Res, non verba
One hardly expects to be taught a philosophy lesson when passing by a police station. But that’s precisely what happened when I finally looked in a less distracted way at an inscription on the wall of a local precinct. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the sign, which was also reproduced on the station’s tile wall: Res, non verba. “Acts (or things), not words.”
The motto (which is definitely not new, used as it has historically been in heraldry, also with the slight variation of Facta, non verba) invites reflection, precisely because of the confidence with which it presents itself. Such confidence is not loud; it is terse, compressed into three Latin words that appear to transcend the contingencies of language—words that disavow words. At first, the slogan that claims fidelity to things rather than verbal expressions seems almost indifferent to interpretation, as though it were a mere factual reminder of how reality operates. It also voices the deepest aspiration of phenomenology that, as formulated by Husserl, aimed to go back to the things themselves. Yet, it is precisely this appearance—the refusal to appear rhetorical, whether in the case of a phenomenologist or a police officer—that makes the motto the bearer of a powerful (perhaps, the most powerful) rhetoric. Even the decision on the meaning of res is not a foregone conclusion: why translate this word as “acts” rather than “things”? Upon a closer look that contemplates the possibilities of interpretation as basic as the choice of translation, the claim starts to erode, undermining itself.
The elevation of deeds over words is rarely innocent. It aligns the agents who adopt the slogan with a certain philosophical posture toward reality: that what truly counts is what is done, not what is said; that the real is constituted by actions, not discourses. Underlying this posture is an ontological claim about the nature of authority. If deeds are privileged, then the one who acts is presumed to stand on firmer ground than the one who speaks, while speech is excluded from the realm of action. (Forget J.L. Austin’s speech acts!) Action becomes the new, presumably post-metaphysical, absolute—a domain, where meaning no longer needs verbal articulation because it allegedly inheres in the act itself.
But deeds do not speak for themselves, while speech does act. Deeds require interpretation no less than words do. Without the narratives that accompany them, actions float in a void of incomprehension, susceptible to contradictory meanings. The Hegelian emphasis on acts and actuality (Wirklichkeit) in the making of the subject, as described in Phenomenology of Spirit, goes hand in hand with the de-actualization or the virtualization of the very same subject in thoughtful self-reflection, before a fresh exteriorization in acts. Dialectically understood, reality (Realität which, both in English and in German, derives from the Latin res) is not actuality, insofar as the former is still not mediated, not self-negated and determined, unlike the latter.
When a police force declares that it is interested in deeds rather than words, it implies that its deeds possess a kind of self-evidence—an immediacy that transcends the need for explanation, let alone for a discussion and a public debate. In this way, the motto does more than oppose two modes of communication; it establishes a hierarchy in which power confers meaning on action, bypassing the communal processes, through which meaning is usually negotiated. Res, non verba is utterly incompatible with res publica, the public thing that organizes a political sphere ideally with the participation of all involved.
Words, of course, introduce uncertainty. They open space for dialogue, which is also the space for dissent, critique, misunderstanding, and rearticulation. They resist the closure that action, especially institutional action, often seeks to impose. In public life, to speak is to expose oneself, to become accountable to others, to risk one’s position rather than assert it unilaterally. For this reason, the suspicion of words can reveal a deeper suspicion of plurality. In reducing its self-presentation to deeds alone, an institution signals a preference for unidirectional relations, those in which it acts and others respond.
The issue is not that deeds are unimportant. They are actually indispensable to any functioning political community. But action devoid of language loses its grounding in shared meaning. It embraces sheer force rather than communication, and so teeters on the precipice of pure violence. Action that refuses to justify, clarify, or contextualize itself denies the interlocutory nature of the political sphere. It presumes that legitimacy flows automatically from the deed, as if action, sanctioned by an institution of enforcement (hence, already heavily tilted toward brutal force), were an extension of indisputable necessity, rather than choice.
Viewed in this light, the motto Res, non verba choreographs an ontological withdrawal in its denial of language. The institution proclaims a preference for the realm of things (solid, mute, indisputable) over the fraught domain of speech. But this preference discloses (paradoxically, in language) a deep anxiety about language and about speaking. Words are the expressions and the catalysts of vulnerability; they require that actors situate themselves within the horizon of others, acknowledging the interdependence of meaning-making. To reject words is to reject this exposure and an ongoing negotiation of meaning and sense. Deeds, by contrast, can be executed without such exposure. They can be completed in silence. Often, in deadly silence.
A different orientation would acknowledge that deeds and words are not adversaries but partners in the constitution of an actuality irreducible to the oppressive weight of reality. Action does not lose power when it is explained; instead, it gains legitimacy, which might itself be ideologically saturated, but still open to another kind of scrutiny. Speech does not dilute resolve, but creates the conditions for mutual understanding. Acting without speaking is severing the relation that makes political life possible. Speaking without acting is hollowing language out. The challenge is not to choose between the two, but to understand how they depend on one another.
The motto, in its brevity, crystallizes a temptation that recurs throughout political history and, to some extent, of metaphysics: the dream of a realm where actions or other extra-linguistic realities are pure, uncontaminated by the ambiguities of speech. Political life, in turn, begins where such purity ends. It begins with the admission that meaning is not contained in the deed, but arises between actors, through the fragile, because inherently ambiguous, medium of words.