Semantics, etymology and history of the notion of talent

Abstract

We explore the etymology of the notion of talent, starting with a paradox. Talent was originally a measure of weight, yet its metaphorical transport has led to the enigma of its indefinability. The etymological investigation then turns to modern definitions, starting with the Académie Française's first dictionary of 1694, which proposes a figurative meaning that has remained very stable in subsequent editions: "gift of nature, natural disposition and aptitude for certain things, capacity, skill". By metonymy, the imputed abilities and dispositions are used to qualify the whole person.

The origin of the questioning of the notion and value of talent is well known: the parable of the talents in Matthew's Gospel (25:14-30), whose meanings we examine, drawing in particular on Gianni Mombello's book dedicated to it:

" The parable of the talents is built on two essential themes: the gifts that God has given to men, and the use that men make of these gifts. God's gifts are of two kinds: natural, material or spiritual, and supernatural. Natural and material gifts are man's physical faculties (the five senses); natural and spiritual gifts are intelligence (and reason) and the will. Finally, the supernatural gifts are faith and the "good will", that additional grace which enables man to choose the good and perform meritorious acts for his salvation. These gifts are distributed unequally, according to each individual's capacity to receive them, and unequal is also the use to which they are put. Those who know how to make these gifts "bear fruit" prepare for their salvation; those who leave them inactive prepare for their damnation and the loss of these same gifts. The basic themes of the parable are therefore that of grace and that of free will, which constitute the two essential data of the most difficult problem that Christian speculation has ever had to debate, i.e. the problem of predestination. " [5]

Theologians, hermeneutists and philologists have been busy solving two riddles posed by the notion of talent:

How did what was originally a quantifiable and divisible measure of weight and currency become a trait of people?
How did two very different meanings emerge in the Latin language and culture, and in the exegeses of the parable of the talent, from the earliest centuries of the Christian era?

The medieval meaning, attested in the Romance languages, of envy, desire, will, propensity, inclination, or more simply, attitude of mind;
The modern sense of talent - an individual's intellectual or possibly physical abilities - which came to dominate, mainly from the 15th^centuryonwards, and supplanted the former?

With the success or decline of this or that theological interpretation of the parable, and the constant search to adjust the notion of talent to the evolving and competing doctrines of the Church, multiple recombinations of meaning led, in a non-linear fashion, to the prevalent meaning of the word talent, that of aptitude, which was not the central meaning in medieval exegesis, but which came to the fore in the modern era. Mombello gives the following formulation, which resembles a meccano game whose philological rigor some have criticized, without denying the contributions of the vast survey in the theological corpus:

Talent-grâce didn't survive, and it didn't develop, because it had acquired, among exegetes, strictly theological meanings that were difficult to popularize. So talent-don seems to have had a rather short life, with this very vague meaning. Aided by talentum-bona naturae (and ingenium), it developed the meaning of " aptitude " of any kind [6].

Mombello attributes the assimilation of talent to natural abilities rather than to "gifts from God" to the influence of post-medieval humanism. German philologists (von Wartburg, Müller), for their part, point out that the transposition of God's gifts into natural gifts and aptitudes is already present in scholastic Latin, for example, in the case of Abelard (1079-1142), who evokes these "illa litteralis scientiae talenta" in a letter to Heloise. But it was with the Protestant Reformation that this meaning became much more widespread, particularly with the study of the Bible outside theological and literary circles in the 17th^century.

Having completed this philological exploration, we return to the parable of the talents to decipher it in terms of the sociology of organizations.

One of the parable's readings is the causal relationship between capacity (talent) and result (earnings), but it's a curious one: the two servants best off at the outset (they receive five and two talents respectively, compared with one for the third servant) achieve exactly the same performance, doubling the capital received. We must therefore assume that they have the same skill (doubling the stake), yet do not have the same resources. This forces us to decouple aptitude from resources and positions in the hierarchy of this domestic enterprise, whereas the talents (the sum of gold) distributed among the three servants have nevertheless been proportionate to the position and competence of each in the organization's hierarchy. The relationship between ability and outcome is intriguing for another reason. Those who have passed the test (doubling the stake) are congratulated and say nothing, while those who have deliberately failed or given up on the test, burying the sum of a talent without putting it to good use and returning it in the same form, speak out to justify themselves and to express their distrust of the master and his predatory behavior.

The starting situation was (in managerial jargon) what is known as an inclusive definition of talent: everyone has abilities, even if in unequal quantities, and should be given the means to develop them (golden "talents" are resources designed to implement and develop them), even if the organization's hierarchy reminds us that individual abilities are unequal, and without us knowing anything about this inequality, other than that it is a fact of structural correspondence between abilities and positions. But the final situation is an exclusive one: one of the servants has not shown the right disposition to act. And so we fall back into a retributive justice of rewards and punishments.

In fact, the parable is frequently cited in management literature as an illustration of the "Mathieu effect", which the sociologist of science Robert Merton identifies as the first exemplification of the mechanism of cumulative advantage. Those who are better endowed - in skills, in visibility, in resources derived from their initial success - will receive even more rewards, and more opportunities to increase their earnings, their scientific credit or their capital of notoriety (Merton speaks of the sciences). Symmetrically, the mechanism of cumulative disadvantage acts to diminish the resources and opportunities of those who have little. Applied to the corporate world, the argument serves to illustrate the common practice of selectively accelerating the careers of those placed on the high-potential list, who, given the qualities they appear to possess after selection, are likely to acquire skills and experience in greater quantity and variety, and at a much faster pace than through the normal play of horizontal mobility between various functions, or through the play of progressively upward mobility in the organization's hierarchy.

The history of the spread of the notion of talent in the modern history of European and North American societies can be traced back to a simple and massive question: how does one differentiate a whole (a society, a professional group, an organization, a set of competitors) to bring about the emergence of a principle of hierarchization that is based on a qualification of individual differences in ability, while maintaining an acceptable and justifiable balance between the situations of all stakeholders?

As Pierre Rosanvallon reminds us in his survey of debates on equality and inequality over the last three centuries [7], two terms were used in the second half of the ^18th century to delimit the field of acceptable inequalities between individuals: the notions of virtue and talent.

These notions referred, at the time, to the conduct of individuals and the field of individual responsibility (virtue) and to the givens of nature (talent as an individual endowment of "capital"). Virtue is not simply individual conduct, but conduct oriented towards inter-individual equilibrium. For the notion of talent must be coupled with principles of conduct and self-limitation of the advantages engendered by superior success, in order to achieve the feat of challenging an inegalitarian (Ancien Régime) social order and bringing about a new one, thus substituting an endogenous mechanism of hierarchization for an exogenous principle of a priori stratification. The principle of talented success is, in essence, based on individualistic liberalism, which emphasizes the virtues of competition rather than monopoly or status rents, and the mobility of situations subject to competition. But there's more: the invocation of talent situates an individual's success in a hierarchy of prestige and respect within his or her group and within a social whole.

We examine four specifications of the relationship between individual differences, acquired inequalities and the imperative of formal equality. It appears that talent was a two-sided notion in the ^18th century: it delegitimized the old social order, which the Revolution brought down, and legitimized productive differences, provided that opportunities were equalized. A good illustration of this property of the notion and its use is provided by historians' investigations into the transformations of the military world in ^{eighteenth-century} France. We draw in particular on the research of American historian David Bien.