The Life of the Mind

  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

  All philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve the term into the original context, which must have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it. When Plato introduced the everyday words "soul" and "idea" into philosophical language—connecting an invisible organ in man, the soul, with something invisible present in the world of invisibles, the ideas—he still must have heard the words as they were used in ordinary pre-philosophic language. Psyche is the "breath of life" exhaled by the dying, and idea or eidos is the shape or blueprint the craftsman must have in front of his mind's eye before he begins his work—an image that survives both the fabrication process and the fabricated object and can serve as model again and again, thus taking on an everlastingness that fits it for eternity in the sky of ideas. The underlying analogy of Plato's doctrine of the soul runs as follows: As the breath of life relates to the body it leaves, that is, to the corpse, so the soul from now on will be supposed to relate to the living body. The analogy underlying his doctrine of ideas can be reconstructed in a similar manner; as the craftsman's mental image directs his hand in fabrication and is the measurement of the object's success or failure, so all materially and sensorily given data in the world of appearances relate to and are evaluated according to an invisible pattern, localized in the sky
of ideas.

  We know that noeomai was first used in the sense of perceiving by the eyes, then transferred to perceptions of the mind in the sense of "apprehend"; finally it became a word for the highest form of thinking. Nobody, we can assume, thought that the eye, the organ of vision, and the nous, the organ of thinking, were the same; but the word itself indicated that the relation between the eye and the seen object was similar to the relation between the mind and its thought-object—namely, yielded the same kind of evidence. We know that no one before Plato had used the word for the artisan's shape or blue print in philosophical language, just as no one before Aristode had used the word energos, an adjective indicating someone active, at work, busy, to frame the term energeia denoting actuality in opposition to dynamis, mere potentiality. And the same is true for such standard terms as "substance" and "accident," derived from the Latin for hypokeimenon and kata symbebēkos— what underlies as distinct from what accidentally accompanies. No one before Aristotle had used in any other sense but accusation the word kategoria (category), signifying what was asserted in court procedures about the defendant.75 In Aristotelian usage this word became something like "predicate," resting on the following analogy: just as an indictment (katagoreuein ti tinos) hands something down (kata) to a defendant that he is charged with, hence that belongs to him, the predicate hands down the appropriate quality to the subject. These examples are all familiar and could be multiplied. I shall add one more that seems to me especially telling because of its great importance for philosophical terminology; our word for the Greek nous is either mind—from the Latin mens, indicating something like the German Gemüt— or reason. I am concerned here with the latter only. Reason comes from the Latin ratio, derived from the verb reor, ratus sum, which means to calculate and also ratiocinate. The Latin translation has a totally different metaphorical content, which comes much closer to the Greek logos than to nous. To those who have an understandable prejudice against etymological arguments, I would like to recall the common Ciceronian phrase ratio et oratio, which would make no sense in Greek.

  The metaphor, bridging the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest gift language could bestow on thinking and hence on philosophy, but the metaphor itself is poetic rather than philosophical in origin. It is therefore hardly surprising that poets and writers attuned to poetry rather than to philosophy should have been aware of its essential function. Thus we read in a little-known essay by Ernest Fenollosa, published by Ezra Pound and so far as I know never mentioned in the literature on the metaphor: "Metaphor is ... the very substance of poetry"; without it, "there would have been no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen."76

  The discoverer of this originally poetic tool was Homer, whose two poems are full of all kinds of metaphorical expressions. I shall choose from an emharras de richesses the passage in the Iliad where the poet likens the tearing onslaught of fear and grief on the hearts of men to the combined onslaught of winds from several directions on the waters of the sea.77 Think of these storms that you know so well, the poet seems to tell xis, and you will know about grief and fear. Significantly, the reverse will not work. No matter how long somebody thinks about grief and fear, he will never find out anything about the winds and the sea; the comparison is clearly meant to tell what grief and fear can do to the human heart, that is, meant to illuminate an experience that does not appear. The irreversibility of the analogy distinguishes it sharply from the mathematical symbol used by Aristotle in trying to describe the mechanics of metaphor. For no matter how successfully the metaphor may have hit upon a "perfect resemblance" of relation between two "totally dissimilar things" and how perfectly, therefore, since A obviously is not the same as C and B not the same as D, the formula B:A = D:C may seem to express it, Aristotle's equation implies reversibility—if B:A = D:C, it follows that C:D = A:B. What is lost in the mathematical reckoning is the actual function of the metaphor, its turning the mind back to the sensory world in order to illuminate the mind's non-sensory experiences for which there are no words in any language. (The Aristotelian formula worked because it dealt only with visible things and actually was applied not to metaphors and their carrying over from one realm to another but to emblems, and emblems are already visible illustrations of something invisible—the cup of Dionysus, a pictograph of the festive mood associated with wine; the shield of Ares, a pictograph of the fury of war; the scales of justice in the hands of the blind goddess, a pictograph of Justice, which weighs deeds without consideration of the persons who did them. The same is true of outworn analogies that have turned into idioms, as in the case in Aristotle's second example: "As old age (D) is to life (C), so is evening (B) to day (A).")

  In common parlance of course there are a great many figurative expressions that resemble metaphors without exercising the true function of the metaphor.78 They are mere figures of speech even if used by poets—"white like ivory," to remain with Homer—and they, too, are often characterized by a transference when some term belonging to one class of objects is referred to another class; thus we speak of the "foot" of a table, as if it were attached to a man or animal. Here the transference moves within the same realm, within the "genus" of visibles, and here the analogy is indeed reversible. But this is by no means always the case even with metaphors that do not directly point to something invisible. In Homer there is another, more complex kind of extended metaphor or simile which, though moving among visibles, points to a hidden story. For instance, the great dialogue between Odysseus and Penelope shortly before the recognition scene in which Odysseus, disguised as a beggar and saying "many false things," tells Penelope that he entertained her husband in Crete, whereupon we are told how "her tears ran" as she listened "and her body was melted, as the snow melts along the high places of the mountains when the West Wind has piled it there, but the South Wind melts it, and as it melts the rivers run full flood. It was even so that her beautiful cheeks were streaming tears, as' Penelope wept for her man, who was sitting there by her side."79 Here the metaphor seems to combine only visibles; the tears on her cheek are no less visible than the melting snow. The invisible made visible in the metaphor is the long winter of Odysseus' absence, the lifeless frigidity and unyielding hardness of those years, which now, at the first signs of hope for a renewal of life, begin to melt away. The tears themselves had only expressed sorrow; their meaning—the thoughts that caused them—became manifest in the metaphor of the snow melting and softening the ground before spring.

  Kurt Riezler, who was the first to associate the "Homeric simile and the beginning of philosophy," insists on the tertium comparationis, necessary for every comparison, which permits "the poet to perceive and to make known soul as world and world as soul."80 Behind the opposition of world and soul, there must be a unity that makes the correspondence possible, an "unknown law," as Riezler calls it, quoting Goethe, equally present in the world of the senses and the realm of the soul. It is the same unity that binds together all opposites—day and night, light and darkness, coldness and warmth—each of which is inconceivable in separation, unthinkable unless mysteriously related to its antithesis. This hidden unity becomes then, according to Riezler, the topic of the philosophers, the koinos logos of Heraclitus, the hen pan of Parmenides; perception of this unity distinguishes the philosopher's truth from the opinions of ordinary men. And in support he quotes Heraclitus: "The god is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger [all opposites, he is the nous]; he changes in the way that fire, when it is mixed with spices, is named according to the scent of each of them."81

  Philosophy, one is inclined to agree, did go to Homer's school in order to emulate his example. And one's tendency to agree is considerably strengthened by the two earliest, most famous influential of all thought parables: Parmenides' voyage to the gates of day and night and Plato's Cave parable, the former being a poem and the latter essentially poetic, using Homeric lang
uage throughout. This suggests at least how right Heidegger was when he called poetry and thinking close neighbors.82

  If we now try to examine more closely the various ways in which language succeeds in bridging the gulf between the realm of the invisible and the world of appearances, we may tentatively offer the following outline: From Aristotle's suggestive definition of language as a "meaningful sounding out" of words that in themselves are already "significant sounds" that "resemble" thoughts, it follows that thinking is the mental activity that actualizes those products of the mind that are inherent in speech and for which language, prior to any special effort, has already found an appropriate though provisional home in the audible world. If speaking and thinking spring from the same source, then the very gift of language could be taken as a kind of proof, or perhaps, rather, as a token, of men's being naturally endowed with an instrument capable of transforming the invisible into an "appearance." Kant's "land of thought"—Land des Denkens— may never appear or manifest itself to our bodily eyes; it is manifest, with whatever distortions, not just to our minds but to our bodily ears. And it is in this context that the mind's language by means of metaphor returns to the world of visibilities to illuminate and elaborate further what cannot be seen but can be said.