Remora

Brothers and sisters, are you aware of the Swiss site, culture actif? It is a little treasure trove of unexpected essays for the cultural critics among us. Limited Inc urges a visit. They have a five part interview with Jean Starobinski on his latest book, a meditation on the emergence of the term "reaction." Action et R�action: vie et aventures d�un couple. Don't be skeptical -- just as Sherlock Holmes amazed his companion by lighting on the fact of cigar ash or a hissing sound as the main clue to a murder or theft, the good philosophe spots such seemingly peripheral instances of usage in the language and takes them to be curious. It is the ability to see the familiar as something that once wasn't there, that exists now because of some concantenation of acts, which allows the philosopher to justly appeal to language. The modern philosophical act is liberating in so far as it frees us, momentarily, from a false image of necessity - the idea that because our words make sense, now, they have always made sense. That words are place-markers for this eternal sense. The traditional philosophical act, of course, sought just the opposite - sought to prove that the image of necessity we perceive in the language we speak was, in fact, derived from a true image of the world.

The interview -- Limited Inc has only read the first page, it is rich enough for one visit -- takes us up to the moment that Newton introduces the word reaction in his famous third axiom. What went before the coupling of action and reaction was action and passion. Here's what Starobinski has to say about it:

Les anciens opposent antith�tiquement, action et passion ; action et, traduisons " passion " dans un quasi synonyme " souffrance ", " agir et souffrir ". Cette souffrance, dans la pens�e de certains philosophes de l�antiquit� -Aristote, par exemple- elle est partout, et l�action aussi est partout. Quand Aristote r�fl�chit aux divers types de mouvements, il envisage un type de mouvement parmi d�autres qui est le mouvement dans l�espace; le mouvement local, celui que nous constatons quand nous donnons un coup � un corps dur ; dans le choc, le corps nous r�siste ; le doigt appuie sur la pierre et nous avons le sentiment que la pierre appuie sur le doigt. La pierre est d�une certaine fa�on passive quand nous appuyons notre doigt dessus et elle exerce quelque chose comme une action en retour, une r�pulsion : les anciens parlaient de passion. Le mot " r�action ", � travers des d�rivations qui ont pass� par le grec, n�a pas �t� constitu� dans la langue latine ancienne ; il n�existait pas ; oui, la r�pulsion, mais pas la r�action. Comment ce mot s�est-il form� ? Et bien il a fallu, tr�s probablement, qu�� travers des traductions arabes, ou en revenant au texte grec, des savants, th�ologiens, philosophes du Moyen-�ge, comme Albert le Grand, essaient d�adapter certains mots grecs, ou certains mots arabes � la langue latine sp�cialis�e qui �tait la leur. C'est alors qu'on pourra voir le mot " r�action " doubler le mot " passion ". Toute passion est une r�action ; elle est passive. La r�action est con�ue comme quelque chose de passif, mais qui partage quand m�me avec l�action une qualit� dynamique.

"The ancients opposed, authentically, action and passion; action and, translating passion in its quasi synonym, sufferance, to act and to suffer. That sufferance, in the thought of certain ancient philosophers, Aristotle for example, is everywhere, and action is also everywhere. When Aristotle reflects on the diverse types of movement, he envisions a type of movement among others which is movement in space; local movement, that which we observe when we give a blow to a hard body. In the shock, the body resists us. [In the blow] we hold a finger on a stone and we have the sentiment that the stone holds on the finger. The stone is in a certain manner passive when we rest our finger upon it and it exercizes something like an action in return, a repulsion: the ancients spoke of passion. The word, reaction, going through all the derivations that occured in Greek, wasn't constituted in ancient latin. It didn't exist. Yes, repulsion, , but not reaction. How was this word formed. Well, it was necessary, probably, that by way of arabic translation, or in returning to the Greek text, the thinkers, theologians, philosophers of the Middle Ages, like Albert the Great, tried to adapt certain greek words or certain arabic words to the specialized latin peculiar to them. It is thus that one can see the word "reaction" double the word "passion." All passion is a reaction. It is passive. Reaction is conceived as something passive, but which shared, nonetheless, a dynamic quality with action."