigel, to stage Mother Couroga. The East Berlin gor.ernment offered the couple positions as directors of their orvn troupe, the BerlinerEnsemble, and Brecht-rvho had just frnished a theoretical work on the theater, ALittle Organon Jor the Theater (1949)-turned his attention to the professional roleof director. Although the East Berliners subsidized Brecht's rvork and advertised theartist's presence among them as a tribute to their oun political svstem, thev alsoobliged him to defend some of his plays against charqes ofpolitical unorthodo4'andinde"ed ro re\rJcJ-bsrL $fler 19J4.'the prJvailinic.^-"fiiea.w tieil hidTphelda stvle cg!]r{ socialist realism-)uhose goal was to offer simple me.sages and to fosteridentification

-with revolutionarv heroes. Brecht's mind was too keen and questioning,

BERTOLT BRECHT1898_1956

Bertolt Brecht is a dominant figure in modern drama not only as the author of harfa dozen plays that rank as modern c lassics. but as rhe f i rs t master of .a l4rysr fu l new:n:qpt gf thgater. He disagreed with the rraditional notion. derirei fr;;;il;ElPoef ics. rhat drama should draw i ts spectarors into idenr iGcat ion wi th and s\TnDath\for the characrers. and he re jecred rhe real is t aesrhet ic ofnn,rr l l " f r .

" ; ; ; ; i ; t " i ; ; :ical credibilirv. Brechr sas.""tylg* i" .""t "":t,i"."t

,q!.t.ri"^-fo iilriij*.iifi"Pi randel lo. he bel ieved rhr t rhel i lodei i - r@" ,h iu i lbreak \ rqth rhe dramat ic con-ventions of witers such as lbsen and chekhov. u'ho depicted action from

"di;;";";,as if it were a slice of real life going on behind an i,it;sibl" "for.tr, *.rtt.i u.,iik-"Pirandello. hou'ever, Brecht did not itress the anguish of indi'iduars i" ,r"r"i"i-iri,lqcus uas the communit r_qr large and a recogni t io"

" r , " . i " i . " rp; ; . i l r ; ; ; f i , ; ;Drecnr ' a porr t rcar actrnsr . rhe modern audience must not be ai loued to indurge inpassive emorional identification ar a safe distance or in a whirlpool of existe"itialidentity crises. His characters are first of ail members of sociery-and h;s

"rdi".""must be educated and moved to action. The rriovement .dl"[4o*f;;;;;;;;;;h is needs uel l ' and he dereloped i rs basic ideas in p lays. , i# ia i t#g. , r " i

9:t:: producrions until it became one of rhe -o.t po*".ful theatrical ,;yl;;;,f

tne century.P,i " Eugen Berthold Brecht was born in the medieval town of Augsburg, Bavaria, on

February t 0-lg9g. His father.u'as a respected torm cirizen, direitor ,? "

p"f-rirrr,and a catholic. His mother-, the daughier of a civir servanr from the Black Forest,was a Protestant who raised voung Berthold in her own faith. (.Ihe ,p"iff"g b".Ll,was adopted later . ) Brecht ar tended locar schools unt i l l9r7, .h"n i r "

" ; : " l l ; i , "tt{13ictr uni'ersity to studv naturar science and medicine. He continued his studieswhile acting a-1 d.rama critic for,an.Augsburg newspaper and writing hi, o*r, frylD runs in theN ig l t ( 19 r8 ) won rheK le i s t p r i z . - e i n p22 .m lg l gB rec f , twasmob i l i z "d

{o-r a.y.ear as_ an orderly in a military hospital, and he pursued meclical srudies at

l \ , lunich unt i l I 921 .Moving to Berlin in l92'r. Brechr uorked briefly with the directors Max Reinhardt

{ and Eruin Piscaror b.ur nas chief l r ' in terested in h is o-n wr i t ing. In th is nre-r \ rarxrsr

\ f " ' ' 'o3,n" is especia l l ' concerned u ' i rh the pr ight of the indir jduar ' . i i ' , r r6;-m-". :*

J l : th:d around bv socia l and economic forces bevond his contro l unt i l he loses bothr rdentrtv-and humanit; ln A_r\4an's a Man (1924-25\, the timid dock u,orker Galy Gay

is trans.fornred by frighr und persuasio.n_ inro anorher person. the fero.;;;iy;;::;;;:fu l sold ierJer iahJip. when the_actual J ip rurns up ai the e.d or , r , " pt" i - r i " " r * i " "n

icay 's former papers and forced. to assume Gav's o ld tde. t iw. Th; ;L l f i ; ; ;h" ." ; ; ; r

l.Tl11p^"_11:lllitie; ca1 be broken doun and reassembled lik"

" rnr"'hin", the only

/ weapon against such_mindless manipulat ion is a*,areness, an arvareness that enables, peopte t .o understand and conlro l their dest int , .

N-}t 8

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J audiences in the t 920s. These alienation effects ha'e since become standard produc-

\ t ion techniques in the modem theater . In spi te of Brecht 's inrent ions and f iequent'revisions, hou'ever, the characters and situations of his plays remain emotionallv

B E n r o L r B n e c s r / 2 l L 5

Audiences mav react emotionallv to Brecht's plays and characters, but their reac-t ions are never s imple. Brecht 's characters are complex and inhabi t complex s i tua-tions. Galil.n is hnrllad€dicats,cJ sqlqntist u'ho sacrifrces his reputation for honesty

so as to complete his rvork. anda,wa-kliinqualist u'ho fails to realize how his recan-

tation s'ill afie.t oth"rr' pursuit of scientific kiZxvledge. ln The Cood Woman of Set'

zuan, the overgenerous Shen Te can suruive onlv bv periodically adopting the magk

of a harshll' practical "cousln," Shui T3. Mother Courage is both a tragic mothei

figi-e and a s,nall+l-" profiteer u'ho loses her children as she battens on war.

Biecht 's work teems ui th."ch Paradoxes-at a l l levels He is a c1 'n ic who def lates

religious zeal, militant patriotism, and h=Eroic example as delusions that lead the

-r.r". on to futile sacrifice; but he is also a preacher uho makes prominent use of

traditional biblical language and imagery, and themes of individual sacrifice.<:fGEoof,\V;ilaiof Setzu"nl r'vas written betrveen 1938 and 1940. uith the col-

I a f f i ' a n d R u t h B e r l a u , a n d w i t h m u s i c b 1 P a u | D e s s a u .Painfully drafted *lhile Brecht, his familv, Steffin, and Berlau sought refuge in Scan-

dinavia from the Nazis' conquest of Europe, the play is stamped with bitter disillu-

sionment at a u'orld in which ir is imposs&!9j._h:.gg.q-e-qd.':utl{r-ll..The "good

u'oman," Shen Te, is forced to disguisE-Ferseif?i het male "cousin" and alter ego,

the cruel Shui Ta, to save herself from a su'arm of parasites and opportunists rlhoq,ill not leave her a roof over her head. Appearing alternatgly,as thgr-j*thl.g9s-qbgiTaand the seneroqg,sb-sn Le, she embodies different fr6i-l-being. encounters different

*.fiCEt" th" p;l-pl" a.outd her, is gradually contaninated, and recognizes

despairingly that.she r.,rll alu;eyg,!,gedj9 cel.Lor-her-rarlskgd gou{f-J9-:urvive. The

plal's setting in dEiiiiiCr probably suggested by a 1935 visit to l\iloscow, rvhere,^B.""ht -r. i-p.".."d b1, the'highlv swlited petfoimances of the Chinese actor Mei\

Lan-fang, one of rvhose traditional roles n'as that of the ll1gua-:r'?-rri9r wlrq-must \

disquise herself as a man. Brecht had already sritten a short play and a story that

affU"a tft"Gv * omen .r'ere subordinated and exploited in traditional patriarchal

socieq', a theme that returns strongl)' in The Good Womn oJ Setzuan. The opposition

of men and rvomen is not absolute. hou'ever, for the play contains both good and

bad male and female characters. Indeed, the Woman of the lEnglish title may be

misleading, even if Shen Te represents goodness, for the Gdrman title's Mensch

*"ans lite-ially "person" o. "ht-"n beingi and embraces bo1fr.gg.l*n. ForTiElht'

thE p6El-em-<iTlaoA ail Ei'il, tid the ii6ed to reform a corrupt uoild, confronts both

somen and men. As the Epilogue tells the audience, "Yoa rmite the happv endingto

the playl" "rlni 1^ 't ^r'^

ii^.J- r

Shen le's storv has a larger frame, the state of the universe or' more mundanelv,

th"';;;;iG;;f;h"tF-ffi\riild is so corrupt that affairs cannot be allowed to

2 l l 1 / B r n r o l r B n a c u r

9e-aftraaed-bgirool,,and.pgfg4o)q for him to provide the simplistic drama desired orto have a comfortable relation with authoritv, either of the Right or of the Left. Aftersettling in East Berlin, he Mote no major new plays but onlv minor propaganda piecesand adaptations of classical works such as Molibre's Don Juan and Shakesjeare,scor io lanus. As an addi t ional measure ofprotect ion, he took out Austr ian c i t izenshipthrough his w' i fe 's nat ional i ty . Brecht d ied in Ber l in on August 14, 1956. presumably,he would have taken ironic pleasure in the fact that, on Februarv 10, 199g, the onehundredth anniversary of his birth H,as celebrated throughout Germany and includeda presidential speech at the Berlin Academl'of futs.

The "epic theater" for which Brecht is knorvn derives its name from a famous essay,C)n Epic and Dnwt ic futetnt , b l Goethe and Schi l ler , uho in I i97 descr ibed dra-@;rc=Trroeffi i-o;a-aentifi cation,inconrrasttoenicpoetry, rvhich by being distanced in the time, place, and nature of the acrion coulclbeabsorbed in calm contemplation. The idea of an epic theater is a paradox: how can aplay

2€:geen il5lglghat is still held at a distance? Brecht,s solution was to employ

m,ank:e!g!j!!en_g&SlDhat were genuinely dramaric but that prevented rotal iden-tification with the characrers and forgg!;gecrators ro tbnl!-L,_ltselly3bout-1"bql wa,tgkjlc.pbse. In this, he echoed the

"rrkJih" i"uoiiti*".y Sori"t di.""torGivolod

Meyerhold, whose antirealistic use of masks, pantomime, posters and film projec-tions, song interludes, and direct address to the audience u'as well knoun to German

engrossing, especially in his best-known works, such asThe coodworun of setzuan.Brecht's concept of an epic theater touches on all aspects of the form, dramatic

s t r uC tu re . s tagese t t l ng ' - u , i " , " f f i t u re i s t o ' beopen. episodic. qnd-brqken bv dramaric or musi ia l inter ludes. I r is a "chronic le" that

f".:iii iG5r":fin an epic or distanced perspqctir.e. Episodes ma1 also be performed

independentlv as self-containedilirfriii-parables, insread of being organically tied toa centrally de'eloping plot. skits appear between scenes: in A Man's a ltlaa, there is afantastic interlude in s,hich an elephant is accused of haring murdered its mother.songs break dramatic action and yet crvstallize imporrant themes: in The GootlWonan of Setntan, "The Song of Defenselessness'presents an outraged Shen,Tcmasking hersel f and turning inro shui fa: Yang sun s lording i l over h is coworkers issatirized in "The Song of the Eighth Elephant." sometimes

" n"r."to, comments on

the action (as inThe Threepennt'Opera and A Itlan's a Mad. The alienation effects area.!:Sl'gigglgd_b1;9gL1g-J"o:r o!j!'e plays in-f,'a*av tandildhlilali-lfiEidodWoman oJ let:wn, India in A Man s a lllan, England in The Threepennl,OVera, thesoviet Union inThz caucasianchalkCircle,chicagoinsaintJoanof the stoclqatdsand rhe Resistible Rise of Anuro ui) or distant rimes (the seventeenth century inL[other courage, Renaissance rtaly in calileo, or an imagined ghostly aftcrlife in

-'flre

Trial of Lucullus).

ft{"l)r'lr"rr ''.-

arci l r r l r r ' 1

.,(o - III

'1 Stagecraft and performance further support Brecht's concept of a critical, irrtellec-

Itualized theater. E'ents on stage mav be announced beforehand by signs or accom-

f panied blrprojected images during the action itself. Place-names printed on signs are

.- , i suspended over rhe acrors, and foot l ights and stage machinery a.e ope. ly drsfraved.- - .

\Ma rk ra reused fo r * i c . ked -peo* l s r f o i e remp le . r i r .Sh , , i Tape rson " i i t y i n ' l l i cGoo t l\4/oman of Setzuan), or soldiers"face.

"." ih"lk"d *,hir" t. rrllGiii 'stvlizecl fear.

songs that interrupt the dramatic action are addressed directh'to the audience. somc-times heralded b.yla-g!gn--l!hat Brecht called a "musical emblem.'' In addition, Brechtdescribed

" .p".i"ikin?--i;ffig -"-ct.'sJn"lfa-tEn-*,*i" rr-"i. p-tq i"r,.ra

"ibeing submerged in them. At rehearsals, Brecht often asked actors tolpeak their

/ P. t t t in the th i rd person instead of the f i rs t . Such constant arr i f ic ia l i ry in jected into

/ all as_pects of the performance makes it difficult for the audience to identi$, com-{ p lerel l ' and unsel [ -consciously x. i th the characters on srage.

I cont inue. Her s i tuat ion ar ises f rom a good deed uhose counterPar l recurs in var ious

\sor ld mvrhologies and also in the Bible: hospi ta l i ryof fered ro d isguised div ine mes-

sengers, r rho reward the gi rer accordingl l . Three Chinese gods r is i t ing barth ln

i"ilr= of good people give She. Te, a penniless prosritute, a thousand-silver dollars

in recomp-ense'for-being the onlv pe.ion in Setzuan to give them lodging. Brecht

borro*'s ias so often) from th" Bibie, specifically, from the Old Testrynentrtory of K

Sodom and Gomorrah. in shich God sends angels doun to hnd ten good people rn

tffiriihid-?ilriS*odom.o tn"ili ma1 b-e saved from destruction. Yet these

modern gods are some*hat comic and c".t"itly ineffectual Wearing old-fashioned I

c lothes a 'nd dustv shoes. thev hare been delegated as ,Jt9JS: ' ] '9 [ a bgre.ayc13t ic I

Resolut , ion on high ( \ \hose terms ther debateJ: thev ignore inconvenienI qu"^t" :n: I

andi i ie l i : repearrh-econren( ional . inappl icable regulat ions: the) are terr ihed ot I

compl icat ions' that uould disturb the.r" iu qto unJ- i t an,echg: l Nql : Iabout orooer order- ther oersuade lhemselves at the end that "eter l th ing ts rn oroer

I,FId; ; ' ; ;p i .k . loui 'd"rp i te Shen Te's despair ing cr ies ' .Thes9 t : t t t " " : : t :1: t f i

Ile(s represent ih" br."ru..o,lc stale more tha.n anything.el*,,11t1t..:::i:"1,:t;.

1S-Fkq

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O4 @I]RSE IN GEIYERAL LINGUI8flCS

again pronoun@d WI. The quality of the t is responsible for thedifference between the pronunciation of the German word andtrbench aigln 'eagle': Hagel has a closing I while the trlench wordhas an opening I followed by a mute e QAld,

(,

F*c\hc^n Aq' I c\\$t!.t'r r Luo.* \nt

PART ONE knl,o.{ ^ \,General Principles

L'$tsti t's

wffi

6t

Clwptn I

NATURE OF TEE LINGI'ISTIC SIGN

l. 8i0n, Stgn;M, Sfirdfi.e?Some people regard languagg, when reduced to ite elements, as

s lnming-procees only+ list of words, each corrwponding to thething that it names. For example:

ARBOR

EQAos

This conception ie open to criticism at several points. It assumest'hat ready-made ideas exist beforc words (ou this point, see below,p. 111) ; it does not tpll us whether a name is vocal or psychologicalin nature (atbor, for instance, can be considercd from either view-point); finally, it lets us sssume that the linlnng of a na,me and athing is a very simple operation--an assumption thst iB anything

.but true. But this rather naive approach can bring us near the

f *rn by showing us that the U"g"lrtt. *tt ir "

ao*te ert W, o"elformed bv the agsoci&tins ofFoEffi:--

----a--:------:T- r .

We bave seeDln conffilering the speaking-circuit (p. 11) thatboth temsinvolved in the Unguistic sign are psychological and are

06

'*"+.il:

.L

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@c r-mffi&-antl qttfrtcs of a word provided we remember that ths

ln.o$f*. l^n^.; .'q :*-{,^1-ihrr \s .[n $ r tvr*{'*-- "no* Jh*,X *"-t^:lr,S' ;t-l .?fi ;iy nt

NATT'RE OF lEE IINGuISTIC SIGN 6IsArt-3\ ;*$ tril.tir-) t ul.rr4.t (st L;,

clear thet only the ascociations ssnctioned by that language appearto us to confom to reelity, lnd we disregard whatever othersmight E'imagi"ea.

-----=-1

) Our definition of the linguistic sign poses an important quest'ion

i of tcrminology. I csll the combination of e co''cpf,t p''d s sound-

\ image a srgrl, brit in surent usage the term pnerally designates\ only a sound-image, I woId, for exa,mple (arbor, etc.). One tends

to forget that crbor is called a ricept "tree." with the rd[f-TEt the idee of the sensory partimfrliee the idea of the whole.

..zi\rrrA.rI / *'*" a[ [ f'""''F''n'.'\1ol \ orbor l l l \ ' " " } r$ i " t ' , / lr \_7 rl\:# r

' S r Cfr\t

Ambiguity would disappear if the thrce notions involved here

@I'RSE IN GENEMI, LINGI'I8IIC8

brain by an easooiative bond. ltis point nust bo

but a

on our seqseg. The sound-image is eenro$

The psychological character of our sound-images becomes ap-parent when we obsewe our own speech. IV'ithout moving our lipsor tongue, we can tslk to oureelves or recite mentally a selection ofverEe. Becauee we regard the words of our language as eound-imsges, we must avoid epeaking of the "phonenes" that make upthe words. ThieJerm, which sugests vocal acffity, is applicableto the spoken

Darneo refer to the sound-image.The linguistic aign is then a two-sided psychological eutity that

can be represented by the drawing:

t@rThe tmo elements a,re intimately united, and each recaUs the

other. Wbether we try to find the meaning of the Latin word crboror the word that Latin uees to deaignate the concept .,fi€er' it iE

L j /

gc.|*--&"r-rrr-

0"-. ./{ ^*dh.,1' t\or f n/rr.-th^ p/ +1 c."njr.rlr..-_.$to

r€lnow of any word to replace it, the ordinary languagp zuggpstingnO Other. l6f\\c€K,rr*'Eu.. -

The linguietic sign, as defined, hss @igtics. In enunciating them I a,m also pogiting-the basic principtes of6-stuav of this type.

2. Prhwiplc I : Tlw ArbitrW Natue of tLn Sirl,The bond Ue d is a,rbitrary.

Since I mean by sign tbe whole thst results from the associating ofthe signifier with the signified, I ean simply *yztluli1tguhtia 8Wia arAilrary.

The idea of "sistet''is not linked by any inner relotionehip tothe zuccession of eoundg s-&r which serreg as its signifier in Fhench;

-7 l '1c * l i

iation of the

unit€d in theempbasizecl.

Tbelinnri

way of opposing it to the other term of the associstion, thewhich is generally more abstract.

were designated by three names, eschothers. f propose to retain

the

r- /- r.rJ ! I r* I rtt l f . -ISll l

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tbst it could be reprreented equslly by just any other aequenee isproved by difrerences among languages and bythe very existenceof difrerent languages: the signified ,,ox,, has as its signifier hFlon one side of the border and alc-s (OclB) on the other._ No one disputee the principle of the arbitrary nature of the eip,

68 @I'RSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS

its qgEquencee a,re

principle.

E8rne

equally obvious at first glaEFodv after many detours doee onediscoyer them, and with the,m the primordial importance of the

NATT'RE OF lEE LINGUISTIC SIGN N

imply that the choice of the aignifier is left entirely to the speaker

t) OnntnatoWeia might be used to prove that the @iceltibegignifier is not always &rbitr&rI.. But onomatopoeic formations sr€ncver organic elements of a linguistic system. Besides, their numberis nucE mafler=Gmn is genera-ly supposed. Words like fbenchlfout'whip' or glas'lnell' may strike cert&in ears with mggestive

1.\ / sonority, but to eee that they have not always had thin propertyI we need only exa,mine their Latin fiorms (foutis derived from/@tts| 'beech-tree ,' glm from elassinnn 'sound of a trunpet'). The querlrt/of their present sounds, or rather the quality that is attributpd tothem, is a fortuitous result of phonetic evolution.

As for authentietc;), not also-theyrrc-A-osensomeffhat arbitra,rily, for they are only approximete and more orless eonventional imitations of certain sounds (cf. English MfuiDand trtench ozaona). In addition, onee these words have been intro'duced into the language, they are to a certain extent zubjected tothe eame evolution-phonetic, morphological, etc.-that otherwords undergo (d. ptgeon, ultimately from Vulga,r T.o;tin pnpid,

lderived in turn from an onomatopoeic formation): obvious proofIthat they lose something of their original character in order tof assume that of the linguistic sign in general, which is uxmotivat€d

2) Intnjectione, closely related to onomatopoeia, can be atrtacked on the sa,me grounds and eome no closer to refuting ourthesis. One is tcmpted to see in them spontaneous expressions ofrcality dictated, so to speak, by natural forces. But for most inter-jections we can show that there is no fixed bond between their sifnffied and their aignifier. We need only compare two languages ontrris point to see how much such expressions differ from one lan-Erage to the next (e.g. the English equivalent of French aw! ieoueh|. We know, moreover, that many interjections were onc,o

Xbut it is often easier to diecover a tmth than to sssign to itltgFoper place. Principle I dominates all the linguistics oi tanguagB;

a,re

d_o. to the ground nins times), are nonethetess fixed by rule; it isthis nrle and not the intrinsic

reslize better than theothers the ideal of the

S",f"+rlS!.$

q

k*\

*skiffi,r

to the establiehment of Principle I:

One re,mark in passing: wbgl-eeniology becomee organized as/ a ecienrce, the question will a,rise whethe-r or not it properly incrudeslmodes 9f exqression based on cqepletely *t ot signs, zuch as

{ \paetom4.e.Sup-posing that the ne@pain concern will still be t.he whole sroun of sergtemg urounded o;-

arbitrariness of the sipn. fn fact, everyEffi expreqqggin principfin crilEtffi

most complex and universal of all systems of erpression, i8 alsothe most characteristic; in this sense linguistics can become the

the linguistic sign,fwhat is here called the .rygsrp&lg

r characteristicweighs against the use of this

symbol of justice, abe:eplaced byjust any other symbol, *.h r" a chariot.

The word crAilrary slso ce[e for comment. The term should not

:il.1

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ITO COI]R.SE IN GENERAL LINGUISTTCS

sificstion ; the divieion of words into substantives, verbs, adjectivee,etc. is not an undeniable linguistic reality.t

Linguistics accordingly works continuously with concepts forgedby gra,mmarians without lrrowing whether or not the conceptsactually correspond to the constituenfa of the system of language.But how carr we find out? And if they are phantome, what realitiescarl we place in opposition to them?

To be rid of illusiong we must first be convinced that the con-cretp entities of language are not directly accessible. If we try tograsp them, we come into contact with the true facts. Startingfrom thene, we can eet up all the classifications that linguisticsneede for arranging all the facts at its disposal. On the other hanfl,to base the classifications on anything except concrete entities-tosay, for exa,mple, that the parts of speech a,re the constituents oflanguage simply because they correspond to categories of logie-isto forget that there a,ne no linguistic facts apart from t'he phonicsubstance cut into significant elements.

C. Finally, not every idea touched upon in this chapter difrergbaaically from what we have elsewhere csUed oohrce. A new com-pa.rison with the eet of chesmen will bring out this point (seepp. 88 fr.). Take s Lni8ht, for instance. By itseU is it an element inthe game? Certainly not, for by its material make-up-outside itsBquare and the other conditions of the ga,me-it meane nothing tothe pL,ayer; it becomes a real, eoncrete element only when endowedwith value end wedded to it. Suppose that the piece happens to bedestroyed or lost during a game. Can it be replaced by an equiva-lent piece? Certainly. Not only another }oight but even a figureshorn of any resemblance to I knight can be declared identicalprovided the same value is attributed to it. We see then that insemiological systems like language, where elements hold each otherin equilibriun in accordance with fixed rules, the notion of identityblends with that of value andvice uersa.

Ia a word, that is why the notion of value envelopee the notionsof unit, concrete entity, and reality. But if there is no fundamental

I Foru, function, and meaning combine to make the classing of the parte ofepeech even more difficult in Engtisb than in French. Cf. tetful: tet ful ita bt-foot pole: tlw ph it ten fed lonC. lTtr.l

LINGI'IsTIC VAI,I]E U1

difterence between these diverse notions, it follows that the prob'Iem can be stst€d zuccessively in aeveral ways.

'Whether we try todefine the unit, reality, concrete entity, or value, we alwayn comeback to the central question thet dominst€s all of ststic linguistics'

It would be interesting from a practical viewpoint to begin withunits, to determine what they are and to aceount for their diversityby classifying them. It would be necessary to search for the r'easonfor dividing laoguug" into words-for in spite of the difficulty ofdefining it, the word is a unit that strikes the mind, somethingcentral in ifie 'sshsnism of languag*but thst iB a subject whichby itself would fill a volume. Next we would have to classify thezubunits, then the la,rger units, etc. By determining in t'his waythe elements that it manipulates, synchronic linguistics wouldcompletely fulfiU its task, for it would relate all s;ncbronic p!e'oo-"o" to tueir funda,mental principle. rt crnnot be said thst thisbasic problem has ever been faced squarely or that its scope andaifficutty have been understood; in the matter of languege, peoplehave always been sstisfied with ildefined units.

Still, in spite of their capital imporbance, it is better to approanhthe problem of units through the sbudy of volue, for in ny opinionvalue is of prime importan@.

Clwptn IV

LINGUISTIC VALUE

l. Imtglnge u Orgart;ind mmtght Coupl'efi sith SmndTo prove that lranguage is only a system of pure values, it ie

enough to consider the two elemeDts involved in its functioning:

ideas and sounds.Psychologically our thought--apart from its expression in words

-is lnty Jshepeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and lin-

guists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of

im" we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consist€nt distinction

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II2 COI'RSE IN GENERAL LINGIIISTICS

between two ideas. 'Without

language, thought is a vague, un-char&ed nebula. There ane no pre-existing ideas, and nothing isdistinct before the appearance of language.

Ageinst the floating realm of thought, would sounds by them-eelves yield predelimited entities? No more so than ideas. pboniczubstance is neither more fixed nor more rigid than thought; it ienot a mold into which thought must of necessity fit but a plasticgubstance divided in turn into distinct parts to fumish the signifiersneeded by thought. The linguistic fact can thercfore be picturedin its totality-i.e. language--as a series of contiguous subdivisionsma,rked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas (d) andthe equally vague plane of sounds (B). The following diagra,mgives a rough idea of it:

The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is notto create a material phonic means for exprcssing ideas but to servesB g link between thought and sound, under conditions thatof necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units.Thought, chsotic by nature, has to beeome ordered in tne proces{tof its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material formnor are sounds trandormed into mental entities; the somewhatmysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound,, implies division,and that language works out its units while taking shape betweentwo shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet ofwater; if the atmospheric pres$ue changes, the surface of thewatpr will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the wavesresemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substence.

Language might be called the domain of articulations, using tho

LINGIIISTTC VALUE I13

word as it was defned earlier (eee p. 10), Each tinguistic term is amember, an art/icltlus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and asound becomes the sign of an idea.

Language can also be compared with a sheet of psper: thoughtis the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front with-out cutting the back at the sa,me time; likewiee in language, onec8n neither divide sound from thought nor thouglt from sound;the division could be accomplished only abstractcdln and thereeult would be either pur€ psycholory or purt phonolos/.

Linguistics then works in the borderland where the eleme,nts ofeound nnd thought combine; tltei'r combhati'on prod'unes a font, tnto flhatf,noa

These views give abetter understanding of wbatwas e&id befot€(see pp. 07 fr.) about the arbitrariness of signs. Not only a're t'he twofleprinn that a,re linked by the linguistic fact shapeless and con-fuEed, but the choice of a given elice of sound to na,me a given ideais completely arbitrury. lf this were not true, the notion of valuewould be compromised, for it would include an externally imposedelement. But ectually values remain entirely reletive, and that iswhy the bond between the sound and the idea is radicallyarbitrary.

The arbitrary natlre of the sign explains iD fiun why t'he socialfact alone can create a linguisbic system. The community is necec'eary if valuee thet owe their existence solely to ue88e and generalacceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapableof fting a single value.

In addition, ttre idea of value, as defined, shows that to coDnidere term as einply the union of a certain sound with a certain conceptie gossly misleading. To define it in this way would isolste theters. from its system; it would mean assuming that one can gtart'from the terms and construct the syetem by adding them togotherwhen, on the contrery, it is from the interdependent whole thatone must start and t'hrough analysis obtain its elements.

To develop this thesis, we shsll study value successively fromthe vierrpoint of the signified or concept (Section 2), the nigniffel(Section 3), and tho complete sign (Section 4).

Being unable to seize the concrete entities or units of languagedirectln we ehall work with worde. While the word does not con-

2Za

-..'".'r:m?

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lla @UNsE IN GENURAL LINGUISTICS LINGIIISTIC VAI,UE

IIow, then, can value be confused with signification, i.e' the coun-terpsrt of the sound-image? It seems impo*sible to liken the rela.tions represented here by horizontat a,rrows to those representedabove (p. fU) by verticat arrowa. Putting it another way+ndsgtrin takint up the exa,mple of the sheet of peper that is cut in two

t*" p. ll3)-i[ ;r .1ear that the observable relation between the dif-iereot pieces A, B, C, D, etc. is distinct from the rclrtion betweenthe front and back of the sa,me piece as ia L/L',BfB', et'c'

To resolve the iesue, let us obEerve from the outset thet evenoutside language all values are apparently governed by the sameparadoxical principle. They are always composed:

(1) of a abAmitnr thing that can be aclwngd for the thing ofwhich the value is to be determined; and

(2) of similnr things that can be corn'pord with the t'hing ofwhich the value is to be determined.

Both factorg sre neoeessrJr for the €xisteDce of e value' To de'termine what a fivefranc piece is worth one mugt therefore Lnow:(1) that it can be exchanged for e fixed quantity of a difrerent thingi.i. Ut"tA; and (2) thtt it can be compa,red wit'h s Aimilnr valus efthe same s5rstem, e.g. a one-franc piece, or wit'h coryLs of got'he1 nlr., u.eysbem (a dolla,r, etc.). In the sa,me wsy a word can be exchanged .'.-

-.-' -

tor eomething dissimiibr, an idea; beeides, it can be compaled with lrto,6icd'n

something olthe sg,me nature, another word. Its value is therefore I '

not fixed so long as one ei-ply stat€s that it can be r'63ch&ngedtt

for a given concept, i.e. that it h88 this or t'hat sig"tinsation: onemust also compa,re it with similar values, wit'h ot'h9r words thatstand in oppo.itioo to it. Its eontent is reelly fixed only by theconcurrence of everything that existE outside it. Being part of asystem, it is endowed not only with a signification brrt also andespecially with a value, and this is somet'hing quite differeat'

a f"w examplea will show clearly thot this is tme. ModernFrench moutmt cal- have the ssms simification as English stpepbut not the s8,me value, and this for severel rs88on8, particulerlybesause in speskins of a piece of meat ready to bo served on the

.-l :r iLLI

fom uactly to the definition of the ringuirtic unit (aee p. rOu),it at least bears a rougb resemblance to the unit andhas th";-vantsge of being concretel consequentrn we nhall use words asspecimens equivalent to realterme in a synchronic s5rstem, and tueprinciples that we evolve with respect to words will be o"ua lo.entities in general.

2. IriNryistio Valu lron a Concephnl ViaDpointwhen we speak of the vclue of a word, we generalry think first of

its properf,y of standing for an idea, and tnir i" in fect ooe side orlinguistic value. But if +.his is trug how doa6 aafuc diff.; i;signifinationt Might the -two yords be qmonyms? I think not,although it is easy to confuse f[em, sinss th" cootu.ion resultg notso mueh from their nimilali6y as from the subgety of the dt th;ti;that they mark.- FI9- a conceptual viewpoint, varue is doubiless one element innignification, and it is diffisult_.to see how nigniff6gfiqn ..-b" d;pendent upon value and stiu be distinct fromlt. But we must clesE

up tho isflre or risk reducing ransregg to a simpre na,ning-process(eee p. 65).

- Let us first take signification as it is generally understood and asit waspictured on page 67. As the aoows io th" d""*i";;;;it;only the counterpart of the sound-image. EverythingTn"i"rr"*c-oncenu only the sound-image and the concept when we took upoutho word as independent and self-conta.ined.

I@I. But here is the paradox: on the one hand the concept seeme to be

thecounterpart of the sound-image, and on the otheriand the sigaiteelf is in turn the counterpart of the other eigns of languafe.

r,anguage is a system of interdependent terms in wuiJn inevalue of each term results solely from the simultsn** p**o*of the others, as in the diagram:

L t r . r r i . r g ! ! ! r ' t ! l l t - . - l l l ! ! ! ' '

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110 @URSE IN GENERAI, LINGI]IfITICS

table, English um multon and not sltcep. A\e differcnce in valuebetween slwep andnaldon, is due to the fact that cluepbubesideit a second term while the trbench word does not.

Within the same language, all worde uced to express relatedideas limit each other reciprocally;'synonyme like trtench redm.ter'dre&dr' qairdte tfear,' and a:oir pettr,be sfraid, have value onlythrough their opposition: if rdmder did not exist, all its contentwould go to its competitors. Conversely, Bome words are enrichedthrough contact with othere: e.g. the new element introduced indifrW (un vieilla,rd il&cr@t, see p. Sg) r€sults from the co-existence of dfaepi (un mur iloepr). The value of just any termis accordingly determined by its environment; it is imposaible tofix even the value of the word nipifying (sun,, without first con_sidering i1r .u11'eundingg: in some languagps it is not possible tosay "sit in the e?rn."

Everything said about words applim to any term of language,e.g. to gra,mmefcat entities. The value of a trhench plural does notcoincide with thst of a Sanskrit plural even though their sig-nificetion is usually identical; sarshit has tbr€e numbere i""teadof two (my ege.srrny eo?s,mg artnsrnylegaretc. a,redual);.itwotrldbe wrong to attribute the sa,me value to the plural in Sanskrit andin trbench; its value clearly depends on what is outside and aroundit.

ff words stood for preexisting eoncepts, they would all havoexact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next; butthin is not tnre. Ilench u*,slo?tcr (urw maison) let (a house)' in-difrerently to mean both ,,pay for" and .,rcceive pa5ment for,,'whereas German uses ttro worde, mictsn and amttintcn; there isobviously oo exact corrcspondence of v.alues. The German verbssclfitzpn and' urteilnn share a number of significations, but tbatcorrespondence does not hold at eeversl points.

Tnfection ofrers some particula^rly striking exa,mples. Dis.tinctione of time, which ane so fa,miliar to us, a,re unloown in cer-toin langusges. Eebrew does not recognize even the funda,mental

. . 1!" q*-gf-the comparative form for two and the ouperlative formorB tban

gwo r? Ifng;lish (e.g. may tfu bel+at botnr vin: tlw benlb bsnr in tL, 'u,rld)u plobabfv a ttmleot of the old digtinetion betweeu tbe dual and the pluralnumber. [Tr.]

LTNGITTSTTC VALTIE lt?

distinctions between the past, prrsent, and future. ProtoGetqani.has no special form for the future; to say that the future is e\-pressed by the present is wrong, for the value of the present \ notthe sa,me in Germanic as in languages that have a future along p'i1trthe present. The Slavic languages regularly single out two asps"ctgof the verb: the perfective represents action ae a point, completrs trits totality; the imperfective represents it as taking place, an6 sothe line of time. The categories are difrcult for a Frenchmall 16understand, for they 4,rc unknown in French; if they were prgdetermined, this would not be true. Instcad of pre-existing ideqgthen, we find in all the foregoing examples ttohns emanat'ing flobthe system. When they are said to correspond to concepts, it igunderstood that the concepts are purely difrerential and defis66not by their positive content but negatively by t'heir relations y'itr5the other terms of the system. Their most precise characterisfis 18in being what the others are not.

Now the real interpretation of the diagra'm of the "ign al becomesappa,rent. Thus

t@lmeans that in French the coneept "to iudge" is linLed to the so\11d-image iuger; in short, it symbolizes signification. But it is quiteclear that initially the concept is nothing, that i8 only a vgluedetermined by its relations with other similsr values, and thatwithout them the Bigmifissli6t would not exist. If I stete ei&plythat a word signifies something when I have in mind the associ-ating of a sound-image with a concept, I a'm making a statehsqXthat may suggest what actually happens, but by no meslrs.am texpreming the linguistic fact in its eesence and fullness.

3. Li,nguisti,c Vahu fron a Matsri.ol' Vie'wpoirttThe conceptual side of value ie made up solely of relations qnd

differences with respect to the other terms of language, and ths

.7*Z'7

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terial subst€nco but by the differences tbst eeparate its soutrd-imase from all ot'here.

T[e foregoing principle is so bssic thst it applies to 8ll thematerial elements of language, including phonemes. Every lan-guege foms its worda on t'he basie of a system of sonorous ele'il.o--tu, each element being a clearly delimited unit and oue of afixed number of r:nits. Phonemes arc ch$asterized not, as onomigbt think, by their own pcaitive quality but eimply bv the {ecttn"t tn y arc distinct. Phonemes a,re above all else oppooing'relative, and negative entities.

Proof of this iB the latitude that epeakers have between pointsof convergence in the pronunciation of ai"tinct sounds. In trhenchtfor instan-ce, general use of a dorssl r do€s not prrevent nany epeak-ere from using a tongu+tip trill; language is not in t'he least clts'turbed by it;-fauguage requires only that the eound be difrerentand not, as one nigbt imagine, that it have 8n inva,riable quslily'I cen even pronounce the French r like German chrt Baah, ilncll,etc., but in German I could not ueo r inst€ad of c[, for Germangives recognition to both elements and must keep them ap*'5i-it""ty, L Ruesian there is no latitude for I in thJ direction of l'(palatalized t), for the result would be the confuEing of two souodsdifrerentirated by the language (cf. gnorit' 'glreak' and gntil'bespeaks'), but more freedon may be taken with reepect to & (aspt-rit"A li since this sound does not figure in the Rusaisn syat€o ofphonemes.

Since an identicsl state of a'frairs is obgervable in writing' an-other system of signs, we shall uso writing to draw some coB-parisons thst wiil clarify the whole issue. In fact:

1) The siggs used in writing are arbitra'ry; there is no con;ouriioo, for exanple, between th" lettet t and the sound tbst it

deeignates.Zitne value of letters is purety negative and difrerential The

salrre person can writo t, for instance, in different ways:

same can be said of its mst€rial eide. rhe importrant thing in theword ig not the sound alone but the phonic dr'fierences that makeit possible to distinguish thin word from all otb.ers, fo, ar.n"reocescarry nignification.

This mby eeem zurprising but hoq indeed could the reveme bopossible? since one vocal image is no better zuit€d than the nextfor wbat it is commigEioned to express, it ig evident, even o pri*,t'hat a segment of language can never in the final enelysi' bsbasedon anything except its noncoincidence with the rest. Arbitrary ro'd.d,ifermtial are two correlative qualities.

The alteration of linguistic signs clearly illustrates this. rt igprecisely because the terms o and D as suchar€ radically incapableof rcaching the level of conseioum.esHne is always conscious ofonly the o/b difrerenc*that each term is free to change accord-ing to laws that are unrelated to its eignifying function. Irio positiveeign characteizea the genitive plural in Czech /m, (ree p. g6);still the two forms rena: lnt function as well as the

"""u.i to"-u

lnno: lanb; Iilhss value only beceuse it is different.Eere is anoth.er exa,mple that ehowe even more clearly the eyr

telatic role of phonic differencee: in Greek, ephat r'an imperfectand' 6stat an aorist although both words are lormed in the ssmeway; 4e first belongs to the sys0em of the present indicative ofpldrn't'r aay,' whereas there is no prcsent .ddm,i; now it is precisehthe relation phanz: epharthatcorr.,esponds to the relation betweenthe present and the imperfect (cf. drirmfumi: edbircnrin, etc.). signsf'1clion, then, not through their intrinsic varue tut tirougt in?urelative position.

rnaddit'ion, itr;g impossible for eound alone, a material element,to belong to language. ft is only a secondary thing, substance toGput to use. Au our conventional values have thJcharacteristie ofnot being confusedwith the tangible element whi.n *ppo"t" tu"..Fo-r instsnce, it is not the metal in a piece of money ihat fixee itsvalue. A coin uominally worth five francs may contain less thanhau its worth of eilver. rts varue wil vary according to the ,-o*tsta'nped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a poriti-cal boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic ri;G;;,which is not phonic but incorporeal-constituted-not uv iG .r,.

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W @URSE IN GSNM,AL LINGIIISTICS

the only requirement is thst the gtg', for ! not be confused in hi8ecript with the sipsls used for l, d, etc.

3) Yalues in writing function only through reciprocal oppositionwithin a fixed sysbem that consists of a set number of letters. Thigthird characteristiq though not identical to the second, is closelyre}ated to it, for both depend on the first. Since the graphic sign isarbitrary, its form matters little or rather mattcrs only within trfuslimitations imposed by the system.

4) The meanF by which the sign is produced is completely un-important, for it does not a,frect the system (this also follows fromcharacteristic 1). Whether I make the letters in white or black,raised or engraved, with pen or chisel--all thie is of no importancowith respect to their eiglific8fi.r.

4. Tlw Sign Co??s;d6ed in lts TotnlityEverything that hns been said up to t\is point boils down to

this: in language there are only differences. Even morc important:a difrerence generally implies positive terms between which thedifference is set up; but in language therc a,re only difrereneeswitlwutpotttbe larns. whether we take the signified or the signifier,lsnguage has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before tU" ti"-guistic eystem, but only conceptual and phonic difrerences thsthave issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that eaign contains is of less importance thnn the other siens that sur-round it. Proof of this iB thst the value of a term may be modifiedwithout either its meaning or its sound being a,fiected, eolely be.cause a neighboring term has been modified (see p. 11b).

But the statement that everything in language is negative istrue only if the signified and the sigrifier are considered separately;when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something thatis positive in its own cla^ss. A linguistic system is a series of difrer-ences of sound combined with a series of difrerences of ideas; butthe pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with * -"oycuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values;and this system Beryes as the efrective link between the phonic andpsychological elements within each sigu. Although both the sig-nified and the signifier are purely differential and negative whenconsidercd sepa,rately, their combination is a positive fact; it is

LINGI]ISTIC VALI'E

even the aole type of facts that languagB hos, for maintaining theparalleliryr between the two classes of differences is the diEtinctivefunction of the linguistic institution.

e,ertain diachronic facts 8,re qrpical in this respest. Take t'hecountles8 instanceE where alteration of the signifier occasions"aconceptual change and where it is obvious that the sum of theideas-distinguished corresponds in principle to the sum of the dis-tinctive etgne. When two words are confused t'hrough phoneticalteration (e.g. Flene,h dlirepil ftom ilzcreyittrs and illcttpi. fuomcri$pus), the ideas that they exprress will slEo tend to become eon-fuo4 it only they have something in co'rmon. Or a word may havedifrerent forms (cf. einiae'cbari, and, clwite'desk')' Any nrscentdifrerence will t€nd invariably to become significsnt but withoutalways succeeding or being succesdul on the first tli8l, conversely,any conceptual difrereneaperceived by the mind meks to find ex'pression tbrougb a distinst cigniffer, and two ideas that aFe troioog.t distinct in the mind tend to merge into the sa,me signifier.

Wh"o we comps,re signs-positive terms-wit'h each ot'her, wecsn no longer speak of difrerence; the expression would not beOtting, for it appliea only to the comparing of two sound-imagee'e.g. father eirrd.nntlw, or two ideas, e.g. the ides "father" and theidea "mother"; two eigns, each heving a signified and signifier' a'renot difrerent but only distinct. Between them there is only oppo-Eilion. The entire mechanim of language, with which we shsll beconcerned latpr, is based on oppositions of this kind and on thephonic and conceptual differences that they imply.

Wbst is tme of value is tnre also of the unit (see pp' 110 fr')' A

unit i8 a segment of the epoken chain thst conesponds to a certainconcept; both a're by natu€ purcly difrerent^ial.

epifiin to units, ihe principle oi difrerentiation eanbe ststedinthis way: tlw cle,r6rjt/,rktias of ttu mitblnd wiih tlw mit ituclt'Ielanguage, as in any s€miological system, whet€ver Ai$inguishe8one-sign from the otherg constitut€8 it. Difference makes character

iust as it makes value and the unit.Another rather paradoxical corxpquenc€ of the sane principle is

this: in the last analysis what is comnonly referred to as a "g8tn-matical fact" fits the definition of the unit, for it always exprc8se8an opposition of terms; it difrers only in t'hat the oppoeition is

724

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IXz @I'NSE IN GENER,AI,I,INGIIISTICS

part'icularly signiffcantr (e.g. the formation of German plurals of thotype Nuht: Ndchln). Each tem present in the gra,mmatical fact(the singular without umbut or ffnal e in oppoaition to the pluralwith umlaut and -) consists of the interplay of a number of oppo-eitions within the system. When isolated, neither Nuhtnor Ndchtpis anything: thus everything is opposition. Putting it another way,the Nuht: Ndchta relation can be expreesed by an algebraic formulra/binwhich c and b are not simple terns but rcsult from a set ofrelations. Language, in a manner of speaking, is a type of algebraconaisting solely of complex terms. Some of itsoppoaitions are moFssignifisantr than othens; but units and grammet'ical fects are onlydifrerent nameg for designating diverse aspects of the sa,me generalfact: the funetioning of linguistic oppositione. This statement is sotrue that we might very well approach the problem of units bystarting from grammatical facts. Taking an opposition bke Nuht:Ndrhtp, we mig[t ask what are the units involved in it. Are theyonly the two words, the whole series of similar words, c and d, or allsingulars and plurals, etc.?

Units and gna,mmatical facts would not be confused if linguistieaigns were made up of something besides differsnces. But languagebeing whet it is, we ehnll find nothing simple in it regardless of ourapproach; everywhere and always t'here is the s8,me complexequilibriun of terms that mutually condition each other. Puttingit another way,lnryiuage ia o tonn, ord not o stlbstorce (see p. 113).This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in ourteminologr, all our incorrect ways of nnming thingn thet pertainto language, st€m from the involuntary suppositioD that thelinguistic phenomenon nust hsve gtrbstance.

Ctnptn Y

SYI.ITAGI\IATIC AND ASSOCHTM RELATIONS

l. DefiiitionsIn a language.state everything is based on relations. Eow do

they function?

EYNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATTSE NEI,A'IIONS

Relations and difrerences between linguistic terms fsll into twodigtinct groups, each of which generates a certain class of values.The opposition between the tq.o clastrs gives a better understand-ing of the nature of each chffiEf,tb-rreapond to two foms ofour mental activity, both indispensable to the life of language.

In discourse, on the one hand, words acquire relations based onthe liiffifure of language because they are cheined together.Thig rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements Bimul-taneously (see p. 70). The elements are a,rranged in sequence onthe chain of speaking. ComUination" zupporrcA Uv meawd,aqtna.t The qrutagm is always composed of two or more con-regutive units (e.g. French re-l;ire'r€-r€adr' contre tou,s 'egainst

syeryoner' ln dp hlt rwitu'human hfe r' Dieu est bon'God is Bodr'CiI faitbau tnnps, now wrtirow'if the weather is nice, we'll go

lout,' etc.). In the syntsgn a term acquires its velue only because

lit Btands in opposition to ever5rthing that precedes or fpllows it,pr to both. Aeu^,..,.-i-k-;**-5uv\-& N-5

OUtSae@, on the other hand, @ dfa_ditrerent kind. Those that have something in common are a,ss(>ciated in the memory, resulting in grouw marked by diverse re-

.lations. For instance, the French wordensei,penant 'teaching'will

unconsciously call to mind a host of other words (maeigner'tarchr'rmseignpr'acquaintrt etc.l or amenont'am.a,mentr' clmgemantta,mendment,' etn.; or hdnnotion'educationr' opprmtiaeqe'ayprenticeship,' etc.). All those words are relatcd in some way.

We see thet the eo'ordinations formed outside discourse difrerstrikingly from those formed inside discourse. Those fomed out-eide discouree art not supported by linearity. Theif..pegt-isiil&)brain; they are I psrt of the inner storehouse tbet Bskes up the

kerThefn.

more termg thet ocsur in a,Leffective series. Againsb this, the associ-- -ative relation unit€s terms ir absenlia in a ootential mnemonio-€eqgs.

Flom the assocbtive and syntagmatic viewpoint a linguistic

r It is aca,lc€ly neoeosaly to point out that the etudy of eyztcAae is not to beconfused with eyntar Syutax is only one part of the rtudy of eyntagmr(ce pp. r34fi.). tEd.l

LL>

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I24 . @I]RSE IN GENER,AL IINGUISfiCSQr.,9rai.*F- qm.Ao$1

unit is like e nxdba* of a building, e.B. a column. On the onehand, the eolumn has a certein relation to the arehitrave that itzupports; the a,rrangement of the two units in spsce suggests theqptagmatic relation. On the other hand, if the column ie Doric, itquggesgq a mental cqmpEison of this style ATE-6Tm-Toffc,Corinthian, etc.) although none of these effints is present inspsc€: the relation is associative.

Each of the twoiffiord.ination calls for some specificremarks.

2. SUntng?wtic RelatiorcThe exa,mples on pagp 123 have already indicated that the notion

of syn-1bagL-applggnot only to words butlS-g9Jp!_gf words, tocomplex units of ell lengths and types (compounds, deriv-dfves,phrases,wholeffi

It is not enougb to consider the relation that ties together thedifrerent parts of qmta,gms (e.g. tr'rench oontre.a,geinst, and totn'everyone' in cultre ttus, oonlre and mal,tre.master' in conlremnttre'foreman')f one mugt also trear rggind the relation that links thEhge-tejts pg$g (e.9. contre tousin opposition on the one hand tocontre and on the other toua, or oontremntlrein opposition to contreand,mattre).

An objection night be raised at this poin!. The_senlt€nce is the

@nuti-tEtoossto"pea@(see p. 14). Does it not follow that the syntsgp beTAgB to speak-ing? I do not 'hink

eo. Spgukillis characterized by freedom91! :1mlrnat1qry; one mwt'-tegm8 8ne equslly trce.

It is obvious from the first that many expressions belong to lan-guage. Thes€ are the pat phraees in which any change is prohibitedby usage, even if we can single out their meaningful elements (cf.d qwi bon? 'what'a the use?' allnns donc! ,nonsenset,). The eame istnrg thougb to a lesser degree, of expressi onslike prend,re ln moucluttake offense €8sily,'7 forcer la main d qnlqu,un,foree someone'ghan4' rottpre une lanm'bresk & lanee,,s or even wotr mat (d,ta

| 9f . F;ndiah hcad and. uaiter in lvnduoitpr. (tt.7t

ts:"tty 'take the dy.' Cf. rrndish to*o tl,ebunW &attona. (ft]r Q{. Irngfinh buV tlw tnt*t. Ui.)

L%

tfue,etc.)'have (aheadache, et9')i !tmce,de (sorzs,etc') 'bV.{it of

(car", "i..),'

Euc aous en surful'e)?'how do you feel about it?' poa

iiiw"ai'a"-. . .'ther€'gnoneedfor''',' etfr',whichary.c!ry

STNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATTVE BELATIONS

or syntax.These idiom&tiC

;;ytit, a,re chsracterized bv. somc P""-pl:.133rt* "*l*1 19:..I;"?iltlrUdil"i"t"e."("f .difindir.'difrcurtv'--,!:mA;ifi,T#i,Jiiiiii'trr 'h"u die' beside aonn;'at '[q sbsllaleeP').e

Inde€dr $nce ureFe l8 uouuuE 'luo!r*U s r@6u"6vt

;dr-if ' rrnsuG nr" regi*ered. a rym.i.ol ."9h1_1r Ht-ilty:

3. Aegoci,atia e R'elationsMental association creatps ol,her groups begrdes thoge bqged 9n

of terms that have in common;through

its grasp of the nature that btna the t€r'ms together,

ffi"o "

*o:, Alilrcnal&anlz arises in speaking (s€e pp' 167 fr')'itgsppearance suppoees;fi.J ffpe, 19il t,h* ttry it T tlT pryll:

;ilth""tgh t"membtance of a zufrcient number of similsrwordg

u.riog"g io tanguage Qn'pordotfrln-'unpardonable "

htnwablz'ioto6r"5t,' ;nfafudlz 'indetaugauel' etc')' Exactly-t'he 83me tE

tJ;i;;6"."" "ia groups of words builr_upon rcgular p"ryH.

Conui*uo* like Io iiiw*t 'the world tumg" qn owjlitil?'wbat does he say to you?t etc. correspond to general typee t'bst ale

h tt * ;ppottud io-tn" hnguage by concrete remembrunces'

. -Bu;

*"'-o"t rcalize that in Ue qnrtap thery i8- nojE$rt

l*-*ar"y U"t*."o the language fact, which is s -tgB ot couecuve

l c and depends on rnur-

lffiiiithr 't"ffiffi

".il ;;"* both forces have combined in produc'

-g tt,--a they have combined in indeterminable proportions'

ffus mind creates 8s many associative series 8s there a're diverm

relations. For instance, ; ;;g"t*"t rteaching,' ensei'grw'tn*ch"

I The enomaly of the double r in the fuh[e forme of cert8in verbs in trlench

t"f il;;!A-L-_G"srlai-pt*"lt-:d*.emaninEnslish'fft 'l

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r2o codnsp rN cENERAL LrNcurgTtcs

ensei.g?wts '(we) teach,' etc., one element, the rqlical, is commonto every term; the sa,me word may oeeur in a dfferlifrTffies-I6ffielaround another common element, lhe sufrx (ct. enaeiryerna{ennbmeil, clmgencllt, etc.); or thuanslogy of the concepts Bignifie_d'(enwtgnenmt, instntdimt, ap-prentiuqe, Adunotion, etc.); or again, simply fro-..lhg_giogllgdt1of tlg rgg!&irqages 1g:g . mseignen nr and i usterwnl"pr€c-rsel/). r0Thus there is at timqq_e double similarity of meaninq and forn,;at times dmilarilevoke everythirg that can be associated with it in one way otlanother.

lgE MECSANISM OF LANGUAGE IN

ie not indefinit€ as in the case of enseignenmr''l*g'P::':j:1"

, number of cases i" at"i"iilng"i"st ihis' tne *or& have no fixed

I order of succecaion,li;li ilTv t p"*V a'rbitrarv act that the

I srsmmarian oooo"ti iol""t"v t'ther tnao in another;in tho

I .ioa of speakers til";;;;;" oT.t"'bl no Beatrs the first oue

I io tu" declension, "id

#il;; i" *uitu t""t" * cslled dependa

' on cirgumstanceS'

ChaPlnVI

TEE MECEANISM OF LAI'IGUAGE

t' m?ffffff.**pt*"l- -q1rjT.ces thst constrtut€s

languac€ results{romT*" ty*ti"r colna'risons: the relations are

sometimes assocl&tlve' ***i-o sYnta€mat'ic' The groupings T

both clasees a.re for 'iJ;;t' ffAqy bnsuase; this set ot

common relstio* .ooJritot s languEgre ,nd governs its functioning'

What is most "t"l""g

t"in" *Zd'"tion of language y W

natin aotidaritin'', "Jtil;;il-t"i'" "r hnguage depend'on what

surrounds them in tn" 'potuo chain or ol their succ€ssive parts'

This is Bhowu bv *;"Ji;;Joo' e *it ur" poinJrd decomposes

discar& asoociatiorg that becloutl t'ne fte-flgi!;lih' of discorulo' But ite

existence is proveo oy 'i;#;;'i.afi. o{ pY: l#""J-yi#$SJH-T};

fusiont thst can resur from pure and "tpl:-ilH"bTHliiio?",io-"ti"t"'jiilil.rt" ir* mwiciens produieent les aons L. f}:';it-**; -, tcf . shake

ii?*a"iiu'.hry9r5,tf ff6 f#,9(&ffri?,trd4i-",1ryT*lmepea,re's"Not".1PJt'*ti.-i;;ff;*,ir*plo.taby,l.?TPjr?j*.9ii;;,'ibere g,n sssociatron' qoue t".tu':Tlji^i.--ri"-*en 6hu blue': durtlpnu-(cf . French n s ot' "p"''ffi;-'*Jida

;'c"t^-"Jf;: S"Hffi$i*[#i;;dt;) ; the point is- tbst - one F:-T=" ;.1 H; J;orii-t"'ot io tl";,*,fi Lfr ";-d"i(:*ii:f :rf.;:'f h,ffi ljlii'ii'iiffo"i";u;yar€inSffi:ffi.l;'l")|ffi ;;1,*ry;,t;-T{mf

:,f :;fm,*i G]"n"euil an*ti*- aoa lhe cgneqo-lH

arriii7"i".; hdanvlvip, hoinitq' etn'; owwl

fasiior.,etc. [Tr']

atn painful, il,eligldful, fryl&ful, etc. we a,re unable to predict thenumber of words that the memory will zuggest or the order in

lwhich they will appear. A particular word is like the center of a/constellation; it is the point of convergence of an indefinite numberI of co-ordinated terms (Bee the illustr&tion on page 127).

But of tbe t'wo cha,racteristics of the as8ocigtive setieFin-determinqte orbA;effie,ilTFe-Becoi@TdlT666i the tesr. This happens inthe case of inflectional paradigms, which are tlpical of associatiwgroupings. Latin doninus, dotn:ini, donin6, etc. is obviously anassociative Soup formed around a coulmon ele,ment, tho nountheme dorwin-, but the seriesu

enseigner cl6ment

iustemenfensoignonsGfc.

,elc.

efc.dta.oppronfi$oge

a

6ducotion

chongemenlI

ormemgnletc.

olq\

etc.clc.,

Whereas a anand a fixed

lc The lact case is rare and can be cla^rsed ar abnormal, for ttre mind nrfirally

j-z'1

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F-<o \f\n o*t\ino"1 Pt1Aq. S\tr\,Xs,i

PART IContents

Sigmund Freud: A Bnef Life, by Peter GayEditor's NotePrefdce

PART I THE MIND AND ITS WORKINGS

r The Psychical Apparatusn The Theory of the Instincts

Iu The Development of the Sexual Functionrv Psychical Qualitiesv Dream-lnterpretation as an lllustration

PART II THE PRACTICAL TASKvr The Technique of Psycho-Analysis

r vlt An Example of Psycho-Analytic Work

PART III THE THEORETICAL YIELDvllr The Psychical Apparatus and the Extemal World" rx The lntemal World

Addenda

List of Abbreviations

The Mind and lts Workings

vil

7

9

1 )

r 7t a

z838

4967

8 r94

99

Freud's model of psvchic structure 1933

From //en, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanlayis

W. W. Norton. t . * Yo1f t , 1965

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The Psychica! Apparatus

Psychoanalysis makes a basic asumption, the discussion ofwhich is reserved to philosophical thought but the lustifica-tion for which lies in its results. We know two kinds ofthings about what we call our psyche (or mental life): 6rstly,its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervoussystem) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness,which are immediate data and cannot be further explainedby any sort of description. Everything that lies between isunknown to us, and ihe data do not include any directrelation between these two terminal points of our knowl-edge. lf it existed, it would at the most afford an exactlocalization of the processes of consciousness and would giveus no help towards understanding them.

Our two hypotheses start out from these ends or begin-nings of our knowledge. The first is concerned with localiza-tion.l'We assume that mental life is the function of anapparatus to which we ascribe the characteristics of beingextended in space and of being made up of several por-tions-which we imagine, that is, as resembling a telescopeor microscope or something of the kind. Notwithstandingsome earlier attempts in the same direction, the consistent

'1 %rlThe second is stated on p. z9 below.]

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1 t l' a / S I G M U N D F R E U D

working-out of a conception such as this is a scientificnovelty.

We have arrived at our knowledge of this psychical appa-ratus by studying the individual development of humanbeings. To the oldest of these psychical provinces or agen-cies we give the name ofg;41It contains everything that isinherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the

f constitution-above all, therefore, the instincts, which orig-

\ inate From the somatic organization and which find a first

I psychical expression here [in the id] in forms unknown to

J ut. 'Under the influence of the real extemal world around us,

one portion of the id has undergone a special development.From what was originally a cortical layer, equipped with theorgans for receiving stimuli and with arrangements for act-ing as a protective shield against stimuli, a special organiza-tion has arisen which henceforward acts as an intermediarybetween the id and the external world. To this region of ourmind we have given the name ot:&.

Here are the Pincifal characteristics oflhegeo, In conse-quence of the pre-established connection between sense per-ception and muscular action, the ego has voluntary move-ment at its command. It has the task of self-presewation. Asregards external events, it performs that task by becomingaware of stimuli, by storing up experiences about them (inthe memory), by avoiding excessively strong stimuli(through flight), by dealing with moderate stimuli (throughadaptation) and finally by learning to bring about expedientchanges in the external world to its own advantage (throughactivity). As regards intemal events, in relation to the id, it

2This oldest portion of the psychical apparatus remains the most importantthroughout life; moreover, the investigations of psycho-analysis started withit.

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( ts, performs that task by gaining cpntrol over the demands of

the instincts, by deciding whether they are to be allowedsatisfaction, by postponing that satisfaction to times andcircumstances favourable in the external world or by sup-

, pressing their excitations entirely. It is guided in its activity -by consideration of the tensions produced by stimuli,whether these tensions are present in it or introduced intoit. The raising of these tensions is in general telt as unpleas-

l ure and their lowerin g as pleasure. It is probable, however,

I that what is felt as pleasure or unpleasure is not the absolute

lheight of this tension but something in the rhythm of theI changes in them. The ego strives after pleasure and seeks to

avoid unpleasure. An increase in unpleasure that is expectedand foreseen is met by a signal of anxiety; the occasion ofsuch an increase, whether it threatens from without orwithin, is known as a danger. From time to time the egogives up its connection with the external world and with-draws into the state ofsleep in which it

jblceqtlgglgglization. It is tobe irFerred from the statdof sleep thalttiGi@ilon consists in a particular distri-bution of mental energy.

The long period of childhood, during which the growinghuman being lives in dependence on his parents,-leavesbehind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special

. r -agencv in which this parental infuenffil6n-GlliFF-asreceived the name of.tuberyEo. In so far as this super-egois differentiated from the ego or is opposed to it, it consti-tutes a third power which the ego must take into account.

An action by the ego is as it should be if it satisfiessimultaneously the demands of the id, of the super-ego andof reality-that is to say, if it is able to reconciie their

l demands with one another. The details of the relation be-

I tween the ego and the super-ego become completely intelli-

I Sible when they are traced back to the child's attitude to its

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t 6 ) S I G M U N D F R E U D

I parents. This parental influence of course includes in its

I operation not only the personalities of the actual parents but

I also the family, racial and national traditions handed on

I through them, as well as the demands of the immediatetsocial milieu which they represent. In the same way, the. super-ego, in the course of an individual's development,

receives contributions from later successors and substitutesof his parents, such as teachers and models in public life ofadmired social ideals. It will be observed that- for all theirfundamental difference, the id and the super-ego have onething in common: they both represent the infuences of thepast-the id the influence of heredity, the super-ego theinfluence, essentially, of what is taken over from other peo-ple-whereas the ego is principally determined by the indi-vidual's own experience, that is by accidental and contempo-rary events.

This general schematic picture of a psychical apparatusmay be supposed to apply as well to the higher animalswhich resemble man mentally. A super+go must be pre-sumed to be present wherever, as is the case with man, thereis a long period of dependence in childhood. A distinctionbetween ego and id is an unavoidable assumption. Animalpsychology has not yet taken in hand the interesting prob-lem which is here presented.

The Theory of the Instincts

iu ou"t orn"nism's life, This consists in the satisfaction of its'innate needs. No such purpose as that of keeping itself aliveor of protecting itself from dangers by means of anxiety canbe attributed to the id. That is the task of the ego, whosebusiness it also is to discover the most favourable and leastperilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the exter-nal world into account. The super-ego may bring fresh needsto.th_e fore. but its mainffifsatisfactions -

The forces which we assume to exist behind the tensionscaused by the needs of the id are called instincfs. They,.p."r.ni the somatic demands upon theliliiFihoughthly are the ,r" of

"conservative nafure; the state, whatever it may be, which anorganism has

stincts, and in common practice this is in fact done. For us,however, the important question arises whether it may notbe possible to trace all these numerous instincts back to afew basic ones. We have found that instincts can chansetheir aim (by displacement) and also [EITFffi-rc

so soon as it has ed. It is thuspossible to distinguish an indeterminate number of in-

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1 8 ) S I G M U N D F R E U D

one another-the energy of one instinct passing over tofiibtfiEi:TFis latter process is still insufficiently understood.After long hesitancies and vacillations we have decided toassume the existence of only two basic instincts. Eros andtlg-ltst*rtt, i"ttircl (fhe cffiof self-presewation and the preservation of the species, aswell as the contrast between ego-love and obiectJove, fall

lwithin Eros.) The aim of the first of these basic instincts is

Ito establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus-

{in short, to bind together; the aim of the second is, on the

lcontrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things. Inthe case of the destructive instinct we may suppose that itsfinal aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state. Forthis reason we also call it the death instinct. If we assumethat Iiving thirigs came later thffii'ifrZ'- ones and arosefrom them, then the death instinct fits in with the formulawe have proposed to the eftect that instincts tend towardsa return to an earlier state. In the case of Eros (or the loveinstinct) we cannot apply this formula. To do so wouldpresuppose that living substance was once a unity which hadlater been tom apart and was now striving towards re-union.l

In biological functions the two basic instincts operate

,against each other or combine with each other. Thus, the

lact of eating is a destruction of the obiect with the final aimpf incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggressionfvith the purpose of the most intimate union. This concur-

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( 1 9

rent and mutually opposing action of the two basic rnstinctsgives rise to the whole variegation of the phenomena of iife.

{The analogy of our two basic instincts extends from the

f sphere of living things to the pair of opposing forces-

I attraction and repulsion-which rule in the inorganicI world.2

Modifications in the proportions of the fusion betweenthe instincts have the most tangible results. A surplus ofsexual aggressiveness will turn a lover into a sex-murderer,while a sharp diminution in the aggressive factor wiil makehim bashful or impotent.

There can be no question of restricting one or the otherof the basic instincts to one of the provinces of the mind.They must necessarily be met with everywhere. We maypicture an initial state as one in which the total available

stinct.) At a later stage it becomes relatively easy for us tofollow the vicissitudes of the libido, but this is more difficultwith the destructive instinct.

So long as that instinct operates internally, as a deathinstinct, it remains silent; it only comes to our notice whenit is diverted outwards as an instinct of destruction. it seems

2This picture of the basic forces or instincts, which still arouses muchopposition among analysts, was already familiar to the philosopher Em-pedocles of Acragas. [Freud had discussed Empedocles and his theories atsome length in Section VI of his paper on

'Analysis Terminable andInterminable' (rsll"),5.E., 27,245. He had included a reference to the

dual forces operating in physics in his open letter to Einstein, Why War?

Ostb), Standod Ed., zz, zo9, as well as in lrcture XXXII of the New

Introductory Lecturcs (rgZlo), ibid., ro3.]3[See footnote, p. zr below.]

f, rCreative writers have imagined something of the sort, but nothing like it

liis known to us from the actual history of living substance. [Freud no doubtlihad in mind among other writings Plato's Syrnposiun which he hadf,quoted in this connection in Beyond the Pleasure Principle $9zog), Stan-

dard Ed., 18, 57-8, and to which he had alluded earlier still, in the 6rstof the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (tgoSd), Standard Ed., 7,r36.-1.P.L., 4, 5r-2, and,57,z.l

.t*\=lJ _

-

ich henceforward we shal

resent. (We are without a term analogousing the energy of the destruciive in-

R;

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::3,1

'.:.i.::::.::

S I G M U N D F R E U D

to be essential for the preservation of the individual that thisdiversion should occur; the muscular apparatus serves this

lpurpose. Wlren the super-ego is established, considerable

]amounts of the aggressive instinct are fixated in the interior

lof the ego and operate there self-destructively. This is oneof the dangers to health by which human beings are faced

2 0 )

on their path to cultural development.'Holding back aggrgs-.iveness is in gene'^l nnhealthy and leads to illness (to mor-tificationa). A person in a fit of rage will often demonstratehow the transition from aggressiveness that has been pre-vented to self-destructiveness is brought about by divertingthe aggressiveness against himself: he tears his hair or beatshis face with his 6sts, though he would evidently have pre-ferred to apply this treatment to someone else. Some portionof self-destructiveness remains within. whatever the circum-stances; till at last it succeeds in killing the individual, not,perhaps, until his libido has been used up or fixated in a

ldisadvantageous way. Thus it may in general be suspected

f that the individual dies of his internal conflicts but that the

lspecies dies of its unsuccessful struggle against the external

lworld if the latter changes in a fashion which cannot be

ladequately dealt with by the adaptations which the specieslhas acquired.

It is hard to say anything of the behaviour of the libidoin the id and in the super-ego. All that we know about itrelates to the ego, in which at first the whole available quotaof libido is stored up. We call this state absolute, primary

lnarcissism. It lasts till the ego begins to cathect the ideas of

loUl."tr with libido, to transform narcissistic libido into ob-ject-libido. Throughout the whole of life the ego remains the

+l'Kriinkung' means literally 'making ill'. This same point, including theverbal one, was made by Freud in a lecture on hysteria delivered forty-fiveyears previously. See Freud, r8g3h, Standard Ed., S, Zl.l

TZ

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( 2 r

great reservoir from which libidinal cathexes are sent out toobjects and into which they are also once more withdrawn,

iust as an amoeba behaves with its pseudopodia.s It is onlywhen a person is completely in love that the main quota oflibido is transferred on to the oblect and the obiect to someextent takes the place of the ego. A characteristic of thelibido which is importaut in life is its mobility, the facilitywith which it passes from one obleciT6Gffir. This mustbe contrasted with the fixdtion of the libido to particularobjects, which often peiG6Tfrioughout life.

described as sexual excitation. The most prominent of theparts of the body from which this libido arises are known bythe name of 'erotogenic zones', though in fact the wholebody is an erotogenic zone of thism

,ry, "-u,

lts expGnent, the libide-has been gained from a study of the sexualfunction, which, indeed, on the prevailing view, even if notaccording to our theory. coincides with Eros. We-FiFbten'able

to form a pictuG of the way in which the sexual urge,which is destined to exercise a decisive influence on our life,gradually develops out of successive contributions from anumber of component instincts, which represent particularerotogenrc zones.

t[Some discusion of this passage, and of part of another one on p. r9 above,will be found in Appendix B to The Ego and the Id (t94b), Standard Ed.,l9,64-5; I.P.L., n, S+-S; N' 6++.1

sources. that it streais most clearly seen in the casewhich. from its instinctual aim. is

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I I I '

The Development ofthe Sexual Function

According to the prevailing view human sexual life consistsessentially in an endeavour to bring one's own genitals intocontact with those of someone of thi opposite sex. With thisare associated, as accessory phenomena and introductoryacts,lissing this extraneous body, looking at it and touchingit. This endeavour is supposed to makJ its appearance atpuberty-that is, at theage of sexual maturity_and to servethe purposes of reproduction. Nevertheless, certain factshave always been known which do not fit into the narrowframework of this view. (r ) It is a remarkable fact that thereare people who are only attracted by individuals of their ownsex and by their genitals. (z) It is equally remarkable thatthere- are people whose desires behave exactly like sexualones but who at the same time entirely disregard the sexualorgans or their normal use; people of this kini are known as'perverts'. (3) And lastly it is a shiking thing that somechildren (who are on that account .egarded

"ri.g.n".rt"jtake a very early interest in their g.niLk ,narnori,ign, oiexcitation in them.

It may well be believed that psycheanalysis provokedastonishment and denials when, partly on the basis of these

r[An expanded version of the original. See the Editor,s Note, p 3 above.]

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis| . 5

2Cf. the suggestion that man is desctnded from a mammal which reachedsexual maturity at the age of five, but that some maior extemal influence

three neglected facts, it contradicted all the popular opin_ions on sexuality. Its principal findings

"r. ", follo*r,

^

(a) Sexual life does not begin only at puberty, but startswith plain manifestations soon after bi*i.

(D) It is necessary to distinguish sharply between theconcepts of 'sexual' and 'genital'. The former is the widerconcept and includes many activities that have nothing todo with the genitals.

(c) Sexual life includes the function of obtaining pleasurejrom lones of the body-a function which is subiequentlfbrought into the service of reproduction. The two functionsoften fail to coincide completely.

The chief interest is naturally focused on the first of theseassertions, the most unexpected of all. It has been found thatin early childhood there are signs of bodily activity to whichonly an ancient preiudice could deny the name of sexual andwhich are linked to psychical phenomena that we comeacross later in adult erotic life-such as fixation to particularobjects, iealousy, and so on. It is further found, io*"u"r,that these phenomena which emerge in early childhoojform part of an ordered course of divelopment, that theypass through a regular process of increase, ieaching a climaxtowards the end of the fifth year, after which there followsa lull. During this lull progress is at a standstill and muchis unlearnt and there is much recession. After the end of thisperiod of latency, as it is called, sexual life advances oncemore with puberty; we might say that it has a second effo-rescence. And here we come upon the fact that tle onsetof sexual life is diphasic, thaf it occurs ;n poft6gS S

an importqnt bearing on hominization. [See p. 99 below.]z

3T

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S I C M U N D F R E U D

It is not a matter of indifference that the events of this earlyperiod, except for a few residues, fall a victim to:fiantile_

ryOur views on the aetiology of the neuroses and ourtechnique of analytic therapy are derived from these conceptions; and our tracing of the developmental processes in thisearly period has also provided evidence for yet other conclu-sions.

e and tomake libidinal demands on the mind is, from the time ofbirth onwards, the mouth. To begin with, all psychical activ-ity is concentrated on providing satisfaction for the needs ofthat zone. Primarily, of course, this satisfaction serves the

of self-preservation by means of nourishment; butThe

early stage of a need for satisfaction which, though it origi-nates from and is instigated by the taking of nourishment,nevertheless strives to obtain pleasure independently-ofnourishment and for th"t r."ron@

-Gi.,g this oral phase sadistic impulses already occur

sporadically along with the appearance of the teeth. Their

was brought to bear on the species and at that point intemrpted the straightcourse of development of sexuality. Other hansformations in the sexual lifeof man as compared with that of animals might be connected with this-such as the abohtion of the periodicity of the libido and the exploitationof the part played by menstnution in the relation between the sexes. [Theidea of there being a connection between the latency period and the glacialepoch was first made many ye:rrs earlier by Ferenczi ( r 9 r 3 ). Freud referredto it with a gmd deal of caution in The Ego and the lil $94b), 5.8.,ry, 35; LP.L., n, z5 and again, with more acquiescencc,, in Inhibitions,Symptoms and Anxiety Q9z6d),5.E., zo, t55; I.P.L., 28,69 The questionof the cessation of periodicity in the sexual function was discussed at somelength in two footnotes to Chapter lY of Civilizdtion and its DiscontentsGg1cla),5.8., 2t,99-roo and rc51; [.P.L., ry,7G7 and 4z-4; N., q|land 5z-4.1

An Outline of Psycho-AnalYsis ( zS

extent is far greater in^the second phase, which we describe

the view that sadism is an instinctual fusion of purely libidi-I and purely destructive urges, a fusion which thencefor-rrd persists uninterruptedly.3The third phase is that known as the phallic one. which

, i = = i ;is, as ii @rm taken bY sexuallife and already much resembles it. It is to be noted that itis not the genitals of both sexes that play a part at this stage,

lbut ottly the male ones (the phallus). The female genitals

llong remain unknown: in children's attempts to understand '

Ithe sexual processes they pay homage to the venerable cloa-Lal theory-a theory which has a genetic iustification.a

With the phallic phase and in the course of it the sexual-ity of early childhood reaches its height and approaches itsdissolution. Thereafter boys and girls have different histo-ries. Both have begun to put their intellectual activity at theservice of sexual researches; both start off from the premissof the universal presence of the penis. But now the paths of

[th. r.*.r diverge. The bov enters the Og!.lPut -iabu.t ; t.

J begins to manip-ulate his@as phan-

{ t"ri.r of carrying out some sort of activity with it in relatiori

I to hit mother, till, owing to the combined effect of a threatt of castration and the sight of the absence of a penis in

asin

lThe question arises whether the satisfaction of pure\ destnrctive instinc-

tual impulses can be felt as pleasure, whether puredestructiveness without

any libidinal admixture occurs. Satisfaction of the death instinct remaining

in the ego seems not to produce feelings of pleasure, though masochism

represents a {usion which is entirely analogous.to sadism.aThe occurrence of early vaginal excitations is often asserted. But it is most

probable that what is in quistion are excitations in theslitor-is-that is, in

@This does not itualdiTi6ur right to

descnbe the phase as pnall lc.l

II

r;@c!qn. Our iustifi cationaggressive urges under the libido is based on

B4

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26)

females, he experiences the greatest trauma of his life andthis introduces the period of latency with all its conse-quences. The girl, after vainly attempting io do the same asthe boy, comes to recognize her lack of a penis or rather theinferiority of her clitoris, with permanent effects on thedevelopment of her character; as a result of this first disappointment in rivalry, she often begins by turning away altogether from sexual life.

-It would be a mistake to suppose that these three phasessucceed one another in a clear-cut fashion. One may appearin addition to another; they may overlap one another, maybe present alongside of one another. In the early phases thedifferent component instincts set about their pursuit of plea-sure independently of one another; in the phallic phasethere are the beginnings of an organization which subordi-nates the other urges to the primacy of the genitals andsignifies the start of a co-ordination of the general urgetowards pleasure into the sexual function. The completeorganization is only achieved at puberty, in a fourth, genitalphase. A state of things is then established in which (r ) someearlier libidinal cathexes are retained, (z) others are takeninto the sexual function as pr€paratory, auxiliary acts, thesatisfaction of which produces what is knoun as fore-plea-

)ure, and (3) other urges are excluded from the organization,

)and are either suppressed altogether (repressed) or are em-

f Rlofed in the ego in another way, forming character-traits

lor undergoing sublimation with a displacement of their'Iaims.

This process is not always performed faultlessly. Inhibi-tions in its development manifest themselves as the manysorts of disturbance in sexual life. When this is so, we findfixations of the libido to conditions in earlier phases, whoseurge, which is independent of the normal sexual aim, isdescribed as perversion. One such developmental inhibition,

An Outline of Psycho-Anabsis I z /

for instance, is homosexuality when it is manifest. Analysisshows that in every case a homosexual object-tie was presentand in most cases persisted in a ktent condition. The situa-tion is complicated by the fact that as a rule the processesnecessary for bringing about a normal outcome are not com-pletely present or absent, but partially present, so that thefinal result remains dependent on these quantitative rela-tions. In these circumstances the genital organization is, itis true, attained, but it lacks those portions of the libidowhich have not advanced with the rest and have remainedfixated to pregenital objects and aims. This weakening showsitself in a tendency, if there is an absence of genital satisfac-tion or if there are difficulties in the real external world, forthe libido to hark back to its earlier pregenital cathexes(regression).

During the study of the sexual functions we have beenable to gain a first, preliminary conviction, or rather a suspi-cion, of two discoveries which will later be found to beimportant over the whole of our field. Firstly, the normaland abnormal manifestations observed by us (that is, thephenomenology of the subiect) need to be described fromthe point of view of their dynamics and economics (in ourcase, from the point of view of the quantitative distributionof the libido). And secondly, the aetiology of the disorderswhich we study is to be looked for in the individual's devel-opmental history-that is to say, in his early life.

S I G M U N D F R E U D

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Psychical QruIities

I have described the structure of the psychical apparatus andthe energies or forces which are

""tiu. in-it, and I have

traced in a prominent example the way in which thoseenergies-(in the main, the libido) o.ganize themserves intoa physiological function which servls the furpose of thepreservation of the species. There was nothing in all this todemonstrate the quite peculiar characteristic Jf what is psy_chicai, apart, of course, from the empirical lact that thisapparatus and these energies are the basis of the functionswhich we describe as our mental life. I will now turn tosomething which is uniquely characteristic of what is psychi_caf and which, indeed, according to , u..y widely heldopinion, coincides with it to the exclusion oi all else..

The starting-point for this investigation is provided by afact without parallel, which defies all-explanatiin or descrip

ll"1-th.t-@t"t"-gt..:r. Nevertheless, if anyonerpeaKs or conscrousness we know immediately and from ourmost personal experience-what is meant by it.r Many people, both inside and outside [psychological] science, are satis_

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( z q

fied with the assumption that consciousness alone is psychi-case nothing remains for psychology but to

discriminate among psychical phenomena between percep-tions, feelings, thought-processes and volitions. It is gener-ally agreed, however, that these conscious processes do notform unbroken sequences which are complete in them-selves; there would thus be no alternative left to assumingthat there are physical or somatic processes which are con-comitant with the psychical ones and which we should nec-essarily have to recognize as more complete than the psychi-cal sequences, since some of them would have conscrousprocesses parallel to them but others would not. If so, it ofcourse becomes plausible to lay the stress in psychology onthese somatic processes, to see in them the true essence ofwhat is psychical and to look for some other assessment ofthe conscious processes. The majority of philosophers, how-ever, as well as many other people, dispute this and declarethat the idea of something psychical being unconscious isself-contradictory.

But that is precisely what psycho-analysis is obliged toassert, and this is its second fundamental hypothesis [p. r+].It explains. the. supposedl], sonlatic go_nco[qitgnt phenomena

_as being what is trulv psvchical, and thus in the first instancedisregards the quality of consciousness. It is not alone indoing this. Some thinkers (such as Theodor Lipps,z forinstance) have asserted the same thing in the same words;and the general dissatisfaction with the usual view of whatis psychical has resulted in an increasingly urgent demandfor the inclusion in psychological thought of a concept ofthe unconscious, though this demand has taken such an

2[Some account of Lipps (r85r-r9r4) and Freud's relations with him isgiven in the Editor's Preface to Freud's book on jokes ( r9o5q Standard Ed.,8, +-s) l

l9Jt: exh.eme

Jine of thought, exemplified in the American doctrine olbehavrourism, thinks it possible to construct a pry.l,otogy *ii"h dis.ega.dsthis fundamental fact!

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3 0 ) s r c M u N D F R E U D

indefinite and obscure form that it could have no infuenceon science.s

Now it would look as though this dispute between psycho-analysis and philosophy is concerned only with a triflingmatter of definition-the question whether the name .psy_

chical' should be applied to one or another seque.,ce ofphenomena. In fact, however, this step has become of thehighest significance. Whereas the psychology of conscious_ness never went beyond the broken sequences which wereobviously dependent on something else, the other view.*!icl, helC t"t th. psychical is unconsciousjn ,-.-GiT, El-aDled psychotog-y- to take its place as a nafural science likeany other. The processes with which it is concemed are inthemselves just as unknowable as those dealt with by othersciences, by chemistry or physics, for example; but it ispossible to establish the laws which they obey and to followtheir mutual relations and interdependences unbroken overlong stretches-in short, to arrive at what is described as an'understanding' of the field of natural phenomena in ques-tion. This cannot be effected without framing fresh hypoth-eses and creating fresh concepts; but these are not to bedespised as evidence of embarrassment on our part but de-s€rve on the contrary to be appreciated as an enrichment ofscience. They can lay claim to the same value as approxima-tions that belongs to the corresponding intellectual scaffold-ing found in other natural sciences, and we look forward totheir being modified, corrected and more precisely deter-mined as further experience is accumulated and sifted. Sotoo it will be entirely in accordance with our expectationsif the basic concepts and principles of the new science(instinct, nervous energy, etc.) remain for a considerable

3[When this work wai 6rst published in r94o, a long footnote was insertedat this point in the Cerman version. See tie Editor's Note, p. 3 "bou.j

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( : t

timdnq less indeterminate than those of the older sciences(force, iass, attraction, etc.).

our observations t

with the

ences and translating it into conscious material. In this waywe construct, as it were, a sequence of conscious eventScomplementary to the unconscious psychical processes. Therelative certainty of our psychical science is based on thebinding force of these inferences. Anyone who enters deeplyinto our work will find that our technique holds its groundagainst any criticism.

In the course of this work the distinctions which wedescribe as psychical qualities force themselves on our no-

scious': it is the ne consclousness

conscious easily; they may then cease to be conscious, butcan become conscious once more without any trouble: aspeople say, they can be reproduced or remembered. Thisreminds us that consciousness is in general a highly fugitivestate. What is conscious is conscious only for a moment. If '

our perceptions do not confirm this, the contradiction isonly an apparent one; it is explained by the fact that thestimuli which lead to perception may persist for considera-ble periods, so that meanwhile the perception of them maybe repeated. The whole position is made clear in connectionwith the conscious perception of our thought-processes:

.lR

the a

's

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rtla'rni kv F:i- !€Itlrtira r.v. J.,r-E,. ,l*k$ * Yr"rr \_t*tl"rii- _{ v**-...-.. j^-_ -

3 2 ) s r c M t i N D F R ' E U D

F{n-1**,*-S rj ffN-rtrlJl t k*"4,:- fir'il-'./{ot .ty An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( SS

:..:..t,

:a*.-'. ::1:,,::.,*:

-::=i'."'':l;

r'l::-;

,,r ,','

. ' :. j :: '

ri

these too may persist for some time, but they may just as well

way, that can t iousitat-e forconsclous one, rs

ing conscious' or as preconscious. lenc€'hffi e-u ghrrFfffi rocess, h o*-wer complicated it may be, which cannot on occasion re-main preconscious, even though as a rule it will, as we say,push its way forward into consciousness. There are oth€rpsychical processes and pwchical material which have no*such easy access to becoming conscious but must be in-

e

of the unconscious proggr.ffi three qualities to psychical pro-

cesses: they are eithel consgliq!$, Jreconsciogs or lIncon-scious. The division between the three classes of materialffiH possess these qualities is neither absolute nor perma-nent. What is preconscious becomes conscious, as we haveseen, without any assistance from us; what is unconsciouscan, through our efforts, be made conscious, and in theprocess we may have a feeling that w-e are often overcomingvery strong resistances. When we attempt to do this withsomeone else, we should not forget that the conscious fill-ing-in of the gaps in his perceptions-the construction weare presenting him with-does not mean as yet that we havemade the unconscious material in question conscious tohim. All that is true so far is that the material is present inhim in two records,4 once in the conscious reconstruction

a[The German word translated by'record'here is'Fixierung'used inexactly this sense, in Chapter Vll (B) of The Interpretation of Dreams(r9ooa), 5.E., S, S'zg. Elsewhere Freud uses the term 'Niederschffi'-e.g.

in 'The Unconscious' (r9r5a), Stdndard Ed., 14 r74, and as early as in aletter to Fliess, of December 6, 1896 (Freud r95oa, Lrtter 5z)-which is

he has been given, and besides this in its original uncon-scious state. Our continued efforts usually succeed eventu-ally in making this unconscious material conscious to him

himself, as a result of wlrich the two records are brought to

c'oincide. The amount of effort we have to use, by which we

estimate the resistance against the material becoming con-

scious, varies in magnitude in individual cases. For instance,what comes about in an analytic treatment as a result of our

efforts can also occur spontaneously: material which is ordi-narily unconscious can transform lffi

t o a ic states. From this we i

dreams. Conversely, preconscious material can become tem-porarily inaccessible a s

w-EEnEfr eth i n g--is-te m pora ri$Torgotten or esca pes th e

The theory of the three qualities of what is psychical, asdescribed in this generalized and simplified manner' seemslikely to be a source of limitless confusion rather than a helptowards clarification. But it should not be forgotten that in

translated there by 'registration'. It may be remarked that in Moses and

Monotheism (tszgo), which Freud had recently completed, he several

times used the word 'Fixierung'to describe the recording of a tradition.

See, for example, Standard Ed., z7,6z.l

of certain intelnal - resilon of resistances such as t

with a conGquent lushing forwar!-o:[

construction of

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3 4 ) S I G M U N D F R E U D

fact it is not a theory at all but a first stock-taking of the factsof our observations, that it keeps-aftlose TdTtosfiFisp@;il-d"_q9-r^'"elatt-er"jrtia.*ptiin}6Ciri."Thdcom-plications which it reveals may bring into reiGf the peculiardificulties with which our investigations have to contend. Itmay be suspected, however, that we shall come to a closerunderstanding of this theory itself if we trace qut the rela-tions between the psychicai qualities and the ffi"* -agenEiE-oFThffi -ychicll-a p pa f a tu s wh ich we' h a-G^ postu-laftd-thtucli-t-tbse relations too are far from being simple.

The process of something becoming conscious is above alllinked with the perceptions which our sense organs receivefrom the external world. From the topographical point ofview, therefore, it is a phenomenon whicl?aFC-FTa;;I;TFe

@lt is true that we also receiveconscious information from the inside of the body-thefeelings, which actually exercise a more peremptory influ-ence on our mental life than external perceptions; moreover,in certain circumstances the sense organs themselves trans-mit feelings, sensations of pain, in addition to the perceptions specific to them. Since, however, these sensations (aswe call them in contrast to conscious perceptions) also ema-nate from the terminal organs and since we regard all theseas prolongations or offshoots of the cortical layer, we are stillable to maintain the assertion made above [at the beginningof this paragraph]. The only distinction would be that, asregards the terminal organs of sensation and feeling, thebody itself would take the place of the extemal world.

f- Conscious processes on the periphery of the ego and' everything else in the ego unconscious-such would be thesimplest state of affain that we might picture. And such mayin fact be the state that prevails in animals. But in men thereis an added complication throueh whi.h inteffiessesi iousness.

'$"-1-P(L- c,q\L\\

This is the work of th" f'rnction of speech, which bringsmaterial in the ego into a firm connection with mnemic

.residues of visrnl, h,tt more pa'ri.,,larl], of ,,trlifor}|EGij-Jions. Thenceforward the perceptual periphery of the corti-cal layer can be excited to a much greater extent from insideas well, internal events such as passages of ideas andthought-processes can become conscious, and a special de-vice is called for in order to distinsuish betwe6n TFe-66=j)ossr Drrrtres-a cevrce Knowrr"s_rz4w-tefElg- l ne equa-tion 'perception : reality (exGrna-fwdfflTo longer holds.

- Errors, which can now easily arise and do so regularly .in!-4r.rrnt, are called hallucinationr. :,*;^.r,i!, rt-

The inside of the ego, which comprises above a1l the '

An Outline of Psycho-Arnlysis t 5 )

thought-processes, has the quality of being preconscious.This is characteristic of the ego and belongs to it alone. Itwould not be correct, however, to think that connectionwith the mnemic residues of speech is a necessary precondi-tion of the preconscious state. On the contrary, that stateis independent of a connection with them, though the pres-ence of that connection makes it safe to infer the precon-scious nature of a process. The preconscious state, character-ized on the one hand by having access to consciousness andon the other hand by its connection with the speech-resi-dues, is nevertheless something peculiar, the nature of whichis not exhausted by these two characteristics. The evidence

lfor this is the fact that large portions of the ego, and particu-Ilarlv of the suDer-eso, w

/trtT;Fp."."r*r'r*ness, none the less remain for the most

/ part unconscious in lbg-lhs.nelqenological sense of theI word.-We do not know whv this must be so. We shall

attempt presently to attack the problem of the true naturethe

i d i ofunconsciorrs.Id and unconscious are as intima

'>.(_

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c,f . l.lLdl\ F\0*, \ \' .$^l-',53* o1bht r rr'

3 6 ) S I G M U N D F R E U D

ego and preconscious: indeed, in the former case the con-+---:--necuon ls even more exclusive. If we look back at the devel-opmental history of an individual and of his psychical appa-ratus, we shall be able to perceive an important distinction

X tl'.

scious runs parallel, and having agreed that this quality is tobe regarded only es e' ;-'lics#er €f-rhe differencqand notas itg essence, a further question faces us. What, if this is so,is the frue nature of the state which is revealed in the id bythe quality of being unconscious and in the ego by that ofbeing preconscious and in what does the difference betweenthem consist?

But of that we know nothing. And the profound obscurityof the background of our ignorance is scarcely iliuminated

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (szby a few glimmers of insight. Here we have approached fu

r still shrouded secret of the nature of the psvchical. We

I assume, as other natural sciences have led us to expect, that

I in mental life some kind of energy is at work; but we have

I nothing to go upon which will enable us to come nearer to

Ia knowledge of it by analogies with other forms of energy.We seem to recognize that nervous or psychical energyoccurs in two forms, one freely mobile and another, bycomparison, bound; we speak of cathexes and hypercathexesof psychical material, and evenl6llFto supjkiffi'hy,percathexis brings about a kind of synthesis of differentprocesses-a synthesis in the course of which free energy istransformed into bound energy. Further than this we have'not advanced. At any rate, we hold firmly to the view thatthe distinction between the unconscious and the precon-scious state lies in dynamic relations of this kind, whichwould explain how it is that, whether spontaneously or withour assistance, the one can be changed into the other.

Behind all these uncertainties, however, there lies onenew fact, whose discovery we owe to psycho-analytic re-

/search. We have found that processes in the unconscious or

/ in the id obey different laws from those in the preconsciousI eeo. We name these laws in their totality lhe=bntnary fr!-kuss, in contrast to the sepondary prccess which govems theffir. oi events in the prccolscTffi-the ego.ln the end,therefore, the study of psychical qualities has after all provednot unfruitful.

2a

. in the id. Originally, to be sure, everything was id; the ego

l*"r a."=.t"p:q "="t t th.lexternal world. In the course of this slow development cer-

Itr* "f tEE

""ntents of the id were transformed into the

lpreconscious state and so taken into the ego; others of its

lcontents remained in the id unchanged, as its scarcely acces-

lsible nucleus. During this development, however, the young

f and feeble ego put back into the unconscious state some of

f the material it had already taken in, dropped it, and behaved

f in the same way to some fresh impressions which it might

lhave taken in, so that these, having been rejected, could

fleave a trace only in the id. In consideration of its origin we

lspeak of this latter portion of ihe id as fie repressed. It is

lof little importance that we are not always able to draw a

lsharp line between these two categories of contents in the

lid. They coincide approximately wiih the distinction be-

Itween what was innately present originally and what waspcquired in the,course of the,ego's d"u"lgg*,.1!

..Having now decided upon the topographical disseciion of

an_d an id, with wpreconsclous and uncon-

qo

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VAn Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( SS

dreaming, we attribute obiective reality to the contents ofthe dream.

We 6nd our way to the understanding ('interpretation')

of a dream by assuming that what we recollect as the dreamafter we have woken up is not the true dream-process butonly afagade behind which that process lies concealed. Here

o f ats. The process which

the former out of t is described as the

Dream Interpretation

as an lllustration

An investigation of normal, stable states, in which the fron-tiers of the ego are safeguarded against the id by resistances(anti-cathexes) and have held firm, and in which the super-ego is not distinguished from the ego, because they worktogether harmoniously-an investigation of that kind wouldteach us little. The only thing that can help us are states ofconflict and uproar, when the contents of the unconscrousid have a prospect of forcing their way into the ego and intoconsciousness and the ego puts itself once more on thedefensive against this invasion. It is only under these c,ondi-tions that we can make such observafions as will confirm orcorrect our statements about the two partners. Now, ournightly sleep is precisely a state of this sort, and for thatreason psychical activity during sleep, which we perceive asdreams, is our most favourable object of study. In that way,too, we avoid the familiar reproach that we base our con-structions of normal mental life on pathological findings; fordreams are regular events in the life of a normal person,however much their characteristics may differ from the pro-

ductions of our waking life. Dreams, as everyone knows, maybe confused, unintelligible or positively nonsensical, whatthey say may contradict all that we know of reality, and webehave in them like insane people, since, so long as we are

d,'o m-work. The study of the dream-work teaches us by an

excellent example the way in which unconscious material

,from the id (originally unconscious and repressed uncon-scious alike) forces its way into the ego, becomes precon-

7

It is best to begin by pointing out that the formation ofa dream can be provoked in two different ways. Either, onthe one hand, an instinctual impulse which is ordinarilysuppressed (an unconscious wish) finds enough strength dur-ing sleep to make itself felt by the ego, or, on the other hand,

an urge left over from waking life, a preconscious train of

thought with all the conflicting impulses attachedto it, finds

reinforcement during sleep from an unconscious element.In short,eso. The mechanism of dream-formation is in both cases the

ffi. and so also is the necessary dynamic precondition. The

ego gives evidence of its original derivation from the id by

occasionally ceasing its functions and allowing a reversion to

an earlier state of things. This is logically brought about by

its breaking ofi its relations with the external world and

withdrawing its cathexes from the sense organs. We are

iustified in saying that there arises at birth an instinct to

return to the intra-uterine life that has been abandoned-an

we have our distinction between

the

>a

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S I G M U N D F R E U D

, instinct to sleep. Sleep is a return of this kind to the womb.

I Since the waking ego governs motility, that function is par-

lalysed in sleep, and accordingly a good part of the inhibi-

Itions imposed on the unconscious id become superfluous.

fThe withdrawal or reduction of these 'anticathexes' thus

lallows the id what is now a harmless amount of liberty.The evidence of the share taken by the unconscious id in

the formation of dreams is abundant and convincing. (c)Memory is far more comprehensive in dreams than in wak-ing life. Dreams bring up recollections which the dreamerhas forgotten, which are inaccessible to him when he isawake. (6) Dreams make an unrestricted use of linguisticsymbols, the meaning of which is for the most part unknownto the dreamer. Our experience, however, enables us to

' confirm their sense. They probably originate from earlierphases in the development of speech (c ) Memory very oftenreproduces in dreams impressions from the dreamer's earlychildhood of which we can definitely assert not only thatthey had been forgotten but that they had become uncon-scious owing to repression. That explains the help-usuallyindispensable---given us by dreams in the attempts we makeduring the analytic treatment of neufoses to reconstruct the

ldreamer's early life. (d) Furthermore, dreams bring to light

f f material which cannot have originated either from theI I dreamer's adult life or from his forgotten childhood. We are'

I obliged to regard it as part of the archaic heritage which a

I child brings with him into the world, before any experience

I of his own, influenced by the experiences of his ancestors.

lWe find the counterpart of this phylogenetic material in the

learliest human legends and in surviving customs. Thus

ldreams constitute a source of human prehistory which is not

Ito be despised.But what makes dreams so invaluable in giving us insight

is the circumstance that. when the unconscious material

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( + t

makes its way into the ego, it brings its own modes ofworking along with it. This means that the preconsciousthoughts in which the unconscious material has found itsexpression are handled in the course of the dream-work asthough they were unconscious portions of the id; and, in thecase of the alternative method of dream-formation, the pre-conscious thoughts which have obtained reinforcementfrom an unconscious instinctual impulse are brought downto the unconscious state. It is only in this way that we learnthe laws which govern the passage of events in the uncon-scious and the respects in which they differ from the rulesthat are familiar to us in waking thought. Thus the dream-work is essentially an instance of the unconscious working-over of preconscious thought-processes. To take an analogyfrom history: invading conquerors govern a conquered coun-try, not according to the judicial system which they find inforce there, but according to their own. It is, however, anunmistakable fact that the outcome of the dream-work is acompromise. The ego-organization is not yet paralysed, andits influence is to be seen in the distortion imposed on theunconscious material and in what are often very ineffectiveattempts at giving the total result a form not too unaccept-able to the ego (secondary revision). In our analogy thiswould be an expression of the continued resistance of thedefeated people.

The laws that govern the passage of events in the uncon-scious, which come to light in this manner, are remarkableenough and suffice to explain most of what seems strange tous about dreams. Above all there is a striking tendency tocondensation an inclination to form fresh unities out of

4 0 )

rate. As a consequence of this, a singlemanifeit dream often stands for a whole num-

ber of latent dream-thoughts as though it were a combined

12

Q4

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allusion to all of them; and in general the compass of themanifest dream is extraordinarily small in comparison with

Ithe wealth of material from which it has sprung. Another

\rcculiaritl of the dream-work, not entirely independent of

Ithe former one, is the ease with which psychical intensitiesl

f(cathexes) arc displaced from one element to another, so

ithat it often happens that an element which was of little

limportance in the dream-thoughts appears as the clearestfand accordingly most important feature of the manifest' dream, and, vice versa, that essential elements of the dream-thoughts are represented in the manifest dream only byslight allusions. Moreover, as a rule the existence of quiteinsignificant points in common between two elements isenough to allow the dream-work to replace one by the otherin all further operations. It will easily be imagined howgreatly these mechanisms of condensation a"d d_irplry!can increase the difficulty oFint-etp ng a dream and oJrevealing the relations between the-lqerufesldream and thelatentdream-thouehts.Fromtheevidei-ceiiT6-eexistence

' -.----2'of these two tenTencies to condensation and displacementour theory infers that in the unconscious id the energy is ina freely mobile state and that the-id sets more store by thepossibility of discharging quantities of excitation than by anyother consideration;2 and our theory makes use of these two

4 2 ) S I G M U N D F R E U D

l[A term very often used by Freud from the &rliest times as an equivalentto psychical energy. See the Editor's Appendix to the 6rst paper on theneuro-psychoses of defence ( r 894.a), Standard Ed., 3, 66-7; also an Editor'sfootnote near the end of the paper on'Female Sexuality'(r93rb), ibid.,zr, z4z-3.f2An analogy may be seen in the behaviour of a non-commissioned officerwho accepts a reprimand from his superior in silence but vents his angeron the 6rst innocent private he comes across. [n this insistence by the idon discharging quantities of excitation we have an exact replica of whatFreud in his hoiect of 1895 (Part I, Section r) had described in quasi-neurological terms as the primary principle of neuronal activity: 'neurones

tend to divest themselves of quantity'. (ry5u, 5.E., r, 296.)]

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ( +S

peculiarities in defining the character of the primary processwe have attributed to the id.

The study of the dream-work has taught us rnany othercharacteristics of the processes in the unconscious which areas remarkable as they are important; but we must only men-tion a few of them here. The goveming rules of logic carryno weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm

fil tt "

Illogical. Urges with contrary aims exist side by side\in the unconscious without any need arising for an adjust-

ment between them. Either they have no influence what-ever on each other, or, if they have, no decision is reached,but a compromise comes about which is nonsensical sinceit embraces mutually incompatible details. With this is con-nected the Fact that contraries are not kept apart but treatedas though they were identical, so that in the manifest dreamany element may also have the meaning of its opposite.Certain philologists have found that the same held good inthe most ancient languages and that contraries such as'strong-weak','light-dark' and'highdeep' were originallyexpressed by the same roots, until two different modifica-tions of the primitive word distinguished between the twomeanings. Residues of this original double meaning s€em tohave survived even in a highly developed language like Latin

,; 1in its use of words such as 'altus' ('high' and 'deep') and

7 l'sacer'('sacred' and 'infamous').

[Cf. p. 99 below.]-ln

view of the complication and ambiguity of the relationsbetween the manifest dream and the latent content lyingbehind it, it is of course fustifiable to ask how it is at allpossible to deduce the one from the other and whether allwe have to go on is a lucky guess, assisted perhaps by a

translation of the symbols that occur in the manifest dream.It may be said in reply that in the great maiority of cases theproblem can be satisfactorily solved, but only with the helpof the asociations provided by the dreamer himself to the

: j : \ C , . \ r f ) - , , ) | - l ' n - - ' , , - t t ' ' '

V \ - . , . . . ' - j J , . - , . , : - . t

) . .

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\. 1 ' , . ' \ . , ., ) , . '

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i i

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4 4 ) S I G M U N D F R E U D

elements of the manifest cpntent. Any other procedure isarbitrary and can yield no certain result. But the dreamer'sassociations bring to light intermediate links which we caninsert in the gap between the two fbetween the manifest andlatent content] and by aid of which we can reinstate thelatent content of the dream and'interpret' it. It is not to bewondered at if this work of interpretation (acting in a direc-tion opposite to the dream-work) fails occasionally to arriveat complete certainty.

It remains for us to give a dynamic explanation of why thesleeping ego takes on the task of the dream-work at all. Theexplanation is fortunately easy to find. With the help of theunconscious, every dream that is in process of formationmakes a demand upon the ego-for the satisfaction of aninstinct, if the dream originates from the id; for the solutionof a conflict, the removal of a doubt or the forming of anintention, if the dream originates from a residue of precon-scious activity in waking life. The sleeping ego, however, isfocused on the wish to maintain sleep; it feels this demandas a disturbance and seeks to get rid of the disturbance. Theego succeeds in doing this by what appears to be an act ofcompliance: it meets the demand with what is in the circum-stances a harmless fulflment of a wish and so gets rid of it.This replacement of the demand bv the fulfilment of a wishreEiins-l-he esse.,tgl fqtfiE-"-t-tt" dr"r*-*orE It mayperhaps bt;orth *iiil. io illurtr"te this by three simpleexamples-a hunger dream, a dream of convenience and adream prompted by sexual desire. A need for food makesitself felt in a dreamer during his sleep: he has a dream ofa delicious meal and sleeps on. The choice, of course, wasopen to him either of waking up and eating something orof continuing his sleep. He decided in favour of the latterand satis6ed his hunger by means of the dream-for thetime being, at all events, for if his hunger had persisted he

An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (+swould have had to wake up nevertheless. Here is the secondexample. A sleeper had to wake up so as to be in time forhis work at the hospital. But he slept on, and had a dreamthat he was already at the hospital-but as a patient, whohas no need to get up. Or again, a desire becomes activeduring the night for the enjoyment of a forbidden sexualobject, the wife of a friend of the sleeper. He has a dreamof sexual intercourse-not, indeed, with this person but withsomeone else of the same name to whom he is in factindifferent; or his struggle against the desire rnay find expres-sion in his mistress remaining altogether anonymous.

Naturally, every case is not so simple. Especially in dreamswhich have originated from undealt-with residues of thqprevious day, and which have only obtained an unconsciousreinforcement during the state of sleep, it is often no easytask to uncover the unconscious motive force and its wish-fulfilment; but we may assume that it is always there. Thethesis that dreams are the fulfilments of wishes will easilyarouse scepticism when it is remembered how many dreamshave an actually distressing content or even wake thedreamer in anxiety, quite apart from the numerous dreamswithout any definite feeling-tone. But the objection basedon anxiety' dreams cannot be sustained against analysis. It

f must not be forgotten that dreams are invariably the prod-

luct of a conflict, that they are a kind of compromise-struc-

I ture. Something that is a satisfaction for the unconscious id

lmay for that very reason be a cause of anxiety for the ego.t As the drcam-work proceeds, sometimes the unconsciouswill press forward more successfully and sometimes the egowill defend itself with greater energy. Anxiety dreams aremostly those whose content has undergone the least distor-tion. If the demand made by the unconscious is too greatfor the sleeping ego to be in a position to fend it ofi by themeans at its disposal, it abandons the wish to sleep and

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46) S I G M U N D F R E U D

returns to waking life. We shall be taking every experienceinto account if we say that a dream is invariably an attemptto get rid of a disturbance of sleep by means of a wish-fulfilment, so that the dream is a guardian of sleep. Theattempt may succeed more or less completely; it may alsofail, and in that case the sleeper wakes up, apparently wokenprecisely by the dream. So, too, there are occasions whenthat excellent fellow the night-watchman, whose business itis to guard the little township's sleep, has no alternative butto sound the alarm and waken the sleeping townspeople.

I will close this discussion with a comment which will

iustify the length of time I have spent on the problem of theinterpretation of dreams. Experience has shown that theunconscious mechanisms which we have come to know fromour study of the dream-work and which gave us the explana-tion of the formation of dreams also help us to understandthe puzzling symptoms which attract our interest to neu-roses and psychoses. A conformity of such a kind cannot failto excite high hopes in us.

PART II

The Practical Task

9s

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:cd, with()ut due attcnti()n tol - t h i s no t i on , t ha t ce r ta inrespondent faults, and there-thcr apart is to dcvialc l iorlrr arc obscrved by Swit't to bc: dcgrcc as thcy aro rcsent-v i th othcrs o l - thc samc k ind,lronr a brutc irnpulsc, and

lree ol' inclination, without:ct. l irr. otherwise. though itat gra(itude and rescntment:onstrtulion of the passions,ey wi l l bc cqual ly indulgedrlted; yct. unless lhat c()nse-d . t h i s sagac ious r r rax in rrund. wilhout any rclation to

hat evcn the hrsl ri loti<lns l<lays irr thc srrmr' proporlion.rduces quickncss of rcsent-'a t i tudc. by unwi l l ingncss tor which obl igat ion impl ies;' that hc who cannot th ink hel l acknowlct lgc i r r repay i t .impr.lrtance to nrankind, that:ncy should he laid opcn andnen considcr go<il and cvili samc root, lhey wil l spareof thc othcr . urrd in ludging.st o l ' lhc lnselvcs, wi l l be apttues by their vices.

' l 'o this

il l contribute. who conlirundand wrong, and instead of

: boundarics. rnix them with-'ommon rnind is able to dis-

re histrlr ical veracity has nover why there should not be'rf 'ect idea of virlue; of virtuerve probabil ity. for what wehall never imitate. but thethat humanity can reach,uch trials as the various rev-rall bring upon it, may, byamities, and enduring others,y hope, and what wc can per-: is neccssary to be shown,st; nor should the graces of.y of courage, be so united

with i t , as t<l rcconci lc i t to thc nrint l . Whcrcvcr i lapp€ars. i t should raise hatrcd by thtr rrral ignity ofi t s p rac t iccs , l rn r l con tcmpt hy thc n rcunness o l ' i l sstratagems: l i rr whi lc i l is supportccl hy cithcrpar ts ( ) r sp i r i t , i t w i l l bc se l tk r r r r hc t r r l i l y abhor rcd .The Ronran lyranl was contcnl to be hatcd, i l 'ht:was but teared: :rrtr l thcrc lre lhousln(ls ol (he

reatlcrs ol ' romanccs wil l ing to be thoughl wickcd,i f ' they nray be a lk rwcd to bc w i ts . l t i s thc re to reto bc s lcad i l y incu lca ted , tha t v i r lue is the h ighe s tpnxr l o l 'undcrs (and ing . and thc on ly so l id basrso l 'g reu tncss ; and tha t v ice is lhc na tura l conseqLrencc o l 'n i l r row thoughts ; tha t i l bcg ins in tn is -t : rk t ' . unr l cn t l s i r r ignonr iny .

Rassekts, Chapter I o

IMI,AC'S HIS'I 'ORY CON'I ' INIJI ' I)

"Whcrcvcr I wcnt. I l i lunt l lh:r l l )<letry wirs c() lrsidcrcd as the highcst learnirt t , artd rr 'girrt ler l wi lhaveneration sorrrcwhal upproachint to (hat whiclrman wou l t l pay to thc Angc l i ck Nu lurc . Ant l i t yc tl i l l s n rc w i th wonr lc r ' , tha l , in u l rnos t t r l l r ' ( )u r ) l r i cs ,the nxrsl ancierrt pr)cls arc corrsiclcrcr. l as thc bcst:whether i t be tha t cvery o thcr k ind o l ' knowlcc lgcisan ac t lu is i l ion grar lua l l y a t ta incr l . i rn t l poc t ry i sa gi l i conl 'crrecl al ()ncc: or l l tat lhe l i rst poctry ol 'evcry nation surprisccl thcnr as a novcl ly. antlretained thc crcrl i t hy conscnl which i t rcccivct lby acciderrt al l i rsl : or whelher thc Jrrovincc ol 'poelry is to dcscribc Naturc ani l l )assion, whicltare always lhe sarnc', anrl thc l i rst wri lcrs trxrkp o s s e s s i o n o l . t h c n r o s t s t r i k i n g o h . j c c t s l i r rdescripl irrn, and thc lnost prohable oceurrcncesfor f ict ion, and lel ' t nothing to thosc that l i l l lowcdthem, but transcript ion ol ' thc sarnc cvcnts, arrt lnew conrbinations of ' lhe sarrrc irnagcs. Whatcvcrbe the reason. i t is comnronly obscrvcd that thcearly writers are in p<'rsscssion ot 'nalure, and thcirfol lowers of art: that the l i rst cxccl in slrcngth andinventir>n. and thc Izrttcr in elerpance antl rcl irre-ment.

" l was desirous to at ld my nanlc t t l this i l lus-tr ious fratcrnity. I read al l t l rc pocts ol 'Persia andArabia. and was able to repeat by nrenrory thevolumes that are suspendetl in the rnosque rrf 'Mecca. But I s<xrn f<luntl that no rnitn was cvcrgreat by inri tat ion. My desire oI excel lcnceimpelled me to transf 'er my attention to nature andto l i fe. Nature wus to be mv subiect. an{l ntcn to

hc r r ry uur l i lo rs : I cou ld ncvcr dcscr ihe what I hadn()t scen: I ct lulr l not l topc lo tn()ve thosc withde l igh t o l - le r rour , whosc in tc res ls and op in ions Ir l i t l r tol t tndcrsl irnt l .

"Bcirrg now rcsolved to bc a prlet, I saw cveryth ing w i t l r a ncw purp( )sc : rny spherc o f 'a t tcn t ionwrrs s t t rk lcn ly n ragr r i l i c t l : no k ind o f knowlc t lgcwls t() bc ovcrl txrkert l . I rangcd nrounlains anclderscrls l i rr i rnages and rescrnblances, and pic-turecl upon rrry rnint l cve ry lrcc ol the t irrest anrll lowc l o l ' thc va l l cy . I obscrvcr l w i th cqua l carelhc cnrgs ol. lhc rock and thc pinnaclcs ol ' thepalacc. Somc{irncs I wandcrecl alt lng lhc nrazes of-thc r i vu le t , an t l sorne l i rncs watched the changesol ' lhc suntnrr:r clouds. To a Jroet n<lthing can bct rsc lcss . Wl r t tc ' ver i s hcaut i lu l . l l nd whatevcr i sdrcldl 'Lr l , rrrust bc l i rnri l iar to his irnagina(i()n: hernust bc convcrsant with al l that is awful ly vast orclegantly l i t t lc. Thc plunts of the garclen, the ani-rnals o1'the wrxrd. thc rrr incrals of the earth. andnlclcors ot the sky, nrust al l concur to slore hisnr ind w i th inexhaust ib le var ic ty : lb r every idea rsuse:l ir l l i l r the inlbrcerncnl or clecoration of nroralor rcl igious truthl and he, who kn<lws most. wi l lhavc most powcr of diversifying his scenes, andof grat i f ying his reacler with remote al lusions anduncxpected instruct ion.

"Al l the i lppearances ol 'nalure I was thereti l recarclul to study. and every c:ounlry which I havesurvcyod hirs contr ibutecl something to my poetical powers."

" ln so wide a survey. said the prince, you mustsurely have lcft much unobserved. I have l ived. t i l lnow. within the circuit ol ' these rnountains, and yet

R ^ S S E I - A S . ( ' H A P ' T E R I O 2 1 5

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cannot walk abroad witlrout the sight ol 'somethingwhrch t had never beheld beforc, or neverheeded."

"'[hc business ol- a poet. said lmlac, is toexanrine, not the individual, but the species: torernark gerreral proper-ties and large appe:lranccs:he does not nurnher the streaks o[ the tulip, ordescribe the dit ' t 'crent shades in the verdure tl l ' lheIorest. I le is to cxhibit in his portraits ol natttresuch prilnrinent and striking tl 'aturcs, as recal thcoriginal to every rnind: and nrust neglcct thcrr inuler d iscr i rn inat ions. which one may huvcrc:rnarked, and anolher have neglcctecl, l irr thost:character is t icks which arc l l ikc obviot ts to v ig i -lancc and carclcssncss.

"But the knowlet lgc o l ' naturc is only hal l ' thctask o l 'a poct : hc r t . rust bc acquain lcd l ikcwiscwith all thc ruodcs of l i l 'e. l l is characlcr rctluirc.stlrat he estinlatc thc happincss and rniscry ol.cvcry cr lndi t ion, obscrvc thc powe r o l 'a l l thc pas-s ions in a l l thc i r cornbinat ions, and l racc thcchangcs o l (hc hut t tar t r t t ind as thcy arc rnrx l i l icd

by various institutions and accidcntal influenu<lf climrtc or cu.storD, l 'rotn the spritelinessdinfancy to (he clespondcncc rlf decrepitude. Ilnrust divest himself t l l '(he prejudices of his ageccountry: hc tnust c t rns i t lcr t ight and wrongirtheir abstracterl and invariable stalc: hc mu$dtiregard prcscnt laws itnd opinions, and rise togceral and transecndcntal truths, which wil l alwaphc the sanrc: hc rnust therelorc contenlwith thc skrw pr<tgress rt f his ni lnte; contennft

app lausc o l h is own t in rc , and contmi t h isc la t

t0 the . just iec ( ) l postcr i ty . l lo Inust wr l te asi r r tc- rprcter o l -nature. and thc legis latotrnank in t l . : r r r r l r 'o t rs i t le r h in rsc l l : rs p rcs id ing

thc lhoughts uttd t t tantters ol 'sttcccssivc

l ions: as a he ing supet' iour t t l { i tr tc and place

labour is n()t yr:t ul l tn cnd: hc rtrust know

languugcs r rnd nranv sc icnccs ; and, tha t h is

rnay hc wort l ty o l l r is thoughts, nrust , byprac t ice , la rn i l ia r i zc to h in tsc l l ' evcry de l i

specch and grircc ol hartnotty."

a mountain high, withour the knowlemountains and many rivers: l;,, in rt .oI_g.enlus, nothing can be styled ex33s..r.j compared with othci workrf,.no. Ltemonstration immediafelypower, and has nothing ro hope oi Iflux of years; but worki r.ntutlu. un.tal must be estimated Uy tnel, nru"general and collectiv. uUitity ,,f ' ;;;covered in a long succession of en<the fipr building ihot *u* raised, ir ncertainty determined rhat it was'r<iurbut whether it was spacious or krl i.been referred to tiltc. f.h" pvrtrasu;Dumbers was at ()ncc .f ;...,u"*J-r,ifr,fre poems of Homcr we yet knowscend the comm()n l ir l i ts of t rrnonbut by remarking. that nation aftcrcentury after ccntury, has bcen ublemore than transp()sc his incit lents, ntcnaracters. and paraphrase his scntim

. I ne revcrcDcc duc to writ ings thrsubsisted ari.ses thercfi)re nol liom arconfidencc in the superior wisdorn tftroomy persuasion ol' thc degcncracyh:

l: ,n. c()nscqucncc ()t acknowrnoubttable positi<tns, lhat whut has ttnown has been ntost considercrl, rmost considered is bcst undcrstrxil..

The Poet, of who.sc works I have6e revision, nlay n(,w bt,gin to assuBrty.

9t an ancicnt, and claim the 1esmblished l 'anrc antl prcscriprive veinas tong ()utl ived fris cenlury. the rcrn-fixed a.s the tcst ,,f flt"ri.y ,ncriiadvantages hc lnight oncc tlcrivc l icallustons. loc.al ctrstolnrhave. ror many years n"J; Ll,liT,ill'i.1jnemrnent or molive ol.sorrow, whiclof anificial tit-c affordcd hinr, now orthe scenes which they once il lumicffects of l'avour and cornpctition n1sOe tradition rl 'hi.s l i iendif, ipr; unJ ihas perished; his works support no oSr.gumenls, nr l r supply lny ' luct i0n rnves; tney can ncither indulge vanitymalignity, but are rca<t wittriur any'ohan the desire of' pleasure, and ar,

From Pre.face to Shake.speare

' l 'hat prl iscs arc with()ut rcasott lavishcd on t lrc

dcarl, and that thc honouts duc only t() cxcel lcrrccarc pa id to an t iqu i ty . i s a cornp la i r r t l i ke ly to he

a lways cor r t inued by thosc , who, hc ing ab lc t ( )

adtl nothrng to lruth, hopc l i rr crt t i t tcnce l .rott t t l rc

hercsics ol-paradox; t tr thttse, wlto. bcing ( i trcccl

by disaplxrinlt .nt:nt up()n cortst l lalory cxpedients,

arc wil l ing to lrolre frorrr postcri ty what lhc prc-

sent agc rcl irses. and l latter thcrnsclves thit t lhercgard wh ich is ye t dcn ied by cnvy . w i l l bc a t las t

bestowed hy t inre.Antiquity, l ikc e vcry txhcr qual i ty th: l t i l t tracls

the noticc ol ntankind, has untl trubtct l ly votaries

thi l t revererrcc i l . not l ' rott t reusttn. but t iorn pre' iu

dice . Sonre sce nr lo at lnt ire indiscrir .rr inate ly what-

cvcr has bccn long ptese rvcd, witht lut corrsit lcr ingthat t i rnc has sontetirncs cottpcrated with chancc;al l pcrhaps arc more wil l ing to lronour post t l r i tn

prcscnt exccl lence: ancl lhc rnind contetrtpl i t tcs

gcnius through thc slt :r lcs ol ' i rgc. as the eye

vcys the sutt t l rrou[l t ur l i l ic ial opacity. ' l 'he

contcn t ion o l e r i t ie is rn i s to l ind thc t i ru l tso frr lr t le rrts. l rnt l l t tc bcltrt ies ol the alrcicnls.lun au th t>r i s vc t l i v inu we es t i t r t i t l c l t i s

his worst pcrl i r t ' r t t lnce, artt l whcn hc is

r ir tc thcnt hy lr is hcst.I 'o wttrks, l l rwcvcr. ol 'whiclr l l ic cxcc

not ubsolutc artt t r le l ini te. l"rut trut l tr l r l and

palat ivr.: : lo wot ks ttol raised upon( l c n l ( ) n s l r a l i v c i t n d s c i c r r t i l i c . b u tw l ro l l y lo ohscrva l ion an t l e xpcr tcnce, n0

tcsl can bc lppl iet l thln lcrtgth ol ' duration

c( )n l inuancc t t l cs tcc r i l . What n tank ind have

nosse'ssed thcv lrave ol ictt exattt i tred andparcd . u r td i l ' t l r cy pcrs is t to va luc thc p t

i t is bccrttrsc lrcqucrt l cotnparist lns have

l irrrrcrd opirt ion ir t i ts luvour. As artrong thc( r t n i l t u r c l l o i l l l l l r c r t r r l r opg l l y t l t l l i t r i v c r

2 1 6 \ A M t i l r l . l ( ) l l N S ( ) N

T

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xlv Bibliographical note

Tie agenqr of the letter k tie unconscious or reason sbue .Freud.L'intance dc Ia lettre dans I'irconscicnt ou Ia raison depuis Freud. Deliveredon 9 May, ry17, in the Amphith€ire Descartes of the Sorbonne, Paris,at the reguest of the Philosophy Group of the F6d6ration des dtudiants AsLettres. Written version dated r4-t6May, ry17. Published in La Pslcb-analyse, vol. 3, P.U.F., r9f7tpp.47-8r.

On a quzstion preliminary to any possille ffeattunt of psychosisD'une guestian priliminaire d tout traitemmt possilh de la psychose. Basedo,n the author's seminar for the first two semesters of the year rgtt4.W'ritten D_ecember ry57-Jannry r9y8. Published in Lo Ptyrlroii$,rr,vol.4, P.U.F., r9t9, pp. r-to.

Tfu signifcation of tfu phallusLa Signifcatbn du phallus. Lecture grven in German under the titleDie Bedeurtng des Phallus at the Max-Planck Institute, Munich, at theinvitation of Professor Paul Matusse\ 9 May, ry18.

The dirertbn of thc treatmznt and tlu principles of iu powerLa di.rection de Ia ase et les principes de son pouvoir. First reporr to theColloque international de Royaumont, ro-r3 July, 1958, at the invitationof the Soci6t6 frangaise de psychanalyse. Published in La Psychanalyse,vol.6, P.U.F., rycl',pp. t49-2n6.

Tln subrersion of the subjert @d thz dialtctb ofdesire h the Freudian unconscbas

sulversian du sujet et dialectijue du dzsir dans I'bronsciznt freudicn.Delivered at a conference entitled 'La Dialectigue', held at Rofrumont,rnz3 September, 1960, at the invitation of Jean WahL

J o..cl uqs L o.c.r^*^

ONE

The mirror stage as formative of thefunction of lhe I as revealed in

PsychoanalYtic exPerience

Delivered at the r6th International Congress of

Psychoanalysis, Ziitidl, luJy t7' 1949

I}{{

The conception of the mirror stage tlnt I introduced at our last congresst

,hil yL* "go,

has since blo*" T".t: :i less esablished.-T

l:;;iA; ri*.r. grouP. However,I think f l:$lht''?

b'i"q,]:

-' TlrfA far from exhausting itseli as in the case of the monkey, once

the image has been mastered Ld found emPty, llTt$"ay rebounds

il ,h.;. of the child in a series of gestures-in which he experiences in

fiuytft. ,.f^Uon between the movements assumed in the image an{ the

reflected environment, and berween this vimral complex 1f the reality it

;J"pli;;"., th. "hiidj,

own body, and the p"notti and things, around

him.This event can take place, as we have known since Baldwin' from the

"e. of six months, ar,d'it, repetition has often made me reflect upon the

;LU"t spectacle of the infant in front of.the mirror. Unable ls yet to

;lo, ;t Ju"n ,o stand uP' and held tightly. as he is, by some'support'

6"*L ". ".Ancial

(what, iL Fo"t", *" oll i',otte-6i6i')' he nevertheless

o]r.t.o."t, in a flutter oil"bil*t activity, the obstructions of his suPPort

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Ecrits: A SelectianI

UA The mirror stage

dominatehim, or *i*{6egclglfuin which, in an amliguous relation,tfte=w=orti ojhts-.

"}zn -"tl"q

Indeed, for the-fogggr - whose veiled facesTif-our privilege to see in,, outline in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic efficaatyz

| - the mi51o;imagg would seem to be the thr@d,| . -I if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one's own 6ody presentsI in halLGinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features,or.ilGlffirrr,ities, or its ohieqt-pqissdgs; or if we obserye the roleof the mi+_of eppaTtus hlhegppgarTceTlt,be gl. _oal/e, in whichrowchicalrealitiesrhoweverheterogeneous,aremanifested. yri';:di{^}''9""

}:}n-::utd have to be calei 4"Jdor!. if we wished to in_corporate it into our usual,register, in theffiat it win Jr" r.,rr"

i:::.^:: :HL1_l1,t 1:"6 caf ons,' und"..*hi.h,..* i *""r a pr"* ir,"Ilfnctigns of l;b;6;rr"1 nesneliza{er,. But the il;;;;ilffril;

K' ':**;:i:**i.;&l,';;frffi ffir"lf; TtrJ"tH;TH"'ffi?f;:1f"ily,.ty:$of the subject asymptoticallv, *tararr"r. ih.'"rr"""". af +ho J:-l^^r_lor the su''rect asvmptoticallS whatever the su-ccess of t}i'dialeaical

r :Ef"'or*f . < * < ^

n;il;;*"*li ris given toTfifrAn$ asGesnh, th"t il;,;ffi,,J"r"constilueqt than constitiltElffiwhich iiappsrrs to him above alr in

scarcely recognizabre - by these rwo .ri.l,r ;?il;;;.",t#;';tHthe mental permanence^r-r- r , :-"-:f!*:*s:$'$=i n a r- +i ̂ -. i ̂ -. r.,:=#fS/'

at the same dme asir4rc1fuulprG6at-

.tt rfl qi"gant with,h. ""r."rpoiiffiffiiliin which man oroiects himootf

^*;,r .r.^ -*:::--

? *_-: rLu, uuL ur wrucn lr appears tO him abOVe all in

i1::T::",19 :hr.("",,!:f (, stature) *nt fixes'i,;;;; *n-"C,ir.,r'''verts lt' 'n contclst with the turbulent movemenrs thar thJ ,J;"lir..:,f are animating him. Thu.s,

{gGes{r _;;. pregnancy should be re-Igarded as bound up with iF;;;;o" ;:,;I;:a:::r_ ::::': ::qe,cel., ronnmi--Lrl T:l_,,n"

species, thougA its motor style remarns

in the

ffiot-bring itself to formffipits results in these terms. It nevertheless recognizes that it is a necejsary

{ condition for the maruration of the gonad oT ,h. f"-"le pi$6tt ihat itV 1

[should see another member of its species, of eithefl€-so suficient in

litself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by

\pl".i"g the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror.Similarly, in the case of the migratory locwt, the transition within ageaeration from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained byexposing the individual, at a certain srage, to the exclusively visual actionof a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a sryle suft-

fciendy close to that characteristic ofthe species. Such-facts are inscribed

Iin an order of homeomorphic identification thatwould itself fallwithin the

lQger guestion of the meaning of beaury as both formative and erogenie- ' - -Xqrs *F** '?^-?*- -- ---" :z-*--*-rJ-But the facts of'mimi-ry-are no less instructive when conceived as cases

of heteromoqphic identification, in as much as they raise the problem ofthe signification of space for the living organism - psychological conceptshardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters thanridiculous attempts to reduce them to the supposedly supreme law ofadaptation. We have only to recall how Roger Caillois (who was thenvery young, and still fresh from his breach with the sociological school

. in which he was trained) illuminated the subject by using the term't 'kgerdory pgrchasthenia' to classi$ morphological mimicry as an ob-

session with space in its derealizing effect.I have myself shown in thq sqcial dialectic that structures hurnan know-

ledge as paranoiac3 why human knowledge has greater autonomy thanffi;I1<n--fiI-eAfietn reiation go the field olfo.."if desire, but also whyhuman knowledge is determined in that 'little reality' (ce peu de r6alitQ,

theory, of the ancient

The fact is that the

with the phan-oil-thlt

That a Gestalt should be

!\.*r -,.rJ1- g,il..,or-. - r.j-,*..r*Ibo

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_+{a !o1ever, this relation ro narure is altered by a certain @+!9gg at the heart of the oqganisrq a p.ng94d Discord beEyed b;fiegg.-Uf-sleaseac*aod- ,ir.$oqth..- The objeaive nodon of ,U"-irar.lrni*t i*o.pt.ilr, oCO"pyramidal syst-em and likewise the presence of certain humoral residues

fuhisi t - ] . r-hLut t t l )+.qio1o' :n-J. [e,cg e.tt\.ij

4 Ecrits: A Selection

wlich- the surrealists, in their restress way, saw,as its limitation. Theserefections lead me to recognize in the spaial g-p1id-od:nanifested in themirror-stage, even before the social diarectic.\e-effe.t ir. -r'' .,f ,.mirror-stager_e:*before-thesocialdiiectir-tna------.-.C"o_iorrqeo j_*

The mirror stage t

from the fifteenth cennury to the imaginary zenith of modem man. But thisiorm is even tangibly r.rr""l.d

"t th"irg"ttic level, in the lines of 'fragiliza-

tion' that define the anatomy of phantasn as exhibited in the schizoid andspasmodic symptoms of hysteria.

Correlatively, the formation of the .I is symbolized in drearns by afortress, or a stadium - its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded bymanhes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contestwhere the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castlewhose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the

lid in a guite startling vray. Sirnilarly, on the mental plane, we find realized

f the smrcnnes of forrified works, the metaphor of which arises-spon=

f .taneously, as if issuing from the s)rmptoms themselves, to designate the

I mechanisms of obsessional neurosis - inversior5 isolatioq reduplication,I cancellation and displacement.

But if we were to build on these subjective givens alone - howeverlittle cre &ee them from the condition of experience that makes us see

; them as partaking of the nature of a linguistic tedrrigue - our theoretical

f .attempts would remain exposed to the charge of projecting themselves

I trtto 4..-q4!hALqbl. ol:l e!*lglgjqbi*ect. This is why I have sought inio" pt.."r,t typomeii;, gidGa;d in-iEnlunction of ol;."tirr. dai, thei - gur-dn e gq4 f gr-a- ry p fu 4 t_y nt * 1.rl w iql,

It establishes in the defences of thz ego a genedc order, in accordancewith the wish formulated by Miss Anna Freud, in the first part of hergreat wor\ and situates (as against a freguendy expressed prejudice)hysterical repression and its returns at a more archaic stage than ob-

lsessional inversion and its isolating processes, and the latter in turn astrpreliminarv to paranoic alienation. which dates from the deflection of the11 ,lsPeculll { :$g_ss "*gA1.

7 This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates,

/ by the identification with the imago of the countelpart and the drama of

\ nrimordial isalousy (so well brought out by the school of Charlotte

\ Bi.ilrler in the phenomenon of infantile transitivism), the dialectic thal w:ill' beg"-&ab*ljsk-&ej:o-s.ociallfclabprated siruations.

It is this moment that decisively .ipt ttr" _yIffi-ilr"raqbgyl€dgginto mediatizasss$rossb .the detire?fr e-;m;t - *t ;d nr:"s i m ili""rt

of the $aternal orgarusjt cogqgs the view I have formulated as the fact- r rot q, rc4 sputftc yemagalry of birth'nffi)It is worth rgftg, i"adl"@ffi1ffi6a fact recognized as such by

em bryo lo gists, -bl th. term foe t ctrip tiot4 wfu ctt determin"es .h. p r" J.rr."of the so-called superior app"-no of ihe rreuox; and especiilly J*"cortexr which psycho-surgical operations lead us to o"g"rd as the intra-organic mirror.

u4' '2L o

into mediafizaSes$roseb-.d*re.des.ue -qf fte, q*SIr-."q9Ir_Cg-tUq i_t5_-olj.eEq* _ - ? r y * 5 - - ; . _ : _ . . .r+*art abstncf"e.qurvalenc_eiby dre.co:eperarig-B-qfgthe*rq, -a:rd..U_rns"gr.q I

b.fe,.fu !epp_A51ff q$I*3,!ri.qhevery_.-irr.srrp-crua,l=_*:g:!__99$qgtj._r*"

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic thrje,cts the forgration of the individual into historv.ff i;

-aElgr::g-.Ssgg!'il.s.l19$g e9-r-r"-e-srs"nd*te*,Lq4s+I3l-,gl.4lus3gisn - thevery nbrmalization of this maturation being henceforth dependent, in

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Ecrits: A Sebction

rnan, on a culrural mediation as exemplified, in the case of the sexualobject, by the Oedipus complex.

In the light of this conception, the terrn primary narcissism, by whichanalytic doctrine designates the libidinal investment characteristic of tlutmoment, reveals in those who invented it the most profound awarenessof semantic latencies. But it also throws light on the dynamic oppositionberween this libido and the sexual libido, which the first analysts tried todefine when they invoked destructive and, indeed, death instinas, inorder to explain the evident connection berween the narsissistic libidoand the alienating function of the ,I, the aggressivity it releases ir -yrelation to the other, even in a relarion involving the most Samarita.n ofaid.

on to the level of fataliry, which is where the id manifests itself.

We can thus understand the inenia characteristic of the formations of

and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis - iust as the

rQ'of the subjea by the situation gives us the most general formula

not only the madness that lies bfind the walls of asylums,also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury-

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the

ssions of the soul, iust as the beam of the psychoanalydc scales, whenelculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with

indication of the deadening of the passions in sociery.At this iunaion of nature and culrure, so persistently examined by

anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this*lnqt 9f

' idialist. the pedagozue. and even the reformer.'i" th. teco# #srlbtelt to iub:jeci'ffiifi?Epreserve, psychoanalysis

may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the'Thou art that',ln

nnts the patent form of tlnt function, its effects wi[ for the most

remain laient, so long as they are not illuminated by some light

which is revealed to him the cipher of his moral destiny, but it is not in

our mere pover as practitionen to bring him to that point where the

real joumey begins.

The mirror stage

)x{Notu

lr In fact, they were encountering that existential nqgativity whose

- ;.yU :Tlity isso vigorously proclaimed by the conremporar1r philosophy of

r!,j,-rs- being and nothingness.

#e' But unfortunately that philosophy gmsps negativiry only within thelimits of a self-sufficienry of consciousness, which, as one ofits premises,links to the miconnaissances ihat constitute the ego, the illusion of auto-nomy ro which it entrusts itself. This flight of fanry, for all that it drawq

- - --.-to an unusual extent, on borrowings from psychoanalytic experience,c,ulminates in the pretention of providirg * exisrenrial psychoanalysis.

At the culmination "f *gjggS{d._e-ffert pf a _g9--sr-Srylg-fgfu.gg to

Iggg_gg.*g.1!1*;f.bgl,::ty fuction other than the utilitarian ong and inthe- ani'Fty ,ifiti. inania,iifl.niibnciig'itre

-'ioi6iffiti6rii1'a^form of

the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effon, existentialism mustbe iudged !y fu explanations it gives of the subjective impasses thathave indeed resulted from iq a freedom that is never more authentic thanwhen it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commirmenr, erpress-ing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any siruation; avoyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relationl a penonality thatrealizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other than can besatisfied only by Hegelian murder.

f These propositions are opposed by all our experiencc, in so far as itI teaches us not to regard the ego as centred on the perceptbn-cowciausncsstrslstem, or as organized by the 'realiry principle, - a principle that is thef expression of a scienti.Gc prejudice most hostile to the dialectic of know-iledge- our expedence shows that we should start instead from thefu *::L€:@*"t.h'..t.i,o;ffi ;ii;'i,i;l-iir",-tiEililr,ro-liGTliffAEt.e-b] N{iss Anna Freud. ior, if the,VernciunB

6l'J,^,-. !"0,-t,-o^*t., Lru"o'r"i''r'a)

r r l \ \ . . { h ) T . 1 { ( . q 1 t r . -

\ 6 L

r. Throughout this article I leave in itspeculiarity the translation I have adoptediot F.*d's I&aI-Ich [i.e.,

'ie-id;al'],

without further comment, other than tosay that I have not maintained it since.'2.

Cf. Claude Ilvi-Strauss, StrucuralAntlr opo[o gy, Chapter X.

3. Cf.'Arg$essiviry in Psychoanalysis',p. 8 and &riu, p. r8o.

4-'Coxcentratiotnaie', an adjectivecoined after W'orld War II (this artidewas wdtten in 1949) to describe the life ofthe concentration-camp. In the hands ofcerain writers it became, by €tdelsion,applicable to many aspects of 'modem'

Ufe [Tr.].

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Smith, Steven B. Reading Althusser. Ithaca: Comell University Press, t984.Tmtsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. rg24; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

rg60. <Weimann, Robert. Structure and Society in Literary History. Charlottesville: University Press

of Virginia, r976.Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, I78o-Ig5o. London: Chatto and Windus, t958.

The Country and the Clry. New York: Oxford University Press, r973.Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, r977.The Sociology of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, r995.The Politics of Modernlsm: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, r996.

. Wilson, Edmund. Axel 's Castle. t93t; New York: Scribner's, r96r.The Triple Thinkers. I9381 New York: Oxford Univcrsity hess, tg48.

Wood, Ellen N{eiksins, and John Bellamy Foster, eds. In Defense of History: Marxism and thePostmodern Agenda. New York: Monthly Review Press, r997.

Georg Lukdcst 885-t 97 r

Thc most infuential Marxist aesthetician of the frst half of this century, Georg Lukdcs was the sr.tn ofa wealthy Hungarian family, He attended the University of Heidelberg and the Universiry of Berlin,and received a Ph.D. from the University of Budapest in t9o6. Lulqics wrote several essays onaesthetic ond literary theory (including Soul and Form It9to], Aesthetic Culture ItgrS], and his influ-entialTheory of the Novel [written r9r6, published tgzo]) in a Hegelian phase before joining theHungarian Communist party itt t9t8. In tgtg he begctn a stint as comtnissarfor culture and educa-tion in the regime of Bela Kun, an appoinnnent that ended wilh the fall of Kun. Lukdcs left Hungaryand settled in Vienna, where he produced History and Class Consciousness (r9zj), his most influen-tial work of political theory. Driven by waves of political controversy, Lukdcs spent I92g-31 inMoscow, then moved to Berlin. When the Nazis came to power in t933, he returned to Moscow, tak-ing a po,st at the Soviet Academy of Sciences (tgS1-lfi.He managed, as a great many CentralEuropean intellectuals did not, to survive the Stalini.tt purges of t9j7-j9; it v'as in this dark time thathe wrote The Historical Novel (published in English in t96z). Lukdcs did not return to Hungary untilthe more receptive political climate of 1945, when he was nnde a parliamentary minister and profes-sor of aesthetics and cultural phiktsophy at the University of Budapest. In t956, the year he wrote"The ldeology of Modernism," Lukdcs was again unseated by a politicttl uprising. Deported in r956to Romania, Lukdcs worked on two major theoretical tomes, neither of which was complete at hisdeath; neither has yet been translated: Die Eigenart des Asthetischen ("The Particularity of theAe.rthetic," 193), and the flvo-volume Zur Ontologie der gesellschaftl isches Seins ("Toward anOntology of Social Being," I9n).

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of the abnormal and to an undisguised antihu-manism.

A typology limited in this way to the hommemoyen sensuel and the idiot also opens the door to"experimental" stylistic distortion. Distortionbecomes as inseparable a part of the portrayal ofreality as the recourse to the pathological. But lit-erature must have a concept of the pormal if it isto "place" distortion correctly; that is to say, tosee it as distortion. With such a typology thisplacing is impossible, since the normal is nolonger a proper object of literary interest. Lifeunder capitalism is, often rightly, presented as adistortion (a petrification or paralysis) of thehurnan substance. But to present psychopathol-ogy as a way of escape from this distortion isitself a distortion. We are invited to lneasure onetype of distortion against another and arrive, nec-essarily, at universal distortion. There is no prin-ciple to set against the general pattern, nostandard by which the petty-bourgeois and thepathological can be seen in their social context.And these tendencies, far from being relativizedwith time, become ever more absolute. Distortionbecornes the normal condition of human exis-tence; the proper study, the formative principle,of art and literature.

I have demonstrated some of the literary impli-cations of this ideology. Let us now pursue the ar-gument further. It is clear, I think, that modernismmust deprive literature of a sense of perspective.This would not be surprising; rigorous modernistssuch as Kafka, Ilenn, and Musil have always indig-nantly refused to provide their readers with anysuch thing. I will return to the ideological implica-tions of the idea of perspective later. Let me sayhere that, in any work of art, perspective is of over-riding irnportance. It determines the course andcontent; it drarvs together the threads of the narra-tion; it enables the artist to choose between the im-portant and the superficial, the crucial and theepisodic. The direction in which characters de-velop is determined by perspective, only those fea-rures being described which are material to theirdevelopment. The more lucid the perspective - asin Molidre or the Greeks - the more economicaland striking the selection.

Modernism drops this selective principle. Itasserts that it can dispense with it, or can replace

it with its dogma of the condition humaine. A nat-uralistic style is bound to be the result. This stateof affairs - which to my mind characterizes allmodernist art of the past fifty years - is dis-guised by critics who systematically glorify themodernist movement. By concentrating on for-mal criteria, by isolating technique from contentand exaggerating its importance, these criticsrefrain from judgment on the social or artistic sig-nificance of subject matter. They are unable, inconsequence, to make the aesthetic distinctionbetween realism and naturalisrn. This distinctiondepends on the presence or absence in a work ofart of "hierarchy of significance" in the situationsand characters presented. Conrpared with this,formal categories are of secondary importance.That is why it is possible to speak of the basicallynuturalistic character of modernist literature - andto see here the literary expression of an ideologicalcontinuity. This is not to deny that variations instyle reflect changes in society. But the particularform this principle of naturalistic arbitrariness,this lack of hierarchic structure, may take is notdecisive. We encounter it in the all-determining"social conditions" of Naturalism, in Symbolism'simpressionist methods and its cultivation of theexotic, in the fragmentation of objective reality inFuturism and Constructivism and the GerrnanNeue Sachlichkeit,2t or, again, in Surrealism'sstream of consciousness.

These schools have in common a basically sta-tic approach to reality. This is closely related tothei r lack of perspect ive. Character is t ica l ly ,Gottfried Benn actually incorporated this in hisartistic program. One of his volumes bears thetitle, Staric Poems. The denial of history, ofdevelopment, and thus of perspective, becomesthe mark of true insight into the nature of reality.

The wise man is ignorantof change and developmenthis children and children's childrenare no part of his world.

The rejection of any concept of the future isfor Benn the criterion of wisdom. But even thosemodernist writers who are less extreme in therr

2rNew object iv i ty or impersonal i ty .

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r226 M A R X I S T C R I T I C I S M

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rejection of history tend to present social and hrs-torical phenomena as static. It is, then, of smallimportance whether this condition is "etemal," oronly a transitional stage punctuated by suddencatastrophes (even in early Naturalism the staticpresentation was often broken up by these catas-trophes, without altering its basic character).Musil, for instance, writes in his essay, IfteWriter in our Age: "One knows just as l itt le aboutthe present. Partly, this is because we are, asalways, too close to the present. But it is alsobecause the present into which we were plungedsome two decades ago is of a particularly all-embracing and inescapable character." Whetheror not Musii knew of Heidegger's philosophy, theidea of Geworfenheit is clearly at work here. Andthe following reveals plainly how, for Musil, thisstatic state was upset by the catastrophe of r9r4;"All of a sudden, the world was full of vio-lence. . . . ln European civil ization, there was asudden rif i . . . ." In short: this static apprehensionof reality in modernist l i terature is no passingfashion; it is rooted in the ideology of modernism.

To establish the basic distinction betrveen mod-ernrsm and that realism which, from Homer toThomas Mann and Gorky, has assumed changeand developnrent to be the proper subjer:t of litera-ture, we must go deeper into the underlying ideo-logical problem. In The House of the DeadDostoevsky gave an interesting account of the con-vict's attitude to work. He described how the pris-oners, in spite of brutal discipline, loafed about,working badly or merely going through themotions of work until a new overseer arrived andallotted them a new project, after which they rvereallowed to go home. "The work was hard,"Dostoevsky continues, "but, Christ, with whatenergy they threw themselves into it l Gone was alltheir former indolence and preteniled incompe-tence." Later in the book Dostoevsky sums up hisexperiences; "lf a man loses hope and has no aimin view, sheer boredom can tum hirn into abeast. . . ." I have said that the problern o1'perspec-tive in literarure is directly related to rhe principleof selection. Let me go further: underlying theproblenr is a profound ethical cornplex, reflected inthe corlposition of the work itself. Every humanaction is based on a presupposition of its inherentmeaningfulness, at least to the subiect. Absence of

meaning makes a mockery of action and reducesart to naturalistic description.

Clearly, there can be no literature without atleast the appearance of change or development.This conclusion should not be interpreted in ananowly metaphysical sense. We have alreadydiagnosed the obsession with psychopathology inmodernist literature as a desire to escape from thereality of capitalism. But this implies the absoluteprimacy of the terminus a quo, the condition fromwhich it is desired to escape. Any movementtowards a terminus ad quem is condernned tormpotence. As the ideology of nrost rnodernrstrvriter,s asserts the unalterability of outward real-ity (even if this is reduced to a mere state of con-sciousness) human activity is, a priori, renderedimpotent and robbed of meaning.

The apprehension of reality to which this leadsis most consistently and convincingly realized inthe work of Kafka. Kafka remarks of Josef K., ashe is being led to execution: "He rhought of f l ies,their t iny l imbs breaking as they struggle awayfrom the fly-paper." This mood of total impo-tence, of paralysis in the face of the unintell ieiblepower of circumstances, informs all his work.Though the action of The Castle takes a clil'f'erenr,cven an opposite, direction to that of The Trial,this view of the world, from the perspective of atrapped and struggling fly, is all-pervasive. Thisexperience, this vision of a world dominated byangst and of man at the mercy of incoruprehensi-ble terrors, rnakes Kafka's work the very type ofrnodernist art. Techniques, elsewhere of nrcrelytormal significance, are usecl here to evoke aprinrit ive awe in the presence of an utterly strangcand hosti le reality. Kafka's angst is the experr-ence pur excellence of ntodemism.

Two instances f rom musical cr i t ic rsm _-which can afford to be both franker ancl rnore the-oretical than literary crit icism - show that it isindeed a universal experience with which we aredealing. The composer, Hanns Eisler, says ofSchonberg: "Long betbre the invention of thebonrber, he expressed what people rvere to I'eel inthe air raid shelters." Even mrtre characreristic -though seen fr<tm a moclernist point of vicw - isTheodor W. Adorno's analysii ( in T'he Agirtg ufModern Music) of symptoms of decadence lnmodernist music: "The sounds are sti l l lhe same.

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But the experience of angst, which made therroriginals great, has vanished," Modemist music,he continues, has lost touch with the truth thatwas its raison d'Ate. Composers are no longerequal to the emotional presuppositions of theirmodernism. And that is why modernist music hasfailed. The diminution of the original argst-obsessed vision of l i fe (whether due. as Adomothinks, to inability to respond to the magnitude ofthe honor or, as I believe, to the fact that thisobsession with angst arnong bourgeois intellectu-als has already begun to recede) has broughtabout a loss of subs[ance in modem music, anddestroyed its authenticity as a modernist art form.

This is a shrewd analysis of the paradoxicalsituation of the modernist artist, particularlywhere he is trying to express deep and genuineexperience. The deeper the experience, thegreater the damage to the artistic whole. But thistendency towards disintegration, this loss of artis-tic unity, cannot be written off as a mere fashion,the product of experimental gimmicks. Modemphilosophy, after all, encountered these problemslong before modern l iterature, painting or music.A case in point is the problent of t ine. SubjectiveIdealism had already separated time, abstractlyconceived, from historical change and particular-ity of place. As if this separation were insufficientfor the new age of imperialism, Bergson widenedit further. Experienced time, subjective time, nowbecame identical with real time; the rift betweenthis time and that of the objective world was corn-plete. Bergson and otier philosophers, who tookup and varied this theme claimed that their con-cept of time alone afforded insight into authentic,i.e., subjective, reality. The same tendency soonmade its appearance in literature.

The German left-wing crit ic and essayist of thetwenties, Walter Benjamin, has well describedProust's vision and the techniques he uses to pre-sent it in his great novel: "We all know thatProust does not describe a man's l ife as it actuallyhappens, but as it is remembered by a man whohas lived through it. Yet this puts it far toocrudely. For it is not actual experience that isimportant, but the texture of reminiscence, thePenelope's tapestry of a rnan's memory." Theconnection with Bergson's theories of t ime isobvious. But whereas wi th Bergson, in the

r228 M A R X I S T C R I T I C I S M

abstraction of philosophy, the unity of perceptionis preserved, Benjamin shows that with Proust, asa result of the radical disintegration of the timesequencei objectivity is eliminated: "A l ivedevent is f inite, concluded at least on the level ofexperience. But a rernembered event is infinite, apossible key to everything that preceded it and toeverything that wil l follow it."

It is the distinction between a philosophicaland an artistic vision of the world. However hardphilosophy, under the influence of Idealism, tnesto l iberate the concepts of space and time fromtemporal and spatial particularity, l i terature con-tinues to assume their unity. The fact that, never-theless, the concept of subjective time cropped upin l iterature only shows how deeply subjectivismis rooted in the experience of the modern bour-geois intellectual. The individual, retreating intohimself in despair at the cruelty of the age, mayexperience an intoxicated fascination with hisforlorn condition. But then a new horror breaksthrough. If reality cannot be understood (or noeffort is made to understand it), then the individ-ual 's subject iv i ty - a lone in the universe,reflecting only itself -- takes on an equallyincomprehensible and horrif ic character. Hugovon Hofmannsthal was to experience this condi-tion very early in his poetic career:

It is a thing that no man cares to think on,And far too terrible for rnerc complaint,That all things slip from us and pass away,And that my ego, bound by no outward f1y1ss -Once a small child's beiore it becanre rnine -Should now be strange to me, l ike a .strange dog.

By separating time from the outer world ofobjective reality, the inner world of thc subject istransformed into a sinister, inexplicable flux andacquires - paradoxically, as it nray ceern - astatic character.

On literature this tendency towards disintegra-tion, of course, wil l have an even greater impactthan on philosophy. When tirne is isolated in thisway, the artist 's world disintegrates into a multi-plicity of partial worlds. The static view of theworld, now combined with diminished objectrv-ity, here rules unchallenged. The world of man -the only subject rnatter of l i terature - is shatteredif a single component is removed. I have .shown

;

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the consequences of isolating time and reducing itto a subjective category. But time is by no meansthe only component whose removal can lead tosuch disintegration. Here, again, Hofmannsthalanticipated later developments. His imaginary"Lord Chandos" reflects: "l have lost the abil ity toconcentrale my thoughts or set them out coher-ently." The result is a condition of apathy, punctu-ated by manic fits. The development towards adefinitely pathological protest is here anticipated -

admittedly in glamorous, romantic gurse. But it isthe same disintegration that is at work.

Previous reaiistic l i terature, however violentits crit icism of reality, had always assumed theunity of the world it described and seen it as a l iv-ing whole inseparable from nran himself. But thenrajor realists of our tinre deliberately introducce lenlents of disintegration into their work - forinstance, the subjectivizing of t ime - and usethem to portray the contemporary world moreexactly. In this way, the once natural unitybecomes a conscious, constructed unity (I haveshown elsewhere that the device of the two tem-poral planes in Thomas Mann's Doctor Fau.gtusserves to cmphasize its historicity). But in mod-emist l i terature the disintegration of the worJd ofman - and consequently the disintegration ofpersonal i ty - co inc ides wi th the ideologicalintention. Thus angst, this basic modern experi-ence, this by-product of Geworfenheit, has itsentotional origin in the experience of a disinte-grating society. But it attains its effects by evok-ing the disintegration of the world of man.

T\complete our examination of rnodemist lit-erature\we nrust consider for a moment the ques-t ion ofwbich

Allegory is that aesthetic genreitself .,aar e.xcellence to a description

of rnan's \ l ienat ion f ront object ive real i ty .Allegory is blematic genre because it rejectsthat assumpti\n of an inrmanent nreaning tohuuran existenc\ which - however unconscious,however combinh{ with religious concepts of

basis of traditional art.'l'hus in rnedieval art rle observe a new secularity

( in spite of the continue of religious subjects)rriuniphing more and more, from the time ofGiotto, over the allegorizing of an earlier period.

Certain reservations should be made at thlspoint. First, we must distinguish between literature

equivalent in l i terature; it exists only in a figurativesense, ;r[d then only as a secondary conponenl.Allegori{al art of the quality of Byzantine mosaicis only\alely possible in l i terature. Secondly, wenrust befu\in mind in examining allegory - and

and the visual arts. In the latter, the linutations ofallegory can be the more easily overcome in thattranscendental, allegorical subjects can be clothedin an aesthetic immanence (even if of a tnerely dec-orative kind) and the rift in reality in some sense beeliminated - v7e h2vg only to think of Byzantinemosaic art. This decorative element has no real

towards i (as in Byzantine art or Giotto),or is i t the t precisely of a reject ion of thesetendencies?

Allegory, in st l i terature. is clearlv ofthe latter kind. Tr implies here, rnoreor less consciously, negation of any meaning

or the l ife o{- nran, Weimmanent in thehave already ex

historical di\ t inct ion: does the concept oftranscen-dence in qudlt ion contain within i tself tendencies

basis of this view andunder ly ing ideologicalstylistic conse(luences.

of one of the finestism - to Wal terination ol' allegory

To conclude our analy s, and to establ ish theallegorical chuacter of i s t l i te re tu re , Imust refer aeain to thetheoret ic ians of modBenjanrin. Benjamin's ex

NF' /,1-{frl-

---i-.*_

$IKt L

ff

was a product of his rese rches into Gcrmantsaroque drarna. Benjantin his analys is of

occasron for aics of allegory.

these relatively rninor playsgeneral discussion of theHe was asking, in effect, why is that transcen-dence, which is the essencebut destroy aesthetics itself.

legory, cannot

Benjamin gives a very conterniprary tlelinirionof allegory. He does not labor th{analogies be-tween modern art and the Baroque (\cb analogiesare tenuous at best, and were ntuch \r,erdone bythe fashionable crit icism of the tirne)),,Rather, heuses the Baroque drarna to criticize n\deniisnr,imputing the characteristics of the latter t\ thc for-rner. In so doing, Benjamin became the fi\t criticto at tcrnpt a phi losophical analys is of the ae\rher icparadox undcrlying modernist art. He u,ntcsi,

In Allegory, the facies hippocraticaol' hisrory k{ksto the observer like a petrified primeval landscap\.

I - U K A C S I T H E I D E O L O G Y O F M O D E R N I S M r 2 z g

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.r/ E Beyond Good atd Eoil

./' 5What provokcs us to look at all philosophers with a mixture ofdistrust and contempt is not thet wr re rhrrys uncovering horguileless thcy are-how often and ersily thcy losc thcir gra$p o,their way, il short how childish rnd childlile rhey arc. It is rethcrthet they rm not honest enough, hwever toud and virtuous arrcket they dl make es soon &s thc problern of truthfulness istouched upon, qyen from afar. For they ect rs ifthcy hed discovcredand acquircd what are rctually their opinious through thc indepen-dcnt unrawlling of a cnld, purq divincly unhampercd dialcctic{whcrcas mystics of evcry order, who are more honest, and morefmlish, speak of inspiration'); trasically, honever, they are usingreasonE sought rfrer the fect to dcfcnd e preexisting tcnct, e suddenidea a'bninsrorm', or, in most ctseq r rarefied and abstract versionof their heart's desire. They are all of thcm advocxte$ who refusethc narng that is in mort cascs rrily spokcsmcn for their prejudiccqwhich thcy dub 'truths'; and they rne ocry far from heving aconscicncv breve cnough to Gln up to it, very far frum having thegood taste to mnoun(r it brrvely, whether lo rvtrn a foc or a friend,or simply from high spirits and self-mockery. We have to smilc atthe spectecle of old Kant's hypocrisy,* es rigid as it is chastg as helures u-s onro the dirlectical bactroads that lead (or better, mislced)us to his 'categorical imperative',* firr we are frstidious and takcno smdl ilnurcmcnt in monitsring the subtle *-iles of old mordistsand moral prcachcrs. Or take that hocus-pocus of mathematicalform in which Spinoza armoured and disguiscd his philosophy('the lor.e of ils wisdorn'* ultirnately; if wc interpret the wordcorrecdy u{fairly), to intimidate et thc ourset any brave asseilanrwho might darc to throw a ghnce er this invinciHe virgin endPallas Athrna-hcn+, this sickly hermit's masqucndc bctrals hisown timidity end rssailabiliry!

6",

{ Little by lirtle I came to undcrstand what eveTy grear philosophyto date ha"s been: the personel confession of its ruthor. a kind ofunintcndcd and unwining memoir; and similerly, that the moral(or immoral) aims in evcrl philosophv crrnstituted thc actual scedfrom which the ntole plant invariably grc'r Whenever expleining

lus

On thc Prcludics of Philosophns 9

how a philosopher's most far-fctched mctaphysical propositionshevc come about, in fact, one always does well (and wiscly) to ask6ret 'What moreliry is it (is Ac) aiming rt?' Thus I do not believethat an 'instinct for Lnowledge' is thc fether of philosophy butrathcr that herc rs clsevhcre a diffcrcnt instinct has mercly medeusc of hnowlcdge (and kNOwledgc!)r as its tool. For anyone whoscrutinizes the b*sic human instincts to determine horv influentialthey heve bcen as inspinng spirits (or dcmons rnd goblins) will findthet all the instincts have practised phiftnophS rnd that erch oneof thcrn would like only too well to rcprc$ent itsclJ'a.s the ultimateaim <rf cxisterce and as the legitimete nastct of all othcr instincts.

I Fior wery instinct is rynannical; and as scl secks to philosophize.Admittcdly things may be differcnt ('bcttcr', if you likc) with

schotarg tbe truly scientific people; tL"y -ay really have *methinglil,e an instinct for knowlcdgq some smdl independent cloclcworlwhich, when properly wound up, works rwey bravcly pithout ncccs-sarily inrnolving all the scholer's other instinctt. That is why ascholsr's real'interests' generelly lie elsewhere entirely in his familys,ry, or in the ecquisition of wealth, or in politics; indeed it is almosta matter of indifIerencc whether his little machine is located in thisbranch of sciencc or thet, or whcthcr the 'promising' young n'ortcrturns out to be a good phitologirt or a mushroom exp€rt or achemist: what he cvcnrually becnrncs docs not distingaith him.About the philosophcr, conversely, there is ebeolutcly nothing thatis impersonal; and it is abot'e ell his rnorality ntrich proves decidcdlyend dccisively vho Ae r's-that is, in what hierarchry the innermostdrives of his nature are arranged.

7

Hor rnalicious philosophers can bc! I Lnoq of nothing more ven-omous then the jolc that Epicuruf made at the expense of Plrto

end the Pletonists: he called thcm 'Don1'siokolalcs'. Literally andprimarily, this means '{ltttercrs of Dionysus', that rq the ryrant's

appcndaps and toadies; but it alsn sugg€sts: 'They are r'll actors,thctc is notiing gcnuine about them' (for 'Dionysiololex' vas a

populer term for rn actor). And the laner meaning conttins the

real melice that Epicurus fircd off at Plrto: hc was annoyed b1'

the mannered grandiosiry thc theatricality that Plato and his pupils

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14 Eqowl Good ad Etil

philosophy' exercised throughout Euwrpc (one understands, I hope,why it dcucn'es quotetion marksl), lct no one doubt that a ccrteinxirtrc dmmitirrr hed N part in it: .midgt the noblc meu of leisurgthe moralists, m-vstics, arti$ts, the pcrtiel Christianq end politicalobccurantists of every nation, people nrcrc delighted thet Germrnphilmophy offered an antidote to the rtill overponering scnsuelismpouring into this ocntury from the prer"ious onq in short: 'scnsus

assoupire'. . .

As regards matcrielistic atomisn4' hardly anything has ever bccnso well refuted; in all Europc there is probobly no scholar sounschmlcd as to went to credit it with scrious meaning rprrt frome handy cvcrydry uscfulness (thet ii! as a stylistic abbrevietion).This we owc primarily to the Rrlc Boscovich,'who rlong with thcPole C.opcrnicuS achieved the greatest victory yet in opposingthe appcarrntr of thingt. For whilc Copernicus convinccd us tobclicve contrary to all our scnses that the earth does rol stend still,Boscn'ich taught us to rcnounce thc last thing thrt 'still stood'about the earth, the belicf in 'substancc', in 'mattct', in thc bit ofearth, tbe particlq the rtom: no one on certh hes ever won a greatertriumph over thc senses.

J--- Hrvc"er, we mu$t Bo even further and dechre wer, e merciles.swrr unhr the death ag:ainst thc 'atomistic nsed' thet ixmtinues tolive e dengrrous aftcrlife in plecrs where no one susp€cts it (asdocs tht: morr famous 'metaphysirzl noed').* The first step mustbe ro Lill offthet othcr rnd more ominous Ntomism thu Christianityuught best end longest: tlr atontisn of thc soal.If pu allow mg Iwould use this phrase to describe thc belief thet holds thc soul tobc something ineredicahle, eternel, indivisiblg a monad, an atom:scicnce must srst out /ru bclief! And confidentirllS we do not nccdto gct rid of 'thc soul' itsclf nor do without one of our oldest, mostvencrable h1'pothcscs, which the b'ungling naturalists tend to do,losing 'the soul' ui sq)n s thcy've touc'hed on it. But thc wey Ltclear for new and rc{ned versions of thc hypothesis atxrut thc soul;in futurc, concepLs such as the 'morul soul' and the 'soirl es themultiplicity of the subiect' and thc 'soul as the social construct ofdrivcs and cmotions' will cleim their rightful place in sciencr, B1'

(k thc kejtdicct of Philosophcrs ts

putting an end to the superstitions that proliferetcd with nearlynopicel rbundence around the idea of the vrul, the up psychologisthes of cours€ seerned to crst himself into r new desoletion rnd enew distrust-it may bc that thc old pcychologists hrd it caeier;mcrricr-but he knows thet he is thercbv dso condcmned to

I

Irnaartin* rnd-who knors?-pcrhrys to fiading.-

I 3

Physiologists should thinl nrice bcfore dcciding rher an organicbcing's primary instincr is the instinct for self-paescrrntion. A livingbcing wants abovc all elsc to rcleasc its strength; life itself is thewill to potrer, and sclf-prcscrvation is only one of its indirccr rndmo$t fhquent conseqtntce;

Herc as everywtrcrq in short, wt must bcwerc of stprrfluous tela-logical principles! And this is what thc instinct for selFpreservetionis (which we owe to the incoruistcncy of Spinoze).r Such arcthc dictrtes of our methd, which in esscnce demrnds rhat wc bcfrugel with our principlcs.

r+It norp may be dewning on 6ve or sir thinlcrs that evcn physics isonly a way of interpreting or rrranging the world (if I may ssy so:according to us!) tnd not r way of explaining the world, But in sofar as it relies on our belicf in the senses, physics is tel,cn for morcthan that, and shall long continue to be teken ftrr more, for anerplenetion. Our cyes rnd fingers speal for it, rppeerance andpolprbility spcet for ir to an era with cssentidly ptebeien tastesthis is enchenting, pcrsuesive, convinci4l, for ir instinctivcly followsthc cenonized truth of ever-grpular scnsudism. Whet ir cleer, whrt'clarifies'? First, wlutevcr eilr be scen and ouchcd-you heve totake every prcblem il leest that fer. Convetscly, the megic of thePlatonic mcthod consisted preciscly in its resistarce ro scnsurliq;for this wr.s rn a*tonatit method, practiscd by people *'ho mayhave enjopd s€nses even strongpr rnd more chmoruus than thnseof our c'ontemporan6 btrt who sought r higher triumph by mes-tering them, by toesing over this colourful confusion of thc scnscs(the rabble of the senseq es Plato called it) the pde, rcld, grey netsof concepts. Thcrc was a kind of mjoymcnt in Plato's manner of

tv1

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18 Beyotd Good aad Eoil

approximately the same Pattem, ancicnt stomirm lookcd for thatparticlc of meftcr, the rtom, to ccrmplement thc effective 'energy'

thet works from out of it; more rigorous minds findl.v leerned to

do without this 'littlc bit of certh' end perhape rcme dry logicienswill cven get uscd to doing without thet little'thcre' (into which

the honest old 'I' hrs eveporeted).

T 8

Truly a theory is charming not lc.st becausc it is rdutable: thet is

iust what atrtracts the bctter minds to it. lt would seem ttrat the

theory of 'free will', which has been refuted a hundred rimcs over,wcs its endurrnct to this charm done--someone is elways comingalong and fecling stlong cnough to refute it.

r9

Philosophers tcnd to speak about thc will as if everyone in thcwodd tncw all ebout it; Schopenheucr ev€n suggestcd thrt the villwrs the only thing we ectuelly do knonr, knon'through and througtr,knm without rdditions or subtractions But I continue to thinkthat even in this crse Schopcnheuer wrs only doing whet philo-sophcrs simpb tcnd to do: approprieting end er€S€mting t conmortpcjadicc, As I see it, thc rct of willing is abort ell somethingcofltfilicotcd, something that has unity only as e word*-cnd thirc\rmrnon preiudiw of using only onc word has ovcrridden thcphilosophers'caution (which waa n€vcr all thet great anywry)' S<llct us be more ceutious for one, lcr us be 'unphilosophicrl', I*tus sey that in cvery act of wilting thcre is first of all a mukiplicityof fcelingq namely the fecling of the condition wc crc mowng awa1fmm end the feeling of the condition wc ert moving tooatds; thefe*ling of this 'awey' md.this 'tonrds'; and thcn a concomitantfccling in the muscles thst, without our rctually moving'trms sndlcgs', cnmcs into play out of r kind of hrbiq whenever we 'will'.

Socond, iust as rve must reognize fceling and indeed marry kindsof feeling, as an ingredient of the will, so must nG likewise reoognizethinking: in cver,v act of will therc is a commanding thought, rndlt'c must not deceive ourselves that this thought cen bc FeP$atedoff from 'willingi, as if we would then have erry will lcft over!Third, the will is not merely a complcx of feclings and thoughts,

Cr, '

Oa tlu prcjudica of philasoplurs 19

it is above ill tn cmotion, and in fect the anotiott of cornrnend.what is called 'freedom of thc will' is essentially the ernotion ofsuperiority felt ttrands the one who rnust obey: ,I anr frrc, .,he',must obey.' This onsciousness lies in evcry will, rs does rlso atensc elcrtn$q a direct gazr: concentrated on une thing alonc, anunconditional assessmcnt thrt 'n<n* we must have this end nothingels€', ln inncr certeinty thet obodicnce will follog end cvcrythingelse thrt goes along with the condition of giving co*-"ndr. A[rcrson who oills: this person is commanding a Something inhimself that obeys, or that he thinls is obcying.

But let us now considcr the strangest thing about the will, aboutthis mulriferious thing that the common peoplc <:r[ by one wordrlone. ln rny given qlse, $r both command aad obcy, rnd whenwc obcy nc kntny the fcclings of <nercion, pneesurc! oppression,resistance, and agiution thrt begin immediately aftcr thc rct ofwill. On the othcr hand, we rre in thc hlbit of ignoring or (n/cr_looking this dirision by means of the synthctic concept ,I'. Thuqe rryholc series of erroncous conclusions and thereforr of frtscr.s.s{cs$nents of the will itsclf hes been rppended to willing in sucha way thet the person wh<l wills noq. b€lieves with complete faiththat willing is cnough for action. Because in the vast maiority ofcascq willing has only occurrtd when there is also tha crluctationthat thc cfTcct of the command,-thrt is obcdience, action-willfollow, this i'prcrtroa has been translated into the feeling that thereis t ncccsscry efcct; suffroe it to say, the person wiiling thinks withsomc degrce of crnainty that will and arrion lrc someho* onc: hcattributes his succcss in carrying our his willing to the wilt itselfand in this way enjoys an increase in that fecling of porver thataccompenies rny kind of succrcss. ,Freedom of thc will'-thar isthc w<rnl frn that comptex plcrrsurable condition experienccd by thepcrson willing nho comrnands end simultaneously identifies himsclfwith the onc who executes the comman&-as such he can sherc inenjoying a triumph orer rcsistanct, whilc scrretly iudging that itwss actudl-v his will thrt or.erceme thet resistancc. Thus the personwilling sdds to his plcasurable feeling rs commandsr thc pleasureblefeelings of the succcrlsful crecuting instrument, the .sen'iceable'undcrwill' or under-soul (our hdy after rtl is nothing but a socielstructurc of manl' souls). tr'e;ftt c'eil moi;* whrt is occurring hcrcoccurs in evcry r.ell-structurcd happy urmmunit5i where the ruting

l '1 D

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Bcyoad Good and EoiI

class idcntifies with the sucoesses of the community rs a whole' As

we have said, every act of willing is simply a mrtt€f, of ommrnding

and obeying; bascd on e social structurc of marry 'souls'; fur rhis

ro"on "

pnli.*,rph"r should chim the right to comprehend willing

from witirin thc sphcrc of ethics: ethicq thet iq understood as the

thoory of hicrarchical relationships :unong which rhc phenomcnon'lifc' hes its origins.

zo

Thar individuel philosophicrt conclpts lrc not somcthing isolated,

something unto ihemsclveq but rather grow up in referenoc a1d

reLrtcdness to on€ another; that howevcr zuddcnly and erbitnrily

thcy scem to emcrgc in the history of thought, they are as much e

prt of onc syst€m as are thc brsnchcf of thuna on on€ continent:

this is nt*ed.d not lerst hy the rury the mcnt disparate phiknophers

invariably fill out one particular basic schema of possltla philo-

sophics. Und"r $orne unscen spcll they always run around the same

orLir hwener indepndent they mey fctl, one from thc othcr' with

their will to criticlsm or to system, something in thcm is lcading

thein, driving thcrn all to follow onc rnother in a crcrtain order-

an inborn raxonomy and alfnity- of concepti. li truth their thinking

is much less an act of discovery than en act of rccogrrizing anew'

remcmbering ene\F, a rcturn back homc to a distant' ancient uni-

vcrsal economy of thc soul from out of which thosc concepts

initially grcw: philosophizing is thus a kind of etavism of the highcst

order. -This

easily explains the srengc family rescmblanc-c of ell

Indirn, Greek, and Crcrmen philosophizing' Wherever linguistic

etfinity, above ell, is prrsent, cvcrything n€cessary for an analogous

<lcvelofmcnt and scquence of philomphical systems will inevitatrly

be on hend from the beginning, thrnks to the shererl philos0phy

of granrmar (l mean thanlc to bcing unconsciously' ruled and

guidcd by similar Slsmmltiqrl functions), iust as the way to trrtlin

itrrcr possitrilities for intcrpreting the world will tcern o be bloclcd.philosophers from thc ural-Altaic linguistic zone (rvhere the

*rr..pi of the subicct is least developcd) n"ill most probably lu*

diffcrentty .into thc world' and will be found on othcr paths than

Indo.Gcrmrns or Muslims: and in the last anal.rsis, the spell of

On thc Prejudic* of Philosophcts zr

certain grammeticel funcrions is the spll of physiological velueludgcrncnts and conditions of nce.

This by way of a rciection of [-ocke's superficiality* cnncerningthe origin of ideas.

2 l

Thc causa snrr is the best internd qrntradiction cver deviscd, akind of logi€l freak or outrege: but beceuse of man's exccssivepride wc have <pme to bc deeply and tcrribly cntangled with thisparticular nonsense. Thc yearning for 'fi'eedom of the rrill' in thesuperlative rnctaphysicel sense that unfortunatcly still prereils inthe minds of the half+duceted, thc yrarning to bear complcte rndfinal responsibility for one's owl rcrions and to rclieve Gtxl, theworld, onc's ancestors, coincidencg society from it*this is rcallynothing lcss then bcing that samc rcns4 szi and, with a daringgretter than Milnchhrusen'q+ drrgging yourself by your hair outof thc swarnp of nothingncss and into existcnce, Noq if someonecan sce through the cloddish simplicit;- of rhis fsmous urncepr.frecwill' and eliminatc it from his mind, I would then ash him to takchis 'cnlightenmcnt' a step further and likcwise eliminete from hishczd the opplsite of the non-concept.free will': I mean the.unfreewill' which srnounts to e misuse of cause end effcct. One shouldnot mslcc the mistake of cowctizittg ,ctruse' rnd .effect' es dothe naturel scientists (and whocr.cr else today naturaliz€$ in theirthinling . . .), in conformiry with the prcvalent mechrnistic ftnlish-ness that pushcs and tugs et thc caus€ until it 'has Nn effcct'; .clus€'

and'eftbct'should tc used only as p\re co?tccftsa es c{rnv€ntion$lfictions for the pur1rocc of description or communicztion, andnot for erphnation. In the 'in itsclf' thcre is nothing of 'ceusal

associations', of 'nrcessity', of 'palchological constreint'; the effectdocs na, follow 'upon the cause', no 'lawt got'erns ft. We done arcthc ones who have inverrtcd causeq succesrion, rcciprocity, rcla-tivity, coen:iotr, numb€r, law, freedorn, reitson, purp(l6e; and if rveproiect, if wc mix this n'orld of signs into things as if it wer$ an'in its€lf', wc act onco mor€ as wc have ahmys donq thrt is,mythologicell.y. The'unfrce nill' is mlrhology: in rcal life it is onlya matter of $rong rnd neat wills,

Whencvcr a thinLcr sniffs out cnercion, nccssity, obligation,

talr l l

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Ecyond Good atd Eoil

pressure, constraint in rny 'caus'l connection' or 'psychologicel

neassity', it is almoet elways I symptom of where his own inrd-

;urcy i# . r""r this perticulri w"v is. rcvcaling--+hc petson is

;;;ii"g himself. And ii I heve obscrved correctly' the 'constraint

of the rill' is dweys concsived as I prouem from two completely

"pp.tl," "".apoins, but always in a profoundly pcrsonal w?yt-th."

olr" groop will not hear of rclinqubhing their 'responsibility" their

UUi"? in ihr.srlacs,thcir peruonel right to torke tlub crcdit (thc vain

raccs are of this type); con"crselS the othcr group I*9 lo be

rerft"nsibl" for nott inl piltv* of nothing, and out of their inner

seli+nternp they ycern to curt olf that orn sclves onc \r'ay of

anothcr. Whcn this latter group writes books nowadayq they tend

to tale up thc causc of criminals; a sort of rridistic oomprssion

i. tfr.it nicest disguisc. And indeed, it is surprising horv much

pretticr the fatelism oi the wcet-witled <rn lool when it presents

i*lf ",

'la religion de la souflrance humaine';r that is what it

meen' by. .good tesre,.

( A

If you'll forgivc m€t en old philologirt who crn't givc up the

wi"lolr,ess oi pointing out examples of bad interprctctive Practilt'

the'lawfulness of naturc'that 1ou physicise speal about so proudl5

as if . . .----this only exists by grrcc of lour interpreutiong your

bad 'philology'; it is nor a facturl mafter' not a'text', but rathet no

m,rrc th"n -a

neive humanitarirn concocnon, a contortion of

meaning that allows w)u to suco:ed in accommodeting thc demt>

cratic iistincts of the modern soul! 'Equality txfore the lew- is

erery*hcr.-nature is no differcnt and no bctter thrn *'c llt'-

this amiable ulterior thought onoe eg:rin ma.sls the plcbcian's enmitl'

umrrds everything privilepd and autocretic, as well as e new and

morc subtle atheism. 'Ni dieu, ni mritrc'+-that's w'hrt you folks

o,"n,, ,oo.$1' longl i rrcthelawofn4turcl ' Isn' t thatr ight lButas

1 I say, this is intcrpretrtion, not text; end somEone could comc along

i *it['thc oppoeitc intention rnd interpreEtivc skill whq loolciag at

the very rEme narune and rcfcrring to the vcr-v samc phenomcnr'

would reed out of it thc ruthlcssly tyrannir:l and umelanting

esscrtion of pouer claiml Such rn interpreter would put to you

thcunir.ernalityandunconditionalitvinall.willtoporrcr'insuch

An ilu prcfuica of phitosophns zja wey that virtudly cvcry ruord, cven the wond .tryrnry-', wouldultimetely epp€ar useless or et leesr only as a modiffig, tni,igrti"Smetlphor-rs too humrn. yct this philosopher, too, *oUa *a d

, meking the 1me cleims for his world es you others do f"r Frurs,

I lmcly that ia ciounsc is ,necessrry'rnd .predictrble', ror U"ou*I laws are rt worh in it, but rether be€usc the rrws ere abmlutery\ Iachin1, and in eyery moment Eyery power drrws its 6nal *nr*quencc. And given that he too is iust interpreting<nd you'll beeager to raise that objection, won't youl_then, all the bctter.

/^'t

\ 2 3 1

I Until -l*r, "l! grychology has Yen brought to I stop by moreli Rrciudices and.fi;ers: it has not dared to plumb these depthe. If weJ may tate previous writing ff a symptorn of whrt has also becn

suppresscd, then no one in his thoughts has cven brushed thesedepth.s rs I hevc, es r morphology and ewlattoaary thcoly of ttunitl to poo*. Thc force of moral preiudices has reached'i"t intothe most spirituel world, a world epperrntly* cold end withoutpremiss-and it has obviously had r harmful, inhibiting blinding,distorting effect. A red phyrsio-psychol.gy must strugglc with thiunconscious resistanccs in thc heert of the reseercher, the .heart'is working egainst it; a conrcienc.e that is still strong and heartywill bc disuessed and anno!.ed cven by a theory of ttre recipranlconditionality of 'gotd' end .bed' instincts, which seems to be ekind of subtle immorality--and er.en morc by a theory of thcderimdon of all good drives fruru bed oncs But grantcd that eporson tekes the c.motions of hatrcd, env1,, greed, poncr hunger asconditions for living, crucial and fundamcntd ro the universalcc..'nom), of life and therrfirre in need of intcnsi$ing if life is to beintensified, he is also a p€r'on who suffers from such an orientati<lnin iudgement as if he were seasick. And yet even this hyprthesis isby no means the surngcst or most painful one in this cnormous,virtually new realm of dangcrous insightr--end in truth therc srea hundred gnod rcasons for cve4nne ro stay away from it if he_caa! on thc other hend, oncc your ship hes stra-r'c<J ont this coursc:rvell then! AU right! Grit y.our tccrh bravely-! Opcn your eycs! Kccpyour hantl at the helm!-we ere going to be ravellng beym'drnorality, rnd by daring to trrrel thcre wc may in th. pro"-ss iUn.

1a

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24 BeYotd Good and Eail

or crush whltever remmnt of morelity wc- lravc left--but what do

!r, matrcr! Ncver yer lr*'; irtr;**ia "r insight been opencd to

bold travellcrs and "4"**'"*;

and the peychologist who makcs

this kind of 'secrifice' (it'tt;;; the sacifzn,full'intclktto', qurte

thc contrary!) ,nay dtrnln;fi*tt thet isychologl' be reoognizcd

once ag:ein es the quJn-"? ir'" rienccs' which thc othct sciencrs

cxisr to senre and mticiprtc. For psychology has oncc agein bccorne

\ the way to bgsic issues'

SECTION TWO

THE FREE SPIRIT

2+() saacta simplicLrcst; How strangely simplified and false rrc pcople'slivcs! Once re hrvc focusd our eycs on this wonder, thcre is nocnd to the wondermcnt! Sec how we havc madc everything aroundus bright and free and ligtrt and simple! Weren't we clever to Fv€our s€nses frce accrss to evcrything superficial, to gir.c our mindsa divine craving for hcadlong leaps end fallacicsl Hor. we hrvemanaged from thc beginning to cling to our ignorancq in orderto enioy a life of almost inconceirnablc freedom, thoughtlessncsqcarelersnesq heertinesq chcetfulness-to cnjoy life! And only uponthis foundation of ignorrncq now as 6rm an granitc, could oursciclce be establishcd, and our will to knowlodge onlv upon thefoundation of r much more Srowerful will, the will to no Lnowledggto uncertainty,* to unrruth-not rs the opposite of the former will,but rathcr<s ius refinement! For cven if hngugc, in this case asin others, cannot get pest its ovn unwieldincss and continues tospezh of oppositions wbcre thcre rre really only dcgrees and mrnyfinc differcnccs of gradc; even if wc the knowing also find thcvords in our mouths twisted by the ingrained moral hypourisy thatis now part of our insupcrable 'flcsh encl blood', non' and thcrr weundersund n'hat has happened, and laugh rt how even thc verybest science would Leep us trappcd in this simplifcd, thoroughlyartificial, neldy corcocted, neatly falsified norld, htnr the bestsciencc loves crror whether it will or not, berzuse scicnce, bcingrlive,-loves life!

25

Aftcr such a light-heancd inroduction, it is time to ettend to aserious word, onc that is rddrs.sed rc the most serious of people.Bc on guard, all you philosophers r.nd lovcrs of krunvledgc, end

(1a' I . /

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tJ

3+ BeYond Good and Eail

@\,/

No matter what philosophical standpoint we may take these days,

looking out from any position, the erroteousness of the world we

think we are living in is the most certain and eoncrete thing our

eyes can fasten on: we find a host of reasons for it, reasons that

migtrt tempt us to speculate about a deceptive principle in the'nature of things'. But anyone who would try to claim that the falsity

of the world is due to our thought process' to our 'intellect' (an

honourable way out, taken by ever-\'conscious or unconscious adao-

catus dei),'anyone who takes this world with all its space' time,

form, movement, to be falsely inferred, would at the very least have

good reason to end by distrusting the thought process itself-for

wouldn't this thought process have made us the victims of the

greatest hoax everl And what grnrantee would we have that it

wouldn't go on doing what it has always done? In all seriousness,

there is something touching and awe-inspiring in the innocence of

thinkers that allows them even nowadays to request iozest answers

from their consciousness: about whether it is 'substantial', for

example, or why it insists on keeping the outsidc world at such a

distance, and all sorts of other questions of that kind. The faith in'immediate certainties' is morolly naive, and does honour to us

philosophers, but-we are not supposed to be 'only moral' after

"ttt lr, *y but moral terms, our faith in immediate certainties is

stupid, and does us no great honour! Maybe it is true that in

bourgeois life an ever-ready distrust is taken as a sign of'bad

character' and therefore classified as imprudence: here where we

are, beyond the bourgeois world and its Yes's and No's-what is

there to keep us from being imprudent and saying that the philo-

sopher has a veritable right to his 'bad character', as the creature

who so far has always been most made a fool of on earth-these

days he has a duty to be distrustful, to squint out as maliciously as

he can from the bottom of every abyss of doubt.

Please forgive me for the ioking tone of this sad caricature: for

a while now; I m1''self have learned to think differently about

deceiving and being deceived, learned to assess them differently' so

I am always r€ady to take a few pokes at the philosophers' blind

frugr rrbeing deceived. Why zori It is nothing but a moral prejudice

to consider truth more valuable than appearance; it is, in fact, the

The Free Spirit

most poorly proven assumption in the world. We should admit atleast this much: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of

Paspectivist assessments and appearances; and if one wanted to doanay with the 'apparent world' entirely, as some valiantly enthusi-astic and foolish philosophers want to do, well then, assuming thatPeople like you could do that-then at the very least there wouldbe nothing left of your 'truth', either! Really, why should we befotced to assume that there is an essential difference between 'true'

and 'false' in the first place? Isn't it enough to aszume that thereare degrees of apparency and, so to speak, lighter and darkerslhdows and hues of appearance--different aaleurs,* to use thelanguage of painters? Why should the world that is relevont t0 usnot be a fiction? And if someone asks, 'But mustn't a fiction havean author?' shouldn't we answer him bluntly, 'Why?' Mustn't this'mustn't' be part of the fiction, toq perhapsl Aren't we allowed tbbe a little bit ironig not only about predicates and objects, but also

tbour!-ggltgg1s? Shouldn't the philosopher be able to rise above itaith in grammar? My respects to Bovernesses, but isn't it about

firne that philosophers renounced the religion of governesses?

.35O Voltaire! O humanity! O hogwash! 'Truth' and the search fortruth are no trivial matter; and if a person goes about searching intoo hurnan a fashion ('il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien'),*I'llbet he won't find anything!

36Asuming that nothing real is 'given' to us apart from our worldofdesires and passions, assuming that we cannot ascend or descendto any 'reality' other than the reality of our instincts (for thinkingis merely an interrelation of these instincts, one to the other), maywe not be allowed to perform an experiment and ask whetherthis 'given' also provides a sfficient explanation for the so-calledrncchanistic (or 'material') world? I do not mean the material worldas a delusion, as'appearanc€' or'representation' (in the Berkeleianor Schopenhauerian sense), but rather as a world with the samelevel of reality that our emotion has-that is, as a more rudimentaryform of the world of emotions, holding everything in a powerful

\'1 4

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36 Beyond Good and Epil

unity, all the potentid of the organic process to develop and differ-

entiate (and spoil and weaken, toq ofcourse), as a kind ofinstinctuallife in which all the organic functions (self-regulation, adaptation,

alimentation, elimination, metabolism) are synthetically linked to

ens 3nq1hs1-as a Prelin;nary forn of life?In the end, we are not only allowed to perform such an experi-

ment, w€ are comrnanded to do so by the conscience of our method.We must not assume that there are several sorts of causality untilwe have tested the possibility that one elone will suffice, tested it

to its furthest limits (to the point of nonsense, if you'll allow me to

say so). We cannot evade this morality of method today: it follows'by definition', as a mathematician would say. The question isultimately whether we really recognize that the will can elfect things,whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do (and to

believe in this is basically to believe in causality itsel$, we zzslexperiment to test hypothetically whether the causality of the will

is the only causaliry. A 'will' can have an effect only upon another'will', of course, and not upon 'matter' (not upon 'nerves', forexample): one must dare to hypothesize, in short, that wherever'effects' are identified, a will is having an effect upon another will-and that all mechanical events, in so far as an energy is active inthem, are really the energy of the will, the effect of the will.

Assuming, finally, that we could explain our entire instinctuallife as the development and differentiation of one basic form of the

will (namely the will to power, as n/ tenet would have it); assumingthat one could derive all organic functions from this will to power

and also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation andalimentation (it is all one problem), then we would have won theright to designate a// effective energy unequivocally rsi the Dill topooer. The world as it is seen from the inside, the world definedand described by its 'intelligible shx1xs1s1'**would be simply 'will

to power' and that alone.-

37'What's thatl But doesn't that mean, to speak in the vernacular,that God's been disproved, but not the devil?' On the contrary! Onthe contrary, my friends! And who the devil's forcing you to speakin the vernacular!-

rr5

-ltI

The Free Spirit

38Take what has happened recently, in the full light of our modernage, with the French Revolution, that gruesome and (judged fromclose up) superfluous farce: its noble and inspired spectatorsthroughout Europe have been proiecting their own rebellious andenthusiastic feelings onto it from afar for so long and with suchpassion that the text has disappearcd underneath the interpretation. Anoble posterity might one day misunderstand all of past history ina similar way, and only in so doing make the sight of it bearable.

Or rather: hasn't this already happened? Haven't we ourselvesbeen this 'noble posterity'? And since we now recognize lvhat wehave been doing can't we--stop it?

39No one will very easily hold a doctrine to be true merely becauseit makes us happy or virtuous, with the possible exception of thosedear'idealists' who rhapsodize about goodness, truth, beauty, andlet all sorts of eye-catching, obvious, and good-natured wishfulthoughts swim around together in their pond. Happiness and virtuecannot be used as arguments. But we like to forget, even thethoughtful spirits among us, that whatever makes us unhappy orevil can no more be used as a counter-argument. Something mightbe true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highestdegree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existencethat to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction.The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by howmuch 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely to what extenthe needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.But there can be no doubt that wicked and unhappy people arebetter suited to discover certain parts of the truth and are morelikely to be successfuh not to mention the wicked people who arehappy-a species that the moralists have kept silent about. Perhapsharshness and cunning furnish conditions more favourable for thedevelopment of strong independent spirits and philosophers thando that gentle, refined, accommodating good nature and skill intaking things lightl.'" which we prize in scholars, and with goodreason. Assuming, of course, that we are not restricting the concept

37

l.

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THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE

FNOM

0n Truth and liein an Exha-Moral Sense'

, ON TRUTH AND LIEs-copic-afly focused from all sides on his actionsthoughts.

48and

rn some remote comer of the universe, n"rrj;t:iland glittering in innumerable ,ot", ,yrt"*s, there oncewas a star on which- clever animals invented knowl-edge. That *",,h... h"rghti;;"_or, mendaciousminute of ..world history:,_yet ;nJy'; minute. Afternature had drawn a f* br""fi, tf,.-Jt"igr.rv cold, andthe_ clever animals had to di;:

- -'- "'-'

One might invent such a fable and still not haveill ustra ted iuffi ciently il; ;";;;,1; shadowy andfighty, how aimlesr and arbitr"t, ;h";"_an intellectappears in nature. There have been eterniUes when itdid not exist; and when it is-a"r"^f", "gain,

nothingwill have happened. -ror ttLis i;"id; h", ,o furthermission that^ would l."d l;y;;;;;;;" rife. rt ishuman, rather, ona onty ltr-#;; #i'iroa,r"er, givesij su1h importance, ,, lf th" *"rld;i;o.ted around jt.But if we could communicate with ,1" .;;q;;,'il;rve would learn that jt-foats tl,rorgir-tn" air with thesame self.importance, feeling.wlthi'n *"ff ,fr. ny*gcenter of the world._ There is nothing- in naturc sodespicable or insisnifcant that il;;;?, immecliately

!3 uloy, up ]i\; a bag uy "-rr,gii'i,"",i, of thisporver of knowledg", nnjyrri u.

"u.'.y porter wants anadmirer, the prouiest nur"n;";;;,',# philosopher,thinks that he sees the ;t;,

";'?e i,niuerse tele_

' A fragment published posthumously.

. .I:. tt sTongg that this should be the efiect of the

rnreuect, tor atter all it was given only as an aid to themost unfortunate, most dilcate,

-most evanescent

beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence,from which otherwise, without this gift they would

l?r: ,"*q reason !o fee as quickly is f,essing's son.'rhat h-aughti_ness which goes with knowledge ai'd feel-i1g, which shrouds the iyes and senses oi man in ablinding fog, - therefore deceives him about the value:l_:t:l*..|y "TTng

in- itself the most flatteringevaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal efie,iis dec-eption; but even its most particular efiects havesomething of the same charactei.

The- intellect, as a means for the preservation of theK individual, unfolds its chief po*"rr'in simulation; for

this is the means by which tfre weaker, los ,obrrsi irr-dividuals preserve themselves, since tf,ey

"r" Ju"ia

the chance of waging the stmggle for existence withhltl o,r the fangJ of beasts of""prey. fn man this artor srmulaUon reaches its peak: here deception, flattery,Iying and chearing, ta]ling behind tt"^Uo"t, ffi;,living in bonowed splend-or, being masked, the di!_guise of convention, acting a role"before othe"s andbefore oneself-in short, th"e constant n"tt.rirrg

"LJ;Jthe single lame of vanity is so much the rule"and th;Iaw that almost nothing i, ,nor" incomprehensible thanhow an honest and puie urge for trutli could make its{ppearance."Tong men. They are deeply immersed intuustons and dream images; their eye glides only overthe surface of things oid se"s .fJrms".;

their ieelinqnowhere leads into truth, but contents itself *iah lil;reception of stimuli, f]aying, _as_ it were, a game ofblindman's bufi on tte bactiof things. Mor"oi"r, .*

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& THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE

pennits himself to be lied to at night, his life long,when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries.to prevent this-although men have been said to haveovercome snoring by sheer will power.

What, indeed, does man know of himselfl Can heeven once perceive hjmself completely, laid out as if inan illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep muchthe most from him, even about his body, to spellbindand con$ne him in a proud, deccptive consciousness,far from the coils of the intestines, the quick cunentof the blood sheam, and the involved tremors of thefibers? She threw arvay the key; and woe to the calam-itous curiosity which might peer just once through acrack in tle chamber of consciousness and look down,and sense that man rests upon the merciless, thegreedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indif-ference of his ignoranc*hanging in dreams, as itwere, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whencein all the world comes the urge for truth?

Insofar as the individual wants to preserve himselfagainst other individuals, in a natural state of afiairs heemploys the intellect mostly for simulatjon alone. Butbecause man, out of need and boredom, wants to existsocialln herd-fashion, he requires a peace pact and heendeavors to banish at least the very crudest bellumomnium contru omnesr from his world. This peace pactbrings with it something that looks like tlie first step to-ward the attainment of this enigmatic urge for truth. Fornow that is ffxed which henceforth shall be'truth"; thatis, a regularly valid and obligatory designation of thingsis invented, and this linguistic legislation also furnishes.the ffrst laws of truth: for it is here that the contrastbetween truth and lie ffrst oriqjnates. The liar usesthe valid designations, the word"s, to make the unreal

r "'War of all against all."

ON TRUTH AND LIE 4app€ar as real; he says, for example, "I am rich," whenthe word "poor" would be the correct designation ofhis situation. He abuses the ffxed conventions by arbi-trary changes or even by reversals of the names. Whenhe does this in a self-serving way damaging to others,then society will no longer trust him but exclude him.Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as muchas from being damaged by deception: what they hateat this stage is basically not the, deceptioir but the bad,hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. Ina similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desiresthe agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, buthe is indifferenr to pure knowledge, which'has no con'sequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging anddestructive truths. And, moreover, what about thesecnnyentions of language? Are they really the productsof knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do tl-re desig-nations and the things coincide? Is language theadequate expression of all realities?

Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve thefllusion of possessing a "truth" in the sense iust desig-nated. If he does not wish to be satisffed with truthin the form of a tautology-that is, with empty shells-then he will forever buy illusions for truths. What isa word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds. Butto infer from the nerve stimulus, a cause outside -us,

that is already the result of a false and unjustified appli-cation of the principle of reason. . . . The differentlanguages, set side by side, show that what matterswith words is never the truth, never an adequate ex'pression; else there would not be so many languages.

\The 'thing in itseU" (for that is what pure truth, with-

I out consequences, would be) is quite incomprehensible

I to the creators of language and not at all worth aiming.

I for. One designates only the relations of things to man,

-

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48 THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE

I end to express them one calls on the boldest meta-

I phort. A nerye stimulus, ffrst transposed into an image

| -ffrs-t metaphor. The_ image, in turn, imitated by"a

I sound-second metaphor. . .l,et us still give special consideration to the forma-

tion of concepts. Every word immediately becomes aconc€pt, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as areminder of the unique and wholly individualized orig-inal experience to which it owes its birth, but must ittbe same time fft innumerable, more or less simflarcoses-which means, strictly speaking, never equal-in other wonds, a lot of uniquil case-s. Ilvery *n"eptoriginates thrgugh our equating what is uniqual. lioIeaf ever_wholly equals another, and the concept .Ieaf.

is formed through an arbibary abstraction from theseindividual difrerences, through forgetting the distinc-tions; and now it gives rise to the ldea fhat in naturethere might be something besides the leaves whichwould be '1eaf'-*ome

kind of orjginal form afterwhich all leaves have been woven,

-rnarked, copied,

colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hinds,so that no copy tumed out to be a correct, reliable, andfaithful jryg" of the original {orm. We call a person'l:onest."

lVhy dil he act so honestly todqy? w:e ask.Our answer usually sounds like thii: because of hisbonesty.- Honestyl That is to say again: the leaf is thecause of the leaves. After all, we know nothing of anessence-like quali_ty named 'honesty";

we know onlynumerous individualized, and thus unequal actions,wfjch we equate by omitting the unequal and by thencalling them honest actions. In the end, we distiil from&em a qualitas occulta with the name of .'honesty,,.

. , .What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors,

neton;rms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a^ rurn

ON TRUTH AND LIE

of human relations, which have been enhanced, trans-posed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, andwhich after long use seem firm, canonical, and obUga-tory to a people: truths are illusions about which onehas forgotten that this is what they are; metaphorswhich are worn out and without sensuous power; eoinswhich have lost &eir pictures and now matter only asmetal, no longer as coins.

We still do not lanow where the urge for truth comesfrom; for as yet we have heard only of the obligationimposed by society that it should exist: to be truthfulmeans using the customary metaphors-in moral terms:the obligation to lie according to a ffxed convention, tolie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. . , .

Nsrss ABour \{ecxm

(January 1874)is a transposed painter and Schiller a

transposed r, then Wagner is a transposed actor.(vu, 34r)

&;.3

is an orator without the poger

47

As a pamphleteerto convince. (vu, gsg)

It was a special form of W's

ambition to relatehimself to high points of the : Schiller-Goethe,Beethoven, Luther, Greek \Shakespeare, Bis-marck. Only to the Renaissancerelationship; but he invented theposed to the Romance.

he establish nospirit as op

(vu, g$)

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CHAPTER )GIII [vr. So8

andthen, which gives to the objects of knowledge their truth

him who knows them his power of koowing, is the Formdal sature of Goodness. It is the cause of knowledgc and

so, while you rnay think of it as an object of knowl-edge yo\will do well to regard it as something beyond truth andkrowledge precious as thesc both are, of still higher worth.And, just a\i-o our analogy light and vision were to be thoughtof as like the\Sun, but not identical with it, so here both knowl-cdge and truth\e to be regarded as like the Good, but to idcntifyeither with the is wrong. The Good must hold a yet higherplace of honour.

You are Fvitrg a position of cxtraordinary splendour, if it isthe source of and tmth and itsdf surpasses them in

mean that it is pleasure.worth. You surelyHeaven forbid, I But I want to follow up our analogy

still further. You will that thc Sun not only makes fi6 things

we see visible but dso thcm into existence and gives thcmgrowth and nourishment; he is not the same thing as cxistcncc.lAod so with the objects of : tlesc derive from thc Goodnot only their power of bei known, but their very bcing andrcality; and Goodness is not th same thing as being, but evea be'

\ry *d power.yond being, surpassing it in di

Glaucon exclaimed with some

ness in such extravagant terms-

It is your fauit, I replied; you

at my exalting Good-

mc to say what I think.Yes, and you must not stop there. any rate, complete your

more to be said.comparison with thc Sun, if there is anThcre is a great deal morg ILet us hear ig thcn; don't lcaveI am afraid mudr must be left unspoke However, I will not,

if I can hclp it, leave out anything that can bePlcasc do not.

aid on tlis occasion.

1 Ttc ambiguiry of gcncis can hardly bc rcproduccd- Thc o 'givcs thihp tlcirgcnci! (gcttation, birth), but 'is not ilaclf gcncsis' ttrc existcocc in

bci.ng of ctcraaltimc of tiings wbich bcgin and mc to cxist, as opposcd to thc

things in tlc iaa.lfuiblc world).

-ff,

Pt^4io - R.p,.b)i .

CHAPTER )CilV (vr. 5o9 >5rr r)

FOUR STACES OF COGNTIION. THE LINE

Chaptcr XIX contrasted thc rcalm ol sensiblc aPPearances and shift-

ing bclicls utith thc rcalm ol ctanal and unchanging Forms, domi-

nated (as we lrota frnow) by thc Good. Thc philosophcr ans hc

whosc afrections uerc set or, ftiowlcdge ol that rcal utorld. The

Guardiens' primary education in litcraturc and art was mainly con-

fiiicd to thc arcrld ol appearance and belief, though it culminated

in the Perception ol 'imagci ol the moral idcaLs, the beauty ol

uthich uould crcitc louc for the indiuidual ?ffsott in whose soalthey dwcb (+o+ p.9t). Thc hight intellcctuol training notu to bcdcsctibcd is to dctach thc mind from appearanccs and indiaidualsand to carry it actoss the boutdary bct*een the two worlds atd allthc tuay bcyond to thc aision ol thc Good- It thus cotrcspoflds totAc'grcata' tnystcrics' ol uhich Diotima sPcaks in the Symposium(zro), l.uhere Exos, detached lrom its indiaidual obiect, adaanccsto the dsion oJ Beauty itsclf (the Good considaed as thc obiect of

dcsirc). The ncxt chaptcr tuill giue an allcgoical pictarc of this

ptogress.Thc allegory is here prefoced by a diagram. A line is diaided

into two parts, whose inequality rymbolizes that the uisible uoildhas a lotaer degree ol reality axd truth than thc intclligiblc. Eachpart is thcn subdiuided in thc same Proportion as the wholc line ,(thus A * B : C * D = A : B = C : D|. The lour sections cotc-

spond to four states of mind or modes of cognition, each clearer and

more certain than ihe one below.

Tlte louer port (A { B) is ot frst called 'the Visiblej but elsc-uhere thc feld of doxain the wide sense explained aboue (p. r8r);

and so it includes the'many conuentional notiohs of thc multitudc'

about morality (479 r, p. r88). It is the phyical and moral utorld

as apptehended by those'Ioaas ol appearance' uho do not recog'

nize thc absolutc ideals afiich Plato calls rcal (p. fi9).221

i

IIII

-l__? )

\ s:

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.t-t CHAPTER xxrv ' [vr. so9

Srarrs or lvftrpOaTrcrsTbe Good

Ivrzrr-rcrslrWonr.o

Intelligence(nocsis) orKnowledge(epistanc)

Thinking(dioaoia)

Mathcmaticalobjccts

'Wonr-o or

Appren rNcrs

B Bdief(ptt;t)

A Imagining(ci\as;a)

Images

(A) Thc louest lorm ol cognition k callcd eikasia Thc taorddcfies translation, being onc of tAose current terrns to uhich plangiucs a peculiar sense, to be infercd from thc corrtcxt. It is ctymo-logically cbnnected uith cikon : imagc, liftencss, and atith'eikos: li&cly, and it cdn mcan eitho lifteness (rcyesentation) or liften-ing (comparison) or estimation ol ti\clihooi (conjecture). perh.aps'imagining' is the least unsatisfactory rendering. It seems to be thctuholly unenlightencd state of mind which tiftes sensible appear-ances and current mmel rotions at their face ualue-tht ,oiiitionof

-t/t1 unreleased pisoners in the Caae allegory belout, tuho sec

only imagcs of imagcs-(B) Tltc higher section stands for comnon-tense belicf (pistis)

in tlre reality of the uisible and tengiblc .things commonly -calhd

substantial. In the moral sphere it would includc 'corrcct bericfsu.,ithout ftnowledge' (So6 c, p. zt6), such as the young Guardianttuere taught to hold. Truc bcliefs are sufficient guides for action,but ere insccurc until bascd on \nowlcdge ol thc reasons for them(Meno 97).

Higher cducation is to cfrect a/, escape lrom the pison of ap-

Pearancet by training the intcllea, fra in mathematics, and thenin moral pltilosophy. (C) Thc lonter secNion ol tlze intelligible con-

vL 5o9l FOUB, STAGES OF COGMTION: THE LINE 233

taitzs the subiect-matter ol thc metltematical sciences (5tt B'

p.'45).t Tuo chorrctcriaics of mathcmatical Toccdure afc lnen'

ionr1, @) the use ol uisiblc diagrams and modcls as imperlect

iltustrati)ns ol the objects and truths ol pure thought' Hcre is e

sort ol bidgi carrying the mind anoss lrom the uiiblc thing to

the intclligi\le rcaliti, tuhich it must lcarn to distinguis'' (b)

Each bran'ch of matiematics starts from unquestioned assutnptions

(poaulatzs, otio*r, deftitions) and reasons.lrom them dcduaiuely'

ih, prr*kres nay be trac and the conclusions may follow-' but thc

whoic structure h'angs in the air until the assumptions themselucs'sha|l

haue bcen shoan to dcpend on an unconditional principl'

(This may be conicaured m bc [Jnity itself, an aspea of the.

bood.) Meanttthilc thc rtaft of mind is dianoia, the ordinary amd

fot'tioughf or'thin\ingi hac inplying a degree of undetstanf-'ing a,hici lalls short )1i*1ta rtnowiedge (533 ', P'254)' Dianoia

,rfggrn, dis"ursiuc thinrting oncasoning frym rycm.ks to -conclu-ili, uhneoi noesis k coistaatly conpatcd to the immediatc act

ol vision and suggeas rathcr thc direct intuitiofl or o?Prchcnsion

ol its obiea.' (D) ihc highcr method is called Dialcctic' a atord uhich incc

H)gct has ac'quircd mislead'ing associa-tions' ln thc Republic il

;ipty n eans ,h, trrhriqrc o|it';totophic conaersation (dialogue)

"oo;ia on by question )rd o"w'r and secfring to rendct' :r

to

receiae from a resfondent, at:'account' (logos) ol some .Form'usually'a moral Fo)m such as lurtice in this dialogue. At this stagc

akibli illastrations ,re no long, auailable, and the tnoacment at

frrt k not dounward, deducing conclusions from premkses' but'upward,

cramiaing the premissis-thetnsel!)es and seefring the ulti-

iatc prin"ipte on- whici thcy oJl depend' It is suggested t-hat' if

the mind could eucr ise to glasP the suPreme Form, it might thcn

descend by a dcducion coifr-ing thi tuhole stucturc of moral

cnd muthemetical frnowlcdge. Thi state of mind is callcd intclli-

gcrrcc or rational intuitioi (noesis) and - \nowlcd.ge (cpistemg

itt , p. 254) in the lutl sensei:' The -proccdure ol Dialeaic aill bc

furthi desoibed in ChaPter XXVil'

l Tte intcrprcation of the higher part of thc Linc is thc srbicc of a loag oo'

trovcrsy wbich cannot bc pursued hcrc'

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u4

f havc.

CITAPTER XXIV

p"pT, theq th"t there are ,t"* *^ _- ['o' 5oe

'ooo re{Firs "r*

,*:::--:-t::,,Y: qov.crs r speae of, th.:#.,:,f; ilfl.*;*;;;;:f"T"*T,T,ti*ff .".t#over_ 6c visibl_c world_ gvud,,, ur au that rs intclligiblg the Sunwo{d,r"*i *i,i:H"*T:lT,,f,_, T'sh: ;ii;--; ;;would think I ** ,i.

"' qr ucaYen as r might call- it; ooly youvou. iave thesc rwo "ifft^:{fiTlt t .rvi"r"g}.';,;; i";you. have thesc to/o ;,

,'*" vD' u)lt sKrll rD etymology.l at ,oy i"t.vrsrDre and the ior.lti:ff:r"f

things dcarly b"for.;il;;j,';:"t:tbl:-.To the intcitigibre I

[ra. jo9 n. 5rol FOUR STAGES OF COGMTION: T}IE LINE 225

Then wc wil try again; o.'hat I have just said will hdp you tounderst".d- (C) You k-o.ow, of course, how students of subjcctslike geometry and arithmcdc begia by posnrlatiag odd and eveaauinbcrs, or the various figures and ttre tlree kinds of angle, andother such data i-o each subject" These data they take as t.own;and, havi"g adopted them as assumptions, they do not fed calleduPon to give any account of the- to themselves or to anyone dsc,but treat th...' as self-evident. Then, starting from these assumptions, they go on until they arrivc, by a series of consistent steps,at all the conclusions they set out to investigate.

Yes, I know rhat"You also know how they make use of visible figures and dis-

course about th"m, though what they reliy havc in r.i"d is theoriginals of whic-h these figures ffs images: they are ae6 1625ening,for instrncg abour this particular square and diagonal which theyhave &awn, but about rle Square ar.d the Diagonal; aod so inall cases. The diagrams they draw and the modds they make areacrual things, which may h3ve thcir shadows or images in water;but now they serve in their turn as images, while the studeot isseeking to behold thosc realities which only thoughr can appre-h ^ - , t I

True.This, tlcn, is the dass of things that I spoke o{ as intdiigible,

but with two qualfications: fust, that the mind, in srudying thern,is compelled 16 "mploy assumptions, a:rd, becausc it cannot riscabove t}esg does not uavd upwards to a 6rst principle; and sec-ond that it uses as images those actual things which have imagesof their own in the section below them and whic"h, in comparisonwith those shadows and rcflections) are reputed to be more palpatileand valued accordingly.

I understand: you mean the subject-matter of geometry and Of, '

the kindl6d 413.

(D) Then by the second secdon of the intelligible world you, .

,JK'*oi.T;*"t9ed rlto *o *:"q:l,pm, -oo. to repre-

part aga* io ,h.to% the other the int

parative crearness ^TT p':po'd'", v;L*fll: ;:$*"3,. #io ,n.

"iribt.;;Tj'?:*ttt Tn.n (a; gne of the two sections

:h*::r;S$**:ti,{i.'T"tr9,",T"Tffi ,f ffi*:y;;ffi*:,3f-g of that kini, if you *a.ir,-j:' '"-'

_ Let the second scction (B) stand for tlthe €rst *. Ul."or...-ri""r,,,.,11"j:lj. acrual rhings of which*o;'\

"r;;*;;::?iff""u ffif**o about us

-and al thc

So bc iu

O.Yifr:* takc the proportion in which the_visible world has

that rhe I'kcness ,lrtrflf-t$g to degrees

"f .*liq.^;;'J"i,'**5:;"*,,"1o};1il'trifi.f ;Tffi l,::.tii*;-,'.1;1;'*.- Now corisider hor

*:.,***il:11 i+: l;$ll:f"._:T [T.*,j,tT f:t*rlfu "i: :1. IT i' f --ilil:' .Tn:h" t:pri"lprJ, il;"#:m

assuTPtions and travelling;;;;"moves in thc o,no l?_"

conclusion. In the ,.-oa'ioj-#._ap'io.ipr.wliiTJoff ir*t.|L-,;oT11::l_"p',,*,,-a"*.rmases crnproyed * *: :6.i,..;;, il; "r;il?;LJffr.t:"i.,j^:T

in1uiry solery by their means..( oon'r quitc undersi"oi wh"t t;;;;r".r Soroe coo_oc.ctcd the w,zg6 ").,, i. ."-.'J-Ttr ,.?*Tr:,.,::H":IilH:*r. sec. (crayras,

(

lConvcrdy, thc fact that thc mathcmatician cao usc visiblc obiccs as illus3f,1 .. .tions i-ndicates rhas g6 rcalitics ald truths of mathcmatics arc embodicd, thougb'.,i...impcrfcctly, in thc world of visiblc ard tangiblc thirgs; whcrcas thc countrrpgffil,i:,i,.of thc moral For.s -. ooly bc betrdd by thought. ,,itt;ftf

iilii,',; f ,

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225 CIIAPTER XXIV

may understand me to mearr all that unaided ssasoning apprehends

!f air. power of dialecdc, when it treats its ""ru-p"eo*,

not asfust principles, but as hypothcses in the literal sense, thi"gs .laiddown' LI: . flight of rt.p, up which it may mounr all tie w"yto something thar is not hypotietical, the firsi principl. of all; anihaving gra:sped this, may nirn back a.nd, hol.ti^"g oj . th. -*.-.qxences whjch depend upon it, descend at lasi to a condusion,

:*{ -"Yg use ot any scnsible objecg but only of Forms, mov-

rng txrough !:t3s trom 9ne to another, alrd ending with Forms.

I undersmnd, he said, ,hough not perfecCy; fo, "th.

procedureyou describe.sounds like an .oor-ot.rr^u.oderlrking. But I scc that

I:1 T."t to distinguish the 6eld of inteligibt. .:r[t;di;G

cualecuc-*- o1u-g.a ryeater ccrtainry and tiuth than thc subject_

mafter of the 'aqt,E'\they are elled, whici treat 6qii ass,,-ptiels

,t.g-t, princ;ples. Thd'ltudents of these arts arg it is trug com_pelled to exercise

..h"rghi\ 66q1.-plating objeca which tle scnsescannot- perceive; but becaus\ th.y ,irrt fio-

"rr*ptions without

going back to a.fust.principlly;,u do not regard thL ""

g"ioiogtrue understaading about those

\jects, ahhorigh the oblecti them"_selves, when connected_with a fui.principle;. nteligiUte. anaI thin-k you would d e: starc of nel\ of rl.,e srudcnts oig--.*yaad other such afts, not intclligen..,

\ thinking ".

b.iig ,o-J-

[ v r . 5 r r

arc oot

CHAPTER )CfV (rrr. 5r4 t_5zr n)

THE AILEGORY OF TT{E CAlIE

The ptogress of the mind lrom the louest stotc ol unenliphtE

:::'r:: !"-??r'!n o,f thc Good is notu iilustatcd-by thc

f:rr,comparing -tlte world of appeerance tu an anderC,aue. In Empedocte! retigious'p";; ,;;--;"uerc afiich,ne sout to tts incarnation say, ,We haue cime undcr tlzisroof.' The_image was yoboity ta\en lrom mysteries held in c

!- jj:j,:j :! f_:." p, n -ti o s. t t) o, i nl * o,t a,, t * og h at h i c: heandidates for initiation wcre-led to the ,rrri"r;rr'"it"Ji'iit,,:,r?^!,:::

".! ,:r!,.rh.e idea-tr,a ti, i"ii t, a prison,houie;uhich tlze sout-k condemncd Io, ;o;-*iiaiai,ru"ii#iiiJ7 fi:Plaa m the Orphics. ' r -'-- tt"-q

thing betweeo i-ntellig:n.. "oJ*.r. "r\,*..

"of "pp."rL.o.You have uaderstood me q-uite w.ll

"nou'$, Lepll.d. And now

one moral ol the ollegory is drawn from the disness caascd b,, I

a loo

sud(en passage lrom darftne-s, ti t;ght. T;;;;;;;-;;;;;5,ogot!.fi p\nging untraincd miod, into'the discassio, oy _*:ii

t::::'-\1:l l:p; ?6):as the sop}tists o,) son*n r,;*',,if ifri""i':";) :::l:.:::,? "',\,Pinou

ol .the dazed pisonn aigg,'d:,

you may takg as corresponding to the fJr:I,sectitns, th.re fou,

oat into the sunlipht. ptan's ten yeari ,oor* oy 5)lr'*.ri'Jii;,#f',:,,!:"!;!:::,,^:r.:.:::,j* , *;;;;;;;;ng b,fore morat idcai ,ise callcd in question (SZZ E fr" p. 259).

to illustrare the degrees in which,

states of mind: intelligence for-the highesg ,ila4;og'fr. ;.;;ond, belief for the th;ld, *d for the i;r;-;&;."T# ;;

rs, qu rur uc LdsL tmagtr\ng.- rnese youmay arrarge as the terms in a proportion,

"rrigoiof,to each a de-

gree of clearness and certainry'corresponding"a &\-.r*. i"which their objects possess truti and ,.Airy. "

\I understand and agree with you. I will anange ,n* \ you say.1 Plato ncver uscs hard aod fast l6chnisal tcrms. Tlc four berc

dcf.ncd or stricdy cmploycd in thc rcqucl.

fi"ll*":il^T-:'x{':,oPen to .h. Ld; ;; ;;; P;;* 1:*l-*. To:.. H.,e.th.y ir". ;..""i,;_*;;#: ffi:;llT: l"A.g as3 b/.*.;.:r.,_ ,,",h",;;;ffi;ffi#T::T-:""

only what is in front of them, b.."ur. the chains wiII not

:T*": IT:,*l 1.,"9,:,A, ,".". ii,,*..;sh_."i;, ,ili,fi:of a 6re burning behind them; and il;; ,ii'rrr*""*r;j'il';-_1The

lcngth of the'way 'n' (eisodo) to tle cbambcr where trc prisocrs cit ira.o csscntial fcacurc, cxpl^ining why no daylight ,caJ* an.-.

men

Nrxr, said I, here is a

l 3h

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228 CHAPTER ETV [vn. 5r4

fue is a track 1 with a parapet built along ig like rhe screen at apuppet+ho'w, which hidcs tle performers while they show theirpuppets over the top.

I see, said he.Now behind this parapct imagine persoDs cz;rryl:o,g dong vari-

ous artificial objects, including figures of meo and animals in woodor stone or other materials, which project above the parapct. Natu-rally, some of ttrese persons will bc telking, others silent.z

It is a strange picturg he said, and a strange sort of prisoncrs.Like oursdves, I replied; for in the fust place prisoners so con-

fincd would have seen nothing of the-selves or of onc another,except the shadows thrown by the fue-light on the wail of theCave facing them, would theyl

Not if alt thek lives they had been preventd from moving thciiheads.

Ald they would have seen as lirde of thc objects carried pastOf course.Now, if they could talk to one anorhcr, would they not supposc

that their words referred only to those passing shadows whichtiey sawl u

Necessarily.And suppose their prison had an echo from the wall facing

them? When onc of tl-re peoplc crossing behind them spoke, theycould only suppose that the sound came from the shadow passingbefore their eyes.

No doubc

l Thc track crosscs tlc passag:c i-uto ttrc cave at right anglcs, aad 's

abouc 6cparapct built doog iu

2 A modcro Plato would comparc hii Cave to ao uadcrgrouad ciacm4 wbcrc thcaudieocc watch thc play of shadows tlrown by ttre 6lm passiag bcforc a light atften back& Thc 6Ln itclf is only an imagc of 'rcal' things and cvcnts in tte worlqoutsidc the cin6a1a. For thc €lm Plato h-" to substih.rte the clumsicr apparanrs ofa proccssion of artifcial obiecs caniod on thcir hcads by pcrsons who arc merclypart of the mrchiacry, providing for tle movcmeat of tlc objcca aad tic sor:-odswhosc ccho tJre prisoocrs hcar. Thc panpct preycns thcsc pcrsons' shadows &ombchg cast oq thc wall of the Cavc-

3 Adam's tcxt aod i-otcrprctation- Tbc prisoners, baviag sccn a6thing but shadows,ca-o.uot ttria.k thcir words rcfer to tlc objccs carricd past bchind rheir backs. Fortbcm shadows (imagc) are thc ooly relitic.s.

vrt- 5r5J T H E C V E / n9

Io every way, then, such prisoners would re-.r,gttzr as rcalitysething but the shadows of tlose artificial obiects.'

Incvitably.Now consider what would happen if their rdease from the

chains and the healing of their uqwisdom should come abut inthis way. Suppose one of them set frec and forccd suddenly tostatrd up, turs his head, and walk with cyes liftcd to the light;all these moverrents would be painful, and he would be too daz-zled to make out the objects wlose shadows hc had been used tosee. What do you think he would say, if someone told him fistwhat he had formerly seen was meaningless illusion, but now,being somewhat nearer to realiry and turned towar& more realobjects, he was geftitrg a truer view? Suppose fufther that he wcreshown the various objects being carried by and were nadc to safrin rcply to questions, what each of them was. Would he not beperplexed and believe the objects now shown him to be not sored as what he formedy saw?'

Yes, not nearly so real.Atrd if he werc forced to look at the fue-light itself, would not

his eyes ache, so that he would try to escape and turn back to therh;ngs which he could sce distincdy, convinced that they reallywete cleater than thesc other objects now being shown 16 him?

Yes.Ald suppose someone were to drag him away forcibly uP the

steep and rugged asceat and not let him go until he had hauledhim su1 into the 5rrnlight, would he not sufier pain and vexationat sud treatrnent, and, when he had come out into the light, findhis eyes so f-rill of its radiance that he could not sec a single otrc ofd1g things that he was oouf told were reall

Ceruinly he would not see them all at onceHe would need, then, to grow accustomed before he could see

things in that upper world.'At fust it would be easiest to makcout shadows, and then the imagcs of men and things reflected in

l The state of mind uilrA "i4*io

in thc prcvious chapter.2 Thc fust cficct of Socratic questioning is pcrplexity. Cf. p. 8.E Hcrc is the mcral-the necd of habituation by mathcmatical str.rdy bcfore dis-

cursiag moral idcas and ascending through tlea to thc Form of thc Good.

*.tl

t1-?_ \31€

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230 CTIAPTER XXV [vn. 516 vD,- 5r7l A}PLICATION OF jrHE CA\IE A1JICORY

to becomc used to the darkness.

them up, they would k;ll him.1Yes, thcy would.

Every feature in this parablc, my dear Glaucon, is 'rleant to fitour earlier andysis. The prison dwdling corresponds to the regionrevcaied to us tfuough the scnse of sighg and the fue-light wiihi$it to the powtr of the Sun. The ascent to see the things in ihC-upper world you may take as standing for the upward journey ofthe soul into the region of the intelligible; ttren you will be ilnpossession of what I surmisg shce 6at is what you wish to be toJd'.Heaven kaows whether it is true; but this, at any ratg is how it

this is the cause of whatever is right and good; iti

state.

So far as I can understand, I shue your bdief.Then you may also agree that it is no wonder if dose who hL,v''g,

reactred this height arc reluctant to manage the affairs of lSF r'',Theh souls long to spend all dreir time in that upper world-o{$rally enough, if here once morc our parable holds true. Nor, a$ffi,is it at all strange that one who comes from the contempl?d'Ohof divine things to tle miseries of human life should appear a'wward and ridiculous when, with eyes stiil dazed and not )4et 4.e:customed to the darkness, he is compelled, in a law-court or clte'

r A-u allusioq to the fatc of Socratcs

r&twater, and later on tle thiags themsclves. After thag it would beeasier to watch the

!T".dy bodies and the sky itseff by nighr,looking at the light of the moon and stars rather than t!. Sun Lathe Sun's light in the day-time.

Yes, surdy. rLast of

"ll, hc would be able to look at the Su.,, and contcorplatc

its naturg Dot as it appears- whcn reflected in water o, "oy

'"li*

medirrm, but as it is in itself in its own domai.,-No doubrAnd now he would begin to draw the conclusion that it is thc

Sun that produccs the seasons and the course of rtre year andcontrols everything in the visible world, and moreover is L a wauthe cause of all that he and his companioas used ro see.. Clearly he would come ar last to ih.at conclusion.

Then if he called to mind his fdlow prisoners and what passedfor wisdom in his formcr dwdling-placg he would surely'thi'khimself h.ppy inthe chaage and be sorry for the,r. Th.y may nav.had a pracdce of honouring and commending one *o,no, *ianprizes for the man who had the kccnest cye for the passing shad-ows and the bcst memory for the ordcr in which thev foiloLd o.accompanicd one anotber, so that he could make a good guess asl" -y-ht-"h was going to come next." Would our relised irisonerbe likdy to cover those prizcs or to enry the meu exalted ,o hooo*and power in the cave? would,he nor feel like Fromer's Achires,that he would far sooncr te on earth as a hired servant in thchouse of a landless -T',

9r egdure ani,thing rather than go back

to his old beliefs and live in the old wlvlYes, he would prder any fate to suctr a lifeNow imagrne what. would irappen if be went down again to

take his former seat i_n rhe Cave. Coming suddenly out of thesunlighg his cyes would b. fitled with darkness. He might be re-quired once more to deliver his opinion on those shadowi, in com-

r rhc mpirical politician, with no philosophic irsighg but ooly a .kaac-k of rc-

f#fTfJt?:il:i]'t happcns' (Gorg' 5ot a)' Hc bas 'n*f L;o,;.;^;"

2This vcrse (a.lrady quoted- at :g6 c, p. 76), beiog spoken by thc ghost off,6hill65, suggcsc thel tb6 Cavc is comparablc with Hadcs

=+>

#&t-feEtrg-e up o{_to co-m. b"*_@_hi:

t the ascenl

appeds to me. In the world of knowledg+ the last thing to be

perceived a,nd only with grcat difficulry is the essentiSl For,q ofit is perceived, the conclusion must follow thet,

t38

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232 CTIAPTER XXV [vu. 5r8 vn. 5r9l APPLICAIION OF T}IE CAVE AILEGORY 234;,

* If-tbqt{."e]ficn, we must conclude that cducation is not what' it-is said to be by some, who profess to pur knowledge into a soul, Ihi+ docs not possess ig as if they coulj put sight iito blind eyes.' orr th-c contrary, our owrr accounr signifies thal the soul of everyr r'?D does possess.th.e power of learning the truth and rtre organ

to bee it with; and thag just as one might have to rurn the whole' body rouSd i-o. order rhat the eyc shoull see light i-ustead of dark-

i nessr.ro ,h-..

1"rire soul must be rurned "*"y

Lo- this changingi world 'ntil its eye can bear to conremprati reariry and thai su-j p.T: splendour which we have called the Cooa. Hence tlcre may' wdl be an art whose aim would bc to cfiect this very thing the: conversion of the soul, in the readiest way; not ,o pui th. io*o. of sight

T,-" q. soul's ey9 *rri.n J."ai has iq but ro ensure that,instead of.looking in ttre wrong direcrion, it is turned the way it

_*ought to be"Yes, it may well be so.It looks, th.o,

", though wisdom were di-fierent from tlose or-

di"rty virtues, as they are called, which are nor far removed from1In the Goryias 486 ,r, callicres, forccastiag the uial of socratcs, t2uDB him with

thc pbilosophcr's inability to dcfcod him.elf in a courl

bodily qualities, in that they can be produced by habituation ^andexercise-in a soul which has not Possessed them from the fust

Wisdom, it seems, is certainly the virtue of some diviner faculty,

which never loses its power, though its use for good or harm de-

pends on the dircction towards whiqh i1 is turned' You must have

noticed in dishonest men with a rePutatioD for sagacity -th9 .btt-g

glaace of a narrow i rylltrl:.-pig.ge-tbe- gbi-.sb tqt5lEltEfu.Aaa."fnae-is notEiniwt-ofr with thiit-pow.t of vision, buillhffi.o forced into the service of evil, so that the kecner its

sighg the more harm it works.

Quite truc.And yet if the growth of a nature like this had beeq P*q$

from earliest 'childhood, cleared. of thosc clingrng overgrowths

whic.h come of gluttony and all luxurious pleasure and,like leadcn

weights chatgeJ with afinity to this mortal world, hang upon the

soul] bending- its vision downwards; if, frced from thcse, thc soul

were turoed round towards u:ue reality, then this same power in

these very men would see thc truth as keenly as the obiects it is

turned to rrow.Yes, very likdy.Is it rloi also ikdy, or indeed certaiq after what has beeu said

that a statc can never be properly governed either by t}le unedu-

cated who know nothing of truth or by men who are allowed to

spend all their days in the pursuit of culture? The ignorant-haveno single mark before their eyes at which they must -ai-m in dl

th. -od.rct of their own lives and of affairs of state; and the others

will not engage in action if thcy can help it, dreaming-thq whilc

still alivg tl.y l"o. been rranslated to the Islands of thc Blest,

Quite trueIi is fot us, then, as founders of a commonwealth, to bring coln-

pulsion to bear on the noblest natures. They - must be made to

ili*b th. ascenr to the vision of Goodness, which wc called the

highest object of knowledge; and, when they have lookcd upon.lt

loig enough, they must not be ailowed, as they now arg to rern4iD' -,',oo",h. h.ightt, iefuring to come down again to the prisoner's of; ,.to take *| p"ta in their labours and rewards, however much o1'1;."'-

little these mly be worth- ':.i;::;ii

, ii";r' ' ' ;

whcrg to dispute about-the shadows of justicc or the imagcs thatcast those shadows,

.aod to wrangle over ttre notions of "what

isright io the minds of men who hi-ve never bcheld Justice it .lf.'-

It is not at all strange. .

.*?r.g..g1:'!le-*tr3*.yil;Ems*m.bel.*thir-6._.etejgg1!econ-T.f te. qy?,

Yay=r, 3- dergg fr- om_ligh qro_. aarkooi" o1 .ft om9-*.St,,.9 light;.and h9 will recogfrf,thpt the 9a4e. dlng.il3pqggf_Jg -thc soul. When hc sees it troubled and unable to &rJ-eS,I$+S arylt,,i"ti?d .g{. tipghiirg moughtlgstll, he wil askIB$Aer, TT-q tgq Lbrigbt_er p{lq$_e_qgg, its uniccustomed viSionrs_obscured by the dark.ness, in which case he will tliiiitr iti iond-ti1" g-gsrll% o-De ; or wHfr A-, deffi g-F;tjtg-d-eprhdef."lgl9".:f.le ir ia?;72'1Ed by cxcess of liehtlTfir,:.'lrc.u.i! rather fed sorry for it;'iirj Ej.l^ur.r. inclinel"i-;T,,,ot ,l,ii*

u.,n^-di,.9t1"ot1r..t!'es,..t_o-thc lisht.

+++\31

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234 CIIAPTER XXV

eg€t-d"-*I, 6tr,,*+.+ ryu -to Jjve with- ,n. t*i-ffiou will

as rt is in most existin

in truth gou.ro*.oTfr b.';i-iiiE:i-anJdissension only where the destined rulers :are least desir-

'tD. 52rJ APPLIC TIoN oF THE c!{VE AI,I-EGORY 235

sharing in the work of the community, though th.y *y livc to-gether for most of ttreL time in a purer air I

No; it is a fair demand, and they are fair-minded meo. Nodoubt, r'nlike any ruler of the present day, they will think of hold-ing power as an. un.avoidable-ne,ecssity.

Yes, my--frii:nd; for the truth is that you caD have a wdl-gov-erned,,sdciety only if you can discover for your future rulers a bet-tcr,way of life than hing h o6ce; then only will power be in theh,ands of men who are rich, not in gold, but in the wealth that

.5rings.h-"ef--9s, i g*9 and wise life. AU= eg}-*Wrorg,w.he;k,' starve4.for_lack.of a-nythi-og gqod- in-th.eir- _o..wg UJes, pen,t-uJnI tO DUDlrC aflarrs Doprng tO SnatCh trOm tnence the tranorness thewtr

lunger ror. r ney ser aDour ngnung ror power, and tl]rs rDterDeciDec6iHiet*ruins them and their country.l The life of truc philosophyis the only one that looks down upon offices of state ; *i "qcor

toPower must be confined to men who are not in love wi6 it; other-wise rivals will start fighting. So whom else can you compel tougdcftake ti'e guardir.'ship of thc commonwealth, if not thosewho, besides understanding best the principles of governmeng ea-joy a nobler life than the politician's and look for rewar& of a dif-1er'6rr1 Lio.d ?

Tbere is indeed no other choice.

XXW (vrr- 5zr c53r c)

The Pytlzagorcan Arcltytas,istcr subfects (mathemata)music. Plato adopts thcsesciences are here dcsctibcd

t cofltcmpornry, eflumeratet as, aithmetic, astrgnomy, cnd

g solid geometry. Theseuitlt respcct to their

l Aristodc, Politics nt. 6: T.{owadays men scck to bc' ways in o6cc for the sakcof tlc advaatagcs to be gained fiom o6cc and from thciii. 8z (oo tic rcvolution at Corqra): Thc causc of allof o6ce for motivcs of grccd a-od ambition.,

rc rcvenucs.' Thucydidcs,rhings was ttre purzuit

+,

[w. 5zoShall we not be doing them-an injusticc, if we force oo tie-

a worse_ Iife tban they might have?You have f-orgoren

"giio, -y friend, that the law is nor con_

cerned to_make "ay

oni class ipecially happy, but to .";";. ;;welfare of the comrnonwealth as . *hol..'ny p..ru"rion-o;-.;":strainr it will unitc the citizens in harmony,'-"kiog ,h* .irr1whatever benefits each class ca.a contribute io th. co"ro_oo n*a,Td jT.p"Iryse in forming men of that ,pu, ''", n;;;,";;;:T_11

b. 1"ft,to go.hit oio *ry, but th"i they shouJd b;;;

mentat rn blndrng the commrnity into oneTrue, I had forgotten.

= You will sea then, Glaucon, rhat there,will be no real iniusticein.compelling our-philosophers to watch over _d ;; il,il;;citizens. we can fairly teil them that their compeers ia otrer statesmal,.3uite reasonably' refr-ue to collaborate:,n*'. O.y h";rfi;;up, like.a se{f*own- plang in dlpitc of their country,s i-nstirutions;no one has fostered tfreir g.rowll, and they cannot t *p;;;;show gratirude for a care tley have never received- .Bug, we shallsan 'it is not so with yor:- We have brought yoo loto Jr,.o..for.lour

Tunt tt sake as well as for your i*o" ao be like leadersand king-bces in a hive; you have been bener Jd _;;;;r;;;il;educated than those others and hence you are more capabl , of {t^i-ing your parr both as men of thoughi and as men of acdon. you

frce

i;iqi

ous of holding ofice.'1;7 iq-Quite true.

- -"'" Then will our pupils refuse to listen aqd to take their turus ar

y_o.urthose wlo live there

aa(crrttct

-Fts )q D

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Ion touff.ok X,Plato

rr the:iding

ell as. Theing is' I t

i sn ther, rhewith

I hu-

cnp-,hich

a s a

) as-tate,ven-dge,rrld,d t o

ightingale, Andrea wilson. Genres in Dialogue; Plato and rhe Construct of philosophyCambridge: Cambridge University Press, r996.

, Whitney I. Plato's View of Art. New York: Scribner, rgTz, Morriss Henry. Plato's Poetics:The Authority of BeautySalt Lake Ci ty; Univers i ty

of Utatr Press, t 98 r., Paul. What Plato Said. Chicaeo University ofChicago Press, r933.

and Discourse in Plato. Chicago: University of, Herman J. Love, KnowledgeChicago Press, r965.

Taylor, A. E. Plato. r9z9; Ann Arbor: Universiry of Michigan press, r96o

epublic, Book X

$

4rOf the many excellences which I perceive in

the order of our State, there is none which uponreflection pleases me better than the rule aboutpoetry.

To what do you refer?To our refusal to admit the imitative kind of

poetry, for it certainly ought not to be received;as I see far more clearly now that the parts of thesoul have been distinguished.

What do you mean?Speaking in confidence, for you wil l not de-

nounce me to the tragedians and the rest of theimitative tribe, all poetical imitations are ruinousto the understanding of the hearers, unless as anantidote they possess the knowledge of the truenature of the originals.

Explain the purport of your remark.Well, I wil l tell you, although l have always

from my earliest youth had an awe and love ofHomer which even now makes the words falteron my lips, for he seems to be the great captainand teacher of the whole of that noble tragiccompany; but a man is not to be reverenced morethan the truth, and therefore I will speak out.

Very good, he said.Listen to me then, or rather, answer me.Put your question,Can you give me a general definit ion of imita-

tion? for I really do not myself understand what itprofesses to be.

A likely thing, then, that I should know,

Translated by Benjamin Jowetr. The speakers are Socraresand Glaucon.

There rvould be nothing strange in that, for theduller eye may often see a thing sooner than thekeener.

Very true, he said; but in your presence, evenif I had any faint notion, I could not mustercourage to utter it. WiU you inqui-re yourself?

Well then, shall we begin the inquiry at thispoint, following our usual method: Whenever anumber of individuals have a common name, weassume that there is one corresponding idea orform: - do you understand me?

I do.Let us take, for our present purpose, any in-

stance of such a group; there are beds and tablesin the world - many of each, are there not?

Yes.But there are only two ideas or forms of such

fumiture - one the idea of a bed, the other of atable.

True.And the maker of either of them makes a bed

or he makes a table for our use, in accordancewith the idea - that is our way of speaking inthrs and similar instances - but no anincermakes the idea itself: how could he?

Impossible.And there is another artificer - I should like

to krow what you would say of him.Who is he?One who is the maker of all the works of all

other workmen.What an extraordinary man !Wait a little, and there will be rnore reason for

your saying so. For this is the craftsman who rs

$

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29

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able to make not only fumiture of every krnd, butall that grows out of the earth, and all living crea-tures. himseif included: and besides these he canmake earth and sky and the gods, and all thethings which are in heaven or in the realm ofHades under the earth.

He must be a wizard and no mistake.Ohl you are incredulous, are you? Do you

mean that there is no such maker or creator, orthat in one sense there might be a maker of allthese ttrings but in another not? Do you see thatthere is a way in which you could make them allyourself?

And what way is this? he asked.An easy way enough; or rather, there are many

ways in which the feat might be quickly and eas-ily accomplished, none quicker than that of tum-ing a mirror round and leund - you would soonenough make the sun and the heavens, and theearth and yourself, and other animals and plants,and fumiture and all the other things of which wewere just norv speaking, in the mirror.

Yes, he said; but they would be appearancesonly.

Very good, I said, you are coming to the poiltnow. Arrd the painter too is, as I conceive, justsuch another - a creator of appearances, is henot?

Of course.But then I suppoge you will say that what he

creates is untrue. And yet there is a sense lnwhich the painter also creates a bed? Is there not?

Yes, he said, but here again, an appearanceonly.

And what of the maker of the bed? Were younot saying that l.re too makes, not the idea whichaccording to our view is the real object denotedby the word bed, but only a particular bed?

Yes , I d i d .Then if he does not make a real object he can-

not make what is, but only some semblance ofexistence; and if anyone were to say that thework of the maker of the bed, or of any otherworkman, has real existence, he could hardly besupposed to be speaking the truth.

Not, at least, he replied, in the view of thosewho make a business of these discussions.

No wonder, then, that his work too is an indis-tinct expression of tnrth.

No wonder,Suppose now that by the l ight of the examples

just offered we inquire who this imitator is?lf you please.Well then, here we find three beds: one existing

in naturei which is made by God, as I think that wemay say - for no one else can be the maker?

No one, I think.There is another which is the work of the car-

penter?Yes,And the work of the painter is a t l r i r l?Yes.Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are

three artists who superintend them: God, themaker of the bed, and tbe painter?

Yes. there are three of them.God, whether from choice or from necessity,

made one bed in nature and one only; two ormore such beds neither ever have been nor everwil l be made by God.

Why is that?' Because even if He had made but two, a thirdwould sti l l appear behind them of which theyagain both possessed the form, and that would bethe real bed and not the two others.

Very true, he said.God knew this, I suppose, and He desired to

be the real maker of a real bed, not a kind of bed,and therefore He created a bed which is essen-tially and by nature one only,

So it seems.Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural au-

thor or maker of the bed?Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural

process .of creation, He is the author of this andof all other things.

And what shall we say of tire carpenter - isnot he also the maker of a bed?

Yes.But would you call the painter an artif icer and

maker?Certainly not.Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in rela-

tion to the bed?I think, he said, that we may fairly designate

him as the imitator of that which the others make.Good, I said; then you call him whose product

is third in the descent from nature. an imitator?

P L A T O

is tHricef"ttl; an,

That cTF".

whaf aboro lmltat(rsts,lF nal

Tfre laAls the

dete{minrWhat rI lneat

diffelentdrftefenr ,vlewl oblpoin{of vwithdut bthingis.

YOs, heNdw te

is th{ a.rt <tron gf thirappe{ranct

url appe

Thien rhano cFn retouch6.s onan lnlage.cobblgr, cahe knpwsgood paintrpersoris whpente! fronthey afe loc

Ce{rainl'Anp surr

regard] all rtorms ius th;the a+, an(and evlery sicuracf thanthis, I lthinksi,rnplel creaceivedlby s<and wfomhimself warknowl{dge a

Mo{t rrue

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'll'

l',:'

H

:xarnplesis?

' eXistrng( that we.er7

the car-

lere areod, the

cessity,two oror ever

a third,h theyluld be

ired tof bed,essen-

ral au-

raturalis and

l - i s

T and

.rela-

. Certairrly, he said.And so if the tragic poet is an imitator, he too

is th-rice removed from the king and from thenutr; and so are all other imitators.

That appears to be so.Then about the imitator we ale agreed. And

what about the painter? - Do you think he triesto imitate in each case that which originally ex-itsts,in nature, or only the creation of artificers?

The latter., As they are or as tlrey appear? you have still todetermine this.

What do you mean?I mean to ask whether a bed really bocomes

different when it is seen from different points ofview, obliquely or direcply or from any otherpoint of vierv? Or does it simply,appear different,without being really so? And the same of allthings.

Yes, he said, the difference is only apparent.Now ler me ask you another question: Which

is the art of painting designed to be - an imita-tion of things as they are, or as the), appear ..-- ofappearance or of reality?

Of appearance, he said.Then the imitator is a long way off rbe truth,

and can reproduce all things because he lightlytouches on a small part of them, and that partan image. For example: A painter will paint aoo.bbler, carpenter, or any other artisan, thoughhe knows nothing of their arts; and, ,if he is agood painter, he may deceive children or simplepbrsons when he shows them his picture of a car-penter from a distance, and they will fancy tharthey are looking at a real carpenter.

Certainly.And surely, my friend, this is how we should

regard all such claims: Whenever any one rn-forms,us that he has found a man who knows allthe arts, and all things else that anybody knows,and every single thing with a higher degree of ac-curacy than any other man - whoever tells usthis, I think that we can only retort that he is aSir,nple creature who seems to have been de-ceived by some wizard or imitator whom he mot,and whom he thought all-knowing, because hetumself was unable to analyze the nature ofknowledge and ignorance and imitation.

Most true.

And next, I said, we have to consider tragedyand its leader, Homer; for we hea.r some personssaying that these poets know all the arts; and all,things human; where vjrtue and vice are con-cemed, and indeed all divine things too; becausethe good poet cannot compose well unless heknows his subject, and he who has not thisknowledge can never be a poet. We ought toconsider whether here also there may not be asimilar i l lusion. Pelhaps they may have comeacross imitators and been deceived by them;they. may not have remembered when they sawtheir works that these were thrice removed fromthe truth, and oould,easily,be, made without anyknowledge of the truth, because they are appear-ances only and not realities? Or, after all, theymay be in the right, and good poets do reallyknow the things about which they seem to themally to speak so well?

The question, he said, should by all means beconsidored.

Now do you suppose that if a person wereable to make the original as well as the image, hewould seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow imitation to bethe ruling principle of his life, as if he had noth-ing higher in him?

I should'say not.But the real artist, rvho had real knorvledge of

those things which he chose also to imitate,would be irterested in realit ies and not in imita-tions; and would desire to leave as memorials ofhimself works many and; fair; and, instead ofbeing the author of encomium,s, he would preferto be the theme of them.

Yes, he said, that would be to him a source ofmuch greater honor and profit.

Now let us,refrain, I said, from call ing Homeror any other poet to account regarding those artslo which his poems incidentally refer: We willnot ask them, in case any poet has been a doctorand not a mere irnitator of medical parlance, toshow what patients have been restored to healthby a poet, ancient ,or modem, as they were byAsclepius; or what disciples in medicine a poethas left behind him, like the Asclepiads. Norshall we press the same question upon themabout the other arts. B,ut we have a right to knowrespecting warfare, strategy, the administration

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R E P U B L I C , B O O K X a 42 J

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of States, and the education of man, which arethe chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems,and we may fairly ask him about them, "FriendHomer," then we say to him, "if you are onlyin the second remove from truth in what you sayof virtue, and not in the third - not an imagemaker, that is, by our definition, an imitator -and if you are able to discern what pursuits makemen better or worse in private or public life, tellus what State was ever better govemed by yourhelp? The good order of Lacedaemon is due toLycurgus, and many other cities great and smallhave been similarly benefited by others; but whosays that you have been a good legislator to themand have done them any good? Italy and Sicilyboast of Charondas, and there is Solon who isrenowned arnong us; but what city has anythingto say about you?" Is there any city which, hemight name?

I think not, said Glaucon; not even the Horner-ids themselves pretend that he was a legislator.

Well, but is there any war on record whichwas carried on successfully owing to his leader-ship or counsel?

There is not.Or is there anything cornparable to those

clever improvements in the arts, or in other oper-ations, which are said to have been due to rnen ofpractical genius such as Thales the Milesian orAnacharsis the Scythian?

There is absolutely nothing of the kirrd.But, if Homer never did any public service,

was he privately a guide or teacher of any? Hadhe in,his lifetime friends who loved to associatewith him, and who handed down to posterity aFtromeric way of life, such as was established byPythagoras who was especially beloved for thisreason and whose followers are to this day con-spicuous among others by what they term thePythagorean way of lifer

Nothing of the kind is recorded of him. Fqrsurely, Socrates, Creophylus, the companion ofHomer, that child of flesh, whose name alwaysrnakes us laugh, might be rnore justly ridiculedfor his want of breeding, if what is said is true,that Homer was greatly neglected by him in hisown day when he was alive?

Yes, I replied, that is the tradition. But canyou imagrne, Glaucon, that if Homer had reallv

been able to educate and improve mankind - ifhe had been capable of knowledge and not been amere imitator - carl you imagine, I say, that hewould not have attracted rnany followers, andbeen honored and loved by them? Protagoras ofAbdera, and Prodicus of Ceos, and a host of oth-ers, have only to whisper to their contemporaries:"You will never be able to manage either yourown house or your own State until you appointus to be yotrr ministers of education" - and thisingenious device of theirs has such an eff'ect inmaking men iove them that their companions allbut carry them about on their shoulders. And is itconceivable that the contemporaries of Homer, oragain of Hesiod, would have allowed either ofthem to go about as rhapsodists, if they had reallybeen able to help rnankind forward in virtue?Would they not n'ave been as unwilling to partwith them as with, gold, and have compelledthem lo stay at home with them? Or, if the masterwould not stay, then the disciples would havefollowed him about everywhere, until they hadgot education enough?

Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.Then must we not infer that all these poetical

individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imi-tators, wlio copy images of virtue and the otherthemes of their poetry, but have no contact withthe truth? The poet is like a painter who, as wehave already observed, will make a likeness of acobbler though he understands nothing of eob-bling; and his picfure is good enough for thosewho know no more than he does, and judge onlyby colors and figures.

Quite so.ln like manner the poet with his words and

phraseslmay be said to lay on the colors of theseveral arts, himself understanding their natureonly enough to imitate them; and other peopie,who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only fromhis words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling,or of rnilitary tactics, or of anything else, in meterand harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well -such is the sweet influence which melody andrhythm by nature have. For I am sure that youknow what a poor appearance the works of poetsmake when stripped of the colors which art puts

rOr, "wi th h is nouns and verbs." [Tr . ]

upon rhem,land,r.n ro*" Axan

Yes, he iaid,r ney arQ lik

beautitul, $ut,bioom of y$uthExact ly. lCorne ndw, a

tor or makfr o;nave said, pf trances only. lAm

Yes. IThen Ietl us I

not be satisfied vProceed. IOf the pfinter

and he will faintYes. IAnd rhe {vork

,hem? ICertainlylBut aoesl the

he, bit and leinsn Drass and learorseman *1ho I,nows their hght

to the maker lthe s,velop themsdlves-

g,rearest expe[ienc,:o the maker ithe srelop thems{lves-rlayer wiLl tefl ttes satisfactord to tl

:::_ i: oughp ro n

expefienc,

yer wiLl tell the

ttend to his itrsn-ur.Of course. iSo the onl pron

re goodness and

24 P L A T O

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: mankind - ifand not been a, I say, that he.followers, andt Protagoras ofI a host of orh-onternporaries:,ge either your:il y.ou appoint:n" - and this;h an effect in:ompanions alltders. And is its of Homer, orrwed either ofiey,had reallyrrd in virtue?villing to partve compelledi; if the masteri \ilould haverptil they had

Ite true.these:poeticaljare,only imi-'and',the:

other'lic.ontact with$1Who,, as weffieness of .af idng,q1. .6-f'Bh, f,or, thosef$dudgc only

F'.rVords and'S,olors.of rhepth€ir natureflher' ,people,

$eronJy fromrg-f cobbling,ilse;:in'.,meterv,bry well *r-nelody andur€ that youlrks of.poetsfch art puts

upon them, and recited in simple prose. you haveseen some examples?

Yes, he said.They are like faces which were never really

beautiful, but on:ly blooming, seen when thebloom of youth has passed away from them?

Exactly.Come now, and observe this point: The imita_

tor or maker of .the image knows nothing, wehave said, of true existence; he knows ufprur_ances only. Am I not right?

Yes.Then let us have a clear understanding, and

nol be satisfied with halF an explanation.Proceed.Of the painter we say,that he will paint reins,

and he wil l paint a bit?Yes,And the worker ir leatherrand brass will make

them?Certainly.But does the painter knorv the right form of

the bit and reins? Nay, hardly eu"n the workersin brass and leather who make them; only thehorseman who knows how to use them _ heknows their right form.

Most tfue.And may we not say the same of all thinss?What?That there are three,arts which are concerned

with all things: one which uses, another whichmakes, a third which imitates them?

Yes.And the excellence and beauty and rightness

of every structure, animate or inanimate,lnd ofevery action of man, is relative solely to the usefor which nature or the artist has intended them.

True.Then beyond doubt it is the user who has rhe

greatest expenence of them, and he must reo0rtto the maker the good or bad qualities which de-ve.lop themselves in use; for example, the fluteplayer will tell the flute maker rvhich of his flutesrs satisfactory to the performer; he will teii himhow he ought to make them, and the other willattend to his instructions?

Of course,So the one pronounces with knowledae abour

the goodness and badness of flutes, w-hile the

other, confiding in him, rvil l m;rke them accord-ingly?

True.The instrument is the same, but about t l ie ex-

cellence or badness of it the maker wil l possess acorrect belief, since he associates with one rvhoknows, and is compelled to hear what he has rosay; whereas the user wil l have knowiedse?

True.But will the imitator have either? Will he

knorv from use whether or not that which hepaints is corect or beautiful? or rvill he haveright opinion from being compelled to associatewith another who knows and gives him rnstruc-tions about what he should naint?

Neither.Tlien an imitator will no more have true opin-

ion than he wil l have knowledge abour rhe good_ness or badness of his models?

I suppose rnot.The imitative poot will, be in a brillianr srare of

intelligence about the theme of his ooetrv?Nay, very much the reverse.And stili he will go on imitating without know_

ing what makes a thing good or bad, and may beexpected therefore to imitate ody rhar whicfL ap-pears to be good to the ignorant multitude?

Just so.Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that

the imitator has no knorvledge worth mentioningof what he imitates, Imitation is only a kincl ofplay or sport, and the tragic poets, wirether theywrite in iambic or in heroic verse,2 are imitatorsin the highest degree?

Very true.And now teli me, I conjure you _- thrs imita-

tion is concerned with an object which is thriceremoved from the truth?

Certainly.And what kind of faculty in man is that to

which imitation makes its special appeal?What do you mean?I will explain; The same body does not appear

equal to our sight when seen near and when seenat a distance?

True.

tDramatists wrote in iambic verse and epic poets in dac-ty l ic l rexameters - "heroic" verse. [Ed. l

5

ff/ful

f,(

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r-,r,''t j

And the same objects appear straight whenlooked af out of the water, and crooked when inthe water; and the concave becomes convex,orving to the illusion about colors to whuch thesight is liable. Thus every sort of conf,usion is re-vealed within us; and this is that weakness of thehuman mind on which the art of painting in lightand shadow, the art.of conjuring, and many otheringenious devices impose, having an effect uponus like magic.

True.And the arts of measuring and numbering and

weighing come to the rescue of the human under-standing _- there is the beauty of them - withthe result that the apparent greater or less, ormore or heavier, no longer have the mastery overus, but give way before the power of calculationand measuring and weighing?

Most true.And this, surely, must be the work of the cal-

culating and rational principle in the soul?To be sure.And often when this principle measures and

certifies that some things are equal, or that someare greater:or less .than others, it is, at the sametime, contradicted by the appearance which theobjects present?

True.But did we not say that such a'contradiction is

impossible - the same faculty cannot have con--trary opinions at the same.time about the samething?

We did; ,and rightly.Then that part of the soul which has an opin-

ion contrary to measure can hardly be the samewith that which has an opinion in accordancewith measure?

True.And the part of the soul which trusts to mea-

sure and calculation is likely to be the better one?Certainly.And therefore that which is, opposed to this is

probably an inferior principle in our nature?No doubt.This was the conclusion at which I was seek-

ing to arrive when I said that painting or drawing,and imitation in general, are engaged upon pro-ductions rvhich are far rernoved from truth, andare also the companions and friends and associ-

ates of a principle within us which is equally re-moved from reason, and that they have no tnre orhealthy aim.

Exactly.The imitative art is an inferior who from inter-

course with an inferior'has inferior off sprin g.Very true.And is this confined to the sight only, or does

it extend to the hearing also; relating in fact towhat u'e term poetry?

Probably the same would be true of poetry.Do not rely, I said, on a probabil ity derived

from the analogy of parnting; but let us oncemore go directly to that faculty of the mind withwhich imitative poetry has converse, and seewhether it rs good or bad.

By all means.We may state the question thus: Imitation imi-

tates the actions of men, whether voluntary or ln-voluntary, on which, as they imagine, a good orbad result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrowaccordingly. ls there anything more?

No, there is nothing else.But il all this .variety of circr,rmstances is the

man at unity with himself - or rather, as in the n-stance of sight there r.vas confusion ancl oppositionin his opinions about the same things, so hcre alsois there not strife,and inconsistency in his lit'e?Though I need hardly raise the question again, iorI remernber that'alltthis has been already admitted;and,the soul has been acknowledged by us to befuil of these and ten thousand similar oppositionsoccumng at the same moment?

And we,were right, he said.Yes, I said, thus far we were right; but there

was an omission which must now be supplied.What was the omission?Were we not saying that a good man, who has

the misfortune to lose his son or anything elsewhich is most dear,to him, wil l bear the loss witlrmore equanimity than another?

Yes, indeed.But wil l he have no sorrow, or shall we say

that although he cannot help sorrowing, he wil lmoderate his sorrow?

The latter, he said, is the truer statement.Tell me: will he be more likely to struggle and

hold out against his sorrow when.he is seen by hisequals, or when he is alone in a deserted place?

2 6 P L A T O

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::;| 'ii.o,,

liil. :1.:'di1,,,ri

qually re-oo tnre or

onr inter-ri.ing.

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oery.'der ived

us oncednd withand see

tion imi-ry,or in-good orr. sDrTow

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rt theretied,

rho has1g elsess with

#e sayre wil l

Ite onaby hisrUe? ,

The fact of being seen will make a great dif-f e r e n c c h e c a i d

When he is by himself he wil l not mind sayingmany things which he would be ashamed of any-one hearing, and also doing many things whichhe would not care to be seen doing?

True.And doubtless it is the law and reason in him

which bids him resist; while it is the affl iction it-self which is urging him to indulge his sorrow?

True.But when a man is drawn in two opposite di-

rections, to and from the same object, this, as weaffirm, necessarily implies two distinct principlesin him?

Certainly.One of them is ready to follow the guidance of

the law?How do you mean?The law would say that to be patient under

calanrity is best, and that we shouid not give wayto impatience, as the good and evii in such thingsare not clear, and nothing is garned by impa-tience; also, because no human thing is of seriousimportance, and grief stands in the way of thatwhich at the moment is most required.

What is most required? he asked.That we should take counsel about what has

happened, and when the dice have been thrown,according to their fall, order our affairs in the waywhich reason deems best; not, like children whohave had a fall, keeprng hold of the part struckand wasting ti:ne in setting up a howl, but aiwaysaccustoming the soul forthwith to apply a remedy,raising up that which is sickLy and fallen, banish-ing the cry of sorrow by the heahng art.

Yes, he said, that is the true way of meetingthe attacks of forfune.

Weli then, I said, the higher principle is readyto follorv this suggestion of reason?

Cleariy.But the other principle, which inclines us to

recollection of our troubles and to larnentation,and can never have enough of them, we may callirrational, useless, and cowardly?

lndeed, we may.Now does not the principle which is thus in-

clined to complaint, fumish a great variety ofmaterials for imitation? Whereas the wise and

calm temperament, being always nearly equable,is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when imi-tated, espoeially at a public festival when apromiscuous crowd is assembled in a theater. Forthe feeling'represented is one to which they arestrangers.

Certainly.Then the imitative poet who aims at being

popular is not by nature made, nor is his art in- Itended, to please or to affect the rational pril- dciple in the soul; but he will appeal rather to the -?lachrymose and fitful temper, which is easilyimitated?

Clearly.And now we may fairly take him and place

him by the side of the painter, for he is llke lumin two rvays: f irst, inasmuch as his creations havean inferior degree of truth - in this, I say, he islike him; and he is also.l ike him in being the as-sociate of an inferior part of the soul; and this rsenough to show that we shall be right in refusingto admit him into a State which is to bre well or-dered, because he awakens and nourishes thrspart of the soul, and by strengthening it impausthe reason. As in a city when the evil are permit-ted to wield power and the finer men are put outof the way, so in the soul of each man, as weshall maintain, the imitative poet implants an evilconstitution, for he indulges the irrational naturewhich has no discernment of greater and less, butthinks the same thing at one tirne great and at an-other small - he is an imitator of images and isvery far removed from the truth.

Exactly.But we have not yet brought forward the

heaviest count in our accusation: The porverwhich poetry has of harming even the good (andthere are very few who are not harmed) is surelyan awful thing?

Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say,Hear and judge: The best of us, as I conceive,

when we listen to a passage of Homer or one ofthe tragedians, in which he represents some herowho is drawling out his solrows in a long oration,or singing, and smiting his breast - the ,best ofus, you know, delight in givrng way to sympathy,and are in raptures at the excellence of the poetwho stirs our feelings most.

Yes, of course I know.

-lRT

w

R E P U B L I C , B O O K X ) -

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But when any sorrow of our own happens to

us, then you may obserye that we pride ourselveson the opposite quality - we would fain be quiet

and patient; this is considered the manly part, and

the other which delighted us in the recitation is

now deemed to be the Part of a woman.Very true, he said.Now can we be right in praising and admiring

another who is doing that which any one of uswould abominate and be ashamed of in his ownperson?

No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.Nay, I said, quite reasonable from one point of

v iew.What point of view?If you consider, I said, that when in misfor-

tune we feel a natural hunger and desire to re-lieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation,and that this very feeling which is starved andsuppressed in our own calamities is satisfied anddelighted by the poets; the better nature in eachof us, not having been sufficiently trained by rea-son or habit, allows the sympathetic element tobreak Ioose because the sorrow is another's: andthe spectator fancies that there can be no disgraceto himself in praising and pirying anyone who,while professing to be a brave man, gives way t0untimely lamentation; he thinks that the pleasureis a gain, and is far from wishing to lose it by re-jection of the whole poem. Few persons ever re-flect, as I should imagine, that the contagion mustpass from others to themselves, For the pitywhich has been nour.ished and strengthened inthe misfortunes of others is with difficulty re-pressed in our own.

How very true!And does not the same hold also of the ridicu-

lous? There are jests which you would beashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comicstage, or indeed in private, when you hear them,you are greatly amused by them, and are not at alldisgusted at their unsoemliness; fhe case of pity isrepeated; there is a principle in human naturewhich is disposed to raise a laugh, and this, whichyou once restrained by reason because you wereafraid: of being thought a buffoon, is now let outagain; and having stimulated the risible faculty atthe theater, you are betrayed unconsciously toyourself into playing the comic poet at home,

PLATO

Quite true, he said.And the same may be said of lust and anger

and all the other affections, of desire and painand pleasure, which are held to be inseparablefrom every action - in all of them poetry has alike effect; it feeds and waters the passions in-stead of drying them up; she lets them rule, al-though they ought to be controlled if mankind areever to increase in happiness and virtue.

I carmot deny it.Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet

with any of the eulogists of Homer declnring thathe has been the educator of Hellas, and that he rsprolitable for education and for the ordering ofhuman things, and that you should take him upagain and again and get to know him and regulateyour whole life according to him, we may loveand honor those who say these things - they areexcellent people, as far as their lights extend; andwe are ready to acknowledge that Homer is thegreatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; butwe must remain flrm in our conviction that hymnsto the gods and praises of famous men are the onlypoetry which ought to,be admitted into our State.For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyedMuse to enter, either in epic or lyric vense, not lawand the reason of mankind, which by oommonconsent have ever been deemed best, but pleasureand pain will'be the rulers in our State.

That is most true, he said.And now since we have reverted to the subject

of poetry, let this our defense serve to show thereasonableness of our'former judgment in send-lng away out of our State an art having the ten-dencies which we have described; for reasonconstrained us. But that she may not impute to usany harshness or want ofpoliteness, let us tell herthat there is an ancient quarrel between philoso-phy and poetry; of which there are maty proofs,such as the saying of "the yelping houncl howlingat her lord," or of one "mighty in the vain talk offools," and "the mob of sages circumventingZeus," and the "subtle thinkers who are beggarsafter all,"3 and there are innumerable other iignsof ancient enmiry between them. Notwithrtuid-ing this, let us assure the poetry which aims at

3Socrates is alluding to various proverbs, otherwise un_known, denigrating both poets and philosophers. IEd,]

I . pe ' vverbe$a

Yes;

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she

r p e'pxr

. f

28

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and angere and pairinseparableoetry has aassions in-m rule, al-rankind aree.

:r you mgetetaring thatd,that he.isrrdering ofke hirn upnd,regulater rnay love- they are:xtend; andrmer is thevriters; butthat hymnsrre the onlyr our State,re honeyed'se, not lawy corunonut pleasure

pleasure, and the art of imitation, that if she willonly prove her title to exist in a well-orderedState we shall be delighted to receive hs1 _- wsare very conscious of her charms; but it wouldnot be right on that account to betray the truth. Idare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmedby her as I am, especially when she appears inllomer?

Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to

returx from exile, but upon this condition only -that she make a defense of herself in some lyricalor other meter?

Certaidv.., And we may further grant to those of her de-fenders who are lovers of poetry and yet notpoets the permission to speak in prose on her be-half: let them show not only that she is pleasantbut also useful to States and to human life, andwe will listen in a kindly spirit; for we shallsurely be the gainers if this can be proved, thatthere is a use in poetry as well as a delight?

Certainly, he said, we shall be the gainers.If her defense fails, then, my dear friend, like

persons who are enamored of something,lut put a restraint upon themselves when theythink their desires are opposed to their interests,

so too must we after the marmer of lovers giveher up, though not without a struggle. We too areinspired by that love of such poetry which the ed-ucation of noble States has implanted in us, andtherefore we shall be glad if she appears at herbest and truest; but so long as she is unable tomake good her defense, this argument of oursshall be a charm to us, which we will repeat toourselves while we listen to her strains; that wemay not fall away into the childish love of herwhich captivates the many. At all events we arewell aware that poetry, such as we have de-scribed, is not to be regarded seriously as attain-urg to the truth; and he who listens to her, fearingfor the safety of the city which is within him;should be on his guard against her seductions andmake our words his law.

Yes, he said, I quite agree'with you.Yes, I said; my dear Glaucon, for great is the

issue at stake, greater than appears, whether aman is to be good or bad. And what wiil any onebe profited if under the influence of honor ormoney or power, aye, or under the excitement ofpoetry, he neglect justice and virtue?

Yes, he said; I have been convinced by the ar-gument! as I believe that anyone else would havebeen.

t J

9

v.,t-

t r _ /

u//'t/I,"

the subjeot) show thert in sendtrg the ten.[or reaso4lpute to usus tell her

,n philoso;ny proofs,rd howlingain talk ofumventrngre beggarslther signsw:ithsturd+;h aims at

therwise

tEa.;

SOCRATES: Welcome, Ion! And whence comenow to pay us a visit? From your home insus?

IoN: No, Socrates, I come from Epidaurus andfestival of Asclepius. I

SOCRATES: What! Do the citizens of Epidau-, ur honorng the god, have a contest between

apsodes2 too?ION: Indeed thev do. Thev have everv sort of

ical competition.

Translated by Lme Cooper.rGreek god of medicine; his festival, l ike that of other

divinities connected with Apollo, was the occasion for

Itic performarces and competitions. Bd.laProfessionals who delivered recitations of poetry, espe-

SocRATES: So? Ard did you compete? Andhow did you succeed?

IoN; We carried off first prize, Socrates.SoCRATES: Well donel See to it. now. that we

win the Panathenaea also.IoN: l t shal l be so, God wil l ing.

SoCRATES: I must say, Ion, I am often enviousof you rhapsodists in your profession. Your artrequires of you always to go in fine array, andlook as beautiful as you can, and meanwhile youmust be conversant with many excellent poets,and especially with Homer, the best and.most di-vine of all. You have to understhnd his thought,and not merely leam his lines. It is an enviablelot! ln fact, one never could be a rhapsode if onedid not comprehend the utterances of the poet,of Homer and tbe other epic poets. [Ed.]

I O N 2 9

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Thcory and Practice

felt to be his own. It looks as if this is the beginning of his potenry

which he has never had although in fact he has a family. Here in a

different way as compared with the first case was a man having to

reach to the central nothingness. In his case what emerged was not

hunger but peeing. The rwo cases can perhaps be compared for the

purposes of discussion.

\- w, VlinnicoLV

nThe Fate of the Transitional Object

Preparation for a talk giuen to the Association

for Chitd Psychology and Psychiatry, Glasgow,

5 December r959

Although many of you are very familiar with what I have said about

transiti"onal objects I would like first of all to re-state my view of

rhem, and then pass on to my main subject which is the question of

their fate. Here is a sratement then of the way in which transitional

objects seem to me to have significance. They seem to me to be in

several lines of transition. One of these has to do with object relation-

ships; the infant has a fist in the mouth, then a thumb, then there is

arr^aimi*ture of the use of the thumb or fingers, and some obiect

which is chosen by the infant for handling. Gradually there is a use

of obiects which are not part of the infant nor are they part of the

mother.Another kind of transition has to do with the changeover from an

object which is subjective for the infant to one which is obiectively

perceived or external. At first whatever objeet gains a relationship

with the infant is created by the infant, or at least that is the theory

of it to which I adhere. It is like an hallucination' Some cheating takes

place and an obiect that is ready ro hand overlaps with an hallucina-

tion. obviously the way the mother or her substitute behaves is of

paramount importance here. one mother is good and another bad at

ietting a real otject be iust where the infant is hallucinating an object

,o thit in fact the infant gains the illusion that the world can be cre-

ated and that what is created is the world.

At this point you will think of Mme Sechehaye's term "symbolic

realisation," t the making real of the symbol, only from our point of

view dealing with earliest infancy, we are thinking o{ the making real

of the hallucination. This does in fact initiate the infant's capacity for

using symbols, and where growth is straightforward the transitional

r. M. A. Sechehaye, Symbolic Realization (New York: International Universities Press'

r 9 5 r ) .

%Lg- t t l a - -

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54 Psycho-Analysis: Theory and Practice

object is the first symbol. Here the symbol is at the same rime borhthe hallucination and an objectively perceived part of external reality.

From all this it will be seen that we are describing the life of aninfant which means also the relationship of the environment throughthe mother or her substitute to the infant. We are talking about a"nursing couple," to use Merrill Middlemore's term.2 We are referringto the fact that there iS no such thing as an infant because when wesee an infant at this early stage we know that we will find infant-carewith the infant as paft of that infant-care.

This way of stating the meaning of the transitional object makes itnecessary for us to use the word "illusion." The mother is enablingthe infant to have the illusion that objects in external reality can bereal to the infant, that is to say they can be hallucinations since it isonly hallucinations that feel real. If an external object is to seem realthen the relationship to it must be that of the relationship to an hal-lucination. As you will readily agree, this goes bang into an ancientphilosophical conundrum, and you will be thinking of the rwo limer-icks. one of them bv Ronald Knox:

and the reply:

Do the stone and the treeContinue to belWhen there's no-one about in the quad?

The stone and the treeDo continue to beAs observed by yours faithfully, . . .

The fact is that an external object has no being for you or me ex-cept in so far as you or I hallucinate it, but being sane we take carenot to hallucinate except where we know what to see. Of course whenwe are tired or it is twilight we may make a few mistakes. The infantwith a transitional object is in my opinion all the time in this state inwhich we allow him or her to be and although it is mad we do notcall it mad. If the infant could speak the claim would be: "This objectis part of external reality and I creared it." If you or I said that wewould be locked up or perhaps leucotomised. This gives us a meaningfor the word "omnipotence" which we really need because when wetalk about the omnipotence of early infancy we do not only meanomnipotence of thought; we intend to indicate that the infant believes

2.. M. P. Middlemore, Tbe Nursing Couple (London: Hamish Hamilton, r94r).

The Fate of the Transitional Obiect 5 t

in an omnipotence which extends to certain objects and perhaps ex-

tends to cover the mother and some of the others in the immediate

environment. One transition is from omnipotent control of external

objects to the relinquishment of control and eventually to the ac-

knowledgement that there are phenomena outside one's personal con-

trol. The transitional obiect that is both part of the infant and part of

the mother acquires the new status called "possession."There are other transitions which I think are in process during the

period of time in which the infant uses transitional obiects. For in-

,trn.., there is that which belongs to the developing powers of the

infant, developing co-ordination, and a gradual enrichment of sensi-

bility. The r.n.. of smell is at its highest and probably will never be

so high again, except perhaps during psychotic episodes. Texture

means as much as it can ever mean' and dryness and dampness and

also what feels cold and what feels warm; these things have tremen-

dous meaning.Alongside this one has to mention the exrreme sensitivity of the

infantile lips and no doubt of the sense of taste. The word "disgust-

ing" has .rot .o-. to mean anything yet for the infant and at the

beginning the infant has not even become concerned with excretions'

fn. atiUlti"g and drooling that characterises early infancy covers the

object and reminds one of the lion in the cage at the zoo, who almost

seems to soften up the bone with saliva before eventually bringing its

existence to an end by biting it up and eating it. How easy to imagine

the lion with very tender caressing feelings towards the bone which is

just going to be destroyed. So in transitional phenomena we see the

initia1ion of the capacity for affectionate feelings, with the instinctual

direct relationship sinking into primary repressron.ln this way we can see that the infant's use of an obiect can be in

one way or another joined up with body functioning, and indeed one

cannot imagine that an object can have meaning for an infant unless

it is so ioined. This is another way of stating that the ego is based on

a body ego.I have given some examples just to remind you of all sorts of pos-

sibilities which exist and which are illustrated in the case of your own

children as well as the children who are your clients' Somedmes we

find the mother used as if she herself were a transitional object' and

this may persist and give rise to great trouble; for instance, a patient

that I have had to deal with recently used the lobe of his mother's ear.

You will guess that in these cases where the mother is used, there is

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t6 Psycho-Analysis: Theory and Practice

almost certainly something in the mother-an unconscious need o{her child-into the pattern of which the child is fitting himself orherself.

Then there is the use of the thumb or fingers which may persist andthere may or may not be an affectionate caressing of some part of theface or some part of the mother or of an object going on at the sametime. ln some cases the caressing continues and the thumb- or finger-sucking is lost sight of. Then it often happens that an infant who didnot use the hand or thumb for autoerotic gratification neverthelessmay use an object of some kind or other. !7here an object is employedone usually finds an extension of interest so that soon other objectsbecome important. For some reason or other girls tend to persist withsoft objects until they use dolls, and boys tend to go more quicklyover to an adoption of hard objects. One could perhaps better saythat the boy in children goes over to hard objects and the girl in chil-dren of both sexes tends to retain the interest in softness and in tex-ture, and this may join eventually on to the maternal identification.Often where there is a clear-cut transitional object dating from earlytimes this persists although in fact the child is employed more in usingthe next and less important objects; perhaps at times of great distress,sadness or deprivation there is a return to the original or to the thumbor a loss altogether of the capacity to use symbols and substitutesat all.

I want to leave it at that. There is an infinite variety in the clinicalpicture, and all we can talk about usefully is the theoretical implica-tions.

The Passing of the flansitional Object

There are rwo approaches to this subject:A. Old soldiers never die, they simply fade away. The transitional

oblect tends to be relegated to the limbo of half-forgotten things atthe bottom of the chest of drawers, or at the back of the toy cup-board. It is usual, however, for the child to know. For example, a boywho has forgotten his transitional object has a regression phase fol-lowing a deprivation. He goes back to his transitional object. Thereis then a gradual return to the other later-acquired possessions. So thetransitional object may be

i. supplanted but keptii. worn out

The Fate of tbe Transitional Object 57

iii. given away (not satisfactory)iv. kept by mother-relic of a precious time in her life (identifica-

tion)v. etc.

This refers to the fate of the obiect itself.B. I come now to the main point that I want to put forward for

discussion. This is not a new idea although I believe it was new whenI described it in my original paper. (I fear now that I come to it thatyou will feel it is too obvious, unless of course you disagree.)

If it is true that the transitional object and the transitional phenom-ena are at the very basis of symbolism, then I think we may fairlyclaim that these phenomena mark the origin in the life of the infantand child of a sort of third area of existing, a third area which I thinkhas been difficult to fit into psycho-analytic theory which has had tobuild up graduallv according to the stone-by-stone method of a sci-ence.

This third area might turn out to be the cultural life of the indi-vidual.

'What are the three areas? One, the fundamental one, is the individ-

ual psychic or inner reality, the unconscious if you like (not the re-pressed unconscious which comes very soon but definitely later). Thepersonal psychic reality is that from which the individual "halluci-nates" or "creates" or "thinks up" or "conceives of." From it dreamsare made, though they are clothed in the materials gathered in fromexternal reality.

The second area is external reality, the world that is gradually rec-ognised as Nor-ME by the healthy developing infant who has estab-lished a self, with a limiting membrane and an inside and an outside.The expanding universe which man contracts out of, so to speak.

Now infants and children and adults take external reality in, asclothing for their dreams, and they project themselves into externalobjects and people and enrich external reality by their imaginativeperceptions.

But I think we really do find a third area) an area of living whichcorresponds to the infant's transitional phenomena and which actu-ally derives from them. In so far as the infant has not achieved tran-sitional phenomena I think the acceptance of symbols is deficient, andthe cultural life is poverty-stricken.

No doubt you easily see what I mean. Put rather crudely: we go toa concert and I hear a late Beethoven string quartet (you see I'm high-

- \ ( .'/-t u

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t8 Psycbo-Analysis: Tbeory and Practice

brow). This quartet is not just an external fact produced by Beetho-ven and played by the musicians; and it is not my dream, which as amatter of fact would not have been so good. The experience, coupledwith my preparation of myself for it, enables me to create a gloriousfact. I enjoy it because I say I created it, I hallucinated it, and it is realand would have been there even if I had been neither conceived ofnor conceived.

This is mad. But in our cultural life we accept the madness, exactlyas we accept the madness of the infant who claims (though in unut-tered mutterings) "I hallucinated that and it is part of mother whowas there before I came along."

From this you will see why I think the transitional object is essen-tially different from the internal object of Melanie Klein's terminol-ogy. The internal object is a matter of the inner reality, which becomesmore and more complex with every moment of the infant's life. Thetransitional obiect is for us a bit of the blanket but for the infant arepresentative both of the mother's breast, say, and of the internalisedmother's breast.

'Watch the sequence when the mother is absent. The infant clings to

the transitional object. After a length of time the internalised motherfades, and then the transitional object ceases to mean anything. Inother words the transitional object is symbolical of the internal objectwhich is kept alive by the alive mother's presence.

In the same way, perhaps, an adult may mourn someone, and inthe course of mourning cease to enjoy cultural pursuits; recoveryfrom mourning is accompanied by a return of all the intermediateinterests (including the religious experiences) which enrich the indi-vidual's life in health.

In this way I feel that transitional phenomena do not pass, at leastnot in health. They may become a lost art, but this is part of an illnessin the patient, a depression, and somerhing equivalent to the reacrionto deprivation in infancy, when the transitional object and transi-tional phenomena are temporarily (or sometimes permanently) mean-ingless or non-existent.

I would very much like to hear your reactions to this idea of a thirdarea of experiencing, its relation to the cultural life, and its suggestedderivation from the transitional phenomena of infancy.

1,2Notes on Play

Undatedl

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Tbe characteristic of play is pleasureObservations of animal young including human young

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Satisfaction in play depends on the use of symbols, although, at base,the drive comes from instinct.Symbols: This stands for that.

lf that is loved this can be used and enjoyed.lf that is hated this can be knocked over, hurt, killed etc.,and restored, and hurt again.

That is: the capacity to play is an achieuement in the emotional de-velopment of every human child.

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Play as an acbieuement in individual emotional growthA. The tendenry that is inherited that propels the child onwards

and (owing to the extreme dependence of the human infant)B. The provision in the environment for conditions that meet the

infant's and small child's needs, so that development is not inter-rupted by reactions to impingement (cold, heat, bad holding, faultyhandling, starvation, etc.),

andC. Play starts as a symbol of the infant's and the small child's trust

in the mother (or subsritute mother).

r. These handwrinen notes were found in D.W.V.'s "Ideas" file. It is likely that theydate from before the late r96os, when it became his custom to use the verbal noun 'play-

ing' rather than (as mosdy here) 'play.'-Eos.

L1-",| ' 1 .

, ' ' I l l ' t : ' ' '

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