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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Let us enter linguistics by the “gateway of the senses.” The ambiguity of French itself, in which sens signifies both sensation and meaning, leads us to this Janus-portal, a place for elementary exchanges between the self and the world, where Saint Thomas stationed himself to work out a theory of the encounter between the philosophical subject and object or, rather, using his terms, between the cognoscens (active present participle) and cognitum (neuter nominative/accusative of a passive past participle…) The very heart of all diathesis.**
1 We may compare the French "transitive-transitive" of "Je mange la pomme," which answers the question, "Qu'est-ce que tu manges?" and draws attention to the apple, and the "transitive-intransitive" sense, "Je mange-la-pomme" which answers the question, "Qu'est-ce que tu fais?" (both separated by more or less subtle differences in intonation, equivalent to the difference in conjugation in Aleut). Cp. what is said above with regard to Nentsi conjugations.
2 To say nothing of "J'ai vu manger les chiens," dear to L. Tesnière (manger or être mangés?), "J'ai vu couler le navire" (coulé = sunk by someone or cou lant = sinking of itself), "J'ai vu faire ça à = (par!) des enfants," and so on. "Manger" hovers between a subject which may be subject or object of "voir," and an object which may be its subject.
3 A philosophical reflection on the word "civilization" might have been a fitting conclusion to this study. Everything that was written about its "change in meaning" in the eighteenth century (contemporary, furthermore, with the change in meaning of the word "object" in philosophy) comes to a game of seesaw in the balance of transitivity of the corresponding verb. The accent has thus passed from the "civilizing subject"—which called to mind the missionary civilizing the savages and collaborating in the long and difficult "work" of "civilizing a people" (Racine, seventeenth century)—to the "civilized object" (the people): "The civilization of a people" from then on changes into a noun group marked with the sign of subjective genitive and takes on the meaning of state proper to the object transformed into subject. Soon philosophers such as the English Buckle (nineteenth century) claimed, for example, that religion, like literature or the constitution of a political body, was the "effect," and not the "cause," of civilization. They thus discovered, unknowingly, in the light of the far-off sun of language… the moon of their thought… The word "organization" (as near to action as it is to state, to its "interior" verb as to its noun façade) and many others have analogous, very philosophical, balances. Do we not see pollution (in front of our eyes and under our noses in which the "it" is confirmed) lose its reference to the agent polluter in the same way to become the state of the polluted?
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