Page 18 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 18
Slovenian Lectures
The starting point for both the Port-Royal grammarians and Bally is
one of Descartes’ theories, a theory understood in a very simple way: I do
not know if it is really Descartes’, but at least it is the theory which most
people regard as being his. That conception consists in saying that there
are two fundamental faculties in thought: on the one hand, there is the un-
derstanding (or intelligence) and on the other, the will. The understand-
ing is a passive faculty: it consists simply in perceiving a certain number of
ideas which are representations of the world, and then the will adopts atti-
tudes towards those ideas. Let us suppose for example that the understand-
ing conceives of the idea that Peter will come tomorrow. The will can adopt
a certain number of attitudes towards that idea: it can affirm that idea by
saying “Yes, it’s true, Peter will come tomorrow”; it can also deny the truth
of that idea by saying “Peter will not come tomorrow”; it can also ques-
tion it by asking “Will Peter come tomorrow?”. So, according to Descartes,
there are two faculties: one is passive, the understanding; the other active,
the will. One could also say that there is an objective aspect and a subjective
aspect in all thought. So that Descartes’ theory belongs to the great West-
ern tradition that distinguishes object and subject. By the way, even if this
distinction seems obvious to us, I believe that it is obvious only within our
cultural framework: for us, it seems to go without saying, because modern
civilisation is based on it; but the Arabic grammars of the Middle Ages, in
the thirteenth century for example, were not based in the same way on the
distinction between object and subject. Closing that parenthesis, I will sim-
ply remind you that, for Descartes, thought is made up of the understand-
ing which passively conceives ideas and of the will which adopts attitudes
relatively to them.
For the Port-Royal grammarians and for Bally, language is a representa-
tion of thought and each sentence is a small image of a thought. Given that
in thought, there is a cooperation of two faculties, one passive, the other ac-
tive, the understanding and the will, there must be a mark both of passiv-
ity and of activity in the very structure of a sentence. That leads the Port-
Royal grammarians and Bally on to say that in every grammatical sentence,
two aspects must be distinguished: the first is the modus (I keep the Latin
term), which represents the attitude of the will; the second is the dictum,
which represents the idea as conceived by the understanding. If for exam-
ple you are describing a sentence like Peter will come – I am taking a simple
example – you will say that the dictum is the association of a subject (Pe-
ter), of a verb (come) and a tense (the future); and besides that something in
the sentence expresses an attitude of the will, and that is the grammatical
The starting point for both the Port-Royal grammarians and Bally is
one of Descartes’ theories, a theory understood in a very simple way: I do
not know if it is really Descartes’, but at least it is the theory which most
people regard as being his. That conception consists in saying that there
are two fundamental faculties in thought: on the one hand, there is the un-
derstanding (or intelligence) and on the other, the will. The understand-
ing is a passive faculty: it consists simply in perceiving a certain number of
ideas which are representations of the world, and then the will adopts atti-
tudes towards those ideas. Let us suppose for example that the understand-
ing conceives of the idea that Peter will come tomorrow. The will can adopt
a certain number of attitudes towards that idea: it can affirm that idea by
saying “Yes, it’s true, Peter will come tomorrow”; it can also deny the truth
of that idea by saying “Peter will not come tomorrow”; it can also ques-
tion it by asking “Will Peter come tomorrow?”. So, according to Descartes,
there are two faculties: one is passive, the understanding; the other active,
the will. One could also say that there is an objective aspect and a subjective
aspect in all thought. So that Descartes’ theory belongs to the great West-
ern tradition that distinguishes object and subject. By the way, even if this
distinction seems obvious to us, I believe that it is obvious only within our
cultural framework: for us, it seems to go without saying, because modern
civilisation is based on it; but the Arabic grammars of the Middle Ages, in
the thirteenth century for example, were not based in the same way on the
distinction between object and subject. Closing that parenthesis, I will sim-
ply remind you that, for Descartes, thought is made up of the understand-
ing which passively conceives ideas and of the will which adopts attitudes
relatively to them.
For the Port-Royal grammarians and for Bally, language is a representa-
tion of thought and each sentence is a small image of a thought. Given that
in thought, there is a cooperation of two faculties, one passive, the other ac-
tive, the understanding and the will, there must be a mark both of passiv-
ity and of activity in the very structure of a sentence. That leads the Port-
Royal grammarians and Bally on to say that in every grammatical sentence,
two aspects must be distinguished: the first is the modus (I keep the Latin
term), which represents the attitude of the will; the second is the dictum,
which represents the idea as conceived by the understanding. If for exam-
ple you are describing a sentence like Peter will come – I am taking a simple
example – you will say that the dictum is the association of a subject (Pe-
ter), of a verb (come) and a tense (the future); and besides that something in
the sentence expresses an attitude of the will, and that is the grammatical
