The Life of the Mind (15 page)

But the trouble is that no such incontestable locality can be found when we ask ourselves where we are when we think or will, surrounded, as it were, by things which are no more or are not yet or, finally, by such everyday thought-things as justice, liberty, courage, that are nevertheless totally outside sense experience. The willing ego, it is true, early found an abode, a region of its own; as soon as this faculty was discovered, in the early centuries of the Christian era, it was localized
within
us, and if somebody were to write the history of inwardness in terms of an inner
life,
he would soon perceive that this history coincides with the history of the Will. But inwardness, as we have already indicated, has problems of its own even if one agrees that soul and mind are not the same. Moreover, the peculiar reflexive nature of the will, sometimes identified with the heart and almost always regarded as the organ of our innermost self, has made this region even harder to isolate. As for thinking, the question of where we are when we think seems to have been raised only by Plato, in the
Sophist
;
⁵⁶
there, after having determined the sophist's locality, he promised to determine the philosopher's proper locality as well—the
topos noētos
he had mentioned in the earlier dialogues
⁵⁷
—but he never kept this promise. It may have been that he simply failed to complete the trilogy of
Sophist-Statesman-Philosopher
or that he had come to believe that the answer was implicitly given in the
Sophist,
where he pictures the sophist as "at home in the darkness of Not-being," which "makes him so hard to perceive," "whereas the philosopher ... is difficult to see because his region is so bright; for the eye of the many cannot endure to keep its gaze fixed on the divine."
⁵⁸
That answer could indeed be expected from the author of the
Republic
and the Cave parable.

Mental activities, invisible themselves and occupied with the invisible, become manifest only through speech. Just as appearing beings living in a world of appearances have an urge to show themselves, so thinking beings, which still belong to the world of appearances even after they have mentally withdrawn from it, have an
urge to speak
and thus to make manifest what otherwise would not be a part of the appearing world at all. But while appearingness as such demands and presupposes the presence of spectators, thinking in its need of speech does not demand or necessarily presuppose auditors: communication with our fellow-men would not necessitate human language with its intricate complexity of grammar and syntax. The language of animals—sounds, signs, gestures—would be amply sufficient to serve all immediate needs, not only for self-preservation and the preservation of the species, but also for making evident the moods and emotions of the soul.

It is not our soul but our mind that demands speech. I referred to Aristotle when I drew a distinction between mind and soul, the thoughts of our reason and the passions of our emotional apparatus, and I called attention to the extent to which the key distinction in
De Anima
is reinforced by a passage in the introduction to his short treatise on language,
De Interpretatione
.
⁵⁹
I shall come back to the same treatise, for its most interesting point is that the criterion of
logos,
coherent speech, is not truth or falsehood but meaning. Words as such are neither true nor false. The word "centaur," for instance (Aristotle uses the example of "goat-stag," an animal that is half-goat, half-stag), "means something, though nothing true or false, unless one adds 'non-being' or 'being' to it."
Logos
is speech in which words are put together to form a sentence that is totally meaningful by virtue of synthesis (
synthēkē
). Words, meaningful in themselves, and thoughts (
noēmata
) resemble each other (
eoiken
). Hence speech, though always "significant sound" (
phōnē semantikē
), is not necessarily
apophantikos,
a statement or a proposition in which
alētheuein
and
pseudesthai,
truth and falsehood, being and non-being, are at stake. This is not always the case: a prayer, as we saw, is a
logos,
but neither true nor false.
⁶⁰
Thus implicit in the urge to speak is the quest for meaning, not necessarily the quest for truth. It is also noteworthy that nowhere in this discussion of the relation of language to thought does Aristotle raise the question of priorities; he does not decide whether thinking is the origin of speaking, as though speech were merely an instrument of communicating our thoughts, or whether thought is the consequence of the fact that man is a speaking animal. In any case, since words-carriers of meaning—and thoughts resemble each other,
thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

Of all human needs, only "the need of reason" could never be adequately met without discursive thought, and discursive thought is inconceivable without words already meaningful, before a mind travels, as it were, through them—
poreuesthai dia logōn
(Plato). Language, no doubt, also serves communication between men, but there it is needed only because men are thinking beings and as such in need of communicating their thoughts; thoughts do not have to be communicated in order to occur, but they cannot occur without being spoken—silently or sounding out in dialogue, as the case may be. It is because thinking, though it always takes place in words, does not need auditors that Hegel, in agreement with the testimony of almost all philosophers, could say that "philosophy is something solitary." And it is not because man is a thinking being but because he exists only in the plural that his reason, too, wants communication and is likely to go astray if deprived of it; for reason, as Kant observed, is indeed "not fit to isolate itself, but to communicate."
⁶¹
The function of that soundless speech-tacife
secum rationare,
to "reason silently with oneself," in the words of Anselm of Canterbury
⁶²
—is to come to terms with whatever may be given to our senses in everyday appearances; the need of reason is to
give account, logon didonai,
as the Greeks called it with greater precision, of whatever there may be or may have occurred. This is prompted not by the thirst for knowledge—the need may arise in connection with well-known and entirely familiar phenomena—but by the quest for meaning. The sheer naming of things, the creation of words, is the human way of
appropriating
and, as it were, disalienating the world into which, after all, each of us is born as a newcomer and a stranger.

 

These observations on the interconnection of language and thought, which make us suspect that no speechless thought can exist, obviously do not apply to civilizations where the written sign rather than the spoken word is decisive and where, consequently, thinking itself is not soundless speech but mental dealing with images. This is notably true of China, whose philosophy may well rank with the philosophy of the Occident. There "the power of words is supported by the power of the written sign, the image," and not the other way round, as in the alphabetic languages, where script is thought of as secondary, no more than an agreed-upon set of symbols.
⁶³
For the Chinese, every sign makes visible what we would call a concept or an essence—Confucius is reported to have said that the Chinese sign for "dog" is the perfect image of dog as such, whereas in our understanding "no image could ever be adequate to the concept" of dog in general. "It would never attain that universality of the concept which renders it valid of all" dogs.
⁶⁴
"The concept 'dog,'" according to Kant, who in the chapter on Schematism in the
Critique of Pure Reason
clarifies one of the basic assumptions of all Western thinking, "signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent
in concreto,
actually presents." And he adds, "This schematism of our intellect ... is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze."
⁶⁵

In our context, the relevance of the passage is that our mind's faculty of dealing with invisibles is needed even for ordinary sense experience, for us to recognize a dog as a dog no matter in what form the four-footed animal may present itself. It follows that we should be able to "intuit," in Kant's sense, the general character of an object that is never present to our senses. For these schemata—sheer abstractions—Kant used the word "monogram," and Chinese script can perhaps be best understood as monogrammatical, so to speak. In other words, what for us is "abstract" and invisible, is for the Chinese emblematically concrete and visibly given in their script, as when, for instance, the image of two united hands serves for the concept of friendship. They think in images and not in words. And this thinking in images always remains "concrete" and cannot be discursive, traveling through an ordered train of thought, nor can it give account of itself
(logon didonai)
; the answer to the typically Socratic question What is friendship? is visibly present and evident in the emblem of two united hands, and "the emblem liberates a whole stream of pictorial representations" through plausible associations by which images are joined together. This can best be seen in the great variety of composite signs, when, for instance, the sign for "cold" combines "all those notions which are associated with thinking of cold weather" and the activities serving to protect men against it. Poetry, therefore, even if read aloud, will affect the hearer optically; he will not stick to the word he hears but to the sign he remembers and with it to the sights to which the sign clearly points.

These differences between concrete thinking in images and our abstract dealing with verbal concepts are fascinating and disquieting—I have no competence to deal with them adequately. They are perhaps all the more disquieting because amid them we can clearly perceive one assumption we share with the Chinese: the unquestioned priority of vision for mental activities. This priority, as we shall see shortly, remains absolutely decisive throughout the history of Western metaphysics and its notion of truth. What distinguishes us from them is not
nous
but
logos,
our necessity to give account of and
justify
in words. All strictly logical processes, such as the deducing of inferences from the general to the particular or inductive reasoning from particulars to some general rule, represent such justifications, and this can be done only in words. Only Wittgenstein, as far as I know, ever became aware of the fact that hieroglyphic writing corresponded to a notion of truth understood in the metaphor of vision. He writes: "In order to understand the essence of a proposition, we should consider hieroglyphic script, which depicts the facts that it describes. And alphabetic script developed out of it without losing what was essential to depiction."
⁶⁶
This last remark is of course highly doubtful. What is less doubtful is that philosophy, as we know it, would hardly have come into existence without the Greeks' early reception and adaptation of the alphabet from Phoenician sources.

 

Yet language, the only medium through which mental activities can be manifest not only to the outside world but also to the mental ego itself, is by no means as evidently adequate for the thinking activity as vision is for its business of seeing. No language has a ready-made vocabulary for the needs of mental activity; they all borrow their vocabulary from words originally meant to correspond either to sense experience or to other experiences of ordinary life. This borrowing, however, is never haphazard or arbitrarily symbolic (like mathematical signs) or emblematic; all philosophic and most poetic language is metaphorical but not in the simple sense of the Oxford dictionary, which defines "Metaphor" as "the figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different from, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable." There is no analogy between, say, a sunset and old age, and when the poet in a hackneyed metaphor speaks of old age as the "sunset of life" he has in mind that the setting of the sun relates to the day that preceded it as old age relates to life. If therefore, as Shelley says, the poet's language is "vitally metaphorical," it is so to the extent that "it marks the before unapprehended
relations
of things and perpetuates their apprehension" (italics added).
⁶⁷
Every metaphor discovers "an intuitive perception of similarity in dissimilars" and, according to Aristotle, is for this very reason a "sign of genius," "the greatest thing by far."
⁶⁸
But this similarity, for Aristotle, too, is not a similarity present in otherwise dissimilar objects but a similarity of relations as in an
analogy
which always needs four terms and can be presented in the formula B:A = D:C. "Thus a cup is in relation to Dionysus what a shield is to Ares. The cup accordingly will be metaphorically described as the 'shield of
Dionysus'
"
⁶⁹
And this speaking in analogies, in metaphorical language, according to Kant, is the only way through which speculative reason, which we here call thinking, can manifest itself. The metaphor provides the "abstract," imageless thought with an intuition drawn from the world of appearances whose function it is "to establish the reality of our concepts"
⁷⁰
and thus undo, as it were, the withdrawal from the world of appearances that is the precondition of mental activities. This is comparatively easy as long as our thought merely responds to the claims of our need to know and understand what is given in the appearing world, that is, so long as we remain within the limitations of common-sense reasoning; what we need for common-sense thinking are
examples
to illustrate our concepts, and these examples are adequate because our concepts are drawn from appearances—they are mere abstractions. It is altogether different if reason's need transcends the boundaries of the given world and leads us on to the uncertain sea of speculation where "no intuition can be given which shall be adequate to [reason's ideas]."
⁷¹
At this point metaphor comes in. The metaphor achieves the "carrying over"—
metapherein—
of a genuine and seemingly impossible
metabasis eis alio genos,
the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances, and this can be done only by
analogies.
(Kant gives as an example of a successful metaphor the description of the despotic state as a "mere machine (like a hand mill)" because it is "governed by an individual absolute will.... For between a despotic state and a hand mill there is, to be sure, no similarity; but there is a similarity in the rules according to which we reflect upon these two things and their causality." And he adds: "Our language is full of indirect presentations of this sort," a matter that "has not been sufficiently analyzed hitherto, for it deserves a deeper investigation."
⁷²
) The insights of metaphysics are "gained by
analogy,
not in the usual meaning of imperfect resemblance of two things, but of a
perfect resemblance of two relations between totally dissimilar things.
'"
⁷³
In the often less precise language of the
Critique of Judgment
Kant also calls these "representations in accordance with a mere analogy" symbolical.
⁷⁴