The Life of the Mind (17 page)

Mental activities, driven to language as the only medium for their manifestation, each draw their metaphors from a different bodily sense, and their plausibility depends upon an innate affinity between certain mental and certain sensory data. Thus, from the outset in formal philosophy, thinking has been thought of in terms of
seeing,
and since thinking is the most fundamental and the most radical of mental activities, it is quite true that vision "has tended to serve as the model of perception in general and thus as the measure of the other senses."
⁸⁴
The predominance of sight is so deeply embedded in Greek speech and therefore in our conceptual language that we seldom find any consideration bestowed on it, as though it belonged among things too obvious to be noticed. A passing remark by Heraclitus, "The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears,"
⁸⁵
is an exception, and not a very helpful one. On the contrary, if one considers how easy it is for sight unlike the other senses to shut out the outside world and if one examines the early notion of the blind bard, whose stories are being listened to, one may wonder why hearing did not develop into the guiding metaphor for thinking.
⁸⁶
Still, it is not altogether true that, in the words of Hans Jonas, "the mind has gone where vision pointed."
⁸⁷
The metaphors used by the theoreticians of the Will are hardly ever taken from the visual sphere; their model is either desire as the quintessential property of all our senses—in that they serve the general appetitiveness of a needy and wanting being—or they are drawn from hearing, in line with the Jewish tradition of a God who is heard but not seen. (Metaphors drawn from hearing are very rare in the history of philosophy, the most notable modern exception being the late writings of Heidegger, where the thinking ego "hears" the call of Being. Medieval efforts to reconcile Biblical teaching with Greek philosophy testify to a complete victory of intuition or contemplation over every form of audition, and this victory was, as it were, foreshadowed by the early attempt of Philo of Alexandria to attune his Jewish creed to his Platonizing philosophy. He was still aware of the distinction between a Hebrew truth, which was heard, and the Greek
vision
of the true, and transformed the former into a mere preparation for the latter, to be achieved by divine intervention that had made mans ears into eyes to permit greater perfection of human cognition.
⁸⁸
)

Judgment, finally, in terms of discovery the late-comer of our mental abilities, draws, as Kant knew so well, its metaphorical language from the sense of
taste
(the
Critique of Judgment
was originally conceived as a "Critique of Taste"), the most intimate, private, and idiosyncratic of the senses, somehow the opposite of sight, with its "noble" distance. The chief problem of the
Critique of Judgment
therefore became the question of how propositions of judgment could possibly claim, as they indeed do, general agreement.

Jonas enumerates all the advantages of sight as the guiding metaphor and model for the thinking mind. There is first of all the indisputable fact that no other sense establishes such a safe distance between subject and object; distance is the most basic condition for the functioning of vision. "The gain is the concept of objectivity, of the thing as it is in itself as distinct from the thing as it affects me, and from this distinction arises the whole idea of
theōria
and theoretical truth." Moreover, sight provides us with a "co-temporaneous manifold," whereas all the other senses, and especially hearing, "construct their perceptual unities of a manifold' out of a temporal sequence of sensations." Sight permits "freedom of choice ... dependent... on ... the fact that in seeing I am not yet engaged by the seen object.... [The seen object] lets me be as I let it be," whereas the other senses affect me directly. This is especially important for hearing, the only possible competitor sight might have for pre-eminence but which finds itself disqualified because it "intrudes upon a passive subject." In hearing, the percipient is at the mercy of something or somebody else. (This, incidentally, may be why the German language derived a whole cluster of words indicating a position of non-freedom from
hören,
to hear:
gehorchen, hörig, gehören,
to obey, be in bondage, belong.) Most important in our context is the fact brought out by Jonas that seeing necessarily "introduces the beholder," and for the beholder, in contrast to the auditor, the "
present
[is not] the point-experience of the passing
now,
" but is transformed into a "
dimension
within which things can be beheld ... as a lasting of the same." "Only sight therefore provides the sensual basis on which the mind may conceive the idea of the eternal, that which never changes and is always present."
⁸⁹

I mentioned before that language, the only medium in which the invisible can become manifest in a world of appearances, is by no means as adequate for that function as our senses are for their business of coping with the perceptible world, and I suggested that the metaphor in its own way can cure the defect. The cure has its dangers and is never wholly adequate either. The danger lies in the overwhelming evidence the metaphor provides by appealing to the unquestioned evidence of sense experience. Metaphors therefore can be used by speculative reason, which indeed cannot avoid them, but when they intrude, as is their tendency, on scientific reasoning, they are used and misused to create and provide plausible evidence for theories that are actually mere hypotheses that have to be proved or disproved by facts. Hans Blumenberg, in his
Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie,
has traced certain very common figures of speech, such as the iceberg metaphor or the various sea metaphors, through the centuries of Western thought, and thereby, almost incidentally, discovered to what an extent typically modern pseudo-sciences owe their plausibility to the seeming evidence of metaphor, which they substitute for the lacking evidence of data. His prime example is the consciousness theory of psychoanalysis, where consciousness is seen as the peak of an iceberg, a mere indication of the floating mass of unconsciousness beneath it.
⁹⁰
Not only has that theory never been demonstrated but it is undemonstrable in its own terms: the moment a fragment of unconsciousness reaches the peak of the iceberg it has become conscious and lost all the properties of its alleged origin. Yet the evidence of the iceberg metaphor is so overwhelming that the theory needs neither argument nor demonstration; we would find the metaphor's use unobjectionable if we were told that we were dealing with speculations about something unknown—in the same way that former centuries used analogies for speculations about God. The only trouble is that every such speculation carries with it a mental construct in whose systematic order every datum can find its hermeneutic place with an even more stringent consistency than that provided by a successful scientific theory, since, being an exclusively mental construct without need of any real experience, it does not have to deal with exceptions to the rule.

It would be tempting to believe that metaphorical thought is only a danger when resorted to by the pseudo-sciences and that philosophic thought, if it does not claim demonstrable truth, is safe in using appropriate metaphors. Unfortunately this is not the case. The thought-systems of the great philosophers and metaphysicians of the past have an uncomfortable resemblance to the mental constructs of the pseudo-sciences, except that the great philosophers, in contrast to the cocksureness of their inferior brethren, have almost unanimously insisted on something "ineffable" behind the written words, something of which they, when they thought and did not write, were very clearly aware and which nevertheless refused to be pinned down and banded over to others; in short, they insisted that there was something that refused to lend itself to a transformation that would allow it to appear and take its place among the appearances of the world. In retrospect, we are tempted to see these ever-recurring utterances as attempts to warn the reader that he was in danger of a fatal mistake in understanding: what were offered him were thoughts, not cognitions, not solid pieces of knowledge which, once acquired, would dispel ignorance; what, as philosophers, they were primarily concerned with were matters that escape human knowledge, although they had not escaped but even haunted human reason. And since in pursuing these questions the philosophers inevitably discovered a great number of things that are indeed knowable, namely, all the laws and axioms of correct thinking and the various theories of knowledge, they themselves very early blurred the distinction between thinking and knowing.

While Plato still held that the true
arche,
beginning and principle of philosophy, is wonder,
⁹¹
Aristotle, in the opening paragraphs of the
Metaphysics
,
⁹²
interpreted—and was the first to do so—this same wonder as mere astonishment or puzzlement (
aporein
); through astonishment men become aware of their ignorance of things that may be known, starting with "things close at hand" and then progressing "from there to greater matters such as the sun and the moon and the stars and the genesis of all things." Men, he said, "philosophized to escape ignorance," and the Platonic wonder was no longer understood as a principle but as a mere beginning: "all men begin by wondering ... but one must end with the opposite and with what is better [than wondering], as is the case when men learn."
⁹³
Hence, Aristotle, though he, too, in a different context, spoke of a truth
aneu logou,
a truth that refused to be expressed in discourse,
⁹⁴
would not have said with Plato: Of the subjects that concern me nothing is known, since there exists nothing in writing about them, nor will there ever exist anything in the future. People who write about such things know nothing; they do not even know themselves. For there is no way of putting these things in words like other things that one can learn. Hence, no one who possesses the true faculty of thinking
(nous),
and therefore knows the weakness of words, will ever risk framing thoughts in discourse, let alone fix them in so inflexible a form as that of written letters.
⁹⁵

We hear the same, almost in the same words, at the end of this whole development. Thus Nietzsche, certainly no Platonist, writes to his friend Overbeck: "My philosophy ... can no longer be communicated at least not in print,"
⁹⁶
and, in
Beyond Good and Evil:
"One no longer loves one's insight enough when one communicates it."
⁹⁷
And Heidegger writes, not about Nietzsche but about himself, when he says: "The internal limit of all thinking ... is that the thinker never can say what is most his own ... because the spoken word receives its determination from the ineffable."
⁹⁸
To which we may add a few remarks by Wittgenstein, whose philosophical investigations center on the ineffable in a relendess effort to
say
what "the case may
be":
"The results of philosophy are the uncovering ... of
bumps
that the intellect has got by running its head up against the limits of language." These bumps are what we have called here "metaphysical fallacies"; they are what "make us see the value of the discovery." Or: "Philosophical problems arise when language goes on a holiday" (
wenn die Sprache feiert
). The German is equivocal: it can mean "to take a holiday," that is, language ceases to work, and it can mean "to celebrate," and would then signify almost the opposite. Or: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language." The trouble is of course that this battle can be refought only by language.
⁹⁹

Let us return to Plato, since he is, as far as I know, the only philosopher of rank who has left us more than occasional remarks on this subject. The main thrust of the argument in the
Seventh Letter
is not against speaking but against writing. This repeats in abbreviated form the objections already raised against writing in the
Phaedrus.
There is first the fact that writing "will implant forgetfulness"; relying on the written word, men "cease to exercise memory." There is second the written word's "majestic silence"; it can neither give account of itself nor answer questions. Third, it cannot choose whom to address, falls into wrong hands, and "drifts all over the place"; illtreated and abused, it is unable to defend itself; the best one can say for it is to call it a harmless "pastime," collecting "a store of refreshment ... against the day 'when oblivious age comes'" or a "recreation [indulged in] as others regale themselves with drinking parties and the like."
¹⁰⁰
But in the
Seventh Letter,
Plato goes further; he does not mention his
agrapha dogmata,
which we know about through a remark by Aristotle,
¹⁰¹
but implicitly denies them, too, when he explicitly asserts that "these things cannot be put into words like other things we learn."

This indeed is very different from what we read in the Platonic dialogues (though that is no reason to believe that the
Seventh Letter
is spurious). Thus we read in the
Statesman
about "likenesses" between the visible and the invisible:

 

Likenesses which the senses can grasp are available in nature to those real existents ... so that when someone asks for an account of these existents one has no trouble at all—one can simply indicate the sensible likeness and dispense with any account in words. But to the highest and most important class of existents there are no corresponding visible resemblances....In these cases nothing visible can be pointed out to satisfy the inquiring mind.... Therefore we must train ourselves to give ... an account in words of every existing thing. For the existents which have no visible embodiment, the existents which are of the highest value and the chief importance, are demonstrable only in speech [Zogos] and are not to be apprehended by any other means.
¹⁰²