The Warburg years (1919-1933): essays on language, art, myth, and technology 9780300108194, 0300108192

Citation preview

THE WARBURG YEARS (1919–1933)

This page intentionally left blank

THE WARBURG YEARS (1919–1933) ES S AYS ON LANGUAGE , ART, MY T H , A ND T E CHNO LOGY

Ernst Cassirer

Translated and with an Introduction by S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Ernst Cassirer Publications Fund, and from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Baskerville type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cassirer, Ernst, 1874–1945. [Essays. Selections. English] The Warburg years (1919–1933) : essays on language, art, myth, and technology / Ernst Cassirer ; translated and with an introduction by S.G. Lofts with A. Calcagno. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-10819-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, German—20th century I. Title. B3216.C32E5 2013 193—dc23 2013015801 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To John Michael Krois

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION ix The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking (1922) 1 The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences (1923) 72 The Kantian Elements in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language (1923) 101 Language and Myth: A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of the Gods (1924) 130 Eidos and Eidolon: The Problem of Beauty and Art in the Dialogues of Plato (1924) 214 The Meaning of the Problem of Language for the Emergence of Modern Philosophy (1927) 244 The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy (1927) 254 Form and Technology (1930) 272 Mythic, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space (1931) 317 Language and the Construction of the World of Objects (1932) 334 GLOSSARY OF GERMAN TERMS 363 INDEX 377

This page intentionally left blank

T R A N S L ATO R S ’ I N T RO D U C T I O N

The initial impetus for this collection of essays by Ernst Cassirer was provided by the enthusiastic encouragement of John Michael Krois, to whom the volume is dedicated. Initially assisting with the selection of essays to be included here, Professor Krois was very generous with his time and knowledge of Cassirer’s philosophy throughout the manuscript’s preparation. All of the translations have benefited from discussions with him over the years about Cassirer’s philosophy and technical vocabulary, the challenges of rendering Cassirer’s thought into contemporary English, and how Cassirer himself might have wanted his work to be translated. Krois worked extensively on the translation of “Form and Technology” and made numerous suggestions for the revision of his own translation of “The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy.” It is characteristic of him that he insisted we should feel free to retranslate this essay. As he often asserted, a translation is a form of interpretation, and there is nothing wrong with having different interpretations of a text as rich as Cassirer’s. Krois recognized the need for a single volume of Cassirer’s most important essays, a volume that would form a sort of Darstellung (a presentation and exhibition) of his work and thought. All of these essays were written between 1921 and 1932, the most productive period of Cassirer’s career, while he was at the University of Hamburg and worked in close collaboration with the members of the Warburg Library for the Science of Culture. After completing his doctoral studies with Herman Cohen in Marburg, ix

x

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

Cassirer moved to Berlin in 1906. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of Berlin undoubtedly played a formative role in the development of his philosophy of symbolic forms; at the time, Berlin was one of the main cultural and intellectual centers of Europe, and through his family and friends, Cassirer was introduced to various cultural worlds, in particular the worlds of art, music, and literature, as well as the worlds of science, economics, and politics. It was in this context that Cassirer began to work on his philosophy of symbolic forms as a transcendental critique of culture. Unable to secure a permanent university post in Berlin, he taught as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1919. After World War I, two new universities were created in Germany: one in Hamburg, the other in Frankfurt. Wanting to establish themselves, both immediately offered a position to what must have been the most famous Privatdozent in all of Germany, for by 1919 Cassirer had already acquired a considerable reputation as one of the leading thinkers of his generation. By 1920, he had completed a new critical edition of Kant and had published numerous essays and seven monographs. Cassirer’s first book, Leibnizs System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902), had won second place in the prestigious competition of the Berlin Academy (it is worth noting that no first prize was awarded that year). In 1906 and 1907, the first two volumes of his classic history of the problem of knowledge in philosophy and science appeared, and the third volume followed in 1920. It was perhaps the appearance of Substance and Function in 1910, however, that brought the most renown to Cassirer as a thinker in his own right. Cassirer fortuitously accepted the offer from the University of Hamburg. Where Berlin had been the ideal location for the inception of the project of the philosophy of symbolic forms, Hamburg, in particular the Warburg Library for the Science of Culture, would prove to be the ideal environment for its realization. While Cassirer’s work was conceptually well advanced when he arrived in Hamburg, there remained a considerable amount of concrete research to be done. As destiny would have it, not only did the Warburg Library contain the material on art, myth, and language that would be indispensable for Cassirer’s research, its conceptual organization embodied the ideal of a manifold view of culture and meaning that Cassirer was developing philosophically. It is well known that upon entering the library for the first time, Cassirer was immediately

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xi

able to grasp the organizing principles of its seemingly unorthodox system of classification. More than the wealth of information contained in the Warburg collection, Cassirer encountered there new colleagues who were engaged in related spheres of research, all of them pioneers in their fields. To mention only a few, the art historians Fritz Saxl (the director of the library), Aby Warburg (whose name the library bore), Erwin Panofksy, and Edgar Wind were there. At the University of Hamburg, Cassirer began to work with psychologists such as William Stern, Heinz Werner, Kurt Lewin, and Wolfgang Köhler, as well as with the linguist Carl Meinhof and the theoretical biologist Johann Jakob von Uexküll. The essays in this volume bear witness to the intense collaboration and fruitful exchange that took place between Cassirer and these thinkers, both in terms of the content of the material used by Cassirer and in terms of the conceptual problems addressed. Clearly, this collaboration was thoroughly interdisciplinary and entirely reciprocal. Cassirer insisted on the importance of this convergence and synergy between the different scientific spheres, on the mutual interpretation of psychology, history, linguistics, natural science, and philosophy. Throughout these essays, he not only employed material from these other domains to illustrate his own theory but let his own thought be informed and transformed by this engagement. We encounter in these essays the ethos and objective expression of the collective life of the mind seeking to understand the globus intellectualis. Cassirer never engaged in mere polemics, neither in his encounter with other intellectual domains nor in his treatment of the tradition of philosophy. Indeed, in his critical treatment of Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he declared that the dogmatic game of pitting one “point of view” against another was a type of unthoughtful “philosophical dispute” that he found “most unpleasant and most unprofitable.” Rather, for him, “what should be striven after in every philosophical encounter [Auseinandersetzung] and what must be attainable in some sense, is that the extreme opposites learn to see themselves correctly and that they try to understand themselves precisely in this polar dichotomy [Gegensätzlichkeit].”1 Cassirer’s interdisciplinary approach in these essays 1. Ernst Cassirer, “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: Remarks on Martin Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant,” in Kant: Disputed Questions, tr. and ed. M. S. Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 156; Aufsätze und kleine Schriften

xii

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

sets a standard for the most productive critical engagement in the human sciences, an engagement that determines their belonging together, in and through the differences between each of them, which makes up the unity of the globus intellectualis. Thus, for example, Cassirer worked closely with Panofsky. We can see the mutual benefit of this collaboration in Cassirer’s own work as well as in Panofsky’s, as is evidenced by the title of Panofsky’s well-known work Perspective as Symbolic Form, which is one of the most important works of modern art history and the philosophical discussion on the topic of perspective in the twentieth century. Following Cassirer, Panofsky developed his own theory of perspective through the expression of a “will to form,” an expression almost certainly borrowed from Cassirer, as a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and technical practices of culture into an integrated whole. Panofsky’s essay of 1924, “Idea: A Concept of Art Theory,” was both inspired by and a direct response to Cassirer’s 1924 lecture, “Eidos and Eidolon,” which appears in this collection. We see this synergy too in the active collaboration between Cassirer and Stern and Werner, whose work on the psychology of language, in particular Stern’s work on language and children, figured prominently in Cassirer’s writing of this period. Together these three organized the twelfth congress of the German Society of Psychology, which took place in Hamburg in 1931. Cassirer’s contribution to this conference, “Language and the Structure of the World of Objects” which was published in 1932, is included here. Werner’s work clearly reflects the influence of his engagement with Cassirer on his own thought. Through the 1920s, Werner became increasingly focused on the inner dynamic of the lived process of forming a figure (Gestalt) and on determining the general laws of structures and gestalts. Werner’s empirical and experimental works focused on the microgenesis of structures and gestalt systems that stand at the heart of Cassirer’s theory of culture and symbolic configuration (Gestaltung). Even a quick glance at Werner’s Introduction to Developmental Psychology (1926) reveals the important impact of his interaction with Cassirer on his thought. For example, it is not difficult to appreciate the

(1927–1931), in Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 17, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004), 250.

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xiii

interconnection between Cassirer’s work on expressive meaning and metaphor and Werner’s work on the origins of metaphor and lyric. Finally, the influence on Cassirer of Uexküll’s theoretical biology, in particular Uexküll’s theory of the Bauplan (structural blueprint) and Umwelt (environmental surrounding world), cannot be overstated. Cassirer attended Uexküll’s lectures and engaged in many long discussions with him, and we again see how Cassirer took his lead from another domain and formed his view of human culture in coordination with it—in this case, with Uexküll’s view that every animal lives in its own “world of signification” (Bedeutungswelt). It was during the 1920s that Cassirer published his three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The first volume, published in 1923, focused on language. Its introduction functions as a general introduction to the whole project of the “critique of culture.” The second volume, published in 1925, turned to an analysis of mythical and religious thought. The third volume, entitled “Phenomenology of Knowledge,” sought to establish the process by which knowledge arises out of the concrete, lived-effective-action sphere of pure expression and develops through the presentation function to the level of pure signification in scientific concepts. In the introduction to volume 3, it becomes clear that Cassirer had begun to engage Lebensphilosophie, which included, for Cassirer, the work of such philosophers as Bergson, Simmel, Dilthey, and Heidegger. Once again, Cassirer did not merely reject or conduct a dogmatic polemic with Lebensphilosophie. Rather, true to his ethos, he engaged these philosophers in an Auseinandersetzung—an intellectual debate through which he continued to form his own position. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the nuanced position Cassirer took vis-à-vis Lebensphilosophie. In the end, the final section of the third volume, which was to explicitly treat the relationship between the philosophy of symbolic forms and the fundamental tenets of Lebensphilosophie, was never completed. In short, as Cassirer wrote in the introduction to volume 3, “life cannot apprehend itself by remaining absolutely within itself. It must give itself form; for it is precisely by this ‘otherness’ of form that it gains its ‘visibility,’ if not its reality.”2 2. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, tr. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 39. For

xiv

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

The essays in this collection provide more concise and often more pointed statements of Cassirer’s philosophical position than are contained in the three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which exceeds twelve hundred pages in the German edition. In “The Kantian Elements in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language” (1923), “The Meaning of the Problem of Language for the Emergence of Modern Philosophy” (1927), and “Language and the Construction of the World of Objects” (1932), Cassirer presents the core tenets of his understanding of language and its relationship to both reality and thought. For Cassirer, language is not referential; it does not refer or point to a preexisting autonomous existence but rather is constitutive in the construction of thought and therefore in the differentiation of thought and being. In “The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking” (1922) and “Mythic, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space” (1931), Cassirer touches upon mythical thought as a sphere of ritualized, pure, lived effective action that is structured according to the configuring power of the meaning of words and images. In this context, the reader should also consult the much needed new translation of “Language and Myth: A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of the Gods” (1924). Together, these essays provide a comprehensive overview of Cassirer’s theory of language and myth and of their mutual relationship in the configuration of the world of external objects and the constitution of the inner life of the subject. In “The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences” (1923) and “The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy” (1927), Cassirer focuses on the key elements of his philosophical project—the symbolic and how it can be used as a framework for understanding the different modes of meaning without according dominance to any particular mode of meaning. What is more, in the latter work, Cassirer provides a discussion of the new framework that appeared in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, namely, the distinction between expression, the presentational function, and pure signification. In the three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Casa more detailed discussion of Cassirer’s encounter with Lebensphilosophie, see translator’s introduction to Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies, tr. S. G. Lofts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), xxxivff.

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xv

sirer often mentioned art and technology without explicitly dealing with them. In “Eidos and Eidolon: The Problem of Beauty and Art in the Dialogues of Plato” (1924), Cassirer provides a sensitive and corrective reading of Plato’s Cratylus in order to establish an interpretation of Platonic form that is at once intimately connected to meaning but also transcends the view of language as simply referential. Here, Cassirer goes to the core of both Plato’s and his own theory of the image. Finally, “Form and Technology” (1930) is fascinating for a number of reasons. In turning to an analysis of technology, Cassirer not only engaged the position of Lebensphilosophie but at the same time moved from an analysis of transcendental forms and structures to an analysis of his contemporary world. Cassirer’s engagement with Lebensphilosophie began before the publication of Being and Time (1927); Bergson and Simmel rather than Heidegger figure most prominently in the opening pages of the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer delayed the publication of the volume, however, so that he could read the newly published work by Heidegger and insert footnotes to indicate where his own project and Heidegger’s connected. Furthermore, in 1929, Cassirer and Heidegger met in the now famous Devos debate. In the three essays written after 1927, Cassirer’s language began to incorporate the language of Lebensphilosophie—in particular, Heidegger’s language. By the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Cassirer had reached the pinnacle of his academic career in Germany. In 1928, a struggle broke out between the University of Frankfurt, which wanted to lure him there, and the University of Hamburg, which evidently wanted to keep him. He ultimately remained in Hamburg, and the following year he was elected the first Jewish rector of a German university. When one considers the political and social climate of the time, this remarkable fact clearly demonstrates the high esteem in which Cassirer was held. His heavy duties as rector did not hinder his own work, and in 1931 he published two new books, The Case of Jacques Rousseau and the Platonic Renaissance in England. He spent the summer of 1931 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, where he worked on his famous study The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, which was published the subsequent year. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, and the Cassirers, like so many other German intellectuals of Jewish

xvi

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

origin, prepared themselves for a life in exile. Quick to understand the likely significance of the events that followed Hitler’s coming to power, Cassirer immediately requested a leave of absence for the next academic year. By March, he and his wife had left Hamburg, and by July (a mere five months later), the University of Hamburg—the same university that only a few years earlier had fought so hard to keep him and had then made him rector—officially informed Cassirer that he had been “retired” from his post. The last twelve years of Cassirer’s life were spent in exile: first at All Souls College at Oxford (1933–1935); then at the University of Göteborg in Sweden (1935–1941); and finally, from 1941 until Cassirer’s death in 1945, in the United States. During this period, Cassirer continued to write: The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) and the fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge (1950) were written in Sweden shortly after the outbreak of World War II. These two works were very important to Cassirer, as they represented his initial response to the madness that surrounded him. In many ways, the writing of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences was a political act of resistance for Cassirer. While Lebensphilosophie had not brought about the war, it had, as Cassirer states in The Myth of the State (1946), weakened those critical forces that checked the violent power (Gewalt) of mythical consciousness. In the urgency of the moment, he provides his final critical response to Lebensphilosophie by establishing the foundation not only of his own philosophy of symbolic forms but of all the human sciences, in the ethical relationship between the I and the you. In Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, Cassirer’s wife, Toni, provided an account of the summer of 1940, when Cassirer sat down to write The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: In these weeks, everything that could happen politically happened, except that which was expected. Holland, Belgium were overrun, France had been conquered, and only Sweden escaped. . . . We no longer wondered at the shortsightedness of anyone; but to the horrible idea of the subjugation of the Western countries, for us was added the thought that all the German fugitives, who had been victims of political or religious persecution, had now come under Hitler’s power. In this situation, Ernst suddenly decided to undertake a new work [eine neue Arbeit]. In the morning he took a

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xvii

walk with me and told me about what he was working on, and that this new work actually signified the fourth volume of the symbolic forms.3 While in America, Cassirer penned two final monographs: An Essay on Man (1944) and The Myth of the State (1946). Both works are marked by the urgency of the times—by the “crisis in man’s knowledge of himself,” as Cassirer put it in An Essay on Man, and by the realization that “human culture is by no means the firmly established thing that we once supposed it to be,” as he stated in The Myth of the State. The essays contained in this volume give us a window onto Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence—the fact that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of the word and the image, that it is in and through symbolic cultural systems that life realizes itself and attains not only its form, its visibility, but also its reality. It is through the system of symbolic forms that thought and being are set apart in the strife of their belonging together in opposition. At the core of this symbolic strife of thought and being, this Auseinandersetzung, as Cassirer calls it, is found the relationship of the self to the other. Here, too, the word and the image do not mediate two autonomous subjects; rather, it is only in and through them that the I and the you are first distinguished as separate and formed in their belonging together in opposition. In and through the Auseinandersetzung there occurs a genuine and mutual cor-respondence between being and thought, between the I and the you. Cassirer develops a theory of the symbolic forms of culture and a philosophical anthropology of the symbolic animal who is both the product and the creator of these symbolic systems. At the same time, he gives this theory flesh in the wealth of material provided by anthropology, psychology, history, and linguistics. Knowledge, however, does not necessarily lead to enlightenment, to the liberation of the rational-ethical will from the emotive ritual of lived mythical life. Indeed, once the importance of the function of the word and the image for the emotional and intellectual life of human beings is understood, does it not become 3. Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), 269–71. All translations in this volume are our own unless otherwise indicated.

xviii

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

possible to engineer this human life, to enter into what the Frankfurt School called the “culture industry,” or what Cassirer, in his analysis of the discourse of Nazism in The Myth of the State, called the “technology of myth”? Is not rationalism itself just another discourse, another myth? Cassirer would say no. Pointing back to the works in this volume, he would show that there remains a fundamental difference between the life of the mind and the life of emotion, that while myth levels down, there is always a renewed opening, that the forces of critical reason always counterbalance the forces of myth in the endless strife that constitutes the drama of human existence. T R A N S L ATO R S ’ N OT E S

AND

REMARKS

ON

C A S S I R E R ’ S L A N G UAG E

At the beginning of each essay is a footnote within brackets indicating the bibliographical information for the original publication of the essay and, where applicable, the source of the edition from which the translation has been made. All footnotes that appear within brackets are translators’ notes that we have provided. The original pagination of the German edition is found in the margins of each translation. Because most readers do not have access to many of the original publications or to the volumes of the Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, eight of the nine essays have been translated from one or the other of three widely accessible collections of Cassirer’s works: Wesen und Wirkung, Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1937, and Ernst Cassirer: Geist und Leben Schriften. Only “Eidos und Eidolon” has been translated from the original, as published by the Warburg Library. We have, however, checked to ensure that there are no substantial differences between these editions and the original publications. “The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy” is a revised version of the original translation by John Michael Krois. “Myth, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space” is also a revised translation, of the original English translation by Donald Phillip Verene and Lerke Forster. Finally, “Form and Technology” is the result of a team effort by Lofts, Calcagno, Krois, and Wilson Dunlavey. We would like to thank both Krois and Dunlavey for their work and all of their suggestions, which benefited not only “Form and Technology” but the entire volume. We have sought to strike a balance between closely reflecting the orig-

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xix

inal German and producing a readable text in contemporary English. Cassirer writes in a clear, elegant, precise, and poetic German. It is, however, the German of a certain epoch, and thus many of its stylistic norms do not always translate well into contemporary English linguistic and literary sensibilities. We have attempted to mitigate this wherever possible but have, at the same time, wanted to preserve the original feel of Cassirer’s voice and style of expression. For example, Cassirer has a tendency to construct lengthy sentences and employ extraordinarily long paragraph structures. When these are preserved in English translation, the text appears unnecessarily complex and dense to the contemporary reader no longer accustomed to such stylistic devices. In some cases, this has required the introduction of sentence and paragraph breaks where they seemed logical. Beyond the typical challenges encountered in undertaking any translation, several are particularly acute in the case of Cassirer’s work, and these merit discussion. Cassirer clearly enjoyed writing and took a playful approach to language. Sometimes this playfulness is important in bringing out the subtleties of what he is trying to articulate, sometimes it is just playfulness for its own sake. In “Form and Technology,” for example, he refers to the “accusations,” “laments,” and “complaints” made by philosophers against modern technology, and cites Ludwig Klages as a case in point. What is lost in translation is the wordplay between the German word Klage, which means accusation, lament, complaint, and the proper name Klages. There are too many such instances of wordplay to be able to indicate them all to the English-speaking reader. We have included the German where this wordplay introduces conceptual nuances that are essential to the meaning of the text but cannot be rendered into English. A more important challenge concerns Cassirer’s technical vocabulary, or perhaps more to the point, his adoption and transformation of the technical vocabulary of other philosophers combined with a tradition of translation of these authors. In some cases, this is relatively straightforward; in other cases, it is not. Cassirer often reminds us that language is not a static entity that can be passed along from one person to the next without being formed in the process, like a coin at the market whose value and meaning do not change when it passes from the hand of a buyer to that of a merchant. Rather, language exists only in its use,

xx

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

and we can use it only by forming it, by working on and transforming it, thus imprinting it with a new sense. Cassirer uses the language of other philosophers but imprints it with new meaning. The challenge is to translate his usage so as to be faithful to the meaning he imprints on the term, while at the same time providing the reader with the link to the philosophers whose language he is transmitting to the reader. In German, Cassirer’s text resonates with the echoes of the voices of various authors, and even different epochs of thought, which creates a dialogue in his texts. And more often than not, Cassirer’s infusion brings together diametrically opposite views as belonging together in the strife of their opposition that essentially defines their unique meaning—the dissident voices of the tradition form a harmony in Cassirer’s thought. Where and when Cassirer appears to employ a term in a technical sense, we have used the translations found in the glossary at the end of this volume. This is not the place to undertake an extensive analysis of Cassirer’s technical language. Nevertheless, a few comments about Cassirer’s technical vocabulary are appropriate. There is, of course, a great deal of Kantian language to be found in Cassirer’s work. While many of Kant’s technical terms have received standardized translations, it is important to keep in mind what is happening in the original German. The English translation of Anschauung as “intuition” does not capture the sense of “viewing” or “just looking at” that is found in An-schau-ung. Literally, the word means “something that shows itself to us,” stemming from the noun Schau, from the verb schauen (to look), which means “to show” or “exhibit.” The English term “intuition,” while having the sense of an immediate apprehension of the senses, nevertheless suggests the scholastic meaning of immediate knowledge, which is foreign to the German word Anschauung. The German captures the double move of something showing itself to us and something we see because it shows itself to us. In “Eidos and Eidolon,” for example, Cassirer often uses the term Schau in such a way as to play off the double meaning of “showing” and “vision.” Kant’s use of Vorstellung and Darstellung are typically translated as “representation” and “presentation,” respectively. Both words are constructed from the verb stellen (to set or place, to make something stand). Hence the importance of Cassirer’s use of hinstellen (to set out), Hinstellung ( positing), and setzen (to set) throughout the texts collected here. Vor-Stellung, there-

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xxi

fore, is a setting or placing “before” or “in front” (Vor-). Thus, for example, one can make a Vorstellung in the sense of an introduction, in which one person or thing is presented to another—is set or placed before another. The reflexive verb form, sich vorstellen, means “to represent or imagine something,” “to set or place something before the mind’s eye”— hence, Vorstellung can sometimes be translated as “idea,” though this risks the danger of being confused with the German Idee. Wherever Cassirer employs the term Idee the original German is included in parentheses. Finally, by “representation” neither Kant nor Cassirer means something like an image that re-presents some other fundamental presentation— this would be closer to Repräsentation. The term Darstellung means the “setting or placing Da” (there/here); it is the presentation or exhibition of something concretely given in a specific instance. Whereas a representation (Vorstellung) places the emphasis on something that stands before the mind or can be seen with the mind’s eye, a presentation or exhibition (Darstellung) is a concrete object that exhibits itself to us. The former emphasizes the priority of the mind’s eye to see, and the latter privileges a particular object’s exhibiting of itself before the mind’s eye. Darstellung, for Kant, is the “being given”: “That an object be given (if this expression is taken, not as referring to some merely mediate process, but as signifying immediate presentation [Darstellung] in intuition), means simply that the representation [Vorstellung] through which the object is thought is related to actual or possible experience” (Critique of Pure Reason, B 195). The concept is the rule of synthesis by which an object is thought via a representation, that is, that which sets before thought. The concept, however, must be exhibited (dargestellt) immediately in concreto, in a presentation in pure intuition in order for knowledge (Erkenntnis) to occur; the Darstellung is thus a concept made sensible. As a rule of synthesis, the concept “sets out” (hinstellen) and “sets” (setzen) the differences that are “grasped together” (zusammenfassen) as a “combination” (Zusammenfassung) of elements that as “interconnected” form the “coherent” unity of a being. In the translations of Kant, Zusammenfassung is translated as “comprehension” and contrasted with “apprehension” (Auffassung). Etymologically, comprehension goes back to the Latin comprehendere, which signifies a seizing or comprising. The prefix “com” suggests the state of being together, together with, or in combination or union. “Comprehension,” however, does not get to what Cassirer

xxii

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

means when he employs the term Zusammenfassung. We have thus elected to translate it as “combination.” Related to this is the term Zusammenhang, which literally means to hang together. The elements of a combination (Zusammenfassung) hang together as a unified whole. To emphasize the belonging together of the elements, we have translated Zusammenhang as “coherence” or “interconnection,” depending upon the context. This permits us, following the standard translation of Kant, to reserve “connection” for Verknüpfung, “combination” for Verbindung, and “bond” for Bindung. In order for the reader to distinguish Zusammenfassung from Verbindung, we have added the German in parentheses wherever Cassirer employs the term Zusammenfassung. In this context, Cassirer on occasion employs the term Fügung, for which there is no ideal translation. From the verb fügen, “to join” but also “to ordain,” Fügung is thus both a “joining” and a “destiny.” In both cases there is a fitting together, a coincidence, of the part in the whole. Hence, we have elected to translate Fügung with “coincidence,” recognizing that it is not ideal. The term Erkenntnis can be rendered as either “knowledge” or “cognition.” The Norman Kemp Smith translation of the Critique of Pure Reason employs “knowledge,” whereas the translators of the new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant have elected for “cognition.” The root word kennen means to know or to recognize. The prefix erintensifies the action and preserves its active nature—Erkenntnis captures the dynamic active process of knowledge or cognition. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between Erkenntnis and Wissen. Erkenntnis is the process of acquiring Wissen (knowledge). As such, Wissen is a mode of Erkenntnis as well as the achievement of the process of knowing (erkennen), but one can have other modes of Erkenntnis; for example, pure intuition is a form of cognition because cognition is a representation as such (Vorstellung überhaupt), and the manifold of intuition consists of representations. Rendering Erkenntnis always as “cognition,” however, risks confusing Cassirer’s use of the term “cognition” with contemporary cognitive science’s use of the term, which suggests an almost exclusively neurological or physiological basis for cognition. Thus, with only a few exceptions, we have elected to translate Erkenntnis by “knowledge” and to indicate where Cassirer employs the term Wissen to indicate a mode of knowing or Erkenntnis. Corresponding or parallel to these two modes of knowing (Erkenntnis

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xxiii

and Wissen) are two modes of understanding, Verstehen and Verstand. When Cassirer speaks along with Kant of the faculty of the understanding (Verstand ), he speaks of a mode of intellectual thought that can situate objects (Gegenständen) in their correct order according to the application of a rule, plan, or ratio of order—an intelligible lawfulness. This mode of understanding is therefore the understanding of scientific reason. When Cassier speaks, along with Dilthey, of understanding as Verstehen, he speaks of the lived awareness of intelligibility (Verständlichkeit) that more often than not involves a concrete mode of doing and being. Verstand pertains to an understanding of the object, whereas Verstehen invokes the apprehension of an insight concerning the object’s application or use. Thus we say that we understand (verstehen) some historical or social event, such as 9/11, or how to use a particular tool, such as a computer, but, at the same time, we do not understand (verstanden) them in their entirety, that is, we cannot explain them by situating them in a rational context that accounts for them. Hence, Verstehen involves a hermeneutics of praxis that is foreign to Verstand. Cassirer, however, often uses Verstehen in a nontechnical sense. When it is important to understand that he is employing Verstehen in a technical sense, we have added the German in parentheses. The two modes of understanding (intellectual and lived praxis) correspond to two modes of experience: Erfahrung, which we translate simply as “experience,” and Erlebnis, which we translate as “lived-experience.” Erfahrung comes from the verb fahren, “to travel through,” literally a “going forth,” which evokes an encounter with something external. Erlebnis, by contrast, is derived from the verb leben, “to live,” and suggests the inner experience of living through a certain state, such as the feeling of fear or joy: one lives through the experience again in one’s own mind. Kant and Hegel speak essentially of Erfahrung, whereas a series of philosophers associated with the Lebensphilosophie movement, such as Bergson, Simmel, and Dilthey, privilege Erlebnis as an authentic, more primordial experience over the reified common-object experience (Erfahrung) of consciousness and science. If science speaks of our experience of the world, the distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis marks the distinction between natural science and the human sciences. Tangentially connected to the above-mentioned differences between modes of knowing, understanding, and experience, is a difference in the

xxiv

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

description of modes of action. Again, distinctions risk being lost in translation; notions as different as effective action (wirken), doing (Tun), activity (Tätigkeit), action (Handlung), and act (Akt) can all be rendered as act, action, or activity. Cassirer was acutely aware of the different and shifting meanings of these words as they were used by the principal thinkers of German Idealism, including Kant, Hegel, and Fichte; but also by Marx and Lebensphilosophie, in which the relationship between thought and praxis is reversed from the traditional primacy of thought over praxis. For Cassirer, though, each word that describes an act or an action may have a particular nuance attached to it, as, for example, when he employs the words wirken, Wirkung, wirklich, Werk, and Wirklichkeit. The German root wirk renders the Greek word energeia, which translates as “making actual,” or “bringing something concretely about.” Wirken, therefore, is that effective activity of spirit that is the transformative dynamic process of potential into actual (wirklich) being. Thus, reality (Wirklichkeit) is the product of the effective activity (wirken) of spirit, its work (Werk). The symbolic forms are to be understood as the various energeiai, the efficacia, the effective activities that form and configure reality, and not the ergon, the work (Werk), that is the product of that effective activity. Where Cassirer employs the word Arbeit, another word for “work,” we have, when possible, rendered it as “labor.” Arbeit suggests a specific task or labor, whereas wirken suggests a deeper, transformative sense of bringing something into existence, realization. Arbeit, however, in many cases cannot be rendered in English as “labor.” In those cases where it is essential to understanding the text we have added the German in parentheses. Furthermore, Wirkung and wirklich are always translated as “effect” and “actual,” respectively. The distinction in German between Wirklichkeit and Realität has been understood and exploited differently by different thinkers. For Hegel, being has Dasein or Existence and is therefore real, but it does not have actuality, Wirklichkeit—being realizes itself only in and through consciousness. Wirken is the effective activity that produces Wirklichkeit. To preserve this connection and distinguish it from Realität, it is often argued that Wirklichkeit is best translated as “actuality.” One need only survey the translations of the seminal texts of German philosophy, however, to see that translators are not always comfortable with this translation and more often than not elect to alternate between “actuality” and “reality” according to the context. In English,

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xxv

“actuality” suggests a state of affairs or existence that is independent of the subject whose “reality” is a product of perception, assumptions, and above all the cultural interpretation of its signification for us. Actuality is autonomous of its lived signification for us; the actuality of a situation before which I stand may or may not “actually” be threatening, but if I understand it as threatening then this is my reality. For Cassirer, the symbolic forms are meaning-giving, they are the diverse hermeneutical horizons in which things are understood as the things they are. Each symbolic form produces its own mode of seeing, its own apperception of reality. Fortunately, Cassirer rarely employs the German term Realität, and when he does it is often in quotation marks. Thus, we have elected to render Wirklichkeit as “reality,” and when Cassirer employs Realität we have added the German in parentheses. Cassirer forms a network of connected concepts around the word Bild: image (Bild ), to form (bilden), formation (Bildung), formation (Gebilde), copy (Abbilde), after-image (Nachbild ), to copy or reproduce (nachbilden), reproduction (Nachbildung), emblem (Sinnbild ), model (Vorbild ), archetype (Urbild ), worldview (Weltbild ). Bild can be variously translated as “image,” “figure,” “picture,” “idea,” “representation,” “illustration”; and thus bilden is the act or process by which a Bild is created; accordingly, bilden can be translated as “to form,” “to compose,” “to build,” “to cultivate,” “to construct.” Bildung (formation) preserves that dynamic process of forming, of bilden. For Renaissance and Enlightenment thought, Bildung signified the process of cultivating good taste, which imprints and forms the soul; hence, Bildung is used both in the religious sense of formation and in the modern sense of education. It was originally synonymous with Erziehung, from the verb erziehen, “to educate, to raise or bring up”— that is, to cultivate. For Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, and Humboldt, the Bildung of the individual, understood as the dynamic process of cultural education and formation, was essential to progress, freedom, and the construction of the political state. For Cassirer, Bildung is more fundamental than the cultivation of belles lettres or the advancement of freedom and the political state. It is essential to the bringing forth of the world, it is world-forming, providing an original imprinting of form on reality. It thus presents us with the model (Vorbild ) and archetype (Urbild ) of our worldview (Weltbild ), never a mere copy (Abbild ) or reproduction (Nachbildung) of an already given existence. Rather, existence (Dasein) is

xxvi

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

given its actuality and visibility through the form imprinted on it in and through the process of formation. A Gebilde is thus the product of bilden: it is a thing, an object, a work, a creation, or a structure. Following the French translations of Cassirer, we have translated Gebilde as “a formation,” in the sense of a structurally formed object, but have added the German in parentheses so as to distinguish it from the process of formation (Bildung). We have also translated Formung as “forming,” to distinguish it from “formation” (Bildung). Cassirer was clearly engaged with and influenced by gestalt psychology. His theory of symbolic Prägnanz in large part developed out of his reading of Wertheimer’s “law of the Prägnanz of the Gestalt,”4 which was also important in the work of Cassirer’s colleague Köhler. The key challenge is to determine how Cassirer understood Gestalt. A few days before his death, he gave a lecture entitled “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics” to the Linguistic Circle of New York. In this lecture, he drew a direct analogy between his own project of symbolic forms and that of linguistic structuralism through an analysis of the historical development of the concept of Gestalt. After reminding his audience that the substantive Gestalt is derived from the verb stellen (to set or place, to make something stand), he turned to Kant for further clarification: “When Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, approaches those problems that in our modern scientific terminology we should call ‘Gestaltprobleme,’ he does not use the German word. He goes back to the Greek term ıȤ߱ȝĮ and writes his chapter on the schematism of the pure understanding.”5 In Greek, a schema suggests not only a sketch, design, or plan of how things appear but how things should connect and interact as well. Cassirer seems to suggest here that when he speaks of Gestalt and Gestaltung, he is speaking about the schema or schematization and is ready to recognize this as a proto-theory of structure and to speak of structure and structuralization. While it would have been possible to use 4. M. Wertheimer, “Diskussion zum Vortag von Benussi: Kinematopaptische Scheinbewegung und Auffasungsformung,” in Berich über den VI. Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie, part I, ed. F. Schumann (Leipzig: Barth, 1914), 11. 5. Ernst Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York 1 (1945), 118.

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xxvii

the substantive gestalt, the connection with gestalten and Gestaltung would have been lost. In order to preserve this connection, we have chosen the following translations: “figure” (Gestalt), “to configure” ( gestalten), “configuration” (Gestaltung), and “reconfiguration” (Umgestaltung) as to configure something is to give it structure. We should pause here to consider the use of the word Bestand, which Cassirer often employs either as a substantive (Bestand ) or as a verb, bestehen. Bestand is very difficult to render into English. The verb bestehen signifies “to exist,” “to continue,” “to last,” “to remain or survive,” “to insist on,” and thus the substantive Bestand is used to indicate the “existence” of something that “sits” or “stands” (sellen or stehen) there, ready to be used, as in the case of “stock,” “supplies,” “assets,” “cash or goods on hand.” Although it is possible to render Bestand by “existence,” it is essential to distinguish Bestand from Sein (which we render as “being”), Seiende (which we render as “being” or “entity,” depending upon the context), and Dasein (which we render as “existence”). Heidegger’s translators have rendered Bestand as “standing-reserve,” which preserves both the idea of standing ready and the suggestion that what is standing there is a type of supply for some purpose, a stock awaiting use. It would be anachronistic, however, to employ this Heideggerianism. What is more, the emphasis in Cassirer’s use of Bestand appears to be placed on the consistency of a perduring that comes about after a process of formation and configuration and, logically speaking, before its subsequent use for some purpose. We have, therefore, translated Bestand as “consistence” or “consistent existence,” depending upon the context. We would draw the reader’s attention to the original meanings of “consistence” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary: “consistence” signified “standing or remaining still, quiescence; state of rest”; “continuance, endurance; continuing state”; “material coherence and permanence of form.” This would appear to be precisely what Cassirer had in mind with Bestand. Each of the symbolic forms is a unique mode of formation and configuration, a mode that does not simply copy or imitate a given reality but gives it form and figure, thus constituting its visibility and actuality. For Cassirer, then, there is never a pre-given reality, be it objective or subjective. Rather, each symbolic form provides what Cassirer calls an Auseinandersetzung of I and world.

xxviii

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

For a glance at the development of individual symbolic forms shows us that their essential achievement does not consist [bestehen] in that they copy [abbilden] the outward world in the inward world or that they simply project a finished inner world outward, but rather, it is in them and through their mediation that the two factors [Momente] of “inside” and “outside,” of “I” and “reality” [Wirklichkeit] are determined and delimited from one another. If each of these forms embraces a spiritual [ geistige] “Auseinandersetzung” of the I and reality, it should not be understood to mean that the two, I and reality, are to be taken as given quantities, as finished, self-enclosed “halves” of being [Sein], which are only subsequently composed into a whole. On the contrary, the crucial achievement of each symbolic form lies precisely in the fact that it does not have the limit between I and reality as pre-existent and established for all time, but must set [setzt] this limit itself—and each fundamental form sets [setzt] it differently.6 Auseinandersetzung signifies an encounter, a discussion, a debate, a division or separation, a conflict, a confrontation, a polemic, a war, strife, battle, or a clash (Kampf ). Like many German words, Auseinandersetzung is composed of a number of separate terms which nuance and color its unique sense and with which Cassirer plays when he employs it as a terminus technicus in his philosophy. First, Auseinandersetzung is composed of Auseinander and Setzung. Auseinander signifies that things differ, are apart or asunder. Setzung is the substantive form of setzen (to set or posit) and therefore signifies a setting or positing. Thus, we have the idea of a setting apart or putting asunder. Setzen is an important term in Kantian thought as, for Kant, what reason establishes or sets (setzt) as true is a law (Gesetz). Auseinander can be further broken down into three parts: aus (out of/from), ein (one), and ander (other). In this way, Aus-ein-ander-setzung becomes a (lawful) setting asunder of one out of/from another that takes place and manifests itself only in and through the strife of a confronta6. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, tr. Ralph Manheim, Introduction by Ch. W. Hendell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 155–56; Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Zweiter Teil: Das mythische Denken, in Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 12, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 2002), 181–82.

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xxix

tional encounter. In its original legal application, an Auseinandersetzung was the settling or settlement of legal relations between individuals who were divided in conflict over some common property in which both shared ownership, as in the case of a debtor and his or her creditors. To be clear, it is not the case that two already existing unrelated positions clash, but that the positions themselves are a product of the conflict and exist only in the unity of their antithetical opposition to each other (Gegensätzlichkeit) as an expression of the law (Gesetz) of their Auseinandersetzung. Auseinandersetzung thus differentiates as it unites; it binds together the binary poles of a common relationship governed by law in and through the clash of opposition that separates them. The einander in Auseinander means one another or each other: Aus-einander-setzung is a setting out of each other that occurs in the encounter with one another. Auseinandersetzung is, thus, a productive difference in and through which the difference of each position exists as the other of the other within the tension and dynamics of a relational encounter of opposition—or, in Hegelian terminology, it is the productive negativity that sets apart the thesis and antithesis and yet constitutes their relationship of belonging together in opposition. An Auseinandersetzung is a complex synthesis in which the oppositions of difference coexist and belong together as the mutually defining, opposing limits of each other. Here, each position in the Auseinandersetzung exists only in and through the encounter or strife with its difference, through the interaction that is a mutual acting upon the other (Aufeinanderwirken); each is defined in its being not through some self-identical essence but out of its encounter with the limit of the other it is not. No single translation can capture the rich and complex meaning of Auseinandersetzung. In each instance, we translate it according to what makes sense for the particular sentence and include the German in parentheses. Hegel’s presence is impossible to miss in Cassirer’s language and thought. We have followed the standard translation of Aufheben as “to sublate” and Aufhebung as “sublation.” Cassirer also often employs the German term Moment, which he almost certainly took from Hegel. The challenge with this term is that the German Moment can refer either to a “moment” or “instant” in time or an “element” or “factor” of some totality (Ganzheit). For Hegel, the truth is the whole (Ganze), but it cannot be given all at once; rather, it must unfold itself, and this unfolding is history.

xxx

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

Through the mechanism of productive negativity, each element (Moment) that makes up the whole becomes present as a moment (Moment) in history and is then negated, preserved, and taken up through sublation (Aufhebung) into the whole. We have translated Moment either as “element,” “factor,” or “moment,” depending on the context. Where it is important to distinguish it from Element or Faktor, the German is included in parentheses. Throughout his work, Cassirer uses Ganzheit, Gesamtheit, and Totalität. Ideally, Ganzheit would be translated as “whole,” Gesamtheit as “aggregate whole,” and Totalität as “totality.” In a number of instances, however, it becomes idiomatically challenging in English to employ “whole” or “aggregate whole.” The essential difference between a system of parts that forms a whole and one that forms a totality is in the nature of the bond that organizes, relates, and unites them. Where the binding is external to the phenomena brought together, one would speak of a totality (Totalität) of contents; where the binding is internal to the being of the phenomena belonging together, one would speak of the whole (Ganzheit) that forms the aggregate totality (Gesamtheit) of contents. One can also discern this difference in the distinction between Inhalt and Gehalt, two German words for “content,” and Beziehung and Verhältnis, two German words for “relation.” Inhalt implies an external relation (Beziehung), as in the case, for example, of wine as the contents of a glass. Gehalt implies an internal relationship (Verhältnis) in which the content belongs to the being of the thing that contains it, as, for example, the alcohol content of the wine. It is not surprising, then, that Verhältnis is used for personal relationships such as liaisons, love, friendship, and so on, whereas Beziehung speaks to a tie or connection between things. Up to this point, the challenge we have identified with translating Cassirer’s language has been that many of the terms of German Idealism are very specific. In the case of Geist and geistige, the opposite is the case: the challenge comes from the extreme vagueness of the terms. Cassirer employs both Geist and geistige extensively throughout his work, and it is perhaps safe to say that this marks a Hegelian rather than a Kantian influence. When Cassirer wrote An Essay on Man, he followed the lead of the James Baillie’s translation of Hegel and used “mind” where he would usually have used Geist. It is clear, however, that in both An Essay on Man and Myth of the State he employs the term considerably

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xxxi

less often than one might expect. For a number of reasons, we have chosen to translate Geist as “spirit” rather than “mind.” First, the use of “mind” suggests some connection with the analytic philosophy of mind, which would be misleading to the reader—especially because of its interest in determining the relationship of the mind to the physical body, in particular to the brain. The entire debate about mind-body dualism is foreign and perhaps even hostile to Cassirer’s way of thinking. Furthermore, the German term Gemüt, strictly speaking, translates as “mind.” Depending upon the context, we have, however, translated the adjective geistige as “spiritual,” but also as “mental” or “intellectual” when “spiritual” sounded unduly religious. Cassirer makes considerable use of the substantive Wesen, which signifies the inner nature or principle of a thing, that is, the quintessence, or simply the essence, of a thing. Wesen can also be used, however, to signify a being or creature. Thus, depending upon the context, Wesen may be translated as “essence,” “nature,” or “a being.” But it must not be confused with Natur or Sein. Wesen implies the principle that pushes the thing to develop into the being it is, whereas “nature” not only implies the principle or cause that makes a thing be what it is but also refers to its physical process of birth, becoming, eventual degeneration, and, in some cases, death. Where Wesen is translated as “nature” or “a being,” the German is included in parentheses. It is not entirely clear whether Cassirer makes a consistent distinction between “meaning” (Sinn) and “signification” (Bedeutung). On the surface, it appears that there is an argument to be made that he distinguished between the meaning (Sinn) of a symbolic form (e.g., language) and the signification (Bedeutung) it produces. Together, the different symbolic forms constitute the hermeneutical horizons of meaning (Sinn) in which human life is interpreted (Deutung), in which it takes on signification (Bedeutung). The difference between the meaning of myth and that of science, for example, is that science produces “pure signification,” whereas the signification of the totemic structures of myth are lived immediately and, as it were, in the flesh. Throughout this collection we consistently translate Sinn as “meaning” and Bedeutung as “signification.” While Cassirer takes up the classical distinction in German between Macht ( power) and Kraft (force, power), he also employs the term Gewalt, which can be translated as “power.” Macht conveys the sense of an ability

xxxii

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

or position to do something or use strength. Hence, one speaks of political power (Macht) or of God as omnipotent (allmächtig). Macht suggests an author or domain over a sphere of action. Kraft, however, refers to the strength or force to be able to do something. Thus, a king may have the power (Macht) to make laws, but those laws might have no moral force (Kraft). While Macht can always be translated as “power,” Kraft must be translated as “force” or “power,” depending on the context. Where it is not clear from the context or it is essential to understanding the text, we have included the German in parentheses. Depending upon the context, Gewalt can be translated as “power,” “force,” “violence,” or “authority.” For example, one speaks of acts of violence (Gewalttaten), the raw force (nackte Gewalt) of some act, or a violent (gewaltsam) storm. Cassirer speaks of Gewalt almost exclusively in the context of religion and myth. Throughout, we have translated Gewalt as “violent power” so as to distinguish it from Macht and Kraft. The violent power of myth is presented in the mythical figure of the Dämon. This Dämon, however, can be both evil and a savior. Thus, we have translated Dämon as “dæmon” rather than “demon,” as the latter implies a post-Christian conception of an evil spirit, whereas the former suggests a pre-Christian conception of a spirit, as in the Greek įĮȓȝȦȞ. While other translations of Cassirer have in certain contexts rendered Empfindung as “feeling,” we have elected to restrict its translation to “sensation” and “sentiment” in order to preserve the important distinction between Empfindung and Gefühl, which is always translated as “feeling.” Finally, as mentioned above, in the essays written after 1927, Cassirer began to engage with Heidegger’s philosophy and to employ some of Heidegger’s technical language. The reader familiar with Heidegger will recognize such terms as Dasein, Vorhandenheit, Zuhandenheit, Nivellierung, Auseinandersetzung, Bestand, Besinnung, Sorge, Rede, and Stimmung. The problem is that Cassirer did not always explicitly identify the source of his technical language but assumed that his reader would be familiar with the traditions from which he borrowed and with which he was engaged. Thus, it is difficult to know when and when not to interpret particular terms as references to Heidegger. Evidently, many of these terms belong to the vocabulary of the German philosophical tradition, and Cassirer employed almost all of them from the very beginning of his career. It is also possible that it was not Cassirer who took on Heidegger’s language,

TRANSLATO RS’ INTRO D UCTIO N

xxxiii

but the reverse, that Heidegger was influenced by his reading of Cassirer. This is, for example, our contention with respect to both Auseinandersetzung and Nivellierung. This is not the place, however, to put forward an argument or interpretation around the question of influence. We have in all cases tried to translate these terms in the way that we believe Cassirer intended them. Where we believe that he was explicitly referring to Heidegger, we include the German in parentheses. On every page of Cassirer’s text we find evidence of his commitment to the collective life of the mind. Thought comes about neither in a historical vacuum nor in a solitary effort; rather, it is a product of a community, each contributing in their own way, each leaving their trace in the objective work of the spirit. We would like to thank Yale University Press and the Ernst Cassirer Publications Fund for making possible the English translation of Cassirer’s thought. Special thanks must go to Margaret Otzel, Otto Bohlmann, and the rest of the editorial team for their commitment to the life of the mind; they have all contributed to this translation and have each left their trace through their efforts, patience, and collaboration.

This page intentionally left blank

The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking (1922)

F O R E WO R D The following study is an extended version of a paper given at the Society for Religious Studies in Hamburg in July 1921. A separate publication of this lecture was not originally intended, as I was fully aware that the problem it addresses belongs to a larger network of issues from which it would be difficult to detach it. If I have now decided to write this paper, I implore the reader to view the following merely as a first draft and sketch, which can achieve a more detailed implementation only within the presentation of a set of broader problems. The preparations for this presentation are now advanced enough that I hope soon to be able to submit at least the first part of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; the first volume will, of course, include only the phenomenology of the linguistic form and then, according to the overall plan of the work, will be joined by an analysis of mythical consciousness and its relation to language, to art, and to scientific knowledge; thus, much of what is indicated in the following will find its detailed presentation in a more rigorously and systematically justified fashion. [First published as Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 1 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1922). Translated from Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt, 1994), 1–70. Page numbers from the German edition used for translation are given in the margins of each translation in this collection. All footnotes that appear within square brackets are translators’ notes that we have added.] 1

·2·

2

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

The publisher of these studies, Dr. Fritz Saxl, through his lively interest in the content of my exposition from the beginning, has not only supported me in every way, thereby allowing me to overcome not only all my doubts and reservations about this text’s separate publication, but has also assisted me in gathering together the necessary but often inaccessible sources, mostly from the material of the Warburg Library. I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks. I am also indebted to my colleagues Professors Carl Meinhof, Otto Dempwolff, and Erwin Panofsky at the University of Hamburg, all of whom have read the article in manuscript form, as well as the galley proofs. Hamburg, July 1922 Ernst Cassirer 1 ·3·

Logic becomes conscious of its proper philosophical task and systematic form only through its own development, which took place simultaneously with the development of scientific thought and is constantly oriented toward it. In the particular problems presented by the methodology of the individual sciences it grasped a general and comprehensive problem. This reciprocal relation has existed ever since the foundation of scientific philosophy in Plato’s theory of ideas. What we designate today as “logic” was included in the Platonic dialectic as a necessary and integral component—but, because it did not then bear its own unique name, its factual content was situated in strict interconnection with the methodology of the individual sciences. Conceptual “justification,” the ȜȩȖȠȞ įȚįȩȞĮȚ [justificatory account] which is the essential aim of all philosophy and which fulfills its concept, equally applies to the content of knowledge as its pure form.1 The form of the “hypothetical,” of relational thought as it was first emphasized by Plato in all its poignancy, received its confirmation and full clarification in the Meno, which presents a concrete example of geometric thought. The discovery of the analytic method of geometry, which comes to fruition here, prepared 1. See in particular Plato, Politics, 285 A, 286 A.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

3

the ground for the general analysis of logical reasoning and inference as it appeared in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. And in the later Platonic dialogues, especially the Sophist and the Statesman, the genuine dialectical art—the art of distinguishing and connecting—does not emerge as an absolutely detached logical technique. The theory of the logical concept, of its genera and species, concerns more the problem of systematic classification as it was formulated in the descriptive sciences of nature. The logical forms are, however, so clearly distinguished from the forms of nature that they cannot be immediately brought to one’s attention; rather, whoever wants to grasp them as the highest and most significant, as the ȝȑȖȚıIJĮțĮ‫ޥ‬IJȚȝȚȫIJĮIJĮİ‫ݫ‬įȘ [the greatest and most honorable idea], must not shy away from running through the sensuous figures, through their organization and classification. In this version of the problem in Plato, the basic tendency of the Socratic theory of the formation of concepts, the principle of Socratic “induction,” remains alive. The spheres of the sensuous and the intelligible are so strongly distinguished from one another that it is maintained in the rigorous interconnection between the dialectic and the specific forms of the configuration of knowledge [Wissen]. There is never a break here; rather, there is a steady ascent that leads up from natural philosophy and astronomy, through pure mathematics, to the highest idea [Idee], the idea of the Good. In this idea, for the first time, the fundamental determination of logic is given: the conceptual unity of philosophy constitutes and grounds at the same time the conceptual unity of science. In this sense, modern logic has continued to be the logic of scientific knowledge, in particular the logic of mathematics and the mathematical science of nature. All certainty, all “evidence,” which philosophical thought strives after, appears to be based upon this interconnection. “[N]ihil certi habemus in nostra scientia, nisi nostram mathematicam [There is no certainty in our knowledge unless it be in mathematics],” proclaimed Nicholas of Cusa, who, although he was completely absorbed by the content of medieval scholastic problems, nevertheless grounded a new form of philosophy by setting forth, in opposition to scholasticism, a new ideal of “exactness,” the praecisio of knowledge. There is no need here to describe in detail how this ideal subsequently operated in the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Leibniz to Kant, or how it has, with the advances of modern mathematics and mathematical

·4·

4

·5·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

physics, secured for itself an even more definite formulation. It will be forever to Hermann Cohen’s credit that he sketched out this primary development with full certainty and moved it into the full light of historical and systematic knowledge. However, he himself drew from this the conclusion that logic, as the logic of pure knowledge, can be none other than the logic of the mathematical science of nature. For him, this conclusion was the core and meaning of the new method of philosophy founded by Kant, the “transcendental method.” “[C]ritical philosophy,” as Cohen defined it, “is that which not only has an interconnection with science per se, not only with the science of nature per se, but primarily with mathematics and, thus, through it and guided by it in the science of nature.” This interconnection not only appears to be confirmed but, seen from a new angle, was strengthened by the developments in mathematics and theoretical physics following Kant. The construction of nonEuclidean geometries, the altered determinations of the concepts of space and time, and the development of the relationship between both concepts in the general theory of relativity—all of these have weighed heavily on the configuration of the general theory of knowledge, posing before it a wealth of new and more fruitful tasks. From the beginning, the relationship between logic as a general “theory of science” and the system of the “human sciences” shows itself to be a very difficult one. Giambattista Vico was the first to sharply and definitely set out a plan for a structural design of the human sciences in modern philosophy. With Vico, we encounter the idea that this structure, in distinction from the logic of mathematics and the mathematical science of nature, asserts its own full autonomy, that the human sciences must be based on their own peculiar fundamentals, but, at the same time, that they might not necessarily demonstrate the rigor and evidence of the principles of mathematics. Just as with the spatial world with which geometry is concerned, just as with the material world with which physics is concerned, the world of history is based upon general principles that are grounded in the essence of the human spirit. Thus, the project for a “new science” appears, a science that was considered to be analogous to the process of geometry; just as the world of magnitudes is not merely observed but is constructed and created from its elements, the same process now appears in the world of spirit, not only as possible but also as necessary. And the latter possesses more concrete reality [Realität]

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

5

and truth because the orders within the human world are superior to the points and lines, the surfaces and physical figures of geometry. Thus, the task of a general logic of the human sciences,2 which could take its place alongside mathematics and natural science as an equal, was established. However, only in post-Kantian philosophy, in the speculative systems of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, does this task become the central focus of philosophy. With Hegel, what appeared only as a simple requirement for Vico moves toward its ultimate solution. His phenomenology and logic incorporated in bold strokes a greater inclusivity and depth of the concrete totality of spiritual life in the historical richness of its phenomena as well as in its systematic organization and necessity. The content of Hegelian logic, however, was inextricably linked to its form, that of the dialectical method. As soon as we give up this form, the whole of the problem that was held together here through the unity and necessity of a metaphysical principle falls apart again into a manifold of individual methodological questions. In particular, it was the methodology of history that detached itself from that of mathematics and the mathematical sciences of nature, and attempted to confront mathematics with an autonomous claim. The particularity of spiritual being, its differentiation from natural being, should be secured through the logic of the science of spirit [Geschichtswissenschaft], through the definition of the “ideographic” process of history rather than the “nomothetic” process of the natural sciences. However, this methodological distinction, valuable as it was in itself, was greatly overestimated if it was believed to have contained an authentic foundation for the construction of the human sciences and the sciences of culture [Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften]. For reflection on the form and property of historical knowledge does not determine as such anything about the contents of this knowledge—the manner and direction of historical apprehension and description leave the object of this apprehension entirely undetermined. To determine this, we must return again to the form of historical knowledge, to the content and essence of what occurs in historical development. All history, as concrete history, has a determined subject: it is the history of the state or of the law, of language and art, religion and science. All of these formations [Gebilden], 2. See G. Vico, Principi d’una scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni, ed. G. Ferrar (Milano: Opere seelte, 1836), 139, 159.

·6·

6

·7·

·8·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

however, do not simply work themselves out in the mere exteriority of their manifold forms of historical appearance; rather, they reveal in this externality an inner spiritual principle. Language and religion, art and myth, each possesses an autonomous structure [Struktur] that is characteristically different from other spiritual forms—each exhibits a peculiar “modality” of spiritual apprehension and forming. The mere logic of history cannot provide an overview of the totality [Gesamtheit] of these modalities, a view of what constitutes their unique essence and what separates each from the essence of others. For as much as it seeks to differentiate itself from the logic of mathematical science of nature, the logic of history basically belongs to the same spiritual dimension. It continues to move within a single modality—the modality of knowledge. The opposition between historical and natural scientific ideals of knowledge concerns only the organization of the parts within the systematic concepts of scientific knowledge, and does not address the question of how the latter as a whole [Ganzes] comports itself toward other spiritual totalities [Ganzheiten] with essentially different structures and different layouts. So long as the methodological differentiation articulates itself in one level of cognition, so long as it proves itself to cognition, and despite the subtlety of definitions that can be achieved here, then, knowledge [Wissen] as such, the “humana sapientia [human wisdom]” (in the words of Descartes), appears in as many objects as it may be oriented toward, but always as one and the same, such that it receives from the diversity of objects no greater difference than the light of the sun from the diversity of objects it illuminates. Logic, however, is furnished with completely new questions as soon as it attempts to direct its gaze onto the pure forms of knowledge [Wissen] that are based upon the totality of the spiritual forms of the apprehension of the world. Each of them, e.g., language and myth, religion and art, now proves to be a peculiar organ of the intelligibility of the world, and at the same time, each, as the ideal creation of the world, apart from theoretical and scientific knowledge, possesses its own particular task and justification. Of course, this seems to give rise to the question whether or not such a broadening of logic does not abandon the established, traditional, and clear determination of the concept. Does logic not lose its historical and systematic hold, does not its well-defined task and its meaning threaten to evaporate, if it steps out of the boundaries that have been set for it by

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

7

its correlation not only with the mathematical sciences of nature but also with science in general? Is it a mere metaphor to speak of a nonscientific logical formation [Gebilde] in any sense other than that of an arbitrary transposition? To this question we can, however, first say that, even from the point of view of the general philosophical tradition, not only does such an extension of the notion of logic appear permissible, the tradition itself contains numerous independent attempts to do so. Indeed, the name of logic suggests that, in its origin, the reflection on the form of knowledge [Wissen] intimately penetrates the reflection on the form of language. The limits of logic and grammar are secured and guaranteed only very gradually. Of course, today no one would think to renew the ideal of philosophical grammar in the sense of attempting to deduce the laws of language simply from those of rational thinking and reasoning. The idea of “Grammaire générale et raisonnée,” which occupied the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seems to have been removed once and for all by the historical and psychological consideration of language. What emerged from this consideration of the individuality of language and speech, however, is the fact that the more every return to a uniform logical type was prohibited, the more evident was the need to show more clearly that this very individuality of the “inner form of language” was grounded not only in a certain direction of feeling and fantasy but also in a particular intellectual lawfulness. As a theory of “thinking in general,” logic cannot avoid coming closer to this lawfulness of linguistic thinking; it cannot avoid, for example, focusing on the question concerning the principles of linguistic classification and the linguistic formation of concepts, or on the question concerning the relationship of logical judgment to the linguistic sentence. It would appear more difficult to demonstrate a relation between logical and aesthetic lawfulness, for art, at least, appears as a sui generis formation [Gebilde] that can be understood only from its own principle of configuration. Nevertheless, the historical development of aesthetics shows that it also developed as an independent systematic discipline out of logic and only very gradually freed itself from this common philosophical soil. Aesthetics was founded in the eighteenth century by Alexander Baumgarten as a “Gnoseologia inferior [a lower form of knowing],” an epistemological theory of the “lower forces of the soul.” The idea arises that, just as in the intellectual-rational domain, in the sensuous and imaginative realms there are rules and forms

·9·

8

·10·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

that link and integrate. Just as there is a logic of abstract thinking, there is a “logic of the imagination.” This notion of the “logic of fantasy” is given a home in German psychology by Georg Friedrich Meier, a student of Baumgarten, and by Tetens. When Kant grounded the lawfulness of aesthetic consciousness in the transcendental structure of “the power of judgment,” he participated in establishing the philosophy of aesthetics. Guided by such examples, if we dare to speak of a logic of myth and mythical fantasy, the apparent paradox only increases. For it appears that the world of myth characteristically remains completely enclosed in the sphere of primitive sensation and intuition, in the sphere of feeling and affect, and that it leaves no room for the analytical distinctions and divisions that the “discursive” concept introduces. Even the very question concerning the form of the concept of myth seems to implicate itself in the entirely unacceptable rationalization of the form of myth—rather, the object that the question seeks to understand appears to be falsified and estranged from its own nature. And yet, as it is true that myth is not enclosed in a circle of undetermined representations and affects but takes shape in objective figures, it is nonetheless characteristic of a certain mode of giving of figure [Gestaltgebung], of a direction of objectification that cannot coincide with the logical form of object determination. It contains within itself an entirely determined mode of “synthesis of the manifold,” a combination [Zusammenfassung] and reciprocal correlation of sensuous elements. All formation of concepts, regardless of what domain or material it may take place in, be it “objective” experience or that of merely “subjective” representation, implies a certain principle of combination and “sequencing.” It is only by this principle that particular “formations” [Gebilde], particular configurations with fixed contours and “properties,” can be extracted from the constant flow of impressions. The form of this sequencing determines the species and genus of the concept. Serialization is another mode of ordering, another “perspective” of comparison that characterizes particular formations, e.g., physical concepts and biological concepts, but another consideration of the combination [Zusammenfassung] governs the formation of historical concepts. Of course, the tradition of the logical theory of concepts is in the habit of overlooking this very important difference, or at least fails to bring it to clear methodological expression. For it tells us that in order to form concepts we must

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

9

work through an aggregate [Gesamtheit] of identical or similar perceptions, continuing to remove their differences so as to point out the common components; it begins from the presupposition that the similarity or dissimilarity already lies in the simple content of sense impressions and need only be directly and unambiguously read out. A closer analysis, however, shows precisely the opposite: it tells us that the sensuous elements can be grouped together in very different ways, depending upon the viewpoint from which they are considered. Things in themselves are not the same or noncomparable, similar or dissimilar: only thought determines this. Thought does not, therefore, simply copy an existing similarity of things themselves in the form of a concept; rather, by means of the directives of the comparison and combination [Zusammenfassung] that it sets up, it determines concepts of similarity and dissimilarity even before determining what is to be considered similar and dissimilar. The concept, in other words, is not the product of the similarity of things but the precondition for the conscious positing of similarity between them. What is more, the most divergent things can in some respect be considered similar, while the most alike can always be regarded in some respect as different: the concept is concerned with just this relation, with fixing the determining viewpoint and bringing it to a definite expression. This becomes particularly clear and insistent when, instead of comparing the various species of concepts within the same genus, one opposes different genera to one another. Physical, chemical, and biological concepts are distinguished from one another through some characteristic differences, but they nevertheless exhibit certain nuances of the general “concept of nature”; the concepts of the natural sciences are distinguished from historical concepts in their specific principle of formation, but both are nevertheless related and united together as concepts of knowledge. The difference stands out much more clearly when the transition occurs not within the same genus, from species to species, but when it takes place from one genus to another. Here, at once, a real hiatus appears to open up: the methodological difference turns into a fundamental antithesis. Even this antithesis, however, can now be used to describe more clearly the contrast between the peculiarity of each of the opposing elements. In this sense, it is a logical motive and interest that determines the limits of the formation of strictly logical concepts and classes. The categories of logic become completely transparent in terms of their peculiarity only

·11·

10

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

if we do not content ourselves with seeking out and considering them within their own domain, only if we contrast them with the categories of other domains of thought and modalities of thinking, in particular the categories of mythical consciousness. That it is not paradoxical to speak of such categories of mythical consciousness, that the renunciation of the logical scientific form of connection and interpretation is not synonymous with absolute arbitrariness and lawlessness, that mythical thought, rather, is grounded in a law of its own kind and imprint [Prägung], will seek its proof in the following statements. 2

·12·

If we consider the process that language follows in the formation of its concepts and the divisions of its classes, we see that it contains some elements that can scarcely be compared when understood by our logical habits of thought and our usual logical measures. The way by which all the major languages that are closest and most familiar to us divide all the nouns into different “genera” is so self-explanatory that it has formed a stumbling block for philosophical and “rational” grammar. The PortRoyal Grammar, which sets as its task to understand and deduce the totality [Gesamtheit] of grammatical forms from their initial logical ground, has been forced to limit this ambition significantly in its presentation and discussion of the difference between genders. After a first attempt at obtaining a general logical derivative of this difference, it arrived at the conclusion that, at least in its concrete application, the allocation of certain nouns to one gender or another was subject to no fixed rule but was to a large extent governed by “pure caprice and irrational arbitrariness” [“pur caprice et un usage sans raison”].3 The attempt to render the difference of gender intelligible by returning to a type of “intuitive” logic rather than the logic of abstract and discursive thought was also not entirely satisfactory. Jacob Grimm attempted this in one of the richest and most profound chapters of his German Grammar. The power of aesthetic fantasy and linguistic empathy is no more evident than, perhaps, in the section in which Grimm seeks to investigate the end motives of linguistic formation and to uncover their hidden meaning. The logical capacity for 3. Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal, part II (Paris, 1810), chap. 5, 279.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

11

the organization of enormous linguistic material stands here in a fortunate balance with the free movement of linguistic imagination, which never allows a concept to solidify into a simple template but, according to the specific concrete task, always differentiates it anew and pursues it in its most subtle nuances and shadings. Grimm lists fewer than twentyeight different viewpoints in his presentation of the grammatical gender of sensuous objects, according to which the allocation of different objects to a masculine, feminine, or neutral gender is performed. “Grammatical gender,” Grimm summarizes, “is an extension, born of the fantasy of human language, of a natural order onto each and every object. Through this wonderful operation, a lot of otherwise lifeless and deduced concepts have been simultaneously expressed as being alive and sensuous and, insofar as these concepts borrow from true gender forms, formations, and inflections, they become through the things they come into contact with; this process becomes the entire advancing movement of stimulus while simultaneously becoming the binding linking of distinct members.”4 However, as appealing and compelling as this view and interpretation of the difference between genders may be, it nevertheless encountered considerable difficulties, even within the Indo-European language group, in the precise functioning of individual languages. IndoEuropean linguistics had already found itself constrained by this principle, even though it subscribed5 to the general interconnection between grammatical and natural gender, between gender and sex. Finally, Brugmann has replaced Grimm’s observation with a purely formal theory according to which the gender of most substantive nouns does not go back to an act of linguistic-aesthetic fantasy but is qualified essentially by their outer form, by the associative interconnections that developed between nouns with the same or similar endings.6 The problem appeared in a new light when linguistics advanced to pursue the problem beyond the borders of the Indo-European, comparing the difference in gender in Indo-European nouns with related but far 4. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik (Göttingen, 1831), 346. 5. See, for example, H. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1880), 241ff. 6. See Karl Brugmann, “Das Nominalgeschlecht in den indogermanischen Sprachen,” Internationale Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft 4 (1889), 100ff.

·13·

12

·14·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

more general phenomena in other linguistic groups. The analyses thus gained a broader and more secure foundation. The dual gender of Semitic-Hamitic nouns and the three-gendered Indo-European nouns stood out against the far richer and more complex systems of classification of other languages. The phenomenon of the difference between genders was recognized as part of a problem that could find a solution only within a larger, more comprehensive totality [Ganzen], a problem that was connected with this totality [Ganzen] by clearly visible threads, by specific transitions.7 In particular, it was the considerations of the clearly distinctive system of classification of the Bantu languages that resulted here in a much clearer and more comprehensive view. We need only very briefly allude in these introductory remarks to the principle that organizes this system. As is known, each of the substantives of a certain class in the Bantu languages is thought of as belonging to a very specific class and is characterized by its class prefix; furthermore, most classes involve various prefixes, depending on whether the word is singular or plural. The Bantu grammar distinguishes more than twenty classes with the use of even more special prefixes, and it is likely that this extraordinarily rich structure is merely the remnant of a former system of even greater diversity. The entire grammatical and syntactical structure of this language is governed and entirely determined by this principle of classification. Thus, for example, a noun is designated as the nominative subject by the fact that its prefix agrees with the subjective prefix of the verb; in the same way, it is labeled an objective accusative if the analogous agreement takes place between it and the object prefix of the verb. Also, every word that stands for a substantive in a predicative or attributive relation 7. Such transitional phenomena between the allocation of classes by the Bantu languages and the allocation according to the grammatical gender that rules in Semitic-Hamitic and Indo-European languages has been shown by Meinhof in the Hamitic languages, in particular in the Ful. The Ful spreads over the old grouping of the nouns, adding only four new rubrics (persons, things, large and small things), which it then developed into two classes: large things moved into the personal class, small things into the person (according to the organization in masculine and feminine). For further details, see Carl Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten, nebst einer Beigabe: Hamitische Typen (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1912), 22ff. and 42ff. See also “Das Ful in seiner Bedeutung für die Sprachen der Hamiten” in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG), vol. 65 (1911), 201ff.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

13

or relationship, which is expressed in our language by the genitive form, must assume the appropriate substantive-class prefix. As for the pronouns, their prefixes are not identical with the nominal prefixes; rather, they amount to a very determined relationship of unique correlation, such that, for example, the form of the possessive pronoun differs depending on whether or not the owner and the possessive object belong to one or the other class.8 As you can see, by means of grammatical agreement, a difference that was initially based on nouns is, to a certain extent, concentrically spread over the whole of language and its linguistic consideration. However, if we work back from the form in which this process occurs to the contents of the original distinctions, it, of course, seems futile to attempt to discover any fixed rule that guides this content and decides the assignment of certain nouns to certain classes. Even more than in the Semitic and Indo-European designation of gender, everything here appears to be subject to the arbitrariness of linguistic fantasy, the game of the imagination that combines the content according to caprice, whim, or random association. At first glance, it appears as though the comparison and correlation is led essentially by intuitive elements, by agreement between the exterior look and the spatial figure of the objects. For example, a specific prefix stands for particularly large things and gathers them into a separate class, while another prefix serves to form diminutives; one designates duplicate things, especially parts of the body, that correspond to each other symmetrically; another designates objects [Objekte] that appear to be isolated. In addition to these differences in size and number of objects [Objekte] come others that concern their mutual position in space, their intertwining [Ineinander], their proximity [Aneinander], their separation [Außereinander], all of them bringing this relationship to linguistic expression through a differentiated and finely gradated system of locative prefixes. There are also unmistakable indications that the class distinction of nouns frequently refers back to differences in spatial configurations, even beyond the sphere of the Bantu languages. In some Melanesian languages, the class of round, as well as 8. For more details, see Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen (Berlin: Reimer, 1906); see also Karl Roehl, Versuch einer systematischen Grammatik der Schambalasprache (Abhandlungen des Hamburgischen Kolonialinstituts, vol. 2) (Hamburg: Friederichen, 1911), 33ff.

·15·

14

·16·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

those of long or short, things (including the word for sun or moon) is designated by a special prefix that appears before the word for a certain king or canoe or certain species of fish.9 For the most part, the Indian languages of North America do not demonstrate the simple distinction of nouns according to genus; rather, they divide the totality [Gesamtheit] of things into animate and inanimate natures [Wesen], and then go on to distinguish those that are standing, sitting, lying down, as well as between those that live on the earth or in the water, or those that are formed from wood or from stone, etc. The laws of congruence are strictly observed here: the verb changes in the objective conjugation by influxes, which are incorporated into it, its form depending on whether its subject or object [Objekt] is animate or inanimate, standing, seated, or lying down.10 In all of this, the dominant guiding principle of classification that appears in the manifold of different types of classification is relatively simple and transparent because all of these distinctions are understood to be intuitively given, objectively demonstrable characteristics and features, according to which linguistic organization appears to orientate itself. In truth, however, it is at most a single element of apprehension, as opposed to the other, equally important elements, that is designated. In particular, it is a general rule here that the domain of objective sensation and intuition can never be clearly distinguished from that of subjective feeling and affect; rather, both domains intersect in the most peculiar way and interpenetrate one another. The classes of nouns are similar to originary classes of value as well as to property classes: there is expressed in them not so much the objective properties of the object as the emotional and affective position that the I takes toward it. This emerges particularly clearly in the fundamental distinction that dominates the Bantu, as well as most American, languages. It is a known phenomenon, that one and the same object, depending on the signification and value ascribed to it, can be assigned to the class of persons and sometimes to the class of things [Sachen]. Not only do the terms for certain species of 9. S. Robert Henry Codrington, The Melanesian Languages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 146ff. 10. For further details, see John Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages (Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1880), 48ff.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

15

animals change in American and African languages, as, for example, when the animal appears in mythical stories as a personal and autonomous agent,11 the same transformation takes place when an object is singled out from the totality [Gesamtheit] by a specific characteristic feature, such as its size or significance. Thus, according to Westermann, in the Gola language in Liberia, the change of prefix of a noun marks a change into another class, the class of living beings [Wesen], such that the object to which it applies is designated as being of a particular size, excellence, or value.12 In Bedauye, however, the fact that the contrast of grammatical gender has developed from the older opposition between a class of persons and a class of things [Sachen] is still clearly apparent; the masculine, which corresponds to the personal class, is attributed to an object whose size, reputation, and energy require emphasis, whereas the feminine expresses mostly smallness, weakness, and passivity.13 According to the underlying intuition, grammarians from higher and lower castes who are native speakers of the Drawida language, in which nouns are distinguished into two classes—the class of “reasonable” and “unreasonable” beings [Wesen]—rank words differently.14 Editors and scholars of Native American languages have emphasized that the fundamental distinction between “animate” and “inanimate” is not to be taken as being purely objective; rather, the distinction appears to assert itself through its application to certain categories of value. So, instead of 11. S. Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language (Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. II/1) (Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1890), 462; on analogous phenomena in the Ful language, see Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten, 45. 12. D. Westermann, Die Gola-Sprache in Liberia (Hamburg: Friederischsen, 1921), 27. 13. “Thus, for example, ša’, the cow, is masculine gender because it is well known in these countries as the mainstay of the entire household; however, ša,’ the flesh, is feminine because, contrary to ša’ the cow, it is less important.” L. Reinisch, Die Bedauye-Sprache in Nordost-Afrika II (Vienna: Buchhandler der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1893), 60, cited by Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten, 139. 14. See F. Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde, vol. III (Linguistic Part) (Vienna: Gerold’s Sohn in Com., 1867), 83; see also F. Müller, Grundriß der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. III: Die Sprachen der lockenhaarigen Rassen (Vienna: Brockhaus, 1867), 1, 173.

·17·

16

·18·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

speaking about the opposition between living and lifeless (animate and inanimate gender),15 we must speak of an antithesis of noble and ignoble, of personal and impersonal.16 We will not pursue these linguistic phenomena any further here: we will consider the problem in the following pages only insofar as a particular type of classification, which deviates from the logical norms of the characteristic formation of concepts and classes familiar to us, presents itself. Here, we see a completely different kind of ordering and organization of the contents of intuition in our theoretical, empirical, and conceptually abstract thought. Everywhere there are certain concrete distinctions, which are particularly subjectively felt, as well as affective differences, which are crucial for the divisions and separations, as well as for the connections and correlations, between the contents of perception and intuition. Irrespective of whether we are able to understand and relate to the motives that bring about this effect, it is the mere form of these divisions and correlations that constitutes an important problem. For in this form there emerges, in the middle of a domain that, at first glance, seems to defy all logic, a particular lawfulness. Once the point of comparison is ascertained, it is carried out with the greatest consistency throughout every part of language; thanks to the strict rules of grammatical agreement, it asserts itself with an unyielding logic throughout the entire structure of language. As peculiar or “irrational” as the basis of comparison may appear to many of us, there nevertheless prevails in the construction and the development of the system of classes itself a thoroughly consistent and “rational” principle. Above all, the findings show that even in the thought of “primitive” languages, the content of a singular perception or intuition is arranged with others; here, too, the individual is subordinated to a “universal” and determined by a “general.” Certain basic differences function as a common schema, as the 15. [Cassirer uses English here.] 16. S. Gatschet, The Klamath Indians, 462ff. See in particular F. Boas, Handbook of American Indian Languages, part 1, bulletin 40 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1911), 36: “The Algonquian of North America classify nouns as animate and inanimate, without, however, adhering strictly to the natural classification implied in these terms. Thus the small animals may be classified as inanimate, while certain plants may appear as animate.”

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

17

coinciding and continuous principles that gradually organize the entire intuitive world. The sensuous impression is conceptually determined and related to a particular class through linguistic designation. This has been expressed psychologically by the fact that languages do not, with a fixed division of classes, grasp individual things in one single mental act, but [grasp them] in two [mental acts], which, though indissolubly bound, are clearly separate from each other. A thing is never merely an individual but, in representative signification, exists as representing [Repräsentant] a class that is present and embodied in it as an individual case.17 Certain languages are not content simply to designate this subordination of the individual to the general only formally by prefixes; rather, they clearly and extrinsically distinguish both acts of determination by attaching to the actual name of an object another that generically determines and completes it. Humboldt explains this procedure, in the introduction to his Kawi-Werk, with the example of the Brahman. He notes that the “real generic notion” of concrete objects is not always assigned in this way: language is instead satisfied with the expression of what is the same in some common similarity grasped in something that is understood. Thus, the concept of an extended length is connected with the words knife, sword, lance, bread, line, rope, etc., such that the most diverse objects are placed in the same class only because they have but one quality in common. Humboldt concludes: “Thus, if these word combinations attest, however, to a sense of logical organization, out of them more often emerges the livelier activity of the power of the imagination: subsequently, the Brahman used ‘hand’ to serve as the generic concept for all kinds of tools, from firearms to chisels.”18 In these sentences is stated, in a very concise way, the problem at which the following considerations of the formation of mythical concepts and classes are aimed. We approach the mythical correlations and classifications here not in terms of their content but from the perspective of methodology—we wish to make clear the relationship between the various basic forces of the mind and the 17. See F. N. Finck, Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1910), 46ff. and 150ff. 18. W. Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues (Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. VII, 1), 340.

·19·

18

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

psyche, and how, simultaneously with the active movement of the power of the imagination, a peculiar logical meaning and a determined form and direction of thought are exhibited in them. 3

·20·

We begin with those mythical divisions of the world which are rooted in the sphere of totemic representation and on whose content and form the stamp of the totemic way of thought is impressed. The question of the origin and signification of totemism itself—a question that is well known as one of the most controversial problems of ethnology and the history of religion—can be completely left aside as it is not the question of the genesis of totemic intuition, only that of its determined consequences, that concerns us here. The phenomena that we initially want to consider have been particularly well observed in the native tribes of the Australian continent. Concerning the social organization of these tribes, it is generally known that the structure is configured in such a way as to divide the whole tribe into two exogamous groups: in the relatively simplest type of classification, the so-called Urbunna type, the two main groups are further divided into several subclasses, according to which each is designated by its own particular totem animal or plant. It then applies the rule that the man of one class, possessing a certain totemic emblem, can marry only outside the group, and only women of a very specific clan marked by a special totem. Other nuances may result from the fact that the two main exogamous groups can possess as many as two, four, or an even greater number of subdivisions that can determine the affiliation of the children in each class by the class membership of, first, the father, and then the mother. However, the general principle, according to which marriages between individual members of the tribe are regulated and by which the order of the offspring is determined in the totemic society, is not essentially reconfigured. We need not enter into the details of these, for us, very complicated family relationships and the system of kinship that emerges from them. Material about this has been published in the reports and presentations of Fison and Howitt and Mathews, and especially in the careful examination of the native tribes of Australia in two works by Spencer and Gillen. On the basis of this material, Émile Durkheim, in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [Ele-

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

19

mentary Forms of Religious Life] (Paris, 1912), has sketched out a general sociological theory of religion and its genesis. In this theory, the phenomena of totemism is taken out of the narrow sphere in which it first appears to belong; Durkeim stresses that totemism, in its primitive configurations, is not merely a principle of social organization but a universal principle of the classification of the world, and, thus, of the intuition and intelligibility of the world as well. Indeed, the distinctions between the various clans, organized according to their respective totems, expand further and further from the immediate social circles in which they first apply until, finally, they merge with all the spheres of existence in general, the natural as well as the spiritual. Not only the members of the tribe but the entire universe with all that it contains are consolidated by the totemic form of thought into groups that are associated with and separated from one another through certain relationships. In this way, this arrangement ultimately captures everything, both animate and inanimate. The sun, moon, and stars are ordered and separated according to the same classes as individual human beings and members of the tribe.19 When, for instance, the entire tribe is divided into two main groups—the Krokitch and Gamutch, or the Yungaroo and Wootaroo— then all other objects also belong to one of these groups. The alligators are Yungaroo, the kangaroos are Wootaroo, the sun is Yungaroo, the moon is Wootaroo—and the same is true for all known constellations, for all trees and plants. Rain, thunder, lightning, clouds, hail, and wind, each has its own totemic emblem by which it is assigned to a particular genus. We must bear in mind, here, that this generic determination appears to primitive thought and feeling as an absolutely real determination. It is in no way a matter of certain “signs” being attached in any conventional or nominalist sense to factually diverse objects; rather, this commonality of signs brings an existing commonality of being [Wesen] to visible expression. Accordingly, everything humans do, every action 19. “All nature is [ . . . ] divided into class names, and said to be male and female. The sun and moon and stars are said to be men and women, and to belong to classes just as the blacks themselves.” E. Palmer, “Notes on Some Australian Tribes,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 13 (1884), 300; see, in particular, R. Mathews, “Ethnological Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria. Part I,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 38 (1904), 208, 286, and 294.

·21·

20

·22·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

exerted on the world of things, must be determined in accordance with these criteria if it is to be successful. A sorcerer who belongs to the Mallera group can, for instance, use his incantations and magical rites only on those objects that belong to his group; all others would remain unaffected in his hands. The scaffold on which a corpse is placed must be manufactured from the wood of a tree that belongs to the same class as the deceased; so, too, the branches with which he is covered must also be taken from a tree of his class. The Wackelbura in eastern Australia are divided into the Mallera and Wutara, and the former group is separated further into the Kurgila and Banbe. When a member of the Banbe class dies, he must be buried by men of the Mallera class, and covered with branches of the broad-leaved boxtree because it is Banbe.20 As you can see, a very clear separation between the specific spheres of objects has taken place here, in both the theoretical and practical sense, a separation whose specific intellectual or emotional rationale at first appears to us to be impenetrable, but from which at least one negative element clearly emerges—namely, that it is not some exterior similarity of things, their agreement in any singular, sensually understandable or demonstrable feature that guides observation here. We have already recognized, however, that mythical thought transforms sensible impressions in accordance with its own structural form, and that it decrees in this transformation certain peculiar “categories” according to which the assignment of different objects [Objekte] to specific basic classes takes place. These observations on the totemic system of the indigenous tribes of Australia were recently richly augmented and further confirmed in a thorough and detailed presentation by Paul Wirz on the formation of the totemic social groupings of the Marind-Anim in Dutch South New Guinea. Here, too, the same basic feature of thought—the encroachment of the totemic structure of the organization of the tribe on the organization of the world—shows itself in its clearest manifestation. The totemic clan of the Marind and its neighboring tribes is, as Wirz explic20. See, in particular, the characteristic report by Muirhead, cited by Howitt, “On Some Australian Beliefs,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 13 (1884), 191, note 1; see also Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 18 (1889), 61 (Appendix II).

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

21

itly states, a universal totemism in the broadest sense, in that it includes everything that exists. Every natural and artificial object [Objekt] belongs to a clan, to a individual “Boan,” and is determined according to its nature [Wesen]. This original solidarity finds its expression in a plethora of myths by which all reality is grasped in its particularity and associated with a magical-mythical thread. A comparison of the material collected by Wirz and his entire presentation with analogous instances in other cultural spheres shows that the myths are not primary and original; the consciousness and feeling of class affiliation are, by contrast, the derived element. Rather, the reverse relationship clearly applies here. The myth only resets, in the form of a report or narrative, a determined consistency of representation that, as such, is given. Instead of revealing the genesis of this consistency, instead of giving us an explanation for it, the myth provides us only with its explication, its interpretive laying out [Auseinanderlegung] in the form of a temporal event. What unites the various myths is always an immediately felt mythical-totemic kinship, a common bond and friendship that unites the totem with all beings. According to Wirz, this bond extends so far that it is not possible to list all the totemic objects [Objekte] that belong together. Not only individual things but even certain activities, such as “sleeping” and “mating,” are understood as totemic activities of a certain clan or clan association. It is as if no individual thing or process could be “apperceived” or incorporated into the unity of mythical consciousness without being determined and subordinated to one of its mythical concepts of class. In this respect, it is particularly instructive and important to note that new objects that were supplied to the Marind-Anim from the outside, through foreign exchange, were immediately absorbed into the same character of thought. Wirz describes this occurrence in this way: “Any coincidence or minor commonality can give occasion to the totemic relation [ . . . ]. A clan, the SapiZé, which designates itself after an ancestor Sapi, recently received a new totemic relative that was the cow, only because the ox is Malay Sapi and was known by the name Marind.” Likewise, for example, sago and fine gray clay are also brought together based upon a purely superficial resemblance; the Sago-Boan and the Ton-Boan are considered to be related, and this relation extends to such a degree that the two groups are not allowed to intermarry. In its mythical totemic system of relationships, the Marind also classified a bright red, blossoming ornamental tree that

·23·

·24·

22

·25·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

had been recently introduced and cultivated as belonging to the FireBoan because its flowers, they said, were red like fire. If from all of these examples, however, Wirz concludes that totemic relations often come about in a purely accidental, arbitrary, and playful way, then he would seem to measure mythical thought by a standard other than its own. For the very same thing that forms a constitutive basic feature of this thinking finds a community of beings [Wesens] where we are able to identify only a mere analogy or external resemblance. Mythically, the name is never taken as a merely conventional sign for a thing, but as a real part of it—and a part that, according to the mythical-magical principle of “pars pro toto” [a part for the whole], not only represents the whole but actually “is” the whole. Anyone who takes possession of the name gains, in this way, violent power over the object itself, which is the same in its “reality” (that is, in its magical efficacy) as its own. And here as well the similarity is never understood as a “mere” relation that has its origins in our subjective thinking; rather, it immediately points back [zurückgedeutet]21 to a real identity: things cannot appear as similar without somehow being one in their essence. If we consider this, it becomes clear that, in each case, what appears to us as a random and playful ordering of particular objects according to individual mythical classes, is, after all, the formation of a general mythical concept of class which belongs to an even deeper layer of mythical thought, and which, in all its idiosyncracy, expresses not an arbitrary but, in a certain sense, the necessary structure of this thinking.22 The underlying apprehension here emerges even more clearly when we approach it not from the side of the content of intuition but from the side of the form of intuition, considering as well how the representation 21. [Cassirer makes a play on the German that cannot be translated here: zurückgedeutet means to point back, but it can be literally translated as zurückgedeutet, interpret-back.] 22. On the whole of this problem, see Wirz, Die Marind-anim von Holländisch Süd-Neu-Guinea, vol. I, part 2: “Die religiösen Vorstellungen und die Mythen der Marindanim, sowie die Herausbildung der totemistisch-sozialen Gruppierungen.” I was able to consult Wirz’s work, which appeared in the fall of 1922 in the Proceedings of Hamburg University, only after the writing of this paper. I am indebted to my colleagues Professors Carl Meinhof and Otto Dempwolff for pointing it out to me.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

23

of the spatial interconnection of things is configured for the mythical view of the world. In the world of totemic thought, the organization of space and the differentiation of spatial regions and directions do not take place as in our sense according to a geometrical, physical perspective but according to a specific totemic viewpoint. In the totality [Gesamtheit] of space, there are as many clearly separate individual regions as there are different clans within the whole [Gesamtheit] of the tribe. Moreover, every individual clan is associated with a determined orientation in space. Howitt reports that the Aboriginals of an Australian tribe have organized their tribe, which is divided into two main groups, the Krokitch and the Gamutch, according to the initial placement on the ground of a single staff pointing due east. This staff divided the whole of space into upper and lower, northern and southern halves; one place was assigned to the Krokitch group and the other place to the Gamutch group. The further organization of these groups into classes and subclasses arose from the placement, near the first staff, of other staffs that were laid down in a certain sequence in the directions of northeast, north, west, etc., until finally the entire circumcircle of space was divided into different sectors, each of which was simultaneously designated as the place of a very specific class or subclass. We are not dealing here with a merely representative [repräsentative] presentation, such as a schematic illustration of kin relationships by spatial relationships, but with an actual, essential interconnection between the individual classes and the spatial areas associated with them. Here, too, funeral rites prove to be very significant. For example, when a Ngaui, i.e., one of the men of the sun in one of the relevant tribes whose place belongs to the east, dies, care will be taken to place the corpse in the grave so that it rests with the head pointing due east. Correspondingly, members of other classes connected with a particular direction in space are likewise bound to it.23 23. Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” 61ff. (see Appendix II); Mathews, “Ethnological Notes,” 293; see Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1912) (Travaux de l’année sociologique), 15ff. and 200ff., and Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification. Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives,” L’année sociologique 6 (1901–1902), 1–72. A very similar view and description of totemic classification appears to be present when, according to the report by Wirz, the Marind-Anim aboriginals attempted

·26·

24

·27·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

The same basic classification presents itself, however, in much more definite terms and in a truly systematic organization in the representation of the regions of the world by the Zuñi, a tribe of Indians in New Mexico. The mythical-religious worldview of the Zuñi, and the basic form of their “mythic-sociological organization,” have been most thoroughly observed and described by Cushing, who lived for many years among them.24 His writings have been greatly supplemented by Stevenson’s and Kroeber’s in-depth studies on the kinship and clan division of the Zuñi.25 The peculiar form of the “heptarchy,” the sevenfold organization of the tribe that corresponds, according to the Zuñi, to a precise sevenfold organization of space and the world, is clearly reflected in their external way of life. The village they inhabit is divided into seven regions, seven spatial neighborhoods—namely, the north, the west, the south, the east, the upper and lower worlds, and, finally, the “middle” of the world, which is composed of all the parts. Not just every particular clan of the tribe but every inanimate and animate being [Wesen], every thing, every process, every element, and every determined period of time belongs to one of the seven regions. The clan of the crane and the pelican, the forest grouse and the evergreen oak belong to the north, the bear to the west, the deer and the antelope to the east; the parrot clan, the mother clan of the whole tribe, appropriately takes the central position in space, the region of the “middle.” In addition, every spatial region has a specific corresponding color and number: north is yellow, west is blue, south is red, east is white; the upper region of the zenith appears to clarify the relationships between the various clans: they drew a canoe in the sand and explained that everything in Boan had come with a single canoe from the east, where everything belonging to the Boan had its specific place. 24. F. Cushing, “Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths,” Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1891–92), 367ff.; the description is essentially completed in a series of essays by Cushing, collected and published under the title Zuñi Breadstuff (Indian Notes and Monographs. A Series of Publications Relating to the American Aborigines, vol. 8), edited by the Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation, vol. III (New York, 1920). 25. S. Stevenson, “The Zuñi Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies,” Twenty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1904; A. Kroeber, “Zuñi Kin and Clan,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 18 (1917).

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

25

multicolored, while the middle, as the representative [Repräsentative] of all regions, includes all the colors united. Each region is also the homeland [Heimat] of a particular element and a particular season: to the north belong air and winter, to the west water and spring, to the south fire and summer, to the east earth and autumn. Here, not only are the different regions distinguished but so, too, their value: at the top stands the north, followed by the west, the south, the east, the upper and lower worlds; the all-encompassing middle is not specifically named in this organization. The division of the social professions and labor also follows the same principle: war belongs to the north and its classes, hunting to the west, agriculture and medicine to the south, magic and religion to the east. Through this form of classification, as Cushing points out, the entire political and religious life of the people is completely systematized. If the tribe shares a common encampment site, there is not the slightest doubt as to the determined space that each individual occupies in it: the distribution of individual groups is governed by the cardinal points. And this certainty of the spatial “orientation” encloses within itself an analogous orientation of every activity [Tun] and thought. There is no celebration, no ceremony, no meeting of the council, no procession in which some misunderstanding as to the order to be kept, the position of the individual clans and the primacy that each is due, could arise. All of this is so precisely determined by the mythical-sociological structure of their worldview that it not only equals but surpasses the immediate binding force of written regulations and laws. Moreover, this basic view operates as well in the domain of immediate practical activity: for example, according to Stevenson, the Zuñi have taken the greatest care in agriculture to ensure that the colors of their grains correspond to the colors of the main regions.26 All of these details are significant for the general problem that we are concerned with here because they reveal the clearest guidelines by which the manifold of sensuous impressions is divided and organized for the 26. See Stevenson, The Zuñi Indians, 350: “These primitive agriculturists have observed the greatest care in developing color in corn and beans to harmonize with the six regions—yellow for the north, blue for the west, red for the south, white for the east, variegated for the Zenith, and black for the Nadir.” See, in particular, Cushing, Zuñi Breadstuff, 176ff. For the entire question, see Appendix IV.

·28·

26

·29·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

human mind, that is, not according to the mere nature of these impressions, which are given and prescribed in themselves, but according to the characteristic of seeing, the particular spiritual perspective by which the figure of the world, as an equally physical and spiritual cosmos, is first determined. Modern sociology believed that it had found the key to this basic relationship in tracing back all the logical bonds of our thought to primitive and primordial social bonds. And, indeed, does there appear any greater proof and evidence for this interconnection than the relationships we have just considered? Is it not absolutely clear that our logical concepts of classes and kinds are, in the end, nothing other than the reflections of certain social classes and forms of life? The ultimate actual division on which our thought, in all its artful systems of classification, concludes, as Durkheim advances, is the division of human society. “In all probability we would never have thought of joining elements of the universe together in like groups, categories and types, if we had not had the example of human community before our eyes, if we had not begun by making things themselves members of the society of men, so that logical and social groupings originally flowed into one another without distinction.”27 It immediately becomes clear, however, that this explanation is too narrow, and, at the very least, insufficient to grasp and interpret the totality of the phenomena being considered, particularly when we are considering the general form of classification as it confronts us in the Zuñi system. This system far exceeds the narrow dimensions in which we encounter it here. We find again the same typical forms of classification in other modes of life and thought that culturally and socially do not conform to totemic forms of thinking and society. In order to illustrate this, we will return once again to the problem of space and its organization. The totemic structure of spatial-consciousness can immediately be placed beside the astrological structure of spatial-consciousness. Very specific factual transitions and mediations appear to exist between the two, so that in certain cases it remains questionable whether a certain sphere of culture, in its overall spiritual attitude, and especially in its view of space, belonged more to one or to the other structure. Thus, for 27. [Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, tr. Carol Cosman and Mark S. Cladis, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114. Translation slightly amended.]

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

27

example, the view of the world of the ancient Mexican cultural sphere exhibits certain traits by which it appears to be related to the mythicalsociological worldview of the Zuñi, whose basic elements we have just discussed. However, these very elements, out of which the construction of an actual cosmic interconnection is attempted, surround another region of being. Like the Zuñi, the sevenfold division of the world that underlies all their thinking is also reflected externally in the sevenfold arrangement of their dwellings. It is reported that the ancient city of Mexico was divided into four regions according to the four cardinal points.28 As with the Zuñi, where each spatial zone was designated by specific color, here, too, the directions, in ancient Mexican Mayan manuscripts, are identified by different colors. Yellow belongs to the south, red, white, and black, respectively, to the east, north, and west, and the fifth direction, the vertical or middle, appears to correspond to green or blue.29 At the same time, however, the classification assumes a certain calendric character that is retranscribed throughout the domain of astrological-astronomical considerations. As in astrology, here, too, we find the representation of a certain deity that presides over a special period of time. The ancient Mexicans’ “Tonalamatl,” that is, the book of good and evil days, is divided into periods of 13 × 20 = 260 days. Within each day, different “signs of the day,” different masters of certain hours of the day or night, are distinguished. Thirteen guardians of the hours of the day stand by nine masters of the hours of the night. Thus, tiers of divinities or manifestations of a divinity were set into a fixed relation to different time periods and in this way created a basic system of astrological predetermination of the future. If Seler’s interpretation of the Mayan manuscripts applies,30 an exact analogy to the notion of world-zones that was developed by Babylonian astrology can be discerned here. Each of the seven zones is assigned one of the seven planets and is thought to control 28. See T. Danzel, “Babylon und Altmexiko,” El Mexico antiguo. Revista internacional de arqueologia, etnologia, folklore, prehistoria, historia antigua y lingüistica mexicanas 1 (1919–1922), 243. 29. For details, see Eduard Seler, “Der Charakter der aztekischen und der Maya-Handschriften” and “Zur mexikanischen,” in Gesammelte Abhandlung zur amerikanischen Sprach- und Altertumskunde (Berlin: Asher, 1902), 411, 527ff. 30. E. Seler, “Der Codex Borgia und die verwandten aztekischen Bilderschriften,” and “Das Tonalamatl der alten Mexikaner,” ibid., 133ff., 600ff.

·30·

28

·31·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

it. A corresponding organization of the world occurred in India and Persia, in the seven dvipas of Indian geography and cosmography and the seven Persian keshvars. However, through a particularly strange and meticulous design, this classification of the universe and its contents also appears in Chinese thought, where it developed into a general schema of the conception of the world as such. The basic idea of Chinese religions— that the entire world is governed by a uniform law, that one and the same Tao is effective in celestial events as in earthly events and human action—has created in this schema, as it were, its concrete-sensuous expression. Every classification of things, all class formation refers back to the great model of the heavens. Accordingly, the diversity of the heavenly regions progresses through the whole of being and through all of its specific modes of being. For example, one of the oldest works of Chinese medical literature, the Su Wen, sets up a table in which the east is associated with the season of spring, with the element of wood, with the organ of the liver, with the emotion of wrath, with the color blue, and with the sour quality of taste. Correspondingly, the west is associated with autumn, metal, the lung, concern, white, and sharp taste; middle earth is associated with the spleen, thought, etc. Each specific region of space is also assigned a particular animal: to the east, the image of a blue dragon; to the south, that of a red bird; to the west, that of a white tiger; to the north, that of a black tortoise. Every religious “science” of the Chinese, all knowing and all predicting of things and events, is set within this basic schema, from which general guidelines for the “divination of the universe,” particularly, in China, the advanced geomancy of the theory of Fung Šui,31 can be abstracted. If we turn to the way in which the Greeks appropriated ancient Babylonian theory and the ways in which they sought to make it scientifically fertile, an antithetical feature of Greek culture and its manner of thinking clearly emerges. The Greek geographers took up the Babylonian idea [Idee] of world-zones, but they freed it from all cosmological-fantastic trappings in order to use it purely 31. On the whole of the problem, see mainly J. de Groot, The Religious System of China, Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect. Manners, Customs and Social Institutions Connected Therewith, vol. I (Leiden: Brill, 1897), 960ff.; Universismus. Die Grundlage der Religion und Ethik, des Staatswesens und der Wissenschaften Chinas (Berlin: Reimer, 1918), in particular, 119, 171, and 364ff. See Appendix V.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

29

for the purposes of scientific geography. From the many world-zones or world-islands that embrace one another, they conceived seven rectilinear zones that were intended to serve only the requirements of an eidetic overview and organization.32 Thus, these Greek geographers are related to the idea [Idee] of world-zones as Eudoxus, the founder of the Greeks’ scientific astrology and Plato’s pupil, was related to the idea [Idee] of Babylonian astrology. A decisive turn in the intuition of the cosmos takes place here, a turn that was only possible, however, because Greek philosophy had previously discovered and determined with methodological rigor new instruments of pure theoretical knowledge of the world, new concepts and forms of thought. Within mythical-astrological thought, however, the organization of the cosmos, the divisio naturae [the division of nature], now proceeds more definitely in the direction just discussed. In the ancient Babylonian period, astrological geography divided the mundane world into four major regions: Akkad, i.e., Babylonia, in the south; Subartu, i.e., the land that stretches east and northeast of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, in the north; Elam, a part of late Persia just to the borders of the Central Asian highland, in the east; Amurru, i.e., Syria and Palestine, in the west. The operations in the heavens were divided into different orders that reflected these lands. Every planet, like the separate fixed stars, corresponded to a particular geographic-astrological signification: Jupiter designated the star of Akkad; Mars, the star of Amurru; Plejaden for Elam, Perseus for Amurru. In a further specialization, the right side of the rising moon was related to the west, the land of Amuru, while the left side was related to the east, the land of Elam. This spatial organization also takes place in the organization of time. In detailed tables, the separate planets, constellations, and fixed stars were arranged into groups of twelve, which were connected with the individual months of the year and distributed, in accordance with this order, to the various geographical regions. The first, fifth, and ninth months of the year were allocated to Akkad; the second, sixth, and tenth months to Elam; the third, seventh, and eleventh months to Subartu. The same principle of classification

32. For details, see P. Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier (Strasbourg: Karl J. Triibner, 1890), 163ff.

·32·

30

·33·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

was also extended to the individual days of the month.33 More generally, in the later development of the astrological system, every greater or smaller period of time possessed its own particular planetary ruler, its chronocrator. Mars was lord of the year, Venus the mistress of the month; Mercury ordered the day, and the sun commanded the hour. The allocation of individual days of the week to the planets expressed itself directly in their Latin names: Solis, Lunae, Martis, Mecurii, Jovis, Veneris, Saturni. The successive phases in the life of the individual were also subjected to this order: from the moon that rules over earliest childhood, the dominion of the planets over the life of humans moved gradually from Mercury through Venus, the sun, and Jupiter, until, in the end, under the reign of Saturn, life drew to a close.34 And just as each discrete period belonged to and was accompanied by a particular star, everything that happens—the content of every event and all human activity [Tun]—exhibited the same referential character. Even the most insignificant performance was subjected, through its grounding in the time and hour, to its grounding in the stars. It is known how astrology, in its system of classification, methodologically carried out this basic intuition in the smallest and finest detail, how it carefully calculated the most positive moment for the bath, for changing clothes, for each specific meal, for cutting hair and trimming beards, for filing nails; Ungues Mercurio, barbam Iove, Cypride crinem35 is an ancient astrological rule. And, as with the indi33. On astrological geography, see M. Jastrow, Jr., Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (American Lectures on the History of Religions, vol. 8) (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), 217ff. and 234ff. See as well the presentation by C. Bezold in the first chapter of Sternglaube und Sterndeutung. Die Geschichte und das Wesen der Astrologie, by Franz Boll (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1919). 34. On the astrology of the ages of life, see F. Boll, Die Lebensalter (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913); in addition, see the following for a masterful overview of Boll’s work “Sternglaube und Sterndeutung,” in particular, his article on the development of the astronomical worldview in the context of religion and philosophy, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, part III, section 3; vol. III (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1921), 1–51. 35. Ausonius, book VII, 29, cited by F. Cumont, Die orientalischen Religionen im römischen Heidentum (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1910), 313. F. Boll, “Die Erforschung der antiken Astrologie,” Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum (1908), 109ff. [There is a play on words that cannot be rendered into English:

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

31

vidual actions of the human, all natural existence was situated in this planetary schema and obtained by this inclusion a permanent place in the universe. The basic elements of perception, the sensory qualities, as well as the physical elements of the material world were subject to this system of classification. The different colors that illuminated the planets, which appeared to early observers, led to the distribution of the seven colors of the spectrum to five planets, the sun, and the moon. Just as the elements of air, fire, earth, and water were assigned to the planets, so, too, were the qualities of warm-damp and warm-dry, cold-dry and coldwet. Likewise, as the mixture of substances in general were dependent on the stars, so, too, were the mixtures of humors in humans, as well as the “temperaments”—the sanguine, the choleric, the melancholic, and the phlegmatic. If one admits that animals and plants, precious stones, and metals relate to the seven planets and twelve signs of the zodiac in the same way—that, for example, gold is equivalent to the sun, silver to the moon, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter, lead to Saturn36—then it is clear that, in the end, there can be no thing, no property, no process, no action [Tun] in the world that does not have its assigned place and position in the whole. From this, however, it becomes immediately evident that astrology, strange and adventurous as its conclusions appear to be, is based not merely on a confused mixture of superstition but on a peculiar form of thought. The problem of how to think of the totality [Ganze] of the world as a lawful unity, as a self-contained causal structure, is already most decisively posed in astrology. Here, we encounter everywhere “explanations” of particular appearances which may seem insecure and unstable with regard to their specific details, but which belong to a general type of causal [ursächlichen] thinking, causal [kausalen] deduction and reasoning. The entire astrological system is based on the premise that all physical events in the world are interconnected through imperceptible transitions, that every effect, from the place in which it was generated, continues endlessly to seize and affect all the parts of the universe. The stars are, as it were, only the clearest, most visible exponents of this fundamental Nails is for Mercury (to be done on Wednesday), beards is for Jove (to be done on Thursday), hair is for Venus (to be done on Friday).] 36. See Appendix VI, below.

·34·

32

·35·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

interconnection of the universe. As the passage of the sun determines the changing of the seasons and, thereby, the growth and decay of vegetation, as the tides depend on the course of the moon, so, in general, no single occurrence can be thought that cannot be connected, through some close or distant link, to the motion of the heavens. The determination of the individual form and fate [Geschicks] of human beings is, in a similar way, “explained” by the psychological-cosmological speculation that is based on the system of astrology. It was a generally common view in late antiquity, expressed in different forms, that souls, when they descend from empyrean, from the heights of the heavens into the earthly body, must traverse the spheres of the seven planets and that every planet confers on them the particularity that accords with their nature [Wesen].37 Gnostic and Neoplatonic speculation have developed this basic insight in different directions, the former understanding it in a pessimistic way, the latter optimistically. At one moment, the stars impart weakness and passion to humans, and, at another moment, the basic forces of physical and moral life.38 Similarly, in medieval Christian astrology, the seven planets impart to the human soul the seven mortal sins on its descent into the earthly: Mars gives iracundia [irritability], Venus, the libido [appetites], Mercury, the lucri cupiditas [love of gain], Jupiter, the regni desiderium [desire of rule], etc. Even apart from such particular applications, however, the peculiar “principle of causality” of astrology is found in the tendency to explain all earthly configurations and effective actions by “emanations” from the supernatural world. The ancient theory of celestial ȐʌȩȡȡȠLĮȚ [emanations] prevailed until the Renaissance, although Marsilio Ficino nevertheless produced a detailed presentation and analysis of the theory of radii coelestes [rays of the heavens].39 Every particular existence and event is bound as if with chains to a certain point in the heavens as its place of origin. In light of the foregoing, as one can see, 37. For details, see Boll, Die Lebensalter, 37ff. 38. Thus Gnosticism gives the sense of the first intuition of Saturn as idleness or falsehood and deceit; the Neoplatonists, however, accord to it “ratiocinationem et intelligentiam [ratiocination and intelligence]” (IJާșİȦȡȘIJȚțȩȞ [the theoretical]); details about this can be found in a yet unpublished work by Panofsky and Saxl, which is expected to appear in the “Studies of the Warburg Library”. 39. Boll, Die Lebensalter, 37ff.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

33

the astrological view of the world claims, in form, nothing less than the modern natural-scientific explanation of nature. From a purely formal perspective, astrology is one of the most magnificent attempts at the systematic construction of an explication of the world ever ventured by the human spirit: the demand to “behold the whole in the minute” has rarely been so vividly stated and so consistently attempted as it was here. The more pressing question, however, concerns the characteristic features by which the causal thinking of science designated itself as such and by which it clearly and in principle differs from the type of causality that governs in the astrological system. Indeed, if one measures the “explanations” of astrology by our modern notions and modern methods of determining physical “causality,” it immediately becomes apparent just how fragile the astrological system is. From the standpoint of this scientific ideal of knowledge, all the “inductions” of astrology appear as false and skewed analogies, and as arbitrary and hasty generalizations. These errors are so clearly evident that it is, at first, difficult to understand how, in spite of them, in spite of the palpable shortcomings of empirical observation and material evidence, such a system was able to maintain its almost unchallenged domination over the greatest scientific minds, up to Tycho Brahe and Kepler. However, the fact that our modern analyticscientific concept of causality is not a natural possession of the mind but one of its most recent methodological achievements is most evident here. This concept is by no means content with the simple question of the “why” of being and events; rather, it gives this question, which is as old as human thought in general, a distinctly new twist and imprint. Myth also asks after the why of things; it also develops a system of theogony and cosmogony. However, despite all of its efforts to return to the final “origin” of things, in the end it does not go beyond their concrete “existence.” The present form [Gestalt] of the world is to be understood in the context of its mythical past, not in terms of its own structure and nature, but the mythical past differs in that it is suffused throughout with the color of the sensible present. Thus, finally, myth explains the whole world, for its explanation is tied to the tangible [dinglich] part of the same world—it lets the world emerge from the world-egg or world-ash, it lets the world be formed out of the body of a giant. Both members of the causal relationship, the “cause” [Ursache] as well as “effect,” are thus seized as concrete things [Dinge] and are, as such, related to one another.

·36·

34

·37·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

Events take the form of a transition from one thing-figure into another— this is mythically “conceived,” that is, the successive phases of the thing are simply grasped and described in their succession. However, the further mythical thought progresses, the more complex and indirect this description becomes. Thought is no longer content to grasp “cause” and “effect” only as content, that is, to determine that which proceeds out of another, or to state the mere fact of this emergence; rather, it inquires after the form of this emergence and attempts to subject it to a general rule. Astrological thought is already at this stage of reflection; however, it has not yet freed itself from the “complex” thought of myth, from thought that confronts cause and effect only as a thing-like totality [Ganzheiten] that cannot be disassembled. This explains why it takes its form from a peculiar middle-hybrid position between myth and science. Here, for the first time, the infinite variety of the individual forces of myth is systematized and a general order is introduced. Through the relation of the deities to each planet, the figures of the gods of polytheism simultaneously obtained a fixed, limited position in the cosmos and a specific efficacy. Reality is no longer ruled by the individual whims of unpredictable forces but [ruled] by forces that are bound by a common form of effective action in a uniform concept of “nature” as a general lawfulness of events. And yet, within astrology, this abstract thought of the lawfulness of the universe was not able to fill itself with concrete content. It was unable to achieve the apprehension of truly defined “particular laws of nature,” but through its attempt to apply general categories of the lawfulness of events to the particular and individual, thought lost itself again in fantasy and the fantastic. For here an important and indispensable intermediary was still lacking—the medius terminus [middle term] that first gave the concept of law its positive signification and secured its fruitful application in modern physics. Since Galileo and Kepler in the Renaissance, the form of the scientific explanation of nature has remained unalterable in its essential feature— the dissolving of all being into becoming, into spatiotemporal relations, and the grounding of its lawfulness in the whole of these relations. In the mathematical theory of natural events, which was the purest and most perfect expression of this thought, all content and every event had to be transformed into a complex of magnitudes in order to be viewed and available to explanation as changeable from moment to moment. Thus,

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

35

the task of theory is to ascertain how all of these changes are mutually interconnected and how they condition one another. If we imagine a worldly state at a given moment (t1) and assume that all of its determining values of magnitudes are known to us, and, further, that changes in these values would be expressed in equations that present them as functions of time, the entire future knowledge of the world could be determined through the continuation of a point that it would experience in the ensuing moments, t2, t3, . . . , etc.; it could thus be mapped out. The characteristic variable states, the moments x, y, z, together with the first d2x dy d2y or second differential quotients with respect to time dx —, —, —, — and dt dt2 dt dt2 so on, would be sufficient to clearly describe all coming events, as we are able to calculate immediately from them, through a simple setting of the parameter of time, every event in the past. This is the form that the thinking of the lawful necessity of natural events has adopted in the modern astronomical view of the world, in its view of the “mechanics of the heavens.” This “mechanics of the heavens” is based upon the logical analysis of the infinite, that is, on the concept of the infinitely small, the function of and change in magnitude. At the same time, however, in order for our modern scientific thought to be able to conceive some being in this way, it must first correlate it to elementary alterations and simultaneously annihilate it. The form of the whole, as it is available to sensory perception or pure intuition, disappears: it is replaced by the idea of a defined rule of becoming. The nature [Wesen] of each thing is determined by its genetic definition, by its construction [Aufbau] from the individual partial conditions that constitute it. The astrological intuition of being is vehemently opposed to this dissolution into the elements of becoming and into their pure determination as magnitude. Again, it finds in every part, however small, the form of the whole; we can only think the whole as lawful connection, as the synthesis of elementary processes. Our procedure, therefore, is, as mathematics characteristically calls it, the process of integration, the constructive building up of the knowledge of the whole from knowledge of its conditioned parts; astrology’s procedure consists in never approaching the “parts” of being, in the assertion of the identity of being over all empirical differences and divisions, the identity of its pure foundational figure. In this develops the unique character of “complex” thought that so fundamentally distinguishes analytic-scientific consciousness from mythical

·38·

36

·39·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

consciousness. Given the infinite complexity of causal factors that enter into every unique event and existence, the danger exists, for our way of thinking, that we may never arrive at the real determination of a concrete whole, of a single “actual” being or process: this is because the functional thought of science, every cognition of an empirical reality, is transformed into an infinite task, as Galileo first recognized and clearly stated. For the astrological view of the world, however, the problem is reversed—the universe as such can never be separated into actual, independent determinations. Every attempt at such a separation is implicitly sublated by the principle of the “sympathy of all things” before it has barely been undertaken. Particular events and existences become merely a cover or mask behind which hides an identical form of the universe, which stands for everything, the small as the big, the near as the distant, all the same. For modern science, the unity that is sought is the unity of the laws of nature as a pure functional law; for astrology, it is the unity of an enduring and consistent existence, a structure of the totality of the world [Weltganzen]. The world resembles a crystal in which, no matter how much it is broken into ever smaller pieces, one is always able to recognize the same characteristic form of organization. Clearly, this is what appeared in those totemic divisions in which we recognized one of the most primitive forms of the mythical concept of the world. In the system of the Zuñi, for example, not only was the whole of being divided into seven spatial regions, so, too, were the members of the tribe, the animals, the plants, the elements, and the colors, and within a single sphere, the same unique “septuarchy” repeated itself. The members of a single clan, to which a particular totem animal was assigned, may, therefore, differ from one another by virtue of employing a different limb of the animal—e.g., its head, or its right or left leg—as a particular totemic emblem, and, once again, one part would correspond to the north, another to the west, one to the “higher” world and another to the “lower” world, etc.40 The structure of the whole therefore returns, but only on an abbreviated scale and concentrated in different parts. The whole of time and the stages of life, the qualities and elements, the corporeal and spiritual worlds, the characters and temperaments, are also, in the astrological worldview, constructed according to the same model that revealed 40. For more details, see Cushing, Zuñi Breadstuff, 368ff. (see Appendix IV).

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

37

itself to us in the configuration of the planets, a model that stands before us in the clearest spatial projection, as the most orderly arrangement of all the basic relationships. There prevails here a kind of mythical congruence whose pure form can be compared to the law of grammatical congruence that confronts us in the consideration of the formation of linguistic concepts and classes. A certain intuitional, emotional, and intellectual distinction does not remain fixed to the point where it first arose; rather, it has a tendency to continue to have an effect, to pull in all of being in ever-wider circles and, in the end, to envelop and “organize” it in some way. The key idea of astrology—the idea of the unity of the microcosm and the macrocosm—receives here its clearest signification. This unity, even where it appears as the expression of the causal and dynamic, has its origin and fundamental significance in an always statically substantial unity. It is an original unity of being to which the mediated unity of effective action clearly refers. The primary reason that man is governed by the laws of the universe lies not so much in the fact that he continually experiences renewed effects from the cosmos but in the fact that, on a smaller scale, man is the universe itself. Now, of course, this characteristic of astrological thought, which this thinking assigns to a particular genus classification, is not sufficient in order to also determine its particular kind, its specific peculiarity. For even the modern science of causes knows, in addition to the general concepts of function and law, special “structural concepts,” which, in their methodological stratification and coincidence, clearly contrast with the concepts of the first kind.41 In particular, there are the descriptive sciences of nature, above all, the sciences of organic life, which cannot do without such structural concepts. Thus, it appears that the more the mode of astrological thought differs from the modern mathematical sciences of nature, the closer it seems to approach the biological concepts of form. Indeed, the idea of the “worldorganism” is the recurring image in which astrology loves to dress its basic intuition. It would be absurd, says Agrippa von Nettesheim, if the heavens, the stars, and the elements, which are for all individual beings 41. On this subject, see Carl Stumpf, “Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften,” Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophish-historische Classe (Berlin: Verlag der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1907), 28ff.

·40·

·41·

38

·42·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

the source of life and ensoulment, should themselves lack life and ensoulment; if the law that is sensed as a whole in every movement of a limb in the human body does not assert its validity for the entire universe.42 Nevertheless, it is not in just this aspect of the basic view of life that the antagonism between the mythical-astrological mode of thought and the modern sciences’ concepts of form and structure is less pronounced. The apparent coincidence between them in terms of the content of the concepts only highlights the distance between their respective forms of thought all the more clearly. The peculiar inner dialectic of astrological thinking consists in the fact that, by missing the generality of mathematical laws, it forfeits true particularity, the determination of the individual form. It attempts to grasp the organic unity and vitality of the whole world, but the vitality of the universe is completely absorbed in the rigidity of mathematical formulae. The same formulae, when used to breathe independent life into the universe, bring out its authentic cognitive content, its purely ideal signification. The organic becomes a subspecies of mathematics, the mathematical a subspecies of the organic: but in just this way, neither of them attains the real independence of its concepts. Perhaps we become most aware of this limit of astrological thought when we compare the astrological concept of form to Goethe’s concept of form. In one of the most famous and perfect poetic formulations of the concept of form, Goethe connected his basic intuition to the symbols of astrology. In the Orphic originary words, every “shaped [geprägte] form develops by living,” which can only be grasped as a particular development [Ausprägung] of the all-embracing necessity that is expressed in the forms of the heavens and the position of the planets. And it is only by comparing Goethe’s idea of dynamic form and development with the purely static concept of astrology that a great distance becomes completely apparent.43 Equally divorced from the mindset of modern math42. Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, book II, chaps. 56 and 60. 43. What is found here, in the following short summary, can be found in greater detail in two of my works, “Goethe und die mathematische Physik. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtung,” in Idee und Gestalt (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), 27–108, and “Goethe und Platon,” Sokrates. Zeitschrift für das Gymnasialwesen 10 (1922), 1–22.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

39

ematics and mathematical physics, Goethe dismantles the whole of the world, but not only into its elements; he wants to view the whole of the world as a formed whole, as a complex of pure figures. He subjects this “thinking in figures,” however, to the basic principle that finds its universal expression in the idea [Idee] of metamorphosis. It is not a question, here, of rising from the individual figure to the “general,” of comparing and combining it with others under the generic concept of type and class; rather, all coherence exhibits itself as a coherence of becoming. Only that which is derived from a common principle of formation and which can be thought of as emerging from it truly appears to belong together. The rule of continuity is, therefore, considered a basic rule of derivation. At no time can we refer an individual case or intuition immediately to another based on the evidence of mere semblance; rather, only what follows may be linked to what came before and what comes next, being thus combined in the unity of a series. In this axiom of continuity, Goethe follows the methodology of the modern sciences. Indeed, he recognizes mathematics as a teacher. For him, only experience which does not spring suddenly from one point of existence or event to another, but which moves through progressive variations of conditions, through all the intermediary steps, may be considered to be experience of the “highest kind.” “When confronted by such higher experiences, I halt in order to unravel them, assuming to the full the viewpoint of the natural scientist, and there are known examples of excellent men who have excelled at this. We have to learn from mathematics concerning this deliberation: only to arrange what follows from what precedes it; and thus, even so, we must always labor to avail ourselves of no computation, even though we must be accountable to the most rigorous geometrician.”44 By virtue of this basic requirement, Goethe denies himself all forms of “induction,” which we have defined as the unique life principle of the manifold system of astrological “correlations.” He sees the danger of this induction, this comparison and combination of the discrete and the disparate, which, instead of understanding the particular with and against others, merely conceals and levels down its particular individual character. He says that induction “despises the unique and, in a fatal 44. Goethe, “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt,” in Werke, vol. XI, 33ff.

·43·

40

·44·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

tendency, drags that which only has life as separate to its death in the general.” Goethe compares his own methodology of “development” to this method, by which “things worlds apart are connected together in dark fantasy and witty mysticism.” Of course, for him, every observation of nature continues to have as its basis the conviction that nothing happens in living nature that is not combined with the whole. Therefore, if phenomena appear isolated, they must not, for this very reason, be isolated. He insists, however, that we cannot force this conviction on nature as a subjective claim, but that, step by step, we have to prove it in the object itself. In all observations of objects, the highest obligation remains to discover every particular condition according to which the phenomenon appears, striving for, to the greatest possible extent, the integrity of the phenomenon, “because, in the end, these conditions must be capable of being strung together, of interlocking with one another, and must form before the researcher a kind of organization, manifesting their common inner life.” In this way, according to Goethe, the “power of the imagination” proves itself in research—this power, which is not rendered vague by imagining things that do not exist, rather constructs the figure of the reality itself, according to the rules of an “exact sensory phantasy.” We can now see that it is basically the same element that separates the structural concepts of astrology from the functional laws of mathematics, and Goethe’s concept of organic nature from the modern descriptive science of nature. In both cases, the rigid astrological mode of representation, the conviction that nothing can become that is not already, is confronted by an originary genetic intuition that attempts to grasp beings ideally and, initially, to construct them either from the general law or from the individual form of becoming. In contrast to this ideality of the mathematical concept of law and the concept of organic form, the mythical-realistic view grasps at the same time the schema and image of being through the totality [Gesamtheit] of the real. In the end, the unity of the microcosm and the macrocosm cannot present itself in any way other than in the form of such a sensible image. This unity is absolutely bound to the fact that it is the same elements and the same order of the elements that determine the construction of the universe as well as the construction of the lived human body. A magical cosmology, therefore, corresponds to a magical anatomy in a correspondence that appears to have formed under a kind of compul-

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

41

spheres.45

sion of thought within different cultural It is a natural feature of human thought that the inspection and ordering of objective intuitions of the world proceed from the fact that the lived body [Leibes] is taken as the starting point of orientation. The human body [Körper] and its various limbs appear as a “privileged frame of reference” to which the organization of the totality [Gesamt] of space and all that is contained in it is ascribed. The development of language provides numerous clear indications of this interconnection. In a large number of languages, particularly the African languages and the languages of the Ural-Altaic group, all of the words that are used to express spatial relations can be traced back to concrete material words and, specifically, to expressions for parts of the human body. The concept of “above,” for example, is designated by the word for head, while “behind” is designated by the word for back, etc. Even more characteristic in this respect is that linguistic classifications often distinguish the different limbs of the human body and use them as a basis for other linguistic determinations and distinctions. A language as primitive as the South Andaman possesses a richly developed classification of nouns in which all objects are distinguished according to whether or not they possess a human nature, and, furthermore, the different degrees of blood relationships and the different parts of the body are strictly separated from one another according to class. Each class possesses its own prefix and its own corresponding form of a possessive pronoun. The head, brain, lung, and heart all belong to one class; the hand, finger, foot, and toe belong to another class; the back, stomach, liver, and scalp belong to yet another, etc. This is so much the case that the whole body appears to be divided into seven different classes. Especially noteworthy is that there is an extremely curious relation between the organization of the classes of blood relations and those of the parts of the body: there is a strange relationship of correlation and identity between the son and the legs, testicles, etc., between the younger brother and the mouth, between the adopted son, the head, breast, and heart.46 45. For the form of this “magical anatomy” in Babylon and Mexico, see Danzel, Babylon und Altmexiko, 263ff. 46. For more details on this system of classification of South Andaman, see E. H. Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1932), 51ff., 199ff.; see the report by A. J. Ellis on the

·45·

42

·46·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

Such linguistic divisions are known within the mythical divisions. In the medieval speculation of the unity of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the living body [Leibes] of Adam was thought to have been formed out of eight parts: the flesh was identified with the earth, the bones with the rock, the blood with the ocean, the hair with the plants, thought with the clouds, and so on.47 Similarly, in mythical thought, the organs of the human body—the heart, the liver, the spleen, the blood, the bile, etc.— were correlated to the elements of the vast world and its rulers, the planets. Such original equations formed the foundation for all “laws,” for every predetermination of astrology. In order to penetrate more deeply into the epistemological significance of this relationship, we must, of course, return first to the “grounds” of knowledge, to the various positions that the fundamental concepts of space, time, and causality occupy vis-à-vis one another in mythical and scientific thought. The idea of causality always encompasses a pure “intellectual synthesis”—whether in its most primitive or its highest form— regardless of the concrete figure in which we may encounter it. The relation between “cause” and “effect,” between the “condition” and the “conditioned,” is not given in immediate sensuous sensation; rather, it exhibits an original “supplement” of the power of thought, it involves a spiritual interpretation of sensory phenomena. And if this relationship, which itself cannot be intuited, is to be applied to intuition, if the sensible content itself is to serve as the means of this form of causality, then an ideal mediation is necessary. The concept of cause and effect must “schematize” itself in intuition, creating a spatial and temporal correlative and counterimage. It was the Critique of Pure Reason that first clearly and decisively pointed out this basic problem. It conceived the schema, in contrast to the sensual image, which is only individual, as a “monogram of the pure power of the imagination,” as something that can never be made into an image and involves only the “pure synthesis, in accord Andaman language in Transactions of the Philological Society (London, 1882–84), especially 53ff.; and M. V. Portman, “Notes on the Languages of the South Andaman Group of Tribes” (Calcutta: Office of the Government Printing, 1898), chap. IV. 47. See W. Golther, Handbuch der germanisch Mythologie (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1895), 518.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

43

with a rule of unity according to concepts in general.” However, the various schema present, for Kant, different forms of temporal determination: the schema are nothing but a priori determinations of time according to rules that refer to all possible objects following the order of categories, the order of time, the content and order of time, and, finally, temporal embodiment [Zeitinbegriff]. Here in particular, the concept of number is, in its pure mathematical form [Gestalt], related to the intuition of time and bound to it: “number is nothing other than the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogeneous intuition in general, because I generate time itself in the apprehension of intuition.” It is only through this reduction to the intuition of time that the concepts of space and causality are first indirectly determined. The intuition of magnitudes in space can, in the end, only take place because we produce them from their elements in successive synthesis. “We cannot think of a line without drawing it in thought, we cannot think of a circle without describing it, we cannot represent the three dimensions of space at all without placing three lines perpendicular to each other at the same point [. . . ]” (B 154). In the same way, arithmetic “accomplishes its concept of number by the successive addition of units in time; and pure mechanics likewise cannot attain its concept of motion without employing the representation of time.” Every representation of causality, therefore, is based less on the being of things than on the rule and succession of changes; strictly speaking, we can never inquire into the empirical ground of being, only into the ground of events. Only because reason thinks of a certain order in temporal relationships as necessary, as subjected to a general rule, do these give these representations objective signification and determine it as the representation of an “object.”48 In this determination of the basic relationships of space and time, of number and causality, Kant proves himself to be methodologically attuned to the mathematical sciences of nature. Here we find the culmination of an intellectual development common to modern mathematics and modern logic. The analysis of the infinite arises out of the concept of “fluxion,” which understands spatial magnitude as a magnitude of becoming, and, simultaneously, as dissolving the temporal magnitude that 48. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [B 154, B 176ff., and B 242]; Prolegomena, §§ 10ff.

·47·

44

·48·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

is in it. Here, in the place of finite magnitudes and their relationships, the principles of their creation, the laws [Gesetze] of their becoming and growth, are set [gesetzt] ( principia jamjam nascentia finitarum magnitudinum [principles therefore must arise from the magnitude of finite things]).49 In connection with this problem, and from the same perspective, mathematical methodology has always clearly recognized the common form of the formation of mathematical concepts as the genetic formation of concepts: Hobbes and Spinoza, Leibniz and Tschirnhaus unanimously grasped geometrical definitions as genetic, as “causal definition.” All understanding [Verstehen] of spatial magnitude and spatial relationships is bound to the fact that we generate it according to a rule; every form of “coexistence” is only really and truly recognized from the perspective of “succession.” If we compare these determinations with the form of mythical causality, the opposition of the latter to the scientific concept of causality can be illuminated from another side. Mythical causality requires “schematization” even more than the scientific: not only does it constantly refer to concrete sensuous intuition, it also appears to be completely sublated, thereby fusing with it. Of course, what Kant said about the “schematism of the understanding,” namely, that it is “a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty,” holds even more for mythical schematization (B 181). However, if scientific thought endeavors to establish the primacy of temporal over spatial concepts and to impress upon them greater determination, the general direction in which these schematizations move can, nonetheless, be clearly described; in myth, the priority of spatial over temporal intuitions is preserved. Mythical cosmogonies and theogonies also confirm this: for here, where more than anywhere else myth appears to take the form of “history,” the actual concept of becoming and of the continuity of becoming remains foreign to it. The mythical concept is internally related and grows together, not with temporal continuity, but with spatial contiguity. All magic is rooted in the premise that, just as with the similarity of things, their 49. For more details, see Cohen, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte (Berlin, 1883), especially 81ff.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

45

simple spatial proximity harbors in itself mysterious forces. What only once came into contact with other things henceforward grows together with them in a magical unity. Here, simple spatial coexistence has real consequences.50 The well-known principle of magicical causality—the principle of pars pro toto [part for the whole]—according to which every part of the whole represents not only the whole to which it belongs but, in the causal sense, factually is this whole, is rooted in this basic view. Moreover, what happens to the detached and separate part happens to the whole: he who possesses not only a limb of the lived human body but also any arbitrary, even “inorganic” constitutive parts such as nails or hair has, through this possession, violent magical power over the person to whom these parts belong. If one compares this magical causality to the causality of astrology, it appears to be far more detailed and refined; it shows itself superior, as if the astronomical and cosmic views of the world and space exceeded the naïve sensory view of space of primitive man. However, we see now more clearly the bond of the concept of causality to space. For every event and effective action will, in the end, be attached to certain original spatial figurations [Gestaltungen], to given configurations [Konfigurationen] and “constellations.” When we perceive with our senses an empirical temporal event, such as the sequence of a human life, we recognize this, as soon as we are able to refer back to an “intelligible” origin, as being grounded and created from the very beginning in spatiophysical determinations. Modern physics “explains” all spatial togetherness, all coexistence of things, by tracing them back to the form of movement and the laws of motion. Physical space becomes the space of force, which is constructed out of interlocking “lines of power.” This basic view has received its most recent and clearest expression in the general theory of relativity, in which the concepts of metric fields and force fields interpenetrate, in which the dynamic is determined metrically and the metric is determined dynamically. While space dissolves 50. See, for example, E. Lehmann, “Die Anfänge der Religion und die Religion der primitiven Völker,” in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, vol. 1, part 3 (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 11: “I can kill my wart or my ulcer just by touching the grave: when the body decays, my ulcer or wart will disappear, but if only a thread of my clothes enters into the shroud, I must soon follow the dead person.”

·49·

46

·50·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

into force here, in astrological thought force dissolves into space. The structure of the heavens and the position and organization of its individual parts are themselves nothing other than the intuition of the effect of the interconnection of the universe, insofar as this interconnection is grasped in a purely substantial way and is intuited in a purely thing-like and spatial manner. In this sense, it is not time but space that is taken here as the real symbol [Sinnbild ], as the “schema” of all causality. The contrast between the mythical and scientific concepts of causality can be demonstrated down to the finest detail. If the physicist wants to understand a determined sensuous manifold, the manifold of colors, for example, if he wants to derive this diversity from a common principle, there is no choice other than to trace it back, through the mediation of the concept of number, to a dynamic process. Each individual color corresponds to a particular characteristic form and frequency of oscillation, which makes these colors into an objective “concept.” In contrast, the general structure of the mythical concept of causality necessarily gives rise to another procedure, which we have already encountered in certain concrete examples and applications. In the way that the schematization occurred, that is, essentially through the mediation of the form of space rather than the form of time, the individual members of the manifold were not interpreted in terms of a dynamic process but were related and simultaneously attached to different “regions” in space. The organization of regions of the world, because it includes in itself the elements and qualities of all physical and psychological properties, became the archetype and model for organization in general. Here, it is once again clear how space simultaneously constituted an original intellectual system of coordination, a common level of relations to which the manifold of concrete determinations could be transferred, and which, by virtue of this transformation, became even more definitely differentiated. However, precisely because of this transmission, because this projection onto space was uniformly applicable to any arbitrary manifold, it was also possible to consolidate and fuse together elements of an entirely different nature and origin. Mythical thought takes no offence at this coincidentia oppositorum [coincidence of opposites], which is just its peculiar element of life. Things that clash in the intellectual space of logic live effortlessly together in the mythical-astrological space: One and the same physical substrate—the same planet, for example—can unite within it-

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

47

self the most contradictory determinations, which become fused in identity thinking.51 In addition to the spatial proximity of things, however, it is primarily their qualitative similarity that determines their dependent relationship. The element of resemblance enters into the composition of the mythical “concept of causality” with a meaning completely other than that of scientific thought. For the lawfulness of scientific thought, and in particular mathematical physics, it is not enough that direct or indirect similarities be shown in order to maintain an interconnection between two elements of being. Such an interconnection is found not where the elements appear somehow to correspond to each other and where they can be mutually allocated according to a determined schema, but where certain quantitative changes in one bring about quantitative changes in the other according to a general rule. By contrast, in astrological thought, a unique coincidence such as the position of the stars at the hour of birth determines once and for all the being and destiny of man. It is this moment that imprints the stamp of fatalism on astrological determinism. The being of man, as it is determined by the horoscope of the astrologer, consigns him to the iron fist of necessity. In a predominantly and essentially dynamic view of the world, necessity itself bears another imprint, for every empirical being forms itself anew out of the elements of the past. Of course, this process is determined by a fixed law, so that here, too, there is a strict determination of events; however, this determination is itself composed out of an infinity of individually emerging new circumstances that can neither be closed off nor overlooked. Astrological fate, however, condenses this fullness into a unique, original, determined existence that leaves no space for free becoming. This type of logical determination also imprints the ethical. Upon closer inspection, it is the general mythical apprehension of similarity that continues to work here in the astrological intuition of the whole. For modern relational thought, similarity is nothing other than a relation [Relation] that requires, in order to be grasped and determined, a mediating intellectual activity that moves back and forth between the compared contents. The positing 51. For examples of such conflicting determinations in astrological thought, how the various planets, such as Saturn and Jupiter, are assigned, see the abovementioned work by Panofsky and Saxl.

·51·

48

·52·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

of this relation [Relation] may have an objective basis, a fundamentum in re [a grounding in the thing], but, then, it is essentially based on the activity of consciousness, without which it could not come about. Thus, similarity is not an absolute quality that belongs to things in themselves but the work of consciousness, and, ultimately, it is available only for consciousness. Depending on the various viewpoints chosen by consciousness for this comparison, and according to its predominant intellectual or practical interest, very different objective similarities and groups of similarities appear. Mythical thought knows nothing of such idealization, or, of course, of the relativization of the concept of similarity that is linked to it. Mythical thought traces every relation of similarity between two contents back to an underlying factual identity, and is only able to understand [verstehen] it by means of this identity. Every similar comportment [Sich-Verhalten] of things or occurrences is, for mythical thought, immediate tangible evidence that something common must be contained in them. Therefore, if primitive thought and action succeed in imitating a thing [Sache] or an event with fidelity and accuracy, they necessarily possess in this imitation the very essence of the thing [Sache] itself. All magical analogy returns to this presupposition, to the substantial signification and force that it ascribes to mere similarity. Fundamentally, the astrological view of the world does nothing other than bring this presupposition to full implementation and embody it in a logically self-contained system. Before every correspondence that it is able to produce between different spheres of objects, it concludes the unity of an interconnection of force and nature [Wesen]. The mere possibility of mapping the array of colors, the variety of metals, the number of elements or temperaments, etc., onto the system of stars is enough to guarantee that these things are the simple continuation of the “nature” of the stars. This basic intuition is most clearly evident in the astrological system’s view of the position occupied by the concept of number. At first glance, this position appears paradoxical and contradictory, for here, intellectual tendencies that would seem to exclude one another as such meet and interpenetrate in the astrological concept of number. The exactitude of mathematical thought immediately borders here on a fantastic and abstruse mysticism. This peculiar twofold methodological character of the astrological system has long captivated the attention of the best authorities. Thus Warburg writes:

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

49

It is an incontrovertible fact that, in astrology, two entirely antithetical mental forces, which might logically have been expected to be in conflict, combine to form a single “method.” On the one side, we find mathematics, the subtlest operation of the abstract intellect; on the other, the fear of dæmons, the most primitive causal force in religion. The astrologer, who comprehends the universe through a clear and harmonious system of linear coordinates, and who can precisely compute and predict the relationship of fixed stars and planets to the earth and to one another, is gripped, as he pores over his mathematical tables, by an atavistic and superstitious awe of those very names of the stars that he wields like algebraic formulae: to him, they are dæmons, of which he lives in fear.52 This duality of sensation and intellectual disposition might, however, be intelligible if one considers that it is not the number as such, but a very particular determination and application of the concept of number, which manifests itself in the thinking of the modern mathematical sciences of nature and which gives this thinking its specific imprint. The transition to this way of thinking was only possible after number itself had been transformed from signifying the mere number of things into the functional number of the analysis of the infinite. Astrology was not yet familiar with number in this new and crucial signification. It used number not to express the laws of change but to express and hold fast to the similarities and analogies between the structures of things, between the various regions of being. The constant numerical relationships that pervade all being and events thus become the means to sublate all apparent divisions and particularities of being into a single basic form of the universe. By virtue of this reduction, however, every particular event [Ereignis] was then not only ascribed to the ideal form of number but was connected once again through number’s mediation to its concrete-thingly substrate in the heavens. As the heavens are nothing more than the harmony of numbers become visible, every arbitrary numerical relationship, then, 52. A. Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (Heidelberg: Winter, 1919), 24 [Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, tr. David Britt Getty (Los Angeles: Research Institute, 1999), 613.]

·53·

50

·54·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

appeared, directly or indirectly, as if bound with mysterious magical bonds to the heavens and its forces. Thus, the “sacred numbers” of astrology exhibit the first step toward the liberation of the mind from its immediate sensory view of the world; however, the means for its liberation dominates and subjects it, in a one-sided dependence, to the fatality of being. This relationship only changes in the instant when number itself passes over from the form of structural and existential number into the form of the functional number. This latter cannot be grasped and interpreted as a simple product of being; rather, in it a specific achievement, a peculiar creation of thought, exhibits itself. The idea of the unity of the macrocosm and the microcosm then receives a new, specifically idealistic twist in the philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The structural number of astrology implicates human beings in the flesh and in the mind, in the necessity of cosmic events; the functional number of modern science grounds precisely this necessity in the form of scientific thought itself and, thus, in the freedom and depth of the mind. For the signs of numbers, in modern analysis and in their grounding in the modern mathematical science of nature, are, by their very epistemological nature [Wesen], not as much signs of things as they are signs of relations [Relationen] and operations. Behind the given numbers on which arithmetic depends, the concrete intuition of certain objective formations [Gebilde] and forces remains. The “abstract” numerical magnitudes of pure algebra and calculus, however, must confirm their nature through this connection. They are, considered purely concretely, undetermined, but it is precisely in their indefiniteness that they possess the peculiar ideal function of determination. Whereas a kind of dæmonic material power adheres to the sacred numbers 7 and 9 by virtue of the prototype of the planetary world, which is exhibited in them, the a and b of algebra, as an analysis speciosa, established by Vieta in the sixteenth century, or the x and y of Descartes’s analytic geometry and the dy and dx of Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus are all symbols in which only the pure force of mathematical thought exhibits itself. Here we grasp once again the essential difference between the concept of law of modern natural science and the concept of law of astrology. Although for astrology the idea of law constituted, as has been shown, the core and backbone of its theoretical system, it united indissolubly with the idea of fate. Fata regunt

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

51

orbem, certa stant omnia lege [the fates rule the world, all things stand under a fixed law]: in fact, this is what law is called in the astrological poem by Manilius.53 Philosophically understood and grasped, the concept of the law of modern science leads not back to the idea of fate but to the grounding, originary form of thought: it frees the mind in that it subjects things to an ideal of necessity. The Renaissance constituted the crucial intellectual turning point. It is possible to describe precisely—a rare phenomenon in the history of thought and ideas—the exact point at which the “revolution in thought” began. In the context of our problematic, Descartes’s words in his first and basic methodological writings take on a new and original ring: But nothing seems to me more foolish than to dispute boldly, as many do, about the secrets of nature, about the effect of the heavenly spheres on our earthly world, about the prediction of future events, and about similar matters, yet without ever having even inquired as to whether human reason suffices for discovering these matters. Nor should one regard it as an arduous or even as a difficult matter to define the limits of the natural intelligence which we sense in ourselves, since we often do not hesitate to judge even about the things which are outside us and quite foreign to us. Nor is it an immeasurable task to want to encompass, in thought, all the things contained in the universe, in order that we might recognize in what manner we may subject individual ones to the examination of our mind. For nothing can be so multifaceted or so diffuse that it could not be circumscribed by certain limits as well as arranged under a certain number of headings by means of the enumeration of which we have been treating.54 Starting from this fundamental principle, Descartes, in the same work, conceived for the first time the general idea of a mathesis universalis 53. Marcus Manilius, Astronomica (bk. IV, 14); see Cumont, Astrology and Religion (London and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 85ff., 154. 54. R. Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, VIII [Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence: A Bilingual Edition of the Cartesian Treatise on Method, tr. George Heffernan (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 121.]

·55·

52

·56·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

as the basic science of measure, order, and number. However, within the science of nature, the same typical twist takes place. Kepler, through the force of Plato’s idealism, which continued to resonate in him, freed himself step by step from the spell of the astrological way of thinking, which had at first imprisoned him, as well as all the other important astronomers of the Renaissance. In his great work The Harmony of the World (1619), the process of liberation was completed. Once again, the idea of harmony, of the mutual correspondence between all the parts of the universe, between the world and man, was executed here in an extensive and truly grand design. However, the central focus of this relationship had shifted: for number, which is the pure intellectual expression of this relationship, was no longer borrowed from things and their form but was regarded as an “innate” Platonic idea [Idee]. Thus, the pure symbolic use of the concept of number was separated from its signification and application in the exact sciences. In the tradition of Pythagorean thought, which Kepler’s work on the harmony of the world continued, both significations stood undifferentiated next to one another. When the Pythagoreans established the relationship of tonal intervals, when they formulated the law that determines pitch as a function of the length of the string, they found themselves completely at the heart of a way of thinking that leads to the creation of the mathematical science of nature; when, in order to arrive at the sacred number 10 in their cosmology, they added the “anti-earth” to the central life, the sun and the moon, the earth and the five planets, they were moving on the path to symbolic thought. Even for Kepler, the number, as functional number and physical-mathematical measure, stands next to its analogical-symbolic use: the latter, however, no longer constrains spirit because it is recognized and seen for what it is. In a letter to the Leipzig anatomist and surgeon Joachim Tanck, Kepler once wrote: I, too, play with symbols and have planned a little work, Geometric Kabbala, which is about the ideas of natural things in geometry; but I play in such a way that I do not forget that I am playing. For nothing is proved by symbols; no hidden thing is brought to light in natural philosophy, through geometrical symbols; things already known are merely fitted [to them], unless by sure reasons it can be demonstrated that they are not merely symbolic but are descriptions

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

53

of the ways in which the two things are connected and are the causes of these interconnections.55 By way of concluding these considerations, let us ask ourselves briefly how far the form of the mythical formation of concepts and classes continues in higher spiritual forms and to what extent they continue to affect, in particular, the sphere of religious thought. Of course, it is not a question of comparing religion and myth in terms of their mutual content. We need ask only if the peculiar form of thinking that we observed in mythical concepts returns, however it might be modified and transformed, in the construction of the world of religious representations. For the actual content of religious consciousness can never be expressed in a fixed body of dogmas and beliefs; rather, in religion, a continuous form, a unique direction of contemplating the world is expressed such that the content consists essentially in the particular direction through which the entire content of being is newly illuminated and thereby obtains a new figure. Every truly independent religion creates a new spiritual center of being around which all natural and spiritual existence and events are henceforth grouped and ultimately receive their proper “meaning.” The nature of this center depends upon the specific quality and basic direction of religious interest, but the way in which the entire periphery of existence is now set into relation with the religious center is an achievement of mediating thought, which, as such, is capable of and amenable to a logical determination and characterization. Thus, every religion constructs its being and its world in its own way, and certain continuous categories of religious thought can show themselves in this construction. If we consider the configuration of the Vedic religion, it is, above all, the central act of worship that directs religious interests. Prayer and sacrifice constitute the spiritual center of Vedic religious texts, and from this Brahmanic cult of ritual significance, the speculative significance that it receives, in particular, in the Upanishads, gradually unfolds. From Brahmanism as prayer and sacrifice comes Brahmanism as an expression of absolute being. Whoever knows and performs the sacrifice spiritually subjugates all things. All earthly and celestial forces, all the gods them55. Johannes Kepler, Opera omnia, vol. 1, ed. Ch. Frisch (Frankfurt and Erlangen, 1858), 378.

·57·

54

·58·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

selves, are woven into the same fabric: the sacred hymns and sayings, the songs and metric form reign over being. And it is significant that, after the determination and founding of that center, the remainder of the content of being is referred to it through the same characteristic correlations that we encountered earlier in an entirely different domain. In astrology, certain parts of being were equated with certain parts and positions of the celestial heavens, but, here, in its basic form, is the intelligible identification of individual things with different parts of the ritual: the Rigveda is associated with the earth, the Yajurveda with the air, the Samaveda with the heavens, etc. Between the various phases of human life—between youth, manhood, and old age, on the one hand—and, on the other, the various stages of holy action—morning, midday, and evening offerings— all of this constitutes not only a correlation but an immediate identity.56 Here, too, a determined form as archetype and model grows up out of the character of the sacerdotal life, according to which all being, in the end, configures and organizes itself. The intensity of ritual religious activity [Tun] becomes, at the same time, the source of light by which the content of the entire world is progressively illuminated. Again, this process exhibits itself in different ways in those religions that form their worldviews essentially according to an ethical perspective. Wherever this motive is purely and strongly articulated, a magnificent simplification arises in the spiritual structure of the universe, for in place of the infinitely various possible oppositions of being, one single fundamental opposition of value, which embraces and dominates everything, emerges. The ethical dualism of good and evil then becomes the principle of every cosmology. This form of thought has been most clearly realized in the basic intuition of Persian religion, the religion of Zarathustra. There, all being and events are understood exclusively according to the perspective of the battle between the hostile powers of good and evil, between Ormazd and Ahriman. And once again, it is language that brings this characteristic line of thought to its fullest expression. 56. On the place of offerings in the Vedic religion, see H. Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1915), 17ff.; Martin Haug, “The Aitareya Brahmanam” (Bombay, 1863), 73ff.; Sylvain Lévi, La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas (Paris: Leroux, 1898), especially 13ff. See Appendix VII.

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

55

The same physical objects, processes, or activities are designated by different words and given a different signification if they are considered religiously. Names differ depending on whether they refer to “Mazdean” or to “Ahrimanic” concepts. The good head and good hand are identified by expressions different from the “skull” and the “claw” of evil; dying, speaking, etc., receive different names depending on the subject being spoken about. All things belong to one or another of the major ethical classes, depending on whether they are uttered by a supporter of the divine or a supporter of a dæmonic power.57 This characteristic form of religious concept formation can be pursued even further, down to the last and most profound problems of religious consciousness. We need only to remember the separation and division that underlies all religious theories of predestination. Here again, what religious consciousness designates as a “world” falls into two sharply distinct and opposing halves: the class of the elect stands opposed to the “massa perditionis [damnable masses].” If we consider the form that lived religious experience takes with Augustine and Luther, with Calvin, Jansenius, and Pascal, we see that, in fact, the doctrine of the election of grace did not signify for them an isolated theological dogma but formed the specific perspective that constituted the fundamental religious category according to which they considered the whole of the world. It would be delightfully tempting to extrapolate from this the genesis of an entirely new concept and type of religious “causation” [Verursachung] equally distinct from the concept of astrological-naturalistic fate and the concept of scientific causal explanation [Kausalerklärung]. However, these problems, which would lead us into the heart of the content of the philosophy of religion, will not be discussed in detail here. Rather, I will content myself, once again, with pointing out the formal results, the pure principle of the foregoing considerations. The form that the formation of concepts and classes in mythical and religious spheres adopts demonstrates with particular clarity the idealistic meaning and condition of the formation of concepts in general. The traditional theory of logic teaches us that in order to form a concept, we must envisage the fixed properties 57. For more details, see Victor Henry, Le Parsisme (Paris: Dujarric, 1905); see especially W. Jackson, “Die iranische Religion,” in Grundiß der Iran. Philologie, vol. II, ed. Geiger and Kuhn (Strasbourg, 1896–1904), 627ff.

·59·

56

·60·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

of things, compare them with one another, and extract what is common among them. From a purely logical perspective, this precept proves itself to be completely inadequate—and it becomes all the more so the more one looks beyond the narrow realm of the scientific, of specifically logical thought, to other domains and directions of thought. For it clearly follows that we cannot directly read off the properties of things because the inverse of what we call “property” is determined only through the form of concepts. Every positing of characteristic features of objective properties returns to a certain particularity of thought, and according to the orientation or dominant perspective of this thinking, these determinations, for us, change. From this perspective, it also appears that the classes and genres of being are not, as naïve realism assumes, fixed once and for all as such; rather, their demarcation must be obtained, and this production depends upon the work of spirit. The real fundamentum divisionis lies, in the end, not in things but in spirit: the world has, for us, the shape [Gestalt] that spirit gives it. And because its unity is no mere simplicity, but preserves in itself a concrete manifold of different directions and operations, being and its classes, its interconnections and its differences appear otherwise, depending upon which of the different spiritual media apprehends it. APPENDIX I

·61·

Alfred William Howitt, “On Some Australian Beliefs,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 13 (1884), 185–198: 191 Anm. 1 (report by James C. Muirhead).58 When a strong black dies, they think that some other black has put a spell on him. The corpse is placed upon a frame and covered over with boughs. These boughs must be of some tree of the same “class” as the dead. Suppose that he were of the Banbe class division, these boughs of the broad-leaved boxtree would be used, for this tree is Banbe. Men of the Mallera class (of which Banbe and Kurgila are the subdivisions) would place the boughs over him. After placing the body on a frame, which is raised on four forked sticks, they carefully work the ground underneath with their feet into dust, and smooth it so that the slightest 58. [Appendix I was published entirely in English in Cassirer’s original.]

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

57

mark or print can be observed. Then they make a big fire close to the spot and retire to their camp. Before leaving, they mark a number of trees so that this “blazed line” leads back to the frame with the corpse. This is to prevent the dead man following them. The following morning, the relations of the deceased inspect the ground under the corpse. If the track or mark of some animal, bird, reptile, etc., is found, they infer from it the totem of the person who caused the death of their relative. For all things belong to one or the other of the two great classes, Mallera and Wu¯ thera. For instance, if the track of a native dog were seen, they would know that the offender was Banbe-Mallera, for to this sub-class and class the Dingo belongs. A P P E N D I X II Alfred William Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 18 (1889), 31–68: 62ff. 59 Light is thrown upon the structure and development of class divisions by considering the mechanical method used by the Wotjobaluk to preserve and explain a record of their classes and totems, and of their relation to those and to each other. My informant worked this record out by laying down pieces of stick on the ground, determining their directions by the sun, and I took the directions of these sticks by the compass. The stick No. 1 was first placed in a direction due east, then stick 2 was laid down pointing N. 70° E. They represented the two sub-divisions of the Ngaui division of Krokitch, and the people belonging to them or forming them were called “Ngaui-nga-güli,” or “men of the sun.” The direction in which the sticks pointed indicated how the individual was to be laid in his grave. That is to say, his head was laid due east, or 20° north of east, as he belonged to one or another of the sub-divisions of Ngaui, respectively. Ngaui is the principal “Mir” or totem, and from it all the others are counted. My informant then placed stick 4 pointing north, indicating a very powerful Mir of Krokitch, namely, Batchangal. Stick 3 was then placed between 4 and 2, and indicated the Barewun people. The whole space 59. [Appendix II was published entirely in English in Cassirer’s original.]

58

·62·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

between 1 and 2 is called “Kolkorn-Garchuka,” or “all” or “wholly” of the White Cockatoo. I have already said that this is a synonym of Ngaui, or nearly so. The space between 3 and 4 is called Krokitch-Batchangal, to distinguish it from another Batchangal of the Gamutch primary class, which is represented by stick 11. Stick 6 was now laid down, being Wartwut, the name of a powerful Mir whose totem was the Hot-wind, which blows in that country from about north-west. Stick 5, placed between 4 and 6 pointing N. 20° W., indicated Wartwut-Batchangal, a totem having affinities to both 4 and 6. The space between 4 and 5 is called Kolkorn-Batchangal, or “all” or “entirely Batchangal,” and between 5 and 6 the space is WartwutBatchangal. My informant now had some difficulty in fixing the directions for the remaining totems of Krokitch, and he stated that to work it out satisfactorily he would have to get a number of men together so as to have members of the other totems to point out their own directions. However, after consideration he arranged the following: He placed 8 as indicating Münya, and on either hand 7 and 9, indicating respectively

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

59

Moiwiluk, and a second totem of 8. The space between 6 and 7 he called Wartwut-Moiwiluk, between 8 and 9 Kolkorn-Munya. The space between 7 and 8 he did not name, and I omitted to ask him. These nine sticks represent the principal totems of Krokitch. Perhaps there may be more, as there appears to be, for instance, a vacancy between 2 and 3 and between 3 and 4: on the other hand, if the totems 5 and 7 are subdivisions of 4 and 6 respectively, the vacancies referred to would be explained on the supposition that 2 and 3 had not sub-divided. That 7 is a sub-division of 6 is suggested by the statement of another informant that he was Wartwut but that Moiwiluk also “belonged to him,” and by the statement of the informant who made the diagram of sticks that the informant just named was “Wartwut but also partly Moiwiluk.” A P P E N D I X III Extract: Paul Wirz, Die Marind-anim von Holländisch-Süd-Neu-Guinea, vol. I, part 2 (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1922): Die religiösen Vorstellungen und die Mythen der Marind-anim, sowie die Herausbildung der totemistisch-sozialen Gruppierungen (Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der Auslandskunde, vol. 10) (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1922), 119 and 79. [See tables 1 and 2.] A P P E N D I X IV Frank Hamilton Cushing, “Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths,” in Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1891–92, ed. John Wesley Powell (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, 1896), 321–447: 367–372.60

·64·

Outline of Zuñi Mytho-Sociologic Organization [ . . . ] The Zuñi of today number scarcely 1,700 and, as is well known, they inhabit only a single large pueblo—single in more senses than one, for it is not a village of separate houses, but a village of six or seven separate parts in which the houses are mere apartments or divisions, so to say. This pueblo, however, is divided, not always clearly to the eye, but 60. [Appendix IV was published entirely in English in Cassirer’s original.]

·65·

Table 1: Overview of the totem association of the Kaprim-Sami

Kei-zé or Kei (cassowary)boan

Samkakai or Saham (kangaroo)-boan

⎞ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎬ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎠ ⎞ ⎬ ⎠

Uar-rek or ⎞ ⎛ ⎜ Ndikend-hâ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ (by the ⎜ ⎬ Xenorhynchus) ⎜ ⎟ or ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ Wonatai-rek ⎠ ⎨ kuna-hi ⎞ ⎜ ⎜ Ndik-end (by ⎟ ⎜ the dark ⎟ ⎜ Xenorhynchus) ⎬ ⎟ ⎜ or ⎟ ⎜ ⎝ Mamipu-rek ⎠

The most ancient The mythological Ascendants of mythological the Clan ascendants (Dema) (Dema)

ARAMEMB

Mythological totemic clan association (boan)

Ndikend or Uzub (bird)-boan

·63·

⎛ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Dema ⎜ Jagil ⎜ cassowary ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎨ ⎜ ⎜ Jano ⎜ Kangaroo⎜ Dema ⎜ Wonatai ⎜ ⎜ Xenorhynchus⎜ Dema ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Mamipu the ⎜ dark ⎜ Xenorhynchus⎜ Dema ⎜ ⎜ ⎝

Clan Raku-rek (Rak-rek) the smoke from

Garhåbi Waiba Umbri Dawi Honi Teâmbre Bebuklâ ⎛ Alissan ⎨ Harau ⎝ Ugu

Garhåbi-rek Waiba-rek Umbri-rek Dawi-rek Honi-rek Teimbre-rek Bebukla-rek

Mad

Mad-rek

Tab

Araku-end Dapram-rek Onan-rek Endaro-rek Anau-rek, Tab-rek Jawima-rek

Jawima

Kangaroo (Saham) ⎛ ⎨ Rotan (Tup), sugarcane (Od ), birds (Gub-a-gub) ⎝ and other things related to the kangaroo Xenorhyncho asasiaticus ⎛ ⎜ (Uar or white [koi-hi] Ndik) ⎜ Piper methysticum (Uati ) ⎨ ⎜ Turtle (Gau) ⎜ Varanus (Kadivuk) ⎝ Darker Xenorhynchus (kuna-hi Ndik) ⎛ ⎜ Antigone Australia (Darau) ⎜ Monsoons and other winds ⎜ Rain and thunderstorm magic ⎨ ⎜ Swamp snake (Azanid ) ⎜ Various marsh birds and others (Kondkabai, Ahatub, ⎜ Gem-ka, Ebob, etc.) ⎝ Crayfish (And-and ) and others

⎞ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎬ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎟ ⎠

Fire (Takav), jams (Kav), red parrot (Voi ), couscous (Bangá), mosquitoes (Nangit), sleeping (nu), plaice and Tetrodon and Others

Smoke (Rak) ⎞ ⎛ ⎟ ⎜ Various small birds (Tena, Talehé Bankala, etc.) ⎜ Rotan (Tup), stone clubs with spherical knobs (Kupa) ⎟ ⎟ ⎜ Fire (Takav) ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ The wide beach, river valleys, island (Kadhabud ) ⎟ ⎜ The island | special forms of pig and kangaroo ⎜ Habee | Boan ⎟ ⎜ Varanus (Kadivuk) ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ Cassowary (Kei ) ⎜ ⎟ ⎨ Several climbers (Akur, Gu, Dâhi-Kassim, etc.) ⎬ ⎜ Freshwater fish (Orib) ⎟ ⎜ Eugenia aquea (Uarad ) ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ Abrus precatorius (Samandir) ⎟ ⎜ Coix lacrymae (Baba) ⎟ ⎜ Various water plants (Alissan Majub) ⎟ ⎜ The juice primae noctis ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ Female hairstyles ⎟ ⎜ The prepared sago ⎟ ⎝ Magic and magicians (Mesåv) ⎠

Common mythological totemic relation

Fire (Takav) and cassowary (Kei )

Neighboring mythological totemic relation

·64·

Napet (banana)boan

⎛ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎨ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Kuper-såv ⎜ ⎜ (pearl oyster)⎝ boan

⎛ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎨ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎝

Geb

⎛ ⎨ Mana ⎝

Geb-zé-hâ

Table 2: Overview of the totem of the cooperative of the Geb-zé Mythological totem Mythical clan association Sub-Boan ascendants Clan (boan) (Dema)

Closest mythological relation

⎛ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Hong-rek ⎜ ⎜ Walinau-rek ⎨ ⎜ ⎜ Kajar-rek ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Kahar-rek ⎜ ⎝ and others

Banana (Napet) ⎛ ⎜ ⎜ Moon (Mandau) ⎜ ⎜ Earth (Makan) ⎜ Stone (Kahar) and sand (Sa) ⎜ Termites and ants (Kanamin) ⎨ ⎜ Barnacles (Ava) ⎜ Bamboo (Subá ) ⎜ Various fish (Ongajab, Kimu) ⎜ ⎜ Various birds (Momoko, Ruas, ⎜ Kirkua, etc.) ⎝

Mana-rek

⎛ Pear oyster (Kuper-Såv) ⎨ Marsh birds (Obabund, Katar-bira) ⎝

Ongat (coconut)boan

Ugâ (fan palm)boan

⎛ ⎛ Meri-ongat ⎜ (coconut with ⎜ ⎜ unbranched ⎨⎜ Moju ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ inflorescences)- ⎜ ⎝ ⎜ boan ⎜ ⎜ ⎛ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Ongat-hâ ⎜ ⎜ (actual ⎜ Uaba ⎜ ⎨ coconut)⎨ ⎜ ⎜ boan ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Jagriwâr ⎜ ⎝ ⎝

Dema came with the Ugâ-Kanu

Moju-rek

⎛ Coconut with unbranched ⎜ inflorescences (Meri-ongat) ⎜ ⎨ Flying black dogs (kuna-hi Kere) ⎜ ⎜ ⎝

Actual coconut (Ongat-hâ)

Uaba-rek

Jagriwâr-rek Nasem-zé or Mégai-zé

⎛ Snake (Bir) ⎜ Oriolus mimeta (Kâwekawé) ⎜ ⎜ Pleiades (Puno) ⎨ A variety of banana (Sesajo-Napet) ⎜ Inocarpus edulis (Hajam) ⎜ ⎜ Hornbill (Haivui ) ⎝ Bird of paradise (Zakir) ⎛ ⎨ Species of snake (Koroam) ⎝ Nautilus (Kind-arir)

Fan palm (Ugâ) A fish (Nambimb)

64

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

very clearly in the estimation of the people themselves, into seven parts, corresponding, not perhaps in arrangement topographically, but in sequence, to their subdivisions of the “worlds” or world quarters of this world. Thus, one division of the town is supposed to be related to the north and to be centered in its kiva or estufa, which may or may not be, however, in its center; another division represents the west, another the south, another the east, yet another the upper world and another the lower world, while a final division represents the middle or mother and synthetic combination of them all in this world. By reference to the early Spanish history of the pueblo, it may be seen that when discovered, the Áshiwi or Zuñis were living in seven quite widely separated towns, the celebrated Seven Cities of Cibola, and that this theoretic subdivision of the only one of these towns now remaining is in some measure a survival of the original subdivision of the tribe into seven subtribes inhabiting as many separate towns. It is evident that in both cases, however, the arrangement was, and is, if we may call it such, a mythic organization; hence my use of the term the mytho-sociologic organization of the tribe. At any rate, this is the key to their sociology as well as to their mythic conceptions of space and the universe. In common with all other Indian tribes of North America thus far studied, the Zuñis are divided into clans, or artificial kinship groups, with inheritance in the female line. Of these clans there are, or until recently there were, nineteen, and these in turn, with the exception of one, are grouped in threes to correspond to the mythic subdivision I have alluded to above. These clans are also, as are those of all other Indians, totemic; that is, they bear the names and are supposed to have intimate relationship with various animals, plants, and objects or elements. Named by their totems, they are as follows: Kâ´lokta-kwe, Crane or Pelican people; Póyi-kwe (nearly extinct), Grouse or Sagecock people; Tá‘hluptsi-kwe (nearly extinct), Yellow-wood or Evergreen-oak people; Aiñ´shi-kwe, Bear people; Súski kwe, Coyote people; Aíyaho-kwe, Red-top plant or Springherb people; Ána-kwe, Tobacco people; Tâ´a-kwe, Maize-plant people; Tónashi-kwe, Badger people; Shóhoita-kwe, Deer people; Máawi-kwe (extinct), Antelope people; Tóna-kwe, Turkey people; Yä´tok‘ya-kwe, Sun people; Ápoya-kwe (extinct), Sky people; K‘yä´k‘yäli-kwe, Eagle people; Ták‘ya-kwe, Toad or Frog people; K‘yána-kwe (extinct), Water

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

65

people; Chítola-kwe (nearly extinct), Rattlesnake people; Píchi-kwe, Parrot-Macaw people. Of these clans, the first group of three appertains to the north, the second to the west, the third to the south, the fourth to the east, the fifth to the upper or zenith, and the sixth to the lower or nadir region; while the single clan of the Macaw is characterized as “midmost,” or of the middle, and also as the all-containing or mother clan of the entire tribe, for in it the seed of the priesthood of the houses is supposed to be preserved. [ . . . ] By this arrangement of the world into great quarters, or rather, as the Zuñis conceive it, into several worlds corresponding to the four quarters and the zenith and the nadir, and by this grouping of the towns, or later of the wards (so to call them) in the town, according to such mythical division of the world, and finally the grouping of the totems, in turn, within the divisions thus made, not only the ceremonial life of the people, but all their governmental arrangements as well, are completely systemized. Something akin to written statutes results from this and similar related arrangements, for each region is given its appropriate color and number, according to its relation to one of the regions I have named or to others of those regions. [ . . . ] Again, each region—at least each of the four cardinal regions, namely, north, west, south, and east—is the home or center of a special element, as well as of one of the four seasons each element produces. Thus the north is the place of wind, breath, or air, the west of water, the south of fire, and the east of earth [ . . . ] correspondingly, the north is, of course, the place or origin of winter, the west of spring, the south of summer, and the east of autumn. [ . . . ] By means of this arrangement, no ceremony is ever performed and no council ever held in which there is the least doubt as to which position a member of a given clan shall occupy in it, for according to the season in which the ceremony is held, or according to the reason for which a council is convened, one or another of the clan groups of one or another of the regions will take precedence for the time, the natural sequence being, however, first the north, second the west, third the south, fourth the east, fifth the upper, and sixth the lower, but first, as well as last, the middle. [ . . . ] In strict accordance with the succession of the four seasons

·66·

66

·67·

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

and their elements, and with their supposed relationship to these, are classified the four fundamental activities of primitive life, namely, as relating to the north and its masterfulness and destructiveness in cold, war and destruction; relating to the west, war cure and hunting; to the south, husbandry and medicine; to the east, magic and religion; while the above, the below, and the middle relate in one way or another to all of these divisions. As a consequence, the societies of cold or winter are found to be grouped, not rigidly, but at least theoretically, in the northern clans, and they are, respectively: ’Hléwe-kwe, Ice-wand people or band; Áchiakwe, Knife people or band; Kâ´shi-kwe, Cactus people or band; for the west: Pí‘hla-kwe, Priesthood of the Bow or Bow people or band (Ápi‘hlan Shiwani, Priests of the Bow); Sániyak‘ya-kwe, Priesthood of the Hunt or Coyote people or band; for the south: Máke‘hlána-kwe, Great fire (ember) people or band; Máketsána-kwe, Little fire (ember) people or band; of the east: Shíwana-kwe, Priests of the Priesthood people or band; Úhuhukwe, Cottonwood-down people or band; Shúme-kwe, or Kâ´kâ‘hlánakwe, Bird monster people or band, otherwise known as the Great Dancedrama people or band; for the upper region: Néwe-kwe, Galaxy people or band or the All-consumer or Scavenger people or band (or life preservers); and for the lower regions: Chítola-kwe, Rattlesnake people or band, generators (or life makers). Finally, as produced from all the clans and as representative alike of all the clans and through a tribal septuarchy of all the regions and divisions in the midmost, and finally as representative of all the cult societies above mentioned is the Kâ´kâ or Ákâkâkwe or Mythic Dance drama people or organization. It may be seen of these mytho-sociologic organizations that they are a system within a system, which also contains systems within systems, all founded on this classification according to the six-fold division of things, and, in turn, the six-fold division of each of these divisions of things. Indeed, this tendency to classify according to the number of the six regions, with its seventh the synthesis of them all (the latter sometimes apparent, sometimes non-appearing) is carried to such an extent that not only are the subdivisions of the societies also again subdivided according to this arrangement, but each clan is subdivided both according to such a six-fold arrangement and according to the subsidiary relations of the six parts of its totem. The tribal division made up of the clans of the north takes precedence ceremonially, occupying the position of elder brother or

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

67

oldest ancestor, as the case might be. The west is the younger brother of this, and in turn, the south of the west, the east of the south, the upper of the east, the under of them all, and the middle division is supposed to be a representative being, the heart or navel of all brothers of the regions, first and last, as well as elder and younger. In each clan is to be found a set of names called the names of childhood. These names are more titles than cognomens. They are determined by sociologic and divinistic modes, and are bestowed in childhood as the “verity names” or titles of the children to whom they are given. But this body of names that relates to any one totem—for instance, to one of the beast totems— will not be the name of the totemic beast itself, but the names both of the totem in its various conditions and of its various parts, and of its functions or attributes, actual or mythical. Now these parts or functions, or attributes of the parts or functions, are also subdivided in a six-fold manner so that the name relating to one member of the totem—for example, like the right arm or leg of the animal thereof—would correspond to the north, and would be the first in honor in a clan (not itself of the northern group); then the name relating to another member— say, to the left leg or arm and its powers, etc.—would pertain to the west and would be second in honor; and another member—say, the right foot—would pertain to the south and would be third in honor; and of another member—say, the left foot—would pertain to the east and would be fourth in honor; to another—say, the head—would pertain to the upper regions and would be fifth in honor; and another—say, the tail— would pertain to the lower region and would be sixth in honor; while the heart or navel and center of the being would be first as well as last in honor. [ . . . ] With such a system of arrangement, with such a facile device for symbolizing the arrangement (not only according to the number of the regions and their subdivisions in their relative succession and the succession of their elements and seasons, but also in the colors attributed to them, etc.), and, finally, with such an arrangement of names correspondingly classified and of terms of relationships that signify rank rather than consanguinal interconnection, mistake in the order of a ceremonial, procession or council is simply impossible, and the people employing such devices may be said to have written and to be writing their statutes and laws in all their daily relationships and utterances.

68

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

APPENDIX V ·68·

Johann Jakob Maria de Groot, Universismus. Die Grundlage der Religion und Ethik, des Staatswesens und der Wissenschaften Chinas (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1918), 119ff. [ . . . ] The oldest medical book of China [ . . . ] is titled Su Wen and probably originates from the mythical Emperor Huang and his councilors; certainly, the style shows us that it was most likely not written in pre-Christian times, but in it a lot of ancient Chinese science nevertheless survived. In chapter 67, we find that Jang and Jin, the Tao of the universe, expresses itself in five [ . . . ] K’i, breaths or influences, namely, heat or warmth, aridity, cold, wind and wet. As Huang was informed by his wise councilor [ . . . ] K’i-po,’ these influences rule all living beings and action, and are determining factors in their lives, depending on the ratio of the mixture in which they occur. Thus, further, the east brings forth the wind, and because the east corresponds to the element of wood, the wind is thought to produce the wood as well as sourness, because this is designated the taste of the east. The above factors also control the human liver, because it, too, corresponds to the east; the liver produces muscles and the heart. Furthermore, the spring, which annually produces plants and wood through its creative force, also corresponds to the east; as for human beings, this season produces wisdom and understanding, but also [ . . . ] fury because it corresponds to the wind. And so it becomes entirely clear that the liver is anger, and that the wind and sourness are also from the harmful influence on the liver. In the same scholarly way, the great sage indicated to his imperial master that for the other regions and the center of the universe equally ingenious combinations could be clearly illustrated in the following table, which forms the basis of the universal system of Chinese pathology and medicine. East

Spring

Wind

South Summer Warm Middle

Wet

Wood Sour Liver

Muscles Anger and heart Fire Bitter Heart Blood and Joy spleen Earth Sweet Spleen Meat and Thought lung

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

69

Autumn Drought Metal Sharp Lungs Skin, hair, Care and kidneys North Winter Cold Water Salty Kidney Bone and Fear marrow West

Johann Jakob Maria de Groot, The Religious System of China, Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect. Manners, Customs and Social Institutions Connected Therewith, Vol. I/1: Disposal of the Dead, Part 1: Funeral Rites, Part 2: The Ideas of Resurrection (Leiden: Brill, 1892), 316ff. 61 The coffins of grandees in those times displayed “a blue dragon on the left side, a white tiger on the right, a golden sun and a silver moon on the top”; moreover, the books of the later Han Dynasty state that the imperial coffins “used to be decorated and painted with a sun, a moon, a bird, a tortoise, a dragon and a tiger.” In ancient China, these four animals denoted the four quarters of the celestial sphere, the eastern quarter being called the Azure Dragon, the southern quarter the Red or Vermilion Bird, the western quarter the White Tiger, and the northern quarter the Black Tortoise. For the sake of convenience, we may draw these cosmogonic elements in a table as follows: East South West North

Spring Summer Autumn Winter

Blue Red White Black

Dragon Bird Tiger Tortoise

A P P E N D I X VI Distribution of seasons and ages, the elements and qualities of temperaments, etc. of individual plants. From: Codices Germanicos, described by Franz Boll (Catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum, Vol. VII) (Brussels, 1908), 104ff.

61. [The rest of Appendix V was published entirely in English in Cassirer’s original.]

·69·

70

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

Elementa ਕȒȡ ʌ૨ȡ Ȗો ੢įȦȡ

Anni tempora ਩Įȡ șȑȡȠȢ ijșȚȞȩʌȦȡȠȞ ȤİȚȝȫȞ

Humores ĮੈȝĮ ȤȠȜȒ ȤȣȝȩȢȝİȜĮȖȤȠȜȚțȩȢ ijȜȑȖȝĮ

Zodiaci signa ȀȡȚȩȢȉĮ૨ȡȠȢǻȓįȣȝȠȚ ȀĮȡțȓȞȠȢǹȑȦȞȆȐȡșİȞȠȢ ǽȣȖȩȢȈțȠȡʌȓȦȞȉȠȟȩIJȘȢ ǹੁȖȩțİȡȦȢ૽ȊįȡȠȤȩȠȢ੉ȤșȪİȢ

Temperamenta șİȡȝઁȞțĮ੿ਫ਼ȖȡȩȞ șİȡȝઁȞțĮ੿ȟȘȡȩȞ ȥȣȤȡઁȞțĮ੿ȟȘȡȩȞ ȥȣȤȡઁȞțĮ੿ਫ਼ȖȡȩȞ

Colores ਥȡȣșȡȩȞ ȟĮȞșȩȞ ȝȑȜĮȞ ȜİȣțȩȞ

Caeli regiones ȞȩIJȠȢ ਕȞĮIJȠȜȒ ȕȠȡȡ઼Ȣ įȪıȚȢ Status ਫ਼ȖȡȩȞ ȜİʌIJȩȞ ʌĮȤȪ ȖȜȚıȤʌȩȞ

A P P E N D I X VII “The Classification of Age of Sacrificial Victims and the Different Parts of Their Bodies,” Khândogjopanishad (Cândogya Upanishad), ed. and tr. by Otto Böhtlingk (Leipzig: Haessel, 1889), chap. 16, 33ff.

·70·

1) Man is the sacrificed. The matutinal offering is equivalent to his first twenty-four years. The Gâjatrî consists of twenty-four syllables, and the matutinal offering is linked with the Gâjatrî. The Vasu deal with this part of the sacrifice and the Vasu are the breaths. In the Vasu, everything dwells (vâsajanti ). 2) If at this age one becomes unwell, then one says: “O Vasu, your breath! Let my matutinal offering continue uninterrupted until the beginning of the sacrifice, so that I, the sacrificial victim, by no means come to nothing under the Vasu, the breath.” Then he will rise up and be healthy. 3) The midday sacrifice is equivalent to the next twenty-four years. The trishtub consists of forty-four syllables, and the midday offering is linked with the trishtub. The Rudra is concerned with this part of the sacrifice and the Rudra are breaths. The Rudra bring them all to tears (rodajanti). 4) If at this age one becomes ill, then one says: “O Rudra, your breath! Let my midday offering continue uninterrupted until the beginning of the sacrifice, so that I, the sacrificial victim, by no

THE FORM OF THE CO NCE PT IN MYTHICAL THINKING

71

means come to nothing under the Rudra, the breath.” Then he will rise up and be healthy. 5) The next contribution corresponds to the (next) twenty-four years. The Gagatî is forty-eight syllables, and the third offering is related to the Gagatî. The Âditja is implicated in this part of the sacrifice and the Âditja are the breaths. Everything dwells in the Âditja, yes (âdadate). 6) If at this age one becomes ill, then one says: “O Âditja, your breath! Let my third offering continue uninterrupted until the (full) age (100 years). I am the sacrificial victim, not amidst the Âditja, the breath.” Then he will rise up and be healthy.

The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences (1923)

1 ·171·

If I dare to attempt in the purview of these lectures to deal with a topic that is neither historical nor specific to the sciences of culture, but is of a systematic-philosophical nature and therefore would appear to go beyond the sphere of problems that the Warburg Library sets for itself, then such an attempt needs to be accounted for and justified. I believe I can provide this justification in no better way than to speak of the personal impression that I received in my first true encounter with the Warburg Library. The questions that I would like to treat in this lecture by means of a very brief outline have preoccupied me for a long time; however, they now seem to stand as if embodied before me. I felt most intensely what has been said in the opening address of this series: that here it is a question not of a mere collection of books but of a collection of problems. It was not the subject collections of the library that awoke in me this impression; rather, the principle of its construction affected me more greatly than the mere content. For here, the history of art, the history of myth and religion, the history of language and culture were

[First published as “Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1922), 11–39. Translated from Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt, 1994), 171–200.] 72

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S

73

clearly not only juxtaposed but also related to each other and to a common ideal center. Admittedly, at first sight this relation seems to be of a purely historical nature: it is the problem of the living legacy [Nachleben] of antiquity that—as the introductory lecture explained—governs the entire structure of the library and lends to it its characteristic imprint. However, every salvaged problem of the history of spirit, when it is formulated with greater scope and depth, is at the same time a universal systematic problem of the philosophy of spirit. The survey, the synopsis, of the spiritual can fulfill itself in no other way than in its history, but it does not remain in this one dimension of the historical. The relation of being to becoming has its true correlation also in the inverse direction. Just as spiritual being can be viewed in no other way than in the form of becoming, so, too, is it the case with all spiritual becoming, insofar as it is philosophically grasped and penetrated; in this way, it is raised to the form of being. If the life of spirit does not dissolve into the mere temporal form in which it takes place, if it does not flow into it, then it will flow into something else; something permanent that has in itself figure and duration must reflect on the movable background of events. The less the researcher of language, the investigator of the history of religions, the historian of art linger in one single domain of their research, the more clearly they feel this unity of form. With each new sphere of historical existence that is unlocked, they see themselves at the same time directed to interconnections whose explanation leads beyond purely historical observation. In fact, today, not so much in philosophy as, rather, in the individual sciences, a most vigorous endeavor is stirring to go beyond “positivism,” beyond the employment of and limitation to the mere matter of facts. Among contemporary researchers of language, it is Karl Voßler in particular who has advocated with great energy the thesis that we would be led to a genuine and full understanding of the historical facts of language only once research opened itself up to making the crucial step from positivism to idealism. The further research into language and comparative linguistics expands today, the more decidedly there appears the emergence of certain constant motives of linguistic development, certain “fundamental ideas” of language that are rediscovered even where there can be no talk of historical influence and transmission. We are, perhaps, first tempted to search for the grounds for

·172·

74 C O NCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S

·173·

this appearance, insofar as it is concerned with the phenomenon of phonetics and the general lawfulness of its development, in the purely physiological domain. If we consider, however, how deeply phonetic and mental elements penetrate one another in the course of the development of language, if we hold fast to the methodological postulate that Voßler has given in the pregnant formula “first stylistics, then syntax and phonetics,” then at least we will not believe that we have exhaustively explained the whole of the phenomena that are in question here by appealing to physiology. In fact, the phenomenon of phonetics is analogous to that of morphology [Formbildung], which can be conceived only, if at all, from the deepest spiritual, structural relationships of language. Wilhelm von Humboldt has, in his two treatises On Dualism and On the Relationship of the Adverbs of Place to the Pronoun in Several Languages, given the classic model for a method of examination that decisively grasps the spiritual content of an individual grammatical form in order to pursue it in its finest adumbrations and nuances. The implementation and enlargement that the basic idea of the latter of these treaties has recently experienced in linguistics appears to show how much this general tendency of Humboldt’s method continues to have an influence. Even in the field of comparative mythology, the endeavor, not merely to inspect the beginning of mythical thinking and imagining, but to fix a determined unitary core content of mythical formation in general, has emerged ever more clearly in the past century. The call for a “general mythology,” whose task should be to establish a valid universal and to determine the principle in the phenomena in which every particular mythical formation was grounded, has now been raised from specialized research.1 However, the writings of the Society for Comparative Mythology, which ought to have been determined to bring about this program, have only been able to complete the smallest part of the task that was set forth in it with great clarity. For, instead of conceiving and characterizing myth as a unified form of consciousness, they attempted to determine its unity purely from the objective side. A certain sphere of objects [Objekte] was selected from Babylonian astronomy and astrology in order to prove that they were the starting point and model for all mythical formation. However, in this 1. See Paul Ehrenreich, Die allgemeine Mythologie und ihre ethnologischen Grundlagen (Leipzig, 1910).

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S

75

way, the consideration of mythical objects [Objekte] does not really grasp the constructive unity of mythical thought: this shows itself insofar as the astral mythology that was erected here as the core of every interpretation of myth immediately began to disintegrate into a wealth of ever more antagonistic attempts at explanation in terms of a solar mythology, a moon mythology, a star mythology, etc. It emerges indirectly, though very clearly, that the unity of the spiritual sphere can never be determined and secured from the object, only from the function that grounds it. If we pursue the guidelines that come from research into particulars, we see ever more clearly that they point to a general problem: that of the task of a general system of symbolic forms. If I attempt to express the problem in this way, it is, of course, incumbent on me to first define more precisely the concept of “symbolic form.” We can interpret the concept of the symbolic such that it is understood as a very determined direction of spiritual apprehension and configuration that has another, no less determined opposite direction standing over against it. Thus, for example, from the whole of language, a determined range of linguistic phenomena that one can designate as “metaphorical” in the strict sense, and that contrast the “proper” sense of the word and language, can be singled out; thus, in art, one can distinguish a form of presentation that simply takes off from the external configuration of the intuitive-sensory contents, a way of presentation that employs allegoric-symbolic means of expression; and in the end, we can also speak of symbolic thought as a form of thought that is differentiated from the logical-scientific formation [Geblide] of concepts by very clearly determined and typical characteristics. However, what should be designated here by the concept of symbolic form is something different and more general. It is a question of taking symbolic expression, that is, the expression of something “spiritual” through sensory “signs” and “images,” in its most general signification; it is a question of asking whether this form of expression, with all of its different possible applications, is grounded by a principle that marks it as a closed and unified fundamental process. Thus, what should not be asked here is what the symbol signifies and achieves in any particular sphere, what it signifies or achieves in art, myth, or language, but how far language as a whole, myth as a whole, art as a whole, carry within them the general character of symbolic configuration. Of course, we can historically trace how the concept

·174·

76 C O NCEPT OF S Y M BO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S ·175·

·176·

of the symbol only slowly matures into this broad universality of systematic signification. It is originally rooted in the religious sphere and remains bound to it for a long time. It is only in modern times that it was progressively and ever more consciously and resolutely replanted from there into other domains and adapted, in particular, to art and aesthetic contemplation. Here, too, Goethe describes in greatest clarity the crucial turn of modern consciousness. In the splendid portrait sketched by Kestner of the twenty-three-year-old Goethe after his arrival in Wetzlar, he was said to possess an exceptionally vivid force of imagination, which he expressed mostly in images and allegories. He also tended to say that he could never properly express himself, but that he hoped, when he was older, to be able to think and express thoughts in themselves, as they were. At seventy-five, however, Goethe said to Eckermann that throughout his life he had only ever looked upon his works and achievements symbolically, and that, as he expressed it in a letter to Zelter, he only wanted to take the most original and deepest, the most “authentic” thought that he ever thought—the idea of metamorphosis—symbolically. Thus, for him, the spiritual circle of his existence was implied by this concept; it encompasses not only the entirety of his artistic pursuits but also virtually the whole of his own form of life and thought. Beginning from Goethe, and consistent with his perspective, Schelling and Hegel took over the concept of the symbol for the philosophy of aesthetics and, through to Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s essay, the signification that the symbol possesses for the foundations of aesthetics was finally established. In the following observations, however, it is a question not of the often rich and fruitful employment of the concept but of its unified and universally valid structure. By “symbolic form,” one should understand every energy of spirit by which the content of spiritual signification is linked to a concrete and intrinsically appropriate sensuous sign. In this sense, language, the mythical-religious world, and art confront us as particular symbolic forms. For in each of them the basic phenomenon takes shape; our consciousness does not content itself with receiving impressions from the outside, rather it links and penetrates every impression with a free activity of expression. Thus a world of self-created signs and images emerges that opposes and asserts itself in independent fullness and original force against that which we designate as the objective reality of things. Humboldt has demonstrated how the entire mode of subjec-

C O NCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

77

tive perception of objects necessarily merges into the formation and use of language. For the word is never an imprint of objects in themselves, but is the image of these objects engendered in the soul. “Just as the individual sound enters between the object and the human being, so the whole of language enters between the human being and the inner and external nature acting on him. The human being is surrounded by a world of sounds in order to assimilate and process a world of objects. [. . .] Through this same act, by which he spins language out of himself, the human being spins himself into it, and each language draws a circle around the people who belong to it, a circle from which it is possible to escape only insofar as one enters it at the same time into another.”2 What is said here of the world of the phonetics of language holds no less for every unified world of images and signs, as well as for the mythical, religious, aesthetic world. It is a false, though recurring, tendency to measure the content and the “truth” they shelter in themselves by that through which they enter into existence—be it inner or external, physical or psychic existence— instead of measuring it according to the force and coherence of expression itself. They all enter between us and objects; however, they not only designate negatively a displacement in which the object retreats from us, they also create the only possible and adequate mediation and medium through which any spiritual being becomes comprehensible and intelligible. That such a mediation—whether it is through phonetic signs, the configuration of the image in myth and art, or the intellectual signs and symbols of pure knowledge—necessarily belongs to the essence of the spiritual itself can easily be seen only if we reflect on the general form by which it is given to us. All spiritual content is for us necessarily bound to the form of consciousness and thus to the form of time. It is only insofar as it produces itself in time and it is not capable of producing itself in any other way; then it immediately fades away in order to give way to the production of another new space. Thus, all consciousness stands under the Heraclitean law of becoming. The things of nature in their objectively real existence are able to show, if necessary, a fixed “consistency,” a relative duration: consciousness, by its very nature, is refused such a state. It possesses no other being than that of free activity, than the being of the process. And in this process, the components never re2. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 1, 60.

·177·

78 C O NCEPT OF S Y M BO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S

·178·

turn as truly identical. Here, there is only a constant flow, a living stream in which every fixed configuration must, no sooner than it is obtained, die away once more. And this designates the characteristic antinomy, the immanent contradiction of consciousness itself. It cannot free itself from the form of time, for its own characteristic essence exists in it and is based on it. And yet, the content not only originates [entstehen] but arises [erstehen]: out of mere becoming, a formation [Gebilde], a figure, an “eidos” wrestles free. How are these two contradictory demands to be united and reconciled with one another? How can the instant, the moment of time, be held on to, without it losing its character as an instance of time; how can something individual, something given here and now in consciousness, determine its particular individuality so that in it a general content, a mental “signification,” becomes visible? The rift that opens up before us here seems, in fact, irreconcilable; the opposition appears insurmountable as soon as one attempts to render it in the most precise abstract formula possible. And yet, in the activity [Tun] of spirit, a miracle is continuously brought about, namely, that this abyss closes; that the universal encounters the particular, as it were, in a spiritual medium and penetrates it, forming a truly concrete unity. This process exhibits itself everywhere consciousness is not content with simply having sensuous content but produces such content out of itself. It is the force of producing that configures the contents of mere sensation and perception into symbolic contents. Here, the image has ceased to be something simply received from the outside; it has become something formed from the inside in which a fundamental principle of free forming prevails. This is the achievement that we see take place in particular “symbolic forms,” in language, myth, and art. Each of these forms not only takes its starting point from the sensuous but remains constantly enclosed in the sphere of the sensuous. It does not turn against the sensuous material but lives and creates itself in it. And with this, the oppositions that must appear as incompatible [unvereinbar] from the perspective of abstract metaphysics are united [vereinen]. So, in language the pure significative content of concepts, thus a something that must be general and immutable, will be entrusted to the fleeting element of sounds, such that more than of any other it can be said that it is always becoming but never is. However, this fleetingness itself now proves to be a medium and a vehicle for the free plasticity of sounds by thought. In its liveliness and

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 79

its mobility, in opposition to linguistic conduct, which, after all, always remains in the end fixed to the designation of individuals, it comes to express not only what is thought but also the inner movement of thinking itself. Insofar as we do not view the impressions that seem to pierce us from the outside merely as dead images on a blackboard, but instead inform them with the phonetic figure of words, a new diverse life awakens in them. In the differentiation and separation that is imparted to them, they simultaneously gain a new fullness of content. For the phonetic sign is not the mere impression of a difference that already exists in consciousness; rather, it is a medium and a condition of the inner organization of representations. The articulation of sounds does not simply enunciate the finished articulation of thought; rather, it first prepares the way for it. This inseparability of the sensuous and spiritual elements of the formation of form shows itself even more clearly in the construction of the aesthetic world of form. Every aesthetic apprehension of spatial forms may be rooted in elementary sensuous sensations [Elementargefühlen], every sensation [Gefühl] of proportion and symmetry may immediately be traced back to the sensation [Gefühl] of our own bodies—and yet, on the other hand, there can be for us a true understanding of spatial forms, of plastic or architectonic intuition, only in that we are able to produce these forms ourselves and able to become conscious of the lawfulness of this production. We can distinguish three stages in this sort of inner construction of the particular value of form. The sign always begins by snuggling as close as possible to the designated object, by taking it, as it were, up into itself and rendering it as precisely and fully as possible. Thus with language, the further we trace it back, the richer it becomes in authentically imitative and metaphoric sounds. It is no wonder that, for a long time, philosophical theories of language have thought it possible to establish here the immediate explanation of the origins of language. The theory of the onomatopoeic origin of language received its systematic formation with the Stoics, and it underwent original and further elaboration by Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth century, and persisted in modern times to the beginning of modern linguistics. Indeed, today, following the new critical foundation of the philosophy of language by Herder and Humboldt, the belief that one can grasp the secret of the production of language materially as if with our hands has been surpassed. And yet, a look

·179·

80 C O NCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

·180·

at the history of language teaches us that the imitative sound, though little of the actual principle of language is contained in it, effectively proves nevertheless to be a contributing factor in the formation of language. Thus, it is precisely from the perspective of empirical linguistic research that a somewhat qualified attempt to defend the much-abused principle of imitative sound has repeatedly been made by Hermann Paul, Georg Curtius, and Wilhelm Scherer, to mention but a few of the most famous names. No one had the right, Scherer emphatically asserts, to look down with a smile of sympathetic contempt on the acceptance of an original natural interconnection between sound and signification: in fact, it may be remarked here that whoever wrongly solves such problems is a hundred times further ahead than those who never attempted a solution to the problem.3 This view seems to be further confirmed, and an even greater scope seems to be established if we survey the languages of primitive peoples from our linguistically developed culture. Thus, for example, the Ewe language, as Westermann in his Ewe-Grammatik demonstrates, is extraordinarily rich in means to express a received impression through sounds, a wealth that springs from the almost insatiable desire to imitate everything heard, seen, or somehow sensed with one or more sounds. Here and in some related languages, there are, for example, adverbs that describe only one activity, one state, or one characteristic and, consequently, only belong to and can only be associated with one verb. Westermann cites for the single verb to walk no fewer than thirty-three such adverbial image-sounds, each of which designates a particular manner, a certain nuance and feature of walking.4 As we can see, the linguistic expression has not yet divorced itself here from the purely mimetic, and it scarcely possesses a higher form of generality. In particular, this mimetic character of the languages of native peoples distinguishes itself in the cases of clearly differentiated forms of expression that possess the designation and precise determination of spatial relationships. Different degrees of distance, as well as miscellaneous intuitive relationships of 3. Wilhelm Scherer, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Berlin, 1868), 38; see Georg Curtius, Grundzüge der griech. Etymologie (5th ed.), 96; Hermann Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (3rd ed.), 157. 4. Diedrich Westermann, Grammatik der Eve-Sprache (Berlin, 1907), 83f.

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S

81

the position and location of objects that are spoken about, are designated by a different phonetic coloring by means of different vowels or, in certain circumstances, by a different tone. From all this, it clearly emerges how from this stage of linguistic formation [Gebilde] sound immediately coalesces with the elements of sensuous intuition while simultaneously penetrating into it and attempting to exhaust it in its complete concretion and fullness. It is already a further step toward freeing the proper and original form of language from the content of sensuous intuition when, in place of the immediate, imitative, onomatopoeic, or mimetic expression, there emerges another way of designation, which we can call “analogical.” Here, it is no longer any individual objective quality of objects that is maintained and reproduced in sound; rather, the relation between sound and signification is maintained through the subjectivity of thought or feeling. There no longer exists any factually demonstrable similarity between the sound and that which it designates; however, to be sure, there still appears, in the feeling of language, very specific formations and nuances of tone, as well as bearers of determined natural differences in signification. It is no longer quite simply the “thing” but the subjectively mediated impression of it or a form of activity of the subject that should find its presentation and its own kind of “correspondence” in sound. Directly from their refined feeling for language, the subtlest and most profound experts of language believe they are still able to grasp, from time to time, such correspondences, even in the very advanced stages of the development of our civilized languages. Thus, for example, Jakob Grimm attempted to demonstrate such a correspondence between the meaning of the form of questions and answers and the sounds used in Indo-Germanic languages in the formation of the words used in questions and answers. In languages that possess musical syllabic tones, that is to say, languages that differentiate identical syllables by means of high, medium, or deep tones, or by means of monotonic, ascending, descending tones, this differentiation can easily have etymological value: words that designate a difference of signification can soon stand for any clearly formal function of language. Thus, for example, the simple change of tone can be used as the expression of negation, or it can stamp two essentially identical syllables with different tonal qualities to express things

·181·

82 C O NCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

·182·

or events, nouns or verbs. The differentiation between transitive verbs, between pure action verbs and those that express not an action [Tun] but a state and condition, can also be achieved in this way. Here, it is no longer the mere imitation of a sensuously perceived object but an already very complex intellectual distinction in thought, the transfer of a word in a defined grammatical category, that is rendered by a purely musical principle such as the syllabic tone. A linguistic device such as reduplication, by which a certain sensuous medium of tone or sound is likewise used to express the most diverse theoretical relations and significations, appears to maintain itself on the same level. The reduplication initially encloses itself very tightly in the objective process and immediately attempts to imitate it; the reduplication and repetition of the syllable serve the designation of an action or an event that, in fact, fulfills itself in several identical phases. However, it goes further than this to designate only that content which is connected to the fundamental meaning of repetition by a distant analogy. For substantives, it serves the formation of plurality; in adjectives, the formation of comparative forms; in verbs, alongside the frequentative forms, it constitutes above all forms of intensity and is used for the expression of a large number of particular temporal differences. There are languages in which this device of reduplication governs the entire grammatical structure. In all of this, it clearly emerges how language, even after it has freed itself from a merely onomatopoetic mode of expression, still takes great pains to conform to the significative content, to follow it tentatively, as it were. At the highest stages of its development, however, this interconnection appears broken. Every form of real imitation is now renounced, and instead of this, the function of signification achieves pure autonomy. The less the form of language aspires to provide an immediate or mediate copy of the objective world, the less it identifies with the being of this world, the more clearly it penetrates to its own achievement, to its specific meaning. Instead of a mimetic or analogical expression, it now achieves the stage of symbolic expression, which, in that it separates from every similarity with the objective, now directly gains, in this distance and turning away from, a new intellectual content. We cannot follow in detail here how the same direction of progress becomes visible in the construction of the world of aesthetic form. Of

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 83

course, here we are from the beginning on another ground and, so to speak, in another spiritual dimension. For an artistic form, in the proper sense, first originates where intuition has completely ceased to be captivated by mere impressions, where it has freed itself from pure expression. Already, the first phase of artistic configuration is strictly separated from every kind of “imitation.” And yet, here, too, there emerges, on a higher level, the same typical separation. Indeed, it is not a question of a mere succession, of simply historical sequences of concrete artistic modes of presentation, but [a question] of the fundamental moments of artistic presentation which are present at every level of development and whose changing relationship, whose dynamic, is decisive for the style of every epoch. Goethe, in an essay that brings together the whole of his basic view of aesthetics, distinguished three forms of apprehension and presentation, which he identified as “the simple imitation of nature,” the “manner,” and “style.” Imitation attempts to capture in calm faithfulness the concrete sensuous nature of objects that stand before the eye of the artist; however, this faithfulness vis-à-vis the object [Objekt] is at the same time its limitation. A limited object is rendered in a limited way and with limited means. This passivity vis-à-vis the given impression falls away at the second level; insofar that it is not so much the simple nature of objects [Objekte] that is expressed as the spirit of the speaking, the proper language of forms arises. The object, the model confronts the formative force of the artist; however, the artist no longer attempts to grasp it in its totality and exhaust it; rather, he highlights a few characteristic features in it in order to stamp them with uniquely artistic traits. However, there is, of course, a still higher form and higher force of presentation than this, one based on the individual and, thus, accidental nature of artists. If the subjectivity of artists produces the manner, then the subjectivity of the art produces that which all art is able to do purely from its own means of presentation, namely, style. This is, of course, the highest expression of objectivity; however, it is no longer the simple objectivity of existence but the objectivity of the artistic spirit; it is not the nature of images but the simultaneous free and lawful nature of forming that manifests itself in style. “Just as simple imitation is based upon a calm existence and a loving object, and just as the manner seizes a phenomenon with a lighthearted nature, so style rests on the deepest founda-

·183·

84 CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

·184·

tions of knowledge of the very essence of things, insofar as we are permitted to have knowledge of it through visible and tangible figures.”5 If we look back at the examination of the form of language, we see that this differentiation belongs to a general coherence. The path from imitation to pure symbol must be traversed by art as it was traversed by language, and only from this is the “style” of art, as is the style of language, achieved. It is an analogous lawfulness in progress; as with language, it is an identical rhythm of development of the spontaneity of spiritual expression that really proves itself in both. At the same time, however, there exists in Goethe’s definition of style the hint of another sphere of problems: for here the concept of style is linked with that of knowledge. Thus, we are reminded that knowledge, that the development of the logical and intellectual functions are also subject to the conditions that are valid for every kind of progress from natural existence to spiritual expression. Knowledge begins as sensuous impressions and perception, by orienting itself toward things, the “actual,” completely absorbing them into itself and, as it were, drawing them into the sphere of consciousness. The first and, in many respects, classic teaching that grounded the sensualist epistemology in ancient philosophy described this process in an absolutely sensuous and materialistic way: images, İ‫ݫ‬įȦȜĮ, which establish the link between object and subject, are the material particulars that detach from things in order to penetrate the I or soul. The epistemology of Aristotle and the Stoics attempted constantly to refine the expression that had been given to the relation between knowledge and the object. For Aristotle, it was not the material of the object but its pure form that merges with sensory perception in the soul—just as wax picks up the form of the signet ring but not the gold or ore. And in Stoicism, Chrysippus replaced the term IJȪʌȦıȚȢ [imprint] with the general term ‫݌‬IJİȡȠȓȦıȚȢ [alteration in the soul]: it is not an imprint of the object that is produced by perception in the soul; rather, a change is caused in the soul on the ground of which its existence and its qualitative character are judged. However, as much as we have striven here and in medieval philosophy to advance toward an intellectualization and sublimation of the copy theory and, more particularly, as much 5. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil, in Werke, vol. XLVII (Weimar, 1887–1919), 80.]

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 85

as the scholastics endeavored to establish the distinction between species intelligibilis [intelligible species] and species sensibilia [sensible species] the basic sensuous signification of images nevertheless lived on in the abstract concept of “species.” The new form of thought of modern idealism was needed in order for the Aristotelian-scholastic concept of species, and the theory of knowledge linked to it, to finally be surpassed. However, the presupposition that in order to become known the object had, in some way, to enter into consciousness, that it had to copy itself in whole or in part in it, was so solidly and persistently supported that, once this presupposition was shaken, the knowability of objects increasingly threatened to become problematic. The idealism of Descartes and Leibniz aimed at nothing other than bringing forward the criterion of objective validity of knowledge in its pure form, in the form of the cogitatio and the intellectus ipse, imprisoning all those who could not relinquish the dogmatic premise of the copy theory in an openly skeptical conclusion. Even in the case of Kant, the emphasis of the theory itself seems to rest more on the negative consequences it contained in itself than upon its new and positive fundamental insight. For the core of his thought appears neither in the demonstration of how the genuine objectivity of knowledge is grounded in and secured by the free spontaneity of spirit nor in the theory of the unknowable “thing in itself.” On the contrary, here that which clearly detaches knowledge from “things in themselves” is only another expression of the fact that from here on, knowledge has found its own solid ground. The “thing in itself ” is, according to the Hegelian expression, only the “caput mortuum [dead head] of abstraction,”6 only the negative designation of a goal toward which knowledge cannot and need not be oriented, but this negation creates at the same time a new and original position—the centering of knowledge in its own form, and within the laws of this form. And the same typical turn confronts us where we treat knowledge not merely according to its general determination but in its particularities; when we envisage not only its philosophical concept but the manifestation of this concept, or the concrete configuration of the individual sciences. In its progress, each individual science develops ever finer and 6. [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Erster Theil: Die Logik, in Werke, vol. VI (Berlin, 1840), 95.]

·185·

86 CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

·186·

more specific conceptual means and, at the same time, increasingly learns to understand these means for what they are, intellectual symbols. The history of mathematics provides continuous evidence for this fact; geometry, too, may have begun with empirical measurements; the number, too, first appears to human thought as the number of things. However, the progress of mathematics and its development as a rigorous science exist precisely because from this beginning it progressively freed itself from the bonds and limitations connected with it. If the concept of the whole number extends to the fraction, then such an extension may have its correlate in the actual processes of the world of things, in the division of concrete objects; if the irrational, which is denied the name of number in the mathematics of antiquity, is recognized as one of its forms, and the negative number appears beside the positive, all this was still immediately substantiated in the intuition of spatial magnitudes and their relationships. The pure concept of number, however, gradually freed itself from the intuition of things and, thus, of space. Since Dedekind, there has existed in modern mathematics a progressively clearer tendency to conceive the system of numbers as a system of “free creations of the mind”7 that are subjected to no law other than that which was included in their original positing. It generally appears that every truly great methodological advance achieved by mathematics in the course of its history was always closely connected, and even confined, to a development and intellectual refinement of its system of signs. The invention of algebra was founded by Vieta as a logistice speciosa, or figurative analysis: Leibniz’s algorithm of infinitesimal calculus, which signified for him only one particular case of his basic philosophical-scientific plan—the project of a “universal characteristic”—provides the clearest evidence for this. Moreover, with regard to the problem being considered here, mathematical physics, too, demonstrates a highly characteristic development. This was the case so long as the classical system of GalileanNewtonian mechanics was clearly regarded as the system of physics, so long as its basic concepts of space and time, force and mass, could still be interpreted as concepts that were, in the way that physics employed 7. [Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? § 6 (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1893), 21: “Can we rightly call numbers a free creation of the human spirit?”]

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 87

them, imposed upon us immediately and in a univocal determination by the “nature of things,” by the character of physical reality. However, this view lost its foundation the moment that a new construction of mechanics was sought through a variation and transformation of precisely these basic concepts. It is not by accident that it was Heinrich Hertz who first took this crucial step in his Principles of Mechanics, who deleted the concept of force from the foundation of mechanics and constructed it exclusively from the three basic, independent ideas of time, space, and mass; and it was just in this attempt that he gained at the same time a new fundamental clarity about the concept of the symbol in general, and about the direction and meaning of symbolism in physics in particular. It is the first and, in a certain sense, the most important task of our conscious knowledge of nature, [Hertz emphasizes,] to enable us to foresee future experience so that we may direct our present activities accordingly. However, our process in deriving the future from the past, and thus achieving the desired foresight, is always this: we set up internal simulacra or symbols of external objects of such a type that their intellectually necessary consequences are invariably symbols again of the necessary consequences in nature of the objects pictured.8 Thus, here, too, there appears the “inner simulacrum”—the physicomathematical symbols—of objects in place of external objects, and the demand that we place on the symbols of physics is not that they copy a particular sensuous and demonstrable existence but that they stand among themselves in such a connection that, by virtue of this connection, we can systematically organize and control the totality [Gesamtheit] of our experience. If we consider the worldview of modern physics, we see how fruitful this general view of physical knowledge has been for it. The displeasure and helplessness with which philosophy today still often confronts the results of the theory of relativity arise, perhaps, for the most part, from the fact that it has not yet sharply and clearly grasped the genuine character of symbolism in physics that manifests itself in this theory. So long as philosophy knows no other possibility than the symbol 8. [Heinrich Hertz, Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt (Leipzig, 1894), 1ff.]

·187·

88 CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

that is used here—for example, the symbol of Riemannian space, either as expression for the directly given realities or simply as fictions—it will not have grasped its methodological meaning and value. The theory of relativity—if we wish to apply it to the foregoing triadic characterization of Goethe—is, of course, far removed from signifying a “simple imitation of nature”; however, nor does it express a purely accidental “manner” of considering nature; rather, it appears, like other theories, unable to represent [repräsentieren] the true “style” of modern physical knowledge. 2

·188·

We have, up to now, considered essentially as a unity the force of inner images that manifest themselves in the production of the world of art and the world of knowledge, and in the production of the mythical and linguistic worlds; we have attempted to expose in this unity a thoroughgoing form of construction, a general type, so to speak. The true relationship between individual forms, however, only manifests itself when we attempt, within this type, to determine and delimit over against each other the particular and specific features of each individual basic orientation. The function of configuration of images can, after all, be thought of as an ultimate comprehensive unity; however, the differences among the forms immediately manifest themselves again as soon as we reflect on the different relationship that spirit maintains in each case toward the world of images and figures that originates from it. If we remain at the level of myth, then the force of the image of spirit manifests itself to us in all its richness, with its incalculable diversity and the fullness of its demonstrable expressions; however, at the same time, the world of images signifies here for consciousness only another form of objective-tangible reality, because it holds it in the same restriction as the world of immediate sense impression. The image as such is not known or recognized as a free spiritual creation but is approached as an independent effectiveness; a dæmonic compulsion radiates from it, which consciousness masters and then banishes. Mythical consciousness is thoroughly determined by this indifference of image and thing [Sache]: the two are inseparable from one another in the mode of being because the mode of effective action is common to them. For, in the general magicalmythical interconnected coherence of things, the image possesses the

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 89

same force as any physical existence. The images of people or their names in no way represent [repräsentiert] the person but from the standpoint of the magical interconnection of effects, and, thus, measured from the magical concept of “reality” [Realität], it is that individual himself. Just as whoever can take possession of the smallest bodily part of a human being—his hair, his fingernails, etc.—possesses and rules the whole person, so too will the same mastery be established through the possession of images or names. The belief in the essential objective being and objective force of signs, the belief in the magic of words and images, in the magic of names and writing, constitutes the basic element of the mythical view of the world. Now, of course, within the latter itself, a gradual disentanglement and freeing takes place, to the extent that the world of myth begins to give way to the truly religious world. Every development of religious self-consciousness finds its origins here. Even though mythical fantasy remains the substantial foundation and, as it were, the nutritive soil for all religion, the true characteristic form of religion is achieved only when it breaks with conscious energy away from this soil and, with a completely new force of spiritual critique, confronts the content of mythical images. The content and form of the idea of God for Jewish prophecy is gained through this attitude, through the struggle against idolatry [Bilderdienst]. The prohibition of idolatry constitutes the line of demarcation between mythical and prophetic consciousness. What differentiates the new monotheistic consciousness is that, for it, the animating spiritual force of images [Bildes] is, as it were, extinguished; all signification and meaningfulness withdraws into another, purely spiritual sphere and, with this, leaves nothing from the being of images other than the empty material substrate. Before the force of heroical abstraction, which prophetic thought possesses and which also determines prophetic religious feeling, the images of myth become “pure nothingness.”9 And yet, they do not remain closed for long in this sphere of “nothingness” into which prophetic consciousness attempts to force them; rather, they always break out of it again, asserting themselves as an independent power. In the progress and unfolding of religious consciousness, religious symbols are repeatedly thought of as both the bearer of religious forces 9. [Jeremiah 10:3 according to Luther’s translation: “Denn der Heiden Satzungen sind lauter Nichts.”]

·189·

90 CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

·190·

and effects. Throughout the entire evolution of Christian dogma right up to Protestantism, Luther, and Zwingli, it has been highly significant that already in the beginning the concept of the symbol was fused together with that of the sacraments and that of the mystery. “The symbolic”—as, for example, Harnack depicts the belief in originary time—“is for that time to be thought of not as the opposite of the objective or the real but as the mysterious effect of God (ȝȣıIJȒȡȚRY—mystery) that confronts the naturalistic clarity of the profane.”10 Of course, here, too, the separation between the image itself and the spiritual and imageless truth that it wants to present comes to the fore again. It is in the nature of the religious, however, that this struggle of motives cannot in itself be followed to its conclusion; for even this conflict—this constant attempt to free itself from the merely pictorial and the constant necessity to return to it—constitutes a fundamental moment of the religious process as it fulfills itself in history. A new freedom of apprehension, however, now confronts us when we turn from the mythical-religious view to an aesthetic contemplation; for the latter arises and exists inasmuch as spirit enters here into a new relationship with the whole sphere of images. Of course, art, too, in its greatest achievements, remains closely entangled with the mythical view of the world. “Works such as the Indian and Egyptian monuments,” says Schelling in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Myth, “do not arise as cave stalactites by the mere passage of time; the same violent power that internally creates the partly colossal representations of myth is brought out by the initiatives of art, which transcend every measure of earlier times. The violent power that, in mythical representations, raised human consciousness beyond the limits of reality, was also the first teacher of the greatness, of the full significance of art.”11 What is stated here from a general speculative conviction has been thoroughly corroborated by empirical research in the domain of art history and comparative mythology. And yet, despite the reciprocal penetration of the content of art and myth, their mutual form remains clearly distinct. In mythical and religious consciousness, there exists, on the one hand, a complete indif10. Adolf Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, I, p. 198. 11. [Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, in Werke, vol. I (Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1856), 240.]

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S

91

ference between the image and its significative content; on the other hand, there exists a permanent tension between the two. As soon as the ideal content is dissolved into the content of the image and, as it were, absorbed in it, it attempts to free itself from sensuous-figurative expression, only, however, in order to be subjected to its violent power anew. This struggle and conflict of motives is replaced by a pure equilibrium only in the artistic apprehension and configuration of the world. The life of aesthetic consciousness maintains itself in this equilibrium, just as the life of mythical-religious consciousness maintains itself in conflict. Artistic intuition does not look through the image onto something other that is also expressed and portrayed; rather, it immerses itself and remains in the pure form of images themselves. From the world of effective actions and passions in which the magical-mythical view of the world encloses humans, the image has finally freed itself. By freeing itself from the chains of cause and effect, and by being designated only according to its ideal content and not according to what it achieves, the image escapes the sphere of existence that is determined precisely by this intertwining of effects. A world of “semblances” is presented in it, but as a semblance that bears its own necessity and, thus, its own truth. In another sense, art shows itself as the fulfillment of that which, in another domain of spirit, in another direction of symbolic formation, is held only as a demand. We have attempted to prove as a general law of linguistic expression that it begins from the closest proximity to the sensuous object and the sensuous impression in order, therefore, to distance itself progressively from both. More and more, the word ceases to be simply a phonic image; the pure significative content is independent of its sensuous consistence. At the highest point of linguistic development, this separation is finally achieved; the pure relation of sounds to signification appears independent, no longer requiring the support of some “natural” similarity between the two. However, if language is needed not only as the expression of pure concepts, in the sense of an objective determination and objective communication, if it is turned back to the inwardness of subjects from which it began in order to become the pure mirror of this inwardness, then a completely new relationship now emerges in a single gesture. For the language of poetry is no longer a merely abstract expression of concepts; rather, in it, each word has its own sound and emotional value. It not only realizes itself in the general

·191·

92 CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

·192·

achievement of representation [Repräsentation] of a certain significative content but, as sound and tone, it possesses, in addition, an autonomous life, its own being and its own meaning. Thus, at the heart of the highest determination of objective presentation, the sound preserves its inner significance. The objective portrait now strips from itself all mediacy, everything that is merely representative [Repräsentative] and significative [Signifikative], in order to return to the form of pure immediate presence. The secret of the truly perfect poetic expression maintains itself precisely in the fact that, in it, the sensuous and the spiritual no longer oppose one another. All the rigidity of mere signs melts away; every word is once again filled with an individual content specific to it and becomes therewith the expression of the inner mobility, the pure dynamic of emotions. The greatest lyrical works of art—for example, in German poetry, the most perfect poems of Hölderlin—are those that best exhibit this double coincidence: perfect spirituality that has, at the same time, created the perfect body, the sensuous tone and rhythm evidently suited for it. Before creations of this kind, we are seized by the feeling that Hamann has expressed by saying that poetry is “the mother tongue of human kind.”12 We certainly find here no return to the original primitive source, to the first historical beginnings of the creation of language; rather, the form of language has, insofar as it has interpenetrated the form of poetry, gained a new content. The stage of mere imitative or emotional sounds thus lies far behind us here: onomatopoeia can occasionally, in a very limited way, serve certain particular poetic effects; however, it enters into the essence of lyrical expression as little as it does into linguistic expression. For here, too, the sound never portrays the individual, the particular and accidental of the sensuous impression; rather, it oscillates purely within itself—and only as the totality [Gesamtheit] of that which is not directed toward something other and external. Rather, the pure mutually toned oscillations enclose within themselves the unity of an aesthetic mood. Thus, the apparent return to immediacy is more the result of a double mediation in which linguistic and poetic form take part, each in its own particular way. Generally, the philosophical examination of “symbolic forms” can 12. [ Johann Georg Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce: Eine Rhapsodie in Kabbalistischer Prose, in Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, vol. II (Berlin, 1821), 258.]

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 93

never simply be content with describing each individual symbolic form in its determined spiritual structure and in terms of its specific means of expression; rather, one of the most important tasks is to determine the reciprocal relationship of these forms, a relationship that results just as much from their correspondence as from their opposition, from their attraction as from their repulsion. From the range of problems that confront such an examination, I have raised only one. When we contrast the mythical explanation of the world with the scientific one, it appears that the two are distinguished by the fact that, on the one side, there prevails the highest objective determination of thought, whereas, on the other side, there is only fantastic caprice and individual arbitrariness. Myth, too, has a self-enclosed form; a determined law of formation also manifests itself in its wealth of contradictory images. And this form does not arise exclusively in the impulses of fantasy or simply in affects but also contains completely determined intellectual elements. Mythical thought has its “categories” as does logical scientific thought. Above all, it is the fundamental and ruling category, the category of causality, that effectually manifests itself in it. That the most universal concept of causality, the simple idea of the relationship of “cause” and “effect,” is in no way lacking in myth is clearly manifested in its constant tendency to derive and “elucidate” the world. Cosmogony and theogony first define the whole of the mythical world. And, even at the lower stages, the wealth of mythical fairy tales that specify the mythical “genesis” for any individual thing, for the sun or the moon, for humans, animals, or plants, shows how deeply this fundamental feature is rooted in mythical thought. It is, thus, not the form of causality as such but its particular direction and formulation that, in principle, distinguishes the mythical concept of being and becoming from the scientific concept. For myth still and especially remains bound in its causal thinking to the form of “complex thought” that designates and determines it as such. Every mere resemblance or accidental coexistence of things, their togetherness in space and their tangency in time, is enough to unite them into a magical unity of effective action. Every “magical analogy” is a typical example of this behavior. The name of the magical analogy, of course, obscures rather than clarifies this state of affairs: for this is just what characterizes mythical apprehension; where we see a mere “analogy,” a mere relation of similarity between two different and independent elements, myth, in truth,

·193·

94 CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

sees only a single thing before it. It does not separate the various particular things according to generic similarities but sees every similarity as the immediate expression of an identity of being [Wesen]. And the same holds true for spatial togetherness and temporal coexistence as for the relation [Relation] of similarity. Whatever meets once in space and time grows together into a magical-mythical unity. As K. Th. Preuß characterizes this behavior of mythical thought:

·194·

It is as if the individual object [Objekt], as soon as it excites magical interests, can in no way be considered separately, but instead carries the affiliation to other objects [Objekte] with which it is identified, so that the external appearance only forms a kind of envelopment, a mask.13 Even here, however, the scientific concept of causality distinguishes itself from the mythical concept. For, despite Hume and all those who have repeated his psychological theory, this scientific concept does not originate from attraction and the impulse of “association,” from the rule of subjective imagination that transforms the post hoc [after this] and the juxta hoc [next to this] into a propter hoc [on account of this]. On the contrary, looked at more closely, it proves to be grounded precisely in the opposite spiritual comportment. It is the conceptual force of analysis that first makes possible the scientific causal judgment and that gives it its fixed foothold. If myth makes a thing, as a complex totality [Gesamtheit], emerge from another thing, then the scientific causal judgment, strictly speaking, no longer recognizes the relation of cause and effect as such as an immediate thing relationship. It is not things, as complex sensuously given totalities [Gesamtheiten], but changes that are found together in the relationship of cause and effect. Every causal sequence appears as a whole process that is dissected ever more precisely and sharply into its stages and conditions. This segmentation first creates the elements between which a causal relation is predictable as such. Phenomenon Į is not held as the cause of phenomenon ȕ because both are often observed together and their further coming together is expected on the basis of a 13. Konrad Theodor Preuß, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914), 13. See, in particular, Konrad Theodor Preuß, Die NayaritExpedition, vol. I. (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1912).

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 95

psychological compulsion, but rather because a moment x is removed from the whole of Į and a moment y is removed from the whole of ȕ so that x and y are obtained in such a way that the passage from one to the other is determined by a general rule. This rule appears unequivocally fixed and truly general, according to the basic intuition of mathematical physics, only when it succeeds in grasping x and y as magnitudes that undergo changes of a determined measure and that mutually condition each other in this value of measure. These magnitudes, and the form of their lawful combination by which their interconnection is rendered “understandable” and necessary, are not immediately found, however, in the perceived content of the phenomena but must first be, as it were, intellectually subsumed and structurally supported. The sensuously given is subjected to and penetrated by the form of our causal “conclusion,” and only takes on, by virtue of this analysis and synthesis of the understanding itself, a new figure. What before had been close to one another, what appeared to be closely bound together by qualitative similarities or by spatiotemporal proximity, can retreat into the far distance; while on the other hand, the appearances furthest from each other, from the perspective of immediate observation, prove on the basis of theoretical analysis to be subject to one law and, in this respect, similar in nature. While the mode of mythical thought believes, as it were, that it grasps concretely the structural connection between cause and effect, it is the highly involved and genuinely “critical” work of spirit of separating and dividing that first leads to it. Through this critical work, the single, empirical, proximate, individual contents are subjected to an ever rigorous subordination and hierarchization: mere existence and its individual character turn ever more precisely into a general interconnection of “reasons” and “consequences.” Science constantly separates the elements of the simple “existence” of things in order to exchange for this separation a much more solid connection made by universally valid laws. It arranges the elements of “being” and puts them together into a relationship in such a way that its highest intellectual goal is achieved in a most perfect manner. The interconnection of the perceptual world is effaced in order to rise again in another dimension, in a new way, because it is now under a new intellectual form. Thus, to give a single concrete example, phenomena that are sensuously different from one another, such as a falling stone, the movement of the moon, and that of

·195·

96 C O NCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

the earth and tide, have been for us, since Newton, under one and the same physical concept. Moreover, the suppression of specific sensuous elements from the definitions of physical concepts goes so far that the domains of physics, which were originally characterized through the assignment to specific sensations of the senses, now theoretically fall into completely separate areas of study. As Planck emphasizes:

·196·

Whereas, for example, heat, which in the past was characterized by the sensuous percept of warmth, formed a well-delimited and unified region of physics, today, a whole field—thermal radiation —has split off from it and is handled by optics. The signification of the sensations of warmth is no longer sufficient to connect the heterogeneous pieces; rather, now, one area of optics, for example, electrodynamics, and the other, mechanics, are specially joined in the kinetic theory of matter.14 And here, too, it is language, in that it participates in both approaches, in that it joins in itself the element of myth with that of logos, that emerges between the two extremes and produces a spiritual mediation between them. The particularity of “complex” thought stands out for us most clearly in the type of language that we habitually designate as incorporated or polysynthetic. The essential character of these languages, as is generally known, is that in them a clear border between word and sentence does not exist; the unity of the sentence structures itself not through relatively independent word units but tends to draw together the linguistic expression for an entire process or for a whole concrete situation into a single word of extraordinarily complex structure. Humboldt was one of the first to elucidate this practice, attempting to clarify its basic intellectual direction by way of the example of the Mexican language. He emphasized that this form of language is manifestly grounded upon a unique mode of imagination: the sentence is not constructed or gradually built from parts but is given at once as the unity of a stamped form. However, this apparently completely self-enclosed and unified form falls short of a genuine synthetic unity as it is still an undifferentiated form. In its pure intellectual sense, true synthesis is not antithetical 14. Max Planck, Die Einheit des physikalischen Weltbildes (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1909), 8.

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 97

to analysis; rather, it presupposes and infers it as a necessary moment. The force of combination [Zusammenfassung] is based on the force of organization; the more precisely the latter is fulfilled, the more determined and vigorous the former is. By comparison, in “polysynthetic” linguistic practice, the unity of words does not lie in this sense of the combination [Zusammenfassung] of clearly distinguished significative elements of combination in a linguistically whole signification; rather, it is, in essence, only a conglomerate in which individual determinations lie indiscriminately beside one another and merge into one another. Next to the verbal designation, next to the expression of the qualitative character of a process or an activity, a wealth of accidental auxiliary determinations of acts [Tuns] or processes is brought to expression in the word-whole. This modification fuses with the designation of principal concepts and grows, as it were, completely together with it. Their meaning settles down as a thick cover over the verbal expression itself. So it happens, for example, in the linguistic determination of the activity of every particular circumstance of place, time, individual manner, mode and direction of activity [Tun]. The verb changes by incorporating particles from a wealth of suffixes or infixes, depending on whether the subject of an action is sitting, standing, or lying down, depending on whether the action takes place with this or that tool. As Powell, who has depicted this method in graphic detail in the example of Indian languages, remarks: Perhaps one time in a million it would be the purpose to express all of these particulars, and in that case the Indian would have the whole expression in one compact word, but in the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine cases all of these particulars would have to be thought of in the selection of the form of the verb, when no valuable purpose would be accomplished thereby.15 Of course, it could be objected that this remark unwittingly grounds our habits of thinking and our demands of thought on the judgment of other ways of speaking and thinking. What constitutes a main factor and what an accident of an action or a process is never fixed in itself by 15. John Wesley Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages (Washington, 1880), 74.

·197·

98 C O NCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMAN S C IE NC E S

·198·

an unambiguously objective indicator; rather, it is the mode of spiritual apprehension that decides this—and it is this apprehension that gives the expression of linguistic thought its determined direction. However, it appears as a general rule in the overall development of language that the form of intuitively compact expression progressively gives way to the form of conceptually analytic expression, that in place of the extraordinary concretion that governs primitive languages,16 logical clarity in the expression of pure relations prevails. While the concrete way of designation forms an attestation and symptom, here consciousness possesses the wealth of its content, as it were, in one agglomerated and, in the literal sense, “concretized” unity. Moreover, the progressive organization of the sentence not only expresses the progress of intellectual organization but, at the same time, appears as the means, as a spiritual vehicle for this process. It is well known how slowly truly generic expression developed in the evolution of language, how, for a long time, it was delayed by the requirements and the ability of individual expressions. The former phases of linguistic development are characterized vis-à-vis the latter in that not only is there no lack, there is an overabundance of differentiating expressions that have, however, neither cognized nor designated as such the differences because here the general concept is missing and, thus, the general principle from which it can be determined as the particulars of an overarching unity. This principle will be found and secured only if the logical force of analysis strengthens and penetrates the formation of language. The form of the sentence now takes ever more rigorous logical coincidence. In place of the mere juxtaposition of the elements of the sentence, in place of the parataxis that designates every primitive formation of language, there emerges an increasingly determined hierarchization and subordination that makes speech, as it were, the spiritual foreground and background, a logical perspective. Thus, the path of language leads from sensuous complexity to an ever more consciously and tightly thought unity—from elementary wealth to an apparent poverty that, in truth, first makes the rigor of analytic determination and control possible. 16. See in particular the explanation in the well-known work by Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1910); German translation (Vienna and Leipzig, 1921), 116ff.

CONCEPT OF S Y MBO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S 99

However, we could, it is true, put forward an argument objecting not only to language but also to the totality [Gesamtheit] of symbolic forms. Do these forms exhaust the most profound immediate content of consciousness? Or do they not rather signify a continuous impoverishment? We have alluded to W. von Humboldt’s suggestion that language imposes itself between subject and object, between the human being and the reality that surrounds him. However, does it not follow from this that, at the same time, language, as well as the other symbolic forms, erects an opposition and veritable barrier between our consciousness and reality? And must not the question be posed whether it would be possible to break through this barrier in order to arrive at the true and essential, the uncovered being? In fact, the quest to return from mere signification to ultimate and original being, from mere representation [Repräsentation] and symbolism to the basic metaphysical certainty of pure intuition asserts itself more strongly today than ever before. The first and most necessary step here seems to be to renounce all conventional symbols in order to replace words with immediate intuition, linguisticdiscursive thought with pure, wordless showing. Berkeley has anticipated here the modern positivist demand for a “critique of language”: In vain do we extend our View into the Heavens, and pry into the Entrails of the Earth, in vain do we consult the Writings of Learned Men, and trace the dark Foot-steps of Antiquity, we need only draw the Curtain of Words, to behold the fairest Tree of Knowledge, whose Fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our Hand.17 What is said here about language would seem logically to apply to any mode of symbolic expression. Each spiritual form seems at the same time to signify a cover into which spirit encloses itself. If we were able to remove all these covers, we would be able to penetrate true and unaltered reality, the reality of subjects as well as that of objects [Objekte]. A review of language and its place in the construction of the spiritual world already indicates what we are to think about conclusions of this kind. Even if one could really entirely escape the mediating character of 17. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, § 24.

·199·

100 C O NCEPT OF S Y M BO LIC FO RM IN THE HUMA N S C IE NC E S

·200·

linguistic expression and the conditions that this imposes upon us, the realm of pure intuition [Intuition], the unlimited wealth of life itself would not be encountered; rather, it is, again, only the narrowness and dullness of sensuous consciousness that surrounds us. And the necessity of such a conclusion imposes itself upon us even more clearly if we apply this question to the totality [Gesamtheit] of symbolic forms—to language, myth, art, and religion. We believe it is possible to refrain from considering each of these particular forms, and under certain conditions we can refrain from doing so, provided that we are allowed, in abandoning them, to retain other, richer content. It is in this way that the mystic seeks to escape all pictorial configuration, which is the heart of aesthetic intuition, and, thus, tries to evade all relativity of linguistic expression; and in this negation, in this pure “no, no” that as the basic motive recurs in each historical figure of mysticism, seems to open the new and original position of religious consciousness. Even as a positive figure, however, the latter still contains a definite and specific way of forming. Our analysis attempts to show that behind each particular sphere of symbols and signs, be they linguistic, mythical, artistic, or intellectual signs, there are certain energies of forming. To relinquish the sign, not only in this or that sphere, but in every form, signifies at the same time the destruction of these energies. The real substantiality of spirit consists not in the fact that it can do without sensuous and symbolic content as a simple accident and reject it as an empty shell but in the fact that it asserts itself in resisting this medium. Thus, for philosophy, for all contemplation of being, life in itself can never constitute the goal or a nostalgia of its contemplation prior to any formation and thus beyond it; rather, for philosophy, life and form constitute a single indivisible unity. For it is by form and its mediation that the immediacy of life takes the figure of spirit; but the power of spirit is, as Hegel puts it, “only as great as its expression and externalization [Äußerung], its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition [Auslegung].”18

18. [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 6.]

The Kantian Elements in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language (1923)

1 The groundwork of critical philosophy includes not only an altered determination of the relationship of knowledge [Wissen] toward the object but also a new conceptual determination of knowing. Both essential moments of knowledge [Wissen] can themselves be combined in the demand for its objectivity and its encompassing unity. Its unity, like its objectivity, however, is now enriched and grounded in a completely new way in opposition to a dogmatic way of thinking. Just as the object is based upon and measured by knowledge, it obtains an authentic inner multiplicity by virtue of the multiplicity of the principles of knowledge— thus, the unity of knowledge [Wissen] no longer coincides in any way with its simplicity, with its derivation from its own principle. Post-Kantian philosophy once again demanded such a derivation, while Kant’s teaching, in its external triadic organization of the critiques (the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of the Power of Judgment), had already documented how the authentic and complete concept of “reason” not only tolerated but directly demanded a multiplicity of variegated methodological approaches and a variety of applications and [First published as “Die Kantischen Elemente in Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachphilosophie,” in Festschrift für Paul Hensel (Greiz: Ohag, 1923), 105–27. Translated from Ernst Cassirer: Geist und Leben Schriften, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993), 236–73.] 101

·236·

102

·237·

·238·

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

methods of verification. Even within the purely theoretical sphere, the same relationship was repeated. The various basic functions of knowledge determined the domain of objects and generally circumscribed the region of objectivity as such. Kant did not base his thinking on a communal, transcendental world of things in order to observe and copy such a world from different points of view; rather, these points of view are original ways, particular forms of configuring knowledge [Wissen], which nevertheless unify with one another into a collective task of determining objects, and looking back from this task, they produce an inner coherence. However, the overall structure of knowledge [Wissen], in its totality [Ganzheit] and its particularity, is nevertheless only an ideal erected by critical philosophy. The execution and carrying through, the concrete fulfillment of this ideal, can result only in the steady progress of science and can never be anticipated and established once and for all in an abstract project. Where, therefore, such a determination was attempted, certain provisional and hypothetical features were necessarily held next to this generally valid determination. It expressed, on the one hand, the particular historical problem-sphere of the individual sciences, and, on the other hand, the particular scientific orientation of interest of philosophical critical thinkers. Even Kant’s blueprint and methodological construction of the system of scientific knowledge are not free from such individual limitations. Kant’s considerations refer to and classify two large clusters of problems. The concept and knowledge of nature are constituted by mathematics, and the concept of history and the human sciences are constituted by ethics. The thinking of theoretical necessity, as it was advanced by mathematics and the mathematical science of nature, and the thinking of freedom, as it was advanced through ethics, together formed the two unconflatable poles of critical philosophy. Here, synthesis and analysis, as well as connection and separation, become distinct; here lies the Kantian view of the world and of life. The world of being operates against the world of the ought, the world of appearance operates against the intelligible world. Because Kant, with all the energy of his personal and intellectual being, confronts this great fundamental divide, the particular methodological differences, which are found within the two great domains and in which they have their individual members, can for him now be reexamined. Just as the concept of theo-

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

103

retical knowledge [Wissen] is not only grounded in mathematics but in the end seems to be almost entirely bound by it, Kant makes clear that in every discipline there lies only as much “authentic” science as can be contained in mathematics. And, so, there arise the pure concepts of history and development in his theory of ethical principles. In thinking about freedom and ethical self-consciousness, there is, first, the meaning and purpose of history, as well as of all spiritual existence as such. Thus, for Kant, the reason of nature grounds itself in mathematics and the reason of history in ethics. The objectivity of being and the objectivity of values are not immediately encountered; rather, they are first obtained and secured in the determination that we give ourselves in thinking and willing, and in the theoretical or practical law under which we are placed. We can and ought to give ourselves over to this movement, this inevitable process, without fear of losing ourselves in the constancy and limitation promised by the dogmatic concept of being; for this process is from the beginning directly related to both mathematics and ethics as the centers of theoretical and ethical certainty, and will be held through within a determined circle of objectivity, that is to say, within a general and necessary validity. If we look, however, from here to the sciences in their factual structures and systematic configurations, we notice a lacuna in the general critical orientation. There is a domain of spirit, even in the case of the practical and teleological sciences, that is fulfilled neither by the analogy of the mathematical concept of necessity nor by the model of ethical values or the concept of norms. There is an original spiritual energy, comparable to an artistic energy, in which the antithesis between nature and freedom appears to be overcome and a new relationship, a reciprocal determination, exhibits itself, and yet this relation is not sublated into art and aesthetic configuration but flourishes out of its own autonomous principle. If we follow the phenomenon of this domain, we seem to be bound completely within the chain of empirical causes and effects, and there develops out of it a formation [Gebilde] in which the universality of the freedom of spirit first fully exhibits and shows itself. We find ourselves, here, face to face with a pure and true spiritual creation to which all mere arbitrariness of reflection is related and according to which it itself appears as a product of nature. Here, the basic opposition that rules over the whole Kantian system does not appear sufficient to determine and

·239·

104

·240·

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHILO S O PHY

delimit this new sphere—the domain of language, which is distinctly spiritual. If the mathematical concept of natural causality and the idea [Idee] of the ought and freedom constitute two centers of critical theory, then language appears as an ex-centric structure [Gebilde]. This already emerges from the external architectonic organization of Kantian theory. Kant’s system contains within it a logic as well as an ethics and aesthetics; it is oriented like the texts “Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences” and “Metaphysics of Morals.” It establishes a new form of the theory of religion and law, of the philosophy of history and political philosophy, but the problem and theme of a philosophy of language is hardly mentioned or clarified. The cosmos of “reason” is developed and laid out for us without its most important tool, without the logos that is alive and effective in language and belongs to it. Here lies a defect that did not escape Kant’s early critics. All “metacritique” that attempted to surpass the Critique of Pure Reason was always bound to this point, and Kant’s critics attempted to rescue the Kantian system from this flaw. In this regard, we cite Hamann’s texts “Metacritique of the Purism of Pure Reason” and “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason and Language.” The attempt to critique reason without providing a critique of language appears to be Kant’s real, incomprehensible oversight, for he himself had seen how both immediately went together. “According to me,” so Hamann wrote to Jacobi, “neither the talk of physics nor that of theology, but language is the mother of reason and revelation, its A and 1 [alpha and omega].” “Reason is language, ȜȩJRV [logos]. I gnaw at this bone and would go to my death with it. It is always dark for me over this depth. Still I wait for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.” “What Demosthenes called ‘actio,’ Engel ‘mimicking,’ Batteux ‘imitation of a beautiful nature,’ is, for me, language, the organon and criterion of reason. Here lies pure reason and likewise its critique.”1 It was this, Hamann’s basic theme, to which 1. Johann Georg Hamann, Brief an Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi vom 28. Oktober 1785, in Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, ed. Karl Hermann Gildemeister (Gotha, 1868), 122; ibid., Brief an Johann Gottfried Herder vom 6. August 1784, in Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, vol. VII (Leipzig, 1825), 151f., and ibid., Brief an Scheffner vom 11. Februar 1785, 216; concerning Hamann’s constitution of language, see Rudolf Unger, Hamanns Sprachtheorie im Zusammenhange seines Denkens. Grundlegung zu einer Würdigung der geistesgeschichtlichen Stellung des Magus in Norden (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1905).

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

105

Herder held on and always returned anew in his struggle with Kant. “Concerning pure and impure reason,” he emphasized in his Metakritik, “these old most worthy and necessary witnesses must be heard, and we must not allow ourselves to be ashamed of each of the designating words of heralds and deputies when we are speaking of a concept. How ought the judge of reason to assess this means through which reason brings forth, holds, and completes its work?”2 And so the Critique of Pure Reason, which did not deal with the problems of language, notwithstanding the mediating effects that arose from them therein, decisively reconfigured the form of the philosophy of language. This is because language’s principal content did not emerge out of its unique and individual historical shape [Gestalt]. This new principle of thought, which operates with force and fertility in language, proves itself in that, on account of its own factual consequences, language attempts to appropriate and progressively conquer ever new domains of spirit. Here lies the decisive service that Wilhelm von Humboldt performed for critical philosophy. Insofar as he introduced philosophy into the science of language, he united and reconciled it with a domain of problems that, if it appeared to remain outside its limits, meant that its foundational thought would be in constant danger. Now, Kantian theory, by virtue of the mediation of language, contains a new, fuller way and entry point into the human sciences. Thus, language turns out to be an organ, a living tool of reason as well as the critique of reason. However, philosophy must in this sense, through the method of critical idealism, freely fertilize and be reorganized by language itself. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s relationship to Kant has often been portrayed according to its key features and its development: however, the signification of Kant’s teaching for the conception and layout of Humboldt’s philosophy of language has hardly been recognized for its true scope and depth. Just as we must proceed to demonstrate the Kantian roots of Humboldt’s ideas [Ideen] of ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history, so too must we assuredly take care to deal with the interconnection between Humboldt’s philosophy of language and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Admittedly, Rudolf Haym has already emphatically 2. Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke zur Philosophie und Geschichte, ed. Johann von Müller, vol. XV, 24ff.

·241·

·242·

106

·243·

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

referred to this interconnection in his classic 1856 biography of Humboldt; he attempted to elucidate this interconnection in an introductory section on the philosophical presuppositions and foundations of Humboldt’s theory of language and on how the “alphabet and the spirit of Kant”3 are generally present in Humboldt’s linguistic work. With great clarity, Haym demonstrated how the systematic organization of the critique of reason determined the general methodological disposition and construction of Humboldt’s philosophy of language. He also showed how Kant’s transcendental doctrine of form, and, in particular, his view of space and time, as well as his theory of the schematism, had a great effect on Humboldt’s theory of linguistic form, his view of the foundational parts of speech and their reciprocal relationships. However, even greater than Humboldt’s dependency upon the letter of Kant’s text, as Haym emphasized, is his affinity with the spirit of Kant. “The truth is that which thought itself or, more precisely, the undeniable central discovery of language is drawn from its affinities with the Kantian way of thinking. The truth is that the whole of his philosophy of language moves, and it moves directly to the most determined ways of thinking, where, according to the nature of the object, there must be a correspondence with the formulations and propositions of the Kantian system. We can say that Humboldt was a Kantian, even if he never read a line of Kant, even if Kant had not written or lived.”4 In Haym’s remarkable statement, a program is posited that is executed fully and concretely by neither Haym nor his followers. Spranger, in his monograph on Kant and Humboldt, which generally treats the influence of critical idealism on Humboldt’s configuration of humanistic thought, refers back to Haym vis-à-vis the philosophy of language without fully pursuing this argument.5 Particularly striking, however, is that Steinthal, who, in his edition and commentary on Humboldt’s work on the philosophy of language, 3. [Rudolf Haym, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Lebensbild und Charakteristik (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1856), 446.] 4. Rudolf Haym, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Lebensbild und Charakteristik (Berlin, 1856), 450. 5. See Rudolf Haym, “Kant und Humboldt,” Kant-Studien XIII (1908), 157ff. See Eduard Spranger, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Humanitätsidee (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1909).

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

107

dedicated a specific section to Humboldt’s relationship to Kant, only touches upon the general theoretical and ethical foundational questions of Kant’s theory. He completely disregarded the particular linguistic, scientific problems in his discussions of this interconnection.6 This lack of a proper philosophy of language in the critical system appears to exclude a direct relation between this system and Humboldt’s foundation for the science of language. Likewise, we can easily overlook here the underlying pathways through which both are nevertheless connected with one another. The following considerations attempt to make visible this latent mediation, and seek to bring forward new evidence for the effect that the methodological motive of critical idealism apparently had on remote domains of spirit. 2 It is particularly striking that there is no stand-alone discussion of the problem of language in the Critique of Pure Reason, especially when we compare Kant’s work in this respect with the previous great systems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All of these systems, no matter how diverse their points of departure and their basic, critical epistemological orientations might have been, concerned themselves with the phenomenon of language and its principal interpretation. The idea of a “lingua universalis” [a universal language] was already present in Descartes’s letters, and in the further formation of Cartesian philosophy, especially the school of Port Royal, which sought to create a tight connection between logic and grammar, a “grammaire générale et raisonnée” [a general and well-reasoned grammar]. Leibniz took up this idea, expanding its circumference as well as deepening its content. The science of linguistic signs in the broadest sense, the “characteristica generalis” [general characteristic], had become for him a “scientia generalis” [a general science], a method and means to knowledge as such. He planted this direction and interest in the German philosophy of the eighteenth century, in the generation that preceded Kant. Lambert and Ploucquet, 6. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, Die sprachphilosophischen Werke Wilhelms v. Humboldt, ed. and intro. H. Steinthal (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1884), 230–42.

·244·

108

·245·

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

Sulzer and Tetens all followed the interconnection between reason and language, seeking to make clear its rules.7 The Berlin Academy of Sciences, which had come to play a leading intellectual role in the first half of the eighteenth century, grasped this general movement of thought on two occasions: the first was in 1759 when it requested that a prize be awarded for an investigation of the reciprocal influence of language on the development of ideas [Vorstellungen] and opinions, and vice versa; the second was ten years later in 1769 when it posed the question whether human beings, if left merely to their natural capacities, would be able to invent language and by what means they would be able to arrive at this invention. This question, as is well known, was the point of departure of Herder’s award-winning essay, in which he took the problem of the origin of language to a new plane. The logico-idealistic consideration here, which he took from Leibniz, contained the results of empirical and psychological ways of treating the problem. For the systems of empiricism had from the beginning also assigned to language a dominant place in the development of the whole, in the structure of the world of concepts and ideas [Vorstellungen]. For Hobbes, who renewed and reworked the old nominalist theories, language was not only a means but also the direct, singular content of all logical-rational knowledge. All generality of signification was, for him, rooted in the word and could not be separated from it. A true, generally valid knowledge [Wissen] is never possible if it is based upon ideas [Ideen] or things [Sachen] themselves; rather, it is only possible through arbitrarily created signs, which we place in their positions. And so words are not only “collectors of thought”;8 rather they are also that element through which as such there initially comes to stand a sphere of thinking, a connection between all general concepts, in opposition to immediate sensory sensation and concrete, singular intuitions. Locke toned down the radicalism of his predecessors; however, he returned to it later when he advanced his analysis of ideas, where the problem of language increasingly became central. In the third book of his Essay Con7. I follow this closely in my text, Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, 2nd edition, vol. II, 415ff. 8. [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (part 1: De homine, chap. 4), in Opera philosophica, post cognitas omnium objectiones, conjunctim et accuratius edita, vol. I (Amsterdam, 1668), 17: “Vocabula enim sapientium quidem calculi sunt quibus computant. . . .”]

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

109

cerning Human Understanding, he reported how he regarded words and language. From its inconspicuous beginnings, Locke extended the circumference of language and ultimately developed its signification within his entire system. Finally, for Berkeley, too, the analytic-psychological critique, which he exercised on the world of representations, perceptions, and abstract concepts, blended completely with a critique of linguistic signs and symbols. In order to advance genuine knowledge, in order to obtain a true, concrete content of being, he had first to draw back the curtain of words that, for us, cover this being. The negative critique that was carried out here on language also contained, however, a positive enrichment of its meaning and a broadening of its own particular content. For the concept of language in the whole of Berkeley’s theory was not limited to the simple application of speech sounds; rather, next to this conventional language of sounds there was the “natural” language of perceptions and ideas [Ideen]. In the thinking of a “visual language,”9 by virtue of which one perception follows from another and both stand in a constant, empirical connection that points to and represents the perception, the question concerning the origin of the idea of space, for Berkeley, received its solution. And in accord with the double character of Berkeleyan philosophy, this psychological result was overturned in a metaphysical one. The world of things, for Berkeley, lost its absolute consistent existence and substantiality. All being, what remained of it, arose directly out of its function—and this was nothing other than the spiritual interconnection and ordering exhibited in sensory images. The collective, transcendent world of objects, to which the perception of the singular subject ought to be related in accordance with that world’s traditional realistic use, could no longer be replaced by the thinking of a spiritualistic community in which the subject made possible its communal relation to a divine originary substance. The world of sensory perceptions was now regarded as a language used by the divine being [Wesen] in order to communicate with finite subjects and to establish a relationship between them.10 Thus Berkeley’s initial psychological critique of language, which extended from his metaphysical standpoint, was at the same time deepened and enriched. If this critique initially appeared as a defi9. [Gesichtswahrnehmungen, literally, in German, the face or look of perception.] 10. See my Erkenntnisproblem, 2nd edition, vol. II, 278ff., 315ff.

·246·

·247·

110

·248·

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

ciency of language—a language that did not attain in its general and abstract significations of words the individual fulfillment and concretion of the content of perception—this content itself was inverted into a richer and deeper language, as a particular symbolic form. All the same, such a presupposition and hypostasization of the concept of language retained a unified appearance in the metaphysics, as Berkeley had practiced it, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, philosophers had been content with the traditional explanation of words as arbitrary signs that had been given to human beings by the Creator for the purpose of mutual understanding and communication or as signs created by human beings by virtue of their natural capacities and development. Even until Herder’s day, an interest that was essentially oriented to one or the other side of this alternative, to the opposition between the hypothesis of a divinely or a humanly created language, endured. The first view was represented by Bishop Warburton’s book on Moses’s divine reception of the law and, in particular, in Germany, in the Academy of Berlin, by Süssmilch. The second view was expressed and justified in the circles of French Enlightenment philosophy, particularly in the philosophies of Condillac and Maupertuis. However, the conflict that had been waged over the origin of language had, at first, left the intuition concerning the goal and content of language untouched. Both parties were limited in that each essentially viewed language as a means by which to denote a given cognitive content that came from the outside, as well as to render audible our inner, self-enclosed ideas [Vorstellungen]. In the foundation for the general characteristic laid down by Leibniz, we admittedly find the point of view not only that language serves for the expression and presentation of a finished world of concepts and ideas [Vorstellungen] but also that language contains a particular power and gift of “inventing”; it not only dismantles and puts together in an analytic fashion the content of consciousness but also expands it in a synthetic way. However, this fruitful idea, which is interconnected with Leibniz’s general tendency, the syllogistic logic through which to complete and enrich a “logica inventionis” [a logic of inventing], remained for the moment without general effect. In particular, it was the sensualist theory of knowledge of English and French Enlightenment philosophy that hindered its acceptance because for it, every givenness, all genuine “consistence” of representation and knowledge, was thought to arise out

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

111

of sensory elements; and everything that can be added by another function, everything that is added from the perspective of logical or linguistic concepts to this constituent element, could only claim, vis-à-vis it, a secondary signification. Here, the signs of language possess no authentic productive force and validity; rather, they serve only as a necessary aid for consciousness, which—and here the sign cannot at the same time oversee and directly grasp the concrete totality [Gesamtheit] of sensorily intuited content—must be content with a hint, with a symbolic abbreviation. The unlimited fullness and variability of the content of representations can only be reproduced through language and kept in accordance with thought because we introduce into sounds specific conventional signs that characterize it. This view of language, which Locke had already introduced in the third book of his Essay, was further elaborated, in particular by Condillac, in the sense of a consequent, psychological sensualism. Every language now appeared merely as a classifying and ordering of given particularities under certain general characteristics through which a determined linguistic sign was fixed and delimited by other signs, one against another. The work and performance of science consisted in nothing other than this process; science naturally and instinctively turned to language in order to raise up a clear consciousness and to establish definite grounding principles. The sciences are simply methodically constructed and structured languages (langues bien faites), languages that do not so much create individual signs for individual objects as create whole systems of signs with determined connections and order. Condillac led not only algebra, and with it the whole of mathematics and mathematical physics, but every form of free intellectual and artistic activity back to such a model of a language of signs. What we call genius in science and art lay only in the force and clarity with which the analysis of the complex content of representations and its determination through characterizing signs could be effected. Thus language appeared in this view as the basic form of the productivity of consciousness; however, this productivity was delimited by the progressive movement of the given whole to dismantle and once again reassemble its parts. It was Herder’s work The Origin of Language (1770) that introduced a deeper consideration of the autonomy and spontaneity of spirit that lay in language. This new turn consisted primarily in the fact that language was no longer understood in the Enlightenment sense as merely a means

·249·

112

·250·

·251·

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

for knowledge; rather, Herder sought to show its signification in the construction of the whole of consciousness, its theoretical as well as its practical basic orientation. Rousseau’s essay Essai sur l’origine des langues [Essay on the Origin of Languages], insofar as it referred to affectivity as the root of all linguistic formation and sought, therefore, to renew the ancient Epicurean theory of the genesis of speech sounds out of natural animal sounds, had already prepared the way for such a turn. However, Rousseau’s general historical writing, which first appeared, after his death, in 1782, had no general historical effect. Here, what Herder distinguished in his theory of the origin of language, that is, what he distinguished from the theory’s historical surroundings and what he extracted from them, is the same element on which the originality and depth of Herder’s perspective is based. Herder’s legacy lies in both his philosophy of history and his philosophy of language in that a new concept of an end, a new direction for teleology, arises from them. Spiritual events are not questioned or valued according to their benefit; rather, there is present in language a pure, inner meaningfulness, an inner appropriate form. There is no external goal that flows out from language; rather, its goal is language’s immanent form insofar as Herder sees the meaning and content of language as the meaning and content of history or art. In this view, language first becomes for him not some mechanical imprint of given determinations of being or of representations but an active energy and a life-form of spirit. Language recalls not just dead being, it exhibits the pure expression of each dynamic of spirit in which the elements of representations as such are first created and their limits are determined over and against one another for us. This dynamic takes its point of departure from affect, feeling, and willing, understood not as the alphabet of a dead grammar but as “passions that ring out”; they are the first signs of speech and word. Insofar as the affect expresses itself in this way, however, it concomitantly grows out of, and even beyond itself, in this very expression. The beginning of naming is at the same time the beginning of a new and deeper mindfulness. Out of the “cry of impressions” language is born; however, each new force of the soul now develops out of it, not simply because language receives a given impression, but because it distinguishes one from another, it chooses and separates. Here, it reaches reflection and deliberateness, and with these it arrives at its first true spiritual concept and self-consciousness. The originary func-

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

113

tion of judgment lies enclosed in the originary function of language, and together they first make possible for us a “world,” understood as an embodiment of fixed, mutually opposed, delimited determinations and figures; and this world that lies over and against an I is a unified center of apprehension and self-mindfulness. Herder’s theory of the essence and origin of language is related at essential points to Hamann’s basic intuition, and in his struggle against Enlightenment philosophy, Herder borrowed many weapons from Hamann’s theory. What nevertheless distinguishes him from this theory, however, is the emphasis with which he insisted on the view of language as an active spiritual energy. For Hamann a symbolic revelation of the divine exhibits itself in the act of linguistic formation and a linguistic understanding that frees itself from the soul in a receptive and passive way. The soul is the mother earth, the rich field (șİȠࠎ ȖİȫȡȖȚȠȞ [the divine earth]) out of which the divine crops sprout and develop.11 If Herder, in full opposition to this view, sees in language the true characteristics and foundations of the self-activation of the human spirit, then the second decisive formative element of his youth, namely, Kantian theory, can unmistakably be said to assert itself. We can understand Herder’s derivation of language as stemming from the Hamannic element of affect and passion, but we can also trace it back to the Kantian element of the power of reflection and prudence. As Herder wrote in 1770 in his prize essay on the origin of language, he stood in principle on the same ground as Kant. There, he considered purely and factually the same intuition and conceptual determination of the “spontaneity” and autonomy of spirit; both thinkers, through similar but somewhat different paths, simultaneously arrived at a shared conclusion. A growing estrangement between Kant and Herder during the following decades led, however, to a full-blown break between the two, and with this, a break in the development of the philosophy of language. That the Critique of Pure Reason hardly mentioned the problem of language undoubtedly contributed to the fact that, from the beginning, Herder felt himself pulled back from it. What appeared to him in the Critique as a living source and a concrete 11. Johann Georg Hamann, Philologische Einfälle und Zweifel über eine akademische Preisschrift, in Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, vol. IV (Berlin: Reimer, 1823) 47. See, Unger, ibid., 171ff.

·252·

114

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHILO S O PHY

originary power of spirit was replaced with an “abstract” theory of categories, a logical schematism. And with a lacuna of a theory of language, Herder saw a lacuna of a theory of history. Insofar as Kant missed the way to an appreciation of language, he had, therefore, missed, according to Herder, the way to the true concept and understanding of living, spiritual development. In this fact, despite so many personal misunderstandings in Herder’s critique of Kant, there lies an unresolved factual conflict. First, Humboldt’s theory of language brought this conflict forward, but it also led this conflict toward its resolution. For the conflict had to go through the schools of Kant and Herder. It was filled and animated by the thinking of dynamic development; it also made an effort to insert itself and appear equal to the rigorous method of critical idealism. Humboldt, therefore, with both these ideal presuppositions and the demands of the multiplicity of empirical materials, as well as the setting out of the wealth of the linguistic, historical facts, first tapped into the inner richness of these facts as the unifying spiritual form by which they were connected. 3 ·253·

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s entire philosophical intuition, which Steinthal designated as “Kantian Spinozism,”12 was generally determined by two different points of view and tendencies. However, this designation and pregnant formulation utterly and completely expressed the opposite of what was fundamental here: neither the systematic nor the historical sides were fully dealt with. For when Humboldt appears to have an affinity with Spinoza, it is certainly never with the original basic shape of Spinozist ethics; rather, it is only with the Spinoza of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the Spinoza that was exhibited in Herder’s “God.” Humboldt saw the human spirit and its development as situated in a dynamic wholly living [All-Leben] nature, and this intuition frequently led him to the threshold of the theory of pan-unity [All-Einheit], and further to Schelling’s metaphysical version of identity-philosophy.13 As soon 12. [Wilhelm von Humboldt, Sprachphilosophische Werke, 14.] 13. On the relation of Humboldt to Schelling, see Paul Hensel, “W. v. Humboldt,” in Kant-Studien XIII, 177ff.

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

115

as he had been dragged to this point, however, he saw himself once again drawn backward. For it was not the intuition of the universe, as Schelling had announced it, but the intuition of the individuality that constituted Humboldt’s particular strength and ingenuity. And here he sought and found the help of Kant. Kant’s critical determination of limits, as well as his own indelible feeling for individuality, prevented him from allowing the consciousness of the I to be sublated into the consciousness of the all. And then he sought, once again, a medium in which both of the opposing elements of his thought moved, reciprocally penetrating and passing into one another, the finite with infinite, the particularity of spiritual being with the universality of a spiritual life and a spiritual signification. He saw this intellectual demand first truly fulfilled in language. The true synthesis and the genuine reconciliation of the great fundamental antagonisms of metaphysics were achieved in it. Spirit, in its pure particularity and full generality, exhibits itself in language as both limited and unlimited, as free and necessary. Here, it first shows itself, according to Humboldt, to be that ideal of a concrete generality with which the whole of post-Kantian speculation wrestles. Here is a generality that cannot be arbitrarily devised from conceptual reflection; rather, language exhibits itself in the individual spiritual development, which is understood as its immanent goal and, at the same time, as its driving spiritual force. “Language,” as Steinthal expresses this relationship, “is, on the one hand, the bond of individuals that binds one to the other with an endless originary force. On the other hand, it is the individuating principle that plunges the originary force into the reality of appearances and historical development.”14 Humboldt’s first scientific linguistic treatment, his “Essay on the Basque Language and Nation,” already sets this point of view at the center of his considerations. Language is, above all, an intermediary, first between infinite and finite nature and, second, between one individual and another: at the same time and through the same act it makes possible a unification, and it arises out of the same act. . . . The consideration of this topic, such that it does not become chimerical (a chimera, understood as the dry, even mechanical undoing of the bodily and 14. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, Sprachphilosophische, in Werke, 14.

·254·

116

·255·

·256·

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHILO S O PHY

constructible, must have its origin here), leads, in the end, to the depths of humanity. We must free ourselves completely detached from the idea [Idee] that language can be separated from that which it designates, for example, the name of an individual from the person. Likewise, language is not an arranged numbering, a product of reflection and its agreement, or, generally, the work of human beings (as one seizes a concept through experience) or the work of an individual. Like a true inexplicable wonder, it breaks out of the mouths of a nation, and it is no less astonishing when, coming out of the babbling of the child, it is daily repeated and overlooked with indifference [ . . . ] as it is the clearest trace and the surest proof that human beings do not possess in themselves an isolated individuality, that I and you are not merely reciprocally demanding; rather, if we could turn back to the point of separation between I and you, we would find that they are truly identical concepts, and so there are, in this sense, spheres of individuality, from weak, infirm individuals in need of assistance, to the sphere of the ancient roots of humanity, because otherwise all understanding from the beginning until now would have been impossible.15 This first determination of language, given by Humboldt, admittedly appears to belong, once again, to the whole way of considering and thinking that is peculiar to dogmatic metaphysics. The logos, which is effective in language, serves as the point of departure and the means for excluding a lost transcendent originary unity that lies beyond all empirical separations. Language was called forth as witness of the pantheistic view of the world and spirit. However, Humboldt did not remain attached to this first intuition; rather, he configured it according to the standard of Kant’s new critical concept of the object [Objekt], as he understood it. What characterizes this concept of the object [Objekt] is, above all, the insight that an object [Objekt] of knowledge can only really be spoken of in terms of its interconnection with a function of knowledge and correlative to it. The object is an object of knowledge [Wissen]; it is not determined “in itself ” as an object of appearance, rather its determination successively grows through the productivity of spirit. The di15. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Sprachphilososphie, Schriften (Steinthal), 18.

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

117

rection of this productivity—the categories that are determining and actual in this work of spirit—results first in a new, transcendental concept of objectivity. And, according to Kant, it is, in the end, a single originary function that lets itself be integrated into this whole work. All grasping, all determination of an objectivity as such is grounded by the synthesis of judgment. The unity and the necessary connection of the manifold that we have in mind here when we speak about an “object of representations,” return to the logical “unity of action,” which is fulfilled in judgment. By virtue of the different forms of judgment, by virtue of the judgment of quantity, quality, relation, the representation first truly obtains generality and necessity and is thereby moved out into the sphere of “being,” into the domain of objectivity. At this point, the critical theory of knowledge grasps Humboldt’s new turn in the philosophy of language. What is here described by Kant as the achievement of judgment, Humboldt made possible in the concrete life of spirit only through the mediating achievement of language. Objectification in thought must come about through objectification in the sounds of language. This was the foundational conviction that settled in Humboldt the more he became at home in the world of language with respect to logic and the theory of knowledge, but also with respect to all domains of spirit. “Fundamentally, what completely drives me,” he wrote to Wolf in 1805, “is the study of language. I believe I have uncovered the art of how to use language as a vehicle to work us through the deepest and highest manifold of the whole world.”16 What is also remarkable is that Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the vehicle for his theory of knowledge, occasionally relied on notions of language at certain important and meaningful points. Where he speaks of the decisive achievement of judgment in the process of objectivation, he points to the function of the sentence and the copula in the phrase as examples. Through the copula in the sentence, through that “little relational-word [Verhältniswörtchen] ‘is,’” not only are the subject and the predicate externally joined, they are also set in a relation of objective, necessary unity and objective, necessary connection. When I say “the body is weighty,” the content does not lie in this proposition because the representation of the body and a determined feeling of 16. [Wilhelm von Humboldt, Brief an Friedrich August Wolf vom 16. Juni 1804, in Werke, vol. V (Berlin, 1846), 266f.]

·257·

118

·258·

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHILO S O PHY

touch and muscles, which I designate as “weightiness,” are only subjective, only found together in me, and only here and now in a singular instant; rather, both belong to one another according to a general law, because weight is somehow grounded in the “nature” of the body.17 Here as well, Kant immediately thinks of an individual linguistic appearance, a determined linguistic form as the means of a categorical form, as the expression of a logical, factual significative relationship. The method of Humboldt’s philosophy of language is found in the fact that he not only expands and deepens this process, that he not only transfers it onto the whole of the linguistic phenomenon, but also seeks to creatively account for its foundations and its possibility. For Humboldt, as for Kant, the concept of synthesis becomes a genuine, central, and motivating concept; synthesis is not a connection that takes place between ready and given objects, rather it is the basic condition of objective positing, of the positing of something as an object. He finds this property to be particularly well defined and clear in language. For it is, in a single word and in the connected speech, an act, a truly creative action of the spirit. Concepts and sounds are set out as words and as speech, and in this way, between the external world and the mind, something that is distinguished from both is created.18 Language gives rise to subjectivity, even to the individuality of discursiveness; however, on the other hand, the subjectivity of all humanity certainly becomes objectified in it. “The original agreement between the world and humans in which the possibility of all knowledge of truth lies is also further obtained piece by piece and progressively by means of appearance. For the objective remains always to be authentically gained.”19 This is the thought through which Humboldt remains firmly and enduringly connected to the foundation of critical idealism: for the objective is not given, rather it must first be produced. It is not that which is determined in itself but that which has to be determined. Because this fundamental determination, seen from a linguistic point of view, is com17. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edition, B142. 18. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 211. 19. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, vol. III, 20. For a comparable study of language in relation to the different epochs of the development of language, see Werke, Steinthal, 61.

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

119

pleted in the sentence, Humboldt’s philosophy of language claims primacy of the sentence over the word, just as Kant’s transcendental logic claims primacy of judgment over the concept. The sentence, not the word, is the primary linguistic utterance; there again, every incomplete proposition, from the perspective of speaking, actually amounts to a closed thought. The analysis and characteristics of individual languages, as well as language itself, emanate from it and its idiosyncratic structure.20 “We can think it impossible for language to begin with the designation of objects by words and these words then being placed together. In reality, speech is not composed out of words set next to each other; rather, words inversely come out from the whole of speech.”21 It is this later reflection that dismantles, that tears asunder this unity of meaning, which is vividly and immediately exhibited in the sentence, into grammatically separated elements and word unities.22 What the unity of the sentence marks, however, is not some meaning already given and fixed as a mere imprint in the consciousness of the speaker; rather, it is to be thought of as a means and vehicle for the bestowal of meaning itself, as a process in which spiritual signification itself becomes and emerges. And so we have reached Humboldt’s most well-known and famous, albeit hardly fully appreciated, conceptual determination of language. Language is to be seen not as a dead product but more amply as a production. We must abstract further and more deeply from those words that have an effect as the designation of objects and the intermediary of understanding, and against this, we must carefully return to the inner activity of spirit, to language’s tightly interwoven origin and its reciprocal influence. Just as language is itself not work [Werk] (ergon) but an activity (energeia), so too can its true definition, which stands before us as the externally repeating work [Arbeit] of spirit, not its ready and final product, only be genetic. This genesis, however, is itself to be understood not psychologically but transcendentally. And this is not about those psychic elements of the formation 20. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, vol. III, 528. See Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk in Werke, vol. VII, 143. 21. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, vol. III, 448. Ibid., vol. VII, 72. 22. Concerning this position of the sentence, see Moritz Scheinert, “Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Sprachphilosophie,” in Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, vol. XIII (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1908), 163.

·259·

120

·260·

·261·

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHILO S O PHY

[Gebilde] we call language that arise chronologically; rather, we are seeking the position of language in the cosmos of spirit, to grasp its signification for the construction of subjective and objective reality as well as the separation of these realities between them. Just as Kant demonstrated the basic logical categories in which the possibility of “inner” and “outer” experience, the possibility of the consciousness of objects and the consciousness of the I, are to be found, Humboldt likewise sought the same goal for basic linguistic forms. These forms are not copies of a tangible objectively presence and repeatable representation; rather, they are organs and ways of intellectual consideration and forming. And just as the entire character of language, understood in its proper sense, lies only in the act of its actual bringing forth, so is this also the case for its individuations, its particulars. Languages, on the whole and individually, are not genuine means to present an already recognized truth but are more for uncovering an as yet recognized truth. “Their difference is not one of sounds and signs but a difference of worldviews. Herein is contained the foundation and the ultimate purpose of all linguistic investigations.”23 The idea, however, “that different languages only denote the same autonomous mass of objectively present objects and concepts is genuinely pernicious for the study of language—it is the very same idea which hinders the expansion of knowledge of language and makes the objectively present objects dead and unproductive.”24 Every language, insofar as it is not a dead form of being but seeks to be a life-form, insofar as it is not in itself a merely tangible, consistent existence but expresses the activity and energy of spirit, is necessarily mixed in with subjectivity. This subjectivity, however, sets itself on the way to lifting itself up to generality and passing into the objective, that is, as lawfully determined. In the foreword to his work on the Kawi Humboldt writes: Even when considering the products of language, the view of language as a mode of representation, as merely designating objects perceived in themselves, is not confirmed. One could never, moreover, through this view, exhaust the full and deep content of lan23. Concerning this very study of language, see Steinthal, 60. 24. Steinthal, “Handschrift über die Kawi-Sprache,” 152ff.

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

121

guage. Just as no concept is possible without language, so, too, can there be no object for the soul, for it is through the mediation of the concept that the external receives its full essential being [Wesenheit]. The entire manner of the subjective perception of objects necessarily pass through the formation and use of language. For the word that originates out of this perception is not an imprint of the object in itself but an image of the object as it is produced from this in the soul. Here, every objective perception is inevitably mixed with subjectivity, and so we can consider, already independent of language, every human individuality as a unique position of the worldview. It becomes even more, however, through language; here, the word stands over and against the soul . . . and further creates an opposition between standing over and against self-meaning and object, and brings to the fore a new particularity. . . . Just as the individual sound enters between the object and the human being, so the whole of language enters between the human being and the internal and external nature acting on him. The human being is surrounded by a world of sounds in order to assimilate and process a world of objects. These expressions do not exceed in any way the standard of ordinary truth. The human being primarily lives with objects, indeed, sensations and action in him depend on his ideas [Vorstellungen], even exclusively so, as language supplies them to him. On the other hand, however, the idea that the soul and the object are both in language and formed by language exerts a strange effect on the soul. And here the opposite view now arises: language is an autonomous and objective influence to the degree that it is dependent upon being subjectively worked. It is directly in action that its production lies, just as it makes its object again. The true solution to this opposition, however, lies in the unity of human nature. Whatever stems from it, what is authentically one with me, there the concepts of subject and object, of dependency and nondependency, pass over and into one another. Language belongs to me because I bring it forth as I do; and as the ground of this lies both in speaking and in the having-spoken of all humanity . . . so it is with language that I experience a limitation. Everything in it that limits and determines me stems from human nature that is internally co-

·262·

122

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHILO S O PHY

herent with my own; and whatever is foreign stems from my momentary, individual nature and not from my real true nature.25

·263·

Furthermore, in this view, the full validity of Humboldt’s new critical concept of objectivity becomes clear. True spiritual objectivity joins neither one of us independent beings nor only the being that is produced by us; rather, it roots itself in the mode and the generally valid lawfulness of production itself. In this lawfulness of synthesis, understood as an all-encompassing principle, both elements of the opposition come to be with one blow, the world of the subjective and the objective is created. Spirit creates, but the created thing is placed over and against spirit by means of the same act, and the thing lets itself be affected as an object [Objekt].26 Here, language is recognized as creation, but it is freed at the same time from every subjective arbitrariness, an understanding similar to the perspectives on the discovery of language that dominated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Language is no longer a product of reflection and convention, even though it is a work of freedom; rather, it is the product of a freedom that gives itself laws and at the same time creates the sphere of necessity as its counterimage and correlate. In the end, for Humboldt, all of these determinations are ultimately contained in the complex and highly controversial concept of the “inner form of language.” This form corresponds to Humboldt’s new concept of objectivity, an objectivity that in no way expresses that which is tangible but rather a purely functional property and determination. In the work of spirit, laying down of consistency and uniformity raises the articulated sound to the expression of thought; when grasped and systematically presented as thoroughly as possible in its interconnection this accounts, according to Humboldt, for the form of language. This not only reveals itself in the general structure, in what we call the grammatical construction of language, but arises as well in the individual particularities of designation, which are at the same time particularities of apprehension. The result obtained up to now is the same as that achieved through the outer, the corporal, through the senses or perceivable objects; the word is not equivalent to the meaning of the object that 25. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 59ff. 26. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 213.

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

123

one has in mind; rather, it is the apprehension of the very same thing through the production of language. “[I]f in Sanskrit, for example, the elephant is now called the twice-drinking one, now the two-toothed one, and now the one with a single hand, as many different concepts are thereby designated, though always the same object is meant. For language never presents the objects, but always the concepts that spirit has spontaneously formed from them in producing language; and this formation under discussion here, insofar as it must be seen as entirely internal and as preceding, as it were, the sense of articulation.”27 Thus the concept of the inner form of language obtains for the domain of the philosophy of language what the general concept of form achieved for the critical theory of knowledge. The concept of inner form presents the final clearing away of theories of mere imitation and copy in that it allows a type of determination of objects that is dependent upon its being grasped and grounded in thought. Again, and in another sense, we can see an analogy between the application of the concepts of “matter” and “form” in the work of Kant and Humboldt. For Kant, form is merely an expression of a relationship, but it gives rise at the same time to the authentic objectivating principle: for even this designated object [Objekt], in the critical sense, designates the “object in the appearance” that it “composes entirely in relationship.” The sensory impression as such, and the sum of such impressions, constitute only an undetermined object; true determination, the configuration of the object, first takes place through categorical forming, especially through the categories of relation [Relation], understood as the foundational concept of relationship, the “analogies of experience.” We can anticipate that this logical state of affairs will also be found in the structure of language, in its constancy and its correlative expression. And in this fact, says Humboldt, we see in all truly and thoroughly structured languages the separation of matter and form, the complete separation of the thing-component and the relation-component [Relationsbestandteil ], and we also see how both are grasped together in a pure unity. To the acts of designating concepts by a plurality of content- and object-characteristics, language’s own labor is added, through which it is

27. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 89ff.

·264·

124

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHILO S O PHY

transferred into a determined category of thinking or speech ( just like, for example, a determined substance or property). The full meaning of words arises at the same time out of each expression of the concept and this modifying indication.

·265·

These two elements, however, lie in entirely different spheres. The designation of the concept belongs more to the objective process of the meaning of language. The transfer of these senses into a determined category of thinking is a new act of linguistic selfconsciousness through which the singular case, the individual word, becomes related to the whole of possible cases in language or speech. It is through this incorporation of the singular into the whole that this operation binds itself, with complete purity and depth, to this same language in a meaningful fusion and subordination, its autonomous, arising-in-thought, more-than-external impressions rising in pure receptivity consequent to activity.28 As for Kant, for Humboldt matter refers back to the receptivity of the senses, and form refers back to the pure spontaneity of thinking. Likewise, form does not preexist in the object [Objekt] (as the “thing in itself ”); rather, it must “be performed by the subject,” but this performance takes place according to a generally valid rule and possesses form according to its ideality at the same time as signification is being realized. Insofar as the individual content, by virtue of the linguistic endowing of form, is not indicated as such but rather is related to the whole of possible content and becomes characterized according to its position in the whole, it is completely determined in this relation primarily according to its objective content by the unity of the thinking of self-consciousness. According to Humboldt, herein lies as such the perfection of designation and language, because both determinations and their external expression are not separated; rather, as they are made out of one and the same factual act of thinking, they are established as one and as phonetically complete. 28. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 109. See also vol. VII, 287. “The true affix is indicated through the use of sound in the unity of the word, without which nothing material is added, since it is transferred into a determined category from the meaningful part of a word.”

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

125

He sees this ideal of language achieved above all in inflexive languages. For inflection should not be confused with the mere mechanical addition of the form-component to material-component, of the expression of relation to the expression of signification; rather, a pure synthesis of both, a reciprocal determination between them is exhibited. Inflection distinguishes between signification and relation only insofar as both are joined in a linguistic whole, in a unity of words, and lying therein, they fulfill the authentic purpose of language, which is to eternally separate and bind.29 “The inflected word is nevertheless one through structuration, just as the various parts of a budding flower are one, and what arises in language is pure organic nature.”30 As we can see, Humboldt made the basic mistake that the critical theory of knowledge further compounded; he supposed that an autonomous “form,” with its very own underlying matter, became joined and occluded afterward—the form was never part of the matter. In individual inflexive languages, he saw the material components of signification in the verbal roots of stems, understood in the original, self-enclosed pronominal sense, as well as in the formal expression of relation in endings. The verb is the seed from which all intuition of an “objective” event unfolds. The particularization of the world, understood as a particularization of activities and energies, is expressed and established in it. These verbal material roots are, however, of a descriptive or narrative nature, because they designate movements, properties, and objects in themselves, without any relation to a presumable or felt personality; these verbal roots stand over and against other elements of language by which they directly turn out the expression of a personality or a simple relation to the same and exceptional essence of signification.31 In his treatise “On the Relation of Adverbs of Place with Pronouns in Certain Languages,”32 Humboldt tried to show that these subjective roots must originally exist in every language, and that it was a completely incorrect idea to view the pronoun as the 29. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 263; see also vol. VII, 125. 30. Ibid., 113. 31. Ibid., 103. 32. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, vol. III, 483. [Here, Cassirer is referring to the treatise of 1829 and to that of 1827 concerning Dualis. In the following citation, however, he provides further text from vol. III, 483.]

·266·

·267·

126

·268·

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

later part of speech in language. Here, we have a narrowly grammatical type of idea, according to which the pronoun ought only to signify the idea of the noun that more profoundly suppresses the view of language as created. “There is naturally the personality of the speaker himself, who is constantly and immediately in contact with nature, and whom it is impossible to exempt; this personality also contrasts in language with the expression of his I. However, in the I itself, the you is also given, and through a new opposition there arises a third person. Here, now, the realm of feeling and speaking, including dead things, is left behind.” Just as the critical theory of knowledge sought to establish the logical-priority of form over matter, the pure relation over the being of tangible-substance, so, too, Humboldt sought to demonstrate how language follows this path from inner to outer, from relation to being. However, Humboldt’s account basically treats language as only the ʌȡȩIJİȡȠȞIJ߲ijȪıİȚ [first according to nature], and not as ʌȡȩIJİȡȠȞʌȡާȢ‫ݘ‬ȝߢȢ [what is first for us]— that is, as a factual distinction of validity in the individual elements in which all linguistic formation lies, not as the determination of the order of its separated, temporal emergence. For the objective roots, especially, cannot be viewed as real, existing elements of language in themselves; rather, they clearly bear the mark of having been produced through analysis; true language, however, is only revealed through speech, and the actual discovery of language does not let itself be thought as containing enduring elements—the analysis is pursued downward.33 Even in the details of Humboldt’s theory of language, the dominant position asserts itself: on the one hand, he describes the verb as the bearer of objective signification, and on the other hand, he describes pronouns as the expression of a subjective relation. The verb speaks “the act of synthetic positing,” in which the spiritual property of language resides in its clearest and most powerful way. It designates and contains at once this act in both its pure impression and its being freed from all accidental circumstances. The verb sharply distinguishes itself from nouns and the other components of speech because to it alone is given the act of synthetic positing, understood as a grammatical function. All remaining

33. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, vol. VII, 105.

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

127

words of sentences are dead, lying inert between the matter they join. The verb alone is the life-containing and life-preparing center. Through one and the same synthetic act, the predicate, through being, is joined together with the subject; this is only the case because being, which crosses over into an act with an actualizing predicate, insofar as it is thought of as being capable of being joined as such to the general state or occurrence, becomes in reality. One does not merely think a lightning strike; rather, the lightning bolt is as it travels downward. One does not merely bring together, as capable of being joined, spirit and the immortal; rather, spirit is immortal. Thinking, if we can speak of it in meaningful terms, leaves, through the verb, its inner dwelling and crosses over into reality.34 For, according to one of Humboldt’s intuitions, which he took up from the theory of Bernhardis and the Englishman Harris, but which he also reshaped and further developed according to his own particular intuition, two different fundamental acts bind themselves together in the verb.35 Pure relational positing is united with existential positing. Not only is the predicate erected by the subject, the subject itself is established in reality through the form of the enclosure of the two; it asserts itself as a being and not merely as something thought or imagined. This basic determination of being is present in every verbal expression. If I say the tree blooms, I therefore say at the same time of the blooming tree that it is a determined object with a determined property. So the verb is the combination [Zusammenfassen] of something energizing and activating, not merely something quantitative, or a standing attribute given by being or by the capacity of the category of being, which here is proven and guaranteed in its immediate and not only logical but also the force of linguistic forming. Specifically, Humboldt refers to Bopps’s evidence that in Sanskrit the first development of the forms of the future and past 34. Ibid., 214. 35. As obtained by August Friedrich Pott, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Sprachwissenschaft, vol. II (Berlin, 1880), cciiff., and by M. Scheinert, reference above, 184ff. See also the Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 223.

·269·

128

K A NTIA N ELE ME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

tenses were composed from the root word and verb ás (“to be”).36 Here, Humboldt’s theory of language is joined anew to a characteristic feature of the Kantian theory of judgment. The core and the authentic achievement of judgments lie not, according to Kant, in the merely given content of representations that is analytically dismantled; neither are judgments to be merely psychologically understood in the sense of a simple mechanism of association, by which representations are joined with one another. What judgment creates is more a new integrity of cognition—a form of being and objective validity that confronts mere existence and the mere flowing of representations in subjective consciousness. Humboldt locates this act of “self-enactive positing,” above all, in language. And on the strength of this positing, so he emphasizes, a determined language through all periods depends on the whole of psychic life.37 Herein it is asserted anew that no kind of genus of representations can be considered as the mere received consciousness of an already objectively present object. ·270·

The activity of senses must synthetically combine with the inner action of spirit, and from this combination the representations break free; it becomes over and against the subjective force an object [Objekt] and perceived as such anew, turning back to its source. Language is, however, indispensable for this. For spiritual striving breaks through making its path through the lips in speech, its product returns to the ear of the subject. The representation is transferred to actual objectivity, without being deprived of subjectivity. This language alone can do. Without this transposition into an objectivity that returns to the subject, a transposition in which language plays a role and which always happens implicitly, the formation of the concept, and, hence, all true thinking, is impossible.38 In these most pregnant sentences, which clarify from all sides the content and tendencies of Humboldt’s philosophy and science of language, we see once again what fundamentally binds Humboldt to Kant. The 36. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, vol. III, 218. 37. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, vol. VII, 213. 38. Ibid., 55.

KA NTIA N ELEME NTS IN HUMBO LD T’S PHI LO S O PHY

129

dogmatic view of the world dismantles being into two separate and rigorously, mutually opposed spheres: idea [Vorstellung] and object, consciousness and actuality, the I-world and the world of things. The more sharply these spheres are separated and opposed to one another, implicating and making the problem more difficult, the more necessary becomes a bridge between the two spheres, a mediation, an ideal interconnection or a real reciprocal effect. The Critique of Pure Reason demonstrates with methodological rigor and systematic completeness the irresolvable nature of the problem; it shows its inner antinomic characteristic. At the same time, however, with this negative verdict it sets out a new positive concept of subjectivity and objectivity and even a new question. The world of the subject and objects [Objekte] no longer stands as two opposing halves of one absolute being; rather, being constitutes one and the same realm of spiritual functions through which we obtain the content of both, their separation and their reciprocal connection. This abstract result was introduced by Humboldt, through the mediation of language in the concrete consideration of the spiritual life. Language, too, remains an inconceivable wonder so long as we remain with the traditional metaphysical separation of consciousness from the elements of the world, so long as we remain with the separation of being into merely “inner” and “outer.” Language first becomes clarified when we let this dynamic opposition become a position of gazing at the oppositions of being, when we penetrate back from beings that merely exist and are affected by the foundational form of actualization itself, from ergon [work] to energeia [act]. Now it can be shown that subjectivity, the freedom and autonomy of spiritual doing, lies in the objectivity and necessity of all spiritual work, and also in language, understood as the long-standing and irremovable unity of creation and work.

·271·

Language and Myth: A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of the Gods (1924)

To my beloved father-in-law OTTO BONDY

for his eightieth birthday October 3, 1924 1 ·73·

The beginning of Plato’s Phaedrus depicts how Socrates is lured into conversation by Phaedrus, whom he encounters outside the gates of the city on the banks of the Ilissus. The landscape that Plato lays out in this scene is depicted in the finest detail—this presentation emits a radiance and fragrance that we rarely see in the usual classical portrayals of nature. Socrates and Phaedrus sit down under the shade of a tall plane tree, at the edge of a cool spring; the summer breeze is mild and sweet and filled with the chirping of cicadas. In this setting, Phaedrus asks whether this was not the place where, according to myth, Boreas kidnapped Orithyia, for the water is agreeably pure, transparent, and thus fitting for young girls to play in. However, concerning the additional [First published as “Sprache und Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternnamen,” Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 6 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1925). Translated from Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt, 1994), 71–158. Original English translation: Language and Myth, tr. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953).] 130

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

131

question as to whether he holds this story or this “mythologemen” to be true, Socrates replies that, even if he does not precisely believe it, he would not be embarrassed to do so. For then I could proceed as do the learned and say by way of clever interpretation (ıȠijȚȗȩȝİȞȠȢ), that Orithyia, while playing with her companion Pharmacia, had been borne over those far away cliffs by Boreas the Northwind, and because of this manner of her death she was said to have been carried off by the god Boreas. . . . But I for my part, Phaedrus, continues Socrates, find that sort of thing petty enough and consider such interpretations rather an artificial and tedious business, and do not envy him who indulges in it. For he will necessarily have to account for the figures of the centaurs and the chimera, too, and will find himself overwhelmed by a very multitude of such creatures, Gorgons and Pegasuses and countless other strange monsters. And whoever discredits all these wonderful beings and tackles them with the intention of reducing each of them to some probability will have to devote a great deal of time to this unseemly sort of wisdom. But I have no leisure at all for such pastimes, and the reason, my dear friend, is that as yet I cannot, as the Delphic precept has it, know myself. So it seems absurd to me that, so long as I am ignorant of myself, I should concern myself with strange and foreign things. Therefore, I let all such things be as they may, and think not of them, but of myself whether I be, indeed, a creature more complex and monstrous than Typhon, or whether perchance I be a gentler and simpler animal, whose nature contains a divine and noble essence. (Phaedrus 229 Dff.) If Plato described in this way the interpretation of myth, which was considered by the Sophists and rhetoricians of his time to be the expression of the highest learning and the blossom of an authentic urbane spirit, as the opposite of this spirit, if he saw in it only a “farmer’s wisdom” (ܿȖȡȠȚțȠȢıȠijȓĮ), this judgment did not, of course, prevent the following centuries from repeatedly taking pleasure in this wisdom. Like the Sophists and rhetoricians of Plato’s time, the Stoics and Neo-Platonists of the Hellenistic period especially contented themselves in it. And, time and again, linguistic research and etymology have been used as vehicles for

·74·

132

·75·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

it. Here, in the empire of phantom-figures and dæmons, as in the area of advanced mythology, the Faustian word seemed to prove itself again and again: here, one believed that the essence of each individual mythical figure could be immediately gleaned from its name. That the name and the essence stand in an internally necessary relationship to one another, that the name not only designates the essence but is the essence itself and that the force of the essence lies enclosed in it—this belongs to the fundamental presupposition of mythical intuition itself. It appeared that philosophical and scientific research into myths was also willing to assume this presupposition. What is still lived as immediate intuition and conviction in myth is itself turned into a postulate of reflective thought; the inside of this circle, the affinity between things [Sache] and names and the latent identity of both, is raised to the requirement of method. In the course of the history of research into myth and in the history of philology and linguistics, this method has undergone a progressive deepening and refinement. It has developed from the crude instrument it was in the hands of the Sophists, and from the naïve etymologies of antiquity and the Middle Ages, to possess the philological rigor and the force and expanse of intellectual survey that we admire in the master of today’s classical philology. We need only consult Usener’s foundational work on the “names of the gods” to see this. Here, especially when he compares the ironic and exaggerated uses of the Platonic name “Cratylus,” albeit always according to a model of true “explanations,” we clearly see how far we have come in using this intellectual attitude and tool. But even the nineteenth century knows theories about the relationship between language and myth that unmistakably remind us of the old methods of the Greek Sophists. Among the philosophers, it was Herbert Spencer who sought to carry out the thesis that the mythico-religious veneration of the general appearances of nature, such as the sun and the moon, had its ultimate ground in nothing other than a misinterpretation of the names of these appearances. And among the linguists, Max Müller not only used etymological analysis as a means of illuminating the nature of certain mythical figures, especially in the context of Vedic religion, but also connected it to a general theory of the relationship between language and myth. For him, mythology is neither history transformed into fable nor fable transformed into history; nor does it emerge directly from the intuition of nature and its great figures and forces. In fact, everything

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

133

that we name as myth is conditioned and mediated by language in the sense that it is interconnected to the basic lack or original weaknesses of language. All linguistic designation is necessarily ambiguous—and the source and origin of all myth is to be sought in this ambiguity, in this “paronymia” of words. Characteristic of this view are the particular examples employed by Max Müller. We think, for instance, of the saga of Deucalion and Pyrrha: after Zeus rescued them from the great flood that destroyed the human race, they became the ancestors of a new race by taking up stones and casting them over their shoulders to form human beings. This emergence of the human being out of stone is quite simply unintelligible and appears to defy any interpretation. Does it not, however, immediately become comprehensible if one remembers that, in Greek, human beings and stones are denoted by identical or at least similar-sounding names, that the words ȜĮȠȓ [people] and ȜߢĮȢ [stone] are reminiscent of each other? Or take the myth of Daphne, who, transformed by her mother, the earth, into a laurel tree, was rescued from persecution by Apollo. Again, only the history of language can make this myth “intelligible” and give it a clear meaning. Who was Daphne? In order to answer this question, we must seek refuge in etymology or, in other words, we must explore the history of the word. Daphne can be traced back to the Sanskrit Ahanâ, which signifies in Sanskrit the redness of morning. As soon as we know this, everything becomes clear. The history of Phoebus and Daphne is nothing other than a description of what we see every day: first, the appearance of redness in the eastern sky, then the rising of the sun-god who hastens after his bride, the moon, then, with the touch of fiery sunbeams, the gradual fading of the morning redness, and, finally, the sun-god’s death or disappearance into the bosom of its mother, the earth. Thus, it was not the appearance of nature itself that was crucial for the development of the myth; rather, the Greek word for laurel (įȐijȞȘ) and the Sanskrit word for morning redness are interconnected, and thus lead with an inescapable necessity to the identification of the figures they designate. This is, therefore, the conclusion to which Max Müller is led: Mythology is inevitable, it is an inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the external form and manifestation of thought. [I]t is in fact the dark shadow that language throws upon

·76·

134

·77·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

thought and which can never disappear so long as language has not become entirely commensurate with thought, which can never be the case. Mythology, no doubt, breaks out more fiercely during the early periods of the history of human thought, but it never disappears altogether. There is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth. . . . Mythology, in the highest sense of the word, is the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity.1 It might appear idle to revert to intuitions that have long been abandoned by contemporary linguistic and research into comparative mythology, if they did not display a typical attitude that continually recurs in all of these domains—in the theory of myth as well as in the theory of language, in the theory of art as well as in the theory of knowledge. For Max Müller, the mythical world is essentially a world of semblance— a semblance, however, that is explained once it is shown that it arises from the initial and necessary self-deception of the mind. This self-deception is grounded in language, which constantly plays a game with the mind, which always entangles the mind anew in that iridescent ambiguity that is its legacy. And this intuition that myth is founded not on a positive force of configuring and forming but on a type of affliction of the mind, that we must see in myth a “disease” required by language, still finds representatives and advocates in modern ethnographical literature.2 In truth, if we actually attempt to trace it back to its philosophical roots, this view is really nothing other than a necessary consequence of that naïve realism for which the reality of things is something essentially and unambiguously given and which can be directly grasped with the hands, ܻȡ‫ޥ‬ȟIJĮ߿ȞȤİȡȠ߿Ȟ,3 as Plato says. If we grasp reality [Wirklichkeit] in this way, then everything that does not possess this substantial reality [Realität] necessarily changes into deception and semblance. This semblance may be ever so finely spun, 1. Friedrich Max Müller, “The Philosophy of Mythology,” appended to Introduction to the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, 1873), 353–55. 2. E.g., Daniel Garrison Brinton, Religions of Primitive People, 1897 (American Lectures on the History of Religions, vol. 2), 115ff. 3. [Plato, Thaetetus 155 E.]

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

135

and it may flit around us with colorful and appealing images; however, the fact remains that the image possesses no independent content, no intrinsic signification of its own. A reality is mirrored in it, but it is a reality that does not arise in the appearance, that it can never adequately portray. Thus, from this point of view, all artistic configuring is considered as a reproduction that necessarily always falls short of the original. Not only the simple imitation of a sensuously given model but everything that one designates as idealization, manner, or style, succumbs in the end to this verdict: for measured by the simple “truth” of what is to be presented, the idealization is itself nothing more than a subjective deformation and disfigurement. Accordingly, all other processes of spiritual forming also would seem to signify a similar violent distortion, the same secession from the essence of objective reality and the immediate reality of lived-experience. For spiritual processes never grasp reality itself; rather, in order to present it, in order to be able to hold on to it in some way, they must take refuge in signs and symbols. The curse of mediation, however, adheres to every sign: it must veil where it wants to reveal. Thus, the sound of language wants to “express” in some way objective and subjective events, the “inner” as well as the “outer” world. What language retains of this, however, is not the life and individual fullness of existence but only a dead abbreviation. Every “signification” [Bedeutung] that the sound can claim for itself can never go beyond mere “indication” [Andeutung]—an indication that must appear as impoverished and empty with respect to the concrete manifoldness and concrete totality of actual intuition. This holds for the world of objects as well as for the world of the I: “When speaks the soul, alas, the soul already no longer speaks!”4 From this point, we are only one step away from the conclusion that the modern skeptical critic of language has drawn, namely, the total dissolution of the alleged truth-content of language and the insight that nothing more than a type of phantasmagoria of the spirit is presented in it. And seen from this point of view, not only myth, art, and language but, in the end, theoretical knowledge itself become a phantasmagoria. For, the latter, too, is never able simply to mirror the pure essence of things but must grasp this essence in “concepts.” However, are concepts 4. [Friedrich Schiller, Sprache, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Richard Fester and Eduard von der Hellen (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1904), vol. I, 149.]

·78·

136

·79·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

something other than the formations and creations of thought, which, instead of giving the pure form of the object, only enclose the form of thought upon itself ? Accordingly, all schemata of theoretical thought by means of which the reality of appearances are examined, structured, and surveyed are, therefore, in the end, nothing but mere silhouettes— an airy web of spirit, in which it is not so much the nature of things as theoretical thought’s own nature that is expressed. Thus, has knowledge [Wissen], like myth, language, and art, also become a type of fiction—a fiction which recommends itself through its practical usefulness, but to which we may not apply the strict measure of truth, if it ought not to melt immediately into nothingness. In the end, there is only one remedy against this self-dissolution of spirit: we must take seriously the turn that Kant calls the “Copernican Revolution.” Instead of measuring the content, meaning, and truth of spiritual forms by something other than what is reflected in them, we must discover in these very forms the measure and criterion of their truth, their intrinsic significance. Instead of understanding [verstehen] them as mere after-images, we must recognize in each one of them a spontaneous rule of production, an original way and direction of configuring that is more than the mere imprint of something given to us from the beginning in fixed configuration of being. Considered from this point of view, myth, art, language, and knowledge become symbols, not in the sense that they designate, by means of a suggestive [hindeutend] and interpretative [ausdeutend] allegory, an objectively present reality in the form of images, but in the sense that each one of them creates its own world of meaning and has emerged out of them. In these [symbolic forms], the self-development of spirit is exhibited, by virtue of which alone there is a “reality,” a determined and structured existence [Sein]. Individual symbolic forms are not imitations of this reality but organs of it, as it is only through them that reality is rendered into the object of spiritual vision and so is able to become visible as such. The question as to what beings in themselves are beyond these forms of visibility and the making of visibility and how they may be obtained, this question must now be silenced. For only what presents itself in a definite configuration is visible for spirit; each definite figure of being first has its source in a definite mode and way of seeing, in an ideal giving of form and bestowing of meaning. Once language, myth, art, and knowledge are recognized to be such ideal

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

137

modes of bestowing meaning, then the basic philosophical problem is no longer how they relate to absolute existence [Sein], which stands, as it were, behind them as an unfathomable substantial core, but how they mutually complement and support each other. Although they all work together as organs in the construction of spiritual reality, each of these organs nevertheless has its own function and performance. And the task now arises not merely to describe these performances in their simple proximity to one another but to understand them in their mutual penetration of one another, to comprehend them in their relative dependence as well as in their relative autonomy. Here, the relationship between language and myth appears at once in a new light. It is no longer a matter of simply deriving one of these forms from the other and clearly “explaining” the one in terms of the other, for this type of explanation would result in a leveling down, a sublation of their particular contents. If myth is, as Max Müller’s theory has it, nothing more than the dark shadow that language throws upon thought, then it is difficult to understand [verstehen] how this shadow repeatedly changes with the semblance of its own light, how it can develop a thoroughly positive life and an effectiveness behind which that which we are in the habit of naming the immediate reality of things, the fullness of empirically given sensuous existence, resides. Concerning language, Wilhelm von Humboldt has remarked: “The human being primarily lives with objects; indeed, sensations and actions in him depend on his ideas [Vorstellungen], even exclusively so, as language supplies them to him. Through the same act by which he spins language out of himself, the human being spins himself into it; and each language draws a circle around the people who belong to it, a circle from which it is possible to escape only insofar as one enters at the same time into another.”5 This holds perhaps even more for the fundamental mythical representations of humanity than it does for language. They are not raised up from a readymade world of being, not merely formations [Gebilden] of fantasy that become detached from the fixed, empirical real reality of things and rise over them like a light mist; rather, for primitive consciousness, they exhibit the whole of being. Mythical apprehension and interpretation are not subsequently introduced into certain elements of empirical existence; rather, 5. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, vol. VII, 60.

·80·

138

·81·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

the primary “experience” itself is thoroughly penetrated by the figures of myth and, as it were, saturated with its atmosphere. The human being lives with things only because and insofar as he lives in these figures; he discloses reality to himself and himself to reality only in that the world as well as he himself enter into this malleable medium, not only touching but also penetrating one another. Accordingly, every observation that claims to have uncovered the roots of myth by demonstrating the particular object sphere from which it initially arose and gradually spread remains insufficient and one-sided. There is, as we know, an abundance of such explanations; the manifold of theories about the original core and origin of the formation of myths are themselves hardly less motley than the empirical world of objects. Now, the source and point of departure of mythical consciousness are looked for in certain psychological states and experiences, especially in the experience of dreaming; now they are searched for in the intuition of natural existence [Sein], in which the observation of the objects of nature, such as the sun, the moon, and the heavenly bodies, is further distinguished from the great processes of nature, such as the storm, lightning, and thunder, etc. Thus, the attempt is repeatedly made to explain soul mythology or nature mythology, solar mythology and lunar mythology, or storm mythology and thunderstorm mythology, as mythology per se. However, even if we assume that one of these attempts were able to succeed, the genuine problem that the philosophy of myth has to address would not have been solved, only pushed back. For mythical forming as such cannot be understood and clarified by demonstrating the object on which it was initially and originally carried out. It is and remains the same miracle of spirit, the same mystery, whether it applies to this or that content of being, whether it involves the interpretation and configuration of psychic processes or physical objects [Objekte] and, in the case of the latter, this or that object in particular. Even if it were possible to resolve all mythology into astral mythology, what myth understands in the heavenly bodies, what it immediately sees in them, is not the same as what appears to empirical perception and observation or to theoretical thought, which gives a scientific “explanation” of the phenomena of nature. Descartes said of theoretical knowledge that, in its nature and essence, it remains one and the same regardless of what object it may direct itself toward—just as the light of the sun is one and the

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

139

same regardless of what different sorts of objects [Objekte] it illuminates. The same is true for each symbolic form, be it language, art, or myth, insofar as each one of them is a particular way of seeing and harbors a particular source of light proper to it. The function of seeing, of the spiritual coming into light, can itself never be realistically derived from things and cannot be understood from that which is seen. For it is a question here not of what is seen in things but of the original direction of looking. If we understand the question in this way, then admittedly, it does not seem to bring us closer to a solution; rather, it appears to remove us even further from the possibility of one. For language, art, and myth are presented as various originary phenomena of spirit, which can as such be shown but cannot be further “explained,” i.e., reduced to something else. The realistic view of the world always possesses, as a fixed substratum for such explanations, the given reality that it assumes exists in any fixed coincidence, in a particular structure. It takes this reality as a totality [Ganzes] of causes and effects, of things and properties, of states and processes, of static figures and movements, and then poses the question as to which of these components of a particular spiritual form—of myth, of language, or of art—was first grasped. If it were a question of language, then it would be asked whether the designation of things preceded the designation of processes and activities, or vice versa—whether linguistic thought first grasps things or processes and whether it first forms nominal or verbal “roots.” This problem, however, becomes invalid as soon as we make it clear that the distinctions assumed here between the organization of the world into things and incidents, into permanent and transient, into objects and processes, do not underlie the formation of language as a given fact, but that it is language itself that first leads to this organization, which develops it in each of its parts. It turns out, then, that language does not begin with a stage of mere “noun concepts” or mere “verb-stems” but first brings about the distinction between them; it creates the great spiritual “crisis” in which the permanent and the transient, being and becoming, are opposed. Accordingly, the originary concepts of language, insofar as they can be spoken of, must be thought of as lying not on this side but beyond this separation, as being given in their configurations that still maintain themselves, so to speak, in a suspended fashion and in a state of indifference between

·82·

·83·

140

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

the nominal and the verbal sphere, between the expression of things and the expression of process or the expression of activity.6 And a similar indifference also appears to be characteristic of the most original formations of mythical and religious thought whose development we can trace. It appears natural and self-evident to us that, by itself, the world partitions itself off for perception and intuition into fixed, clearly defined individual figures, each of which possesses its own precise spatial limit and, through it, its own determined individuality. If a particular figure signifies a whole for us, this whole nevertheless constructs itself from clearly determined unities that do not merge into one another; rather, each possesses its own particularity that clearly sets it apart from the particularity of the others. These individual elements, however, are not just given to mythical intuition from the beginning; rather, it must gradually and step by step first extract them from the whole—it must first carry out the process of withdrawing and separating. For this reason, and in order to distinguish it from our theoretical-analytic mode of observation, the mythical apprehension has been described as a “complex” apprehension. Preuß, who coined this term, points out, for example, that in the mythology of the Cora Indians, which he has studied and presented, the intuition of the nocturnal and diurnal heavens must have as a whole preceded the intuition of the sun, the moon, and the individual constellations. Here, the first mythical conception was not that of a lunar or solar deity; rather, it was, as it were, the totality [Gesamtheit] of the heavenly bodies that first assumed mythical impulses. To be sure, the sun-god occupies the first position in the hierarchy of gods, but he is represented . . . by the various astral deities. They are there before him, he is created by them, by someone jumping or being thrown into the fire; his effective power is influenced by them, and he is artificially kept alive and going in that he feeds off the hearts of the sacrificed, i.e., off the stars. The starry night heaven is the precondition for the existence of the sun, which is the meaning of the whole religious apprehension of the Cora and 6. For more details about this see my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, Language, 228ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

141

the ancient Mexicans, and which is still able to function as a main factor for the development of religion.7 And the same function that is attributed here to the nocturnal heavens appears in the beliefs of Indo-Europeans to be assigned to the light of the day heavens. Comparative linguistics seems to render accessible to us the fundamental status of religious sentiment and thought of the Indo-Europeans in which the heavens of the day are revered as the highest deity: in a known linguistic equation, the Vedisch Dyaush-pitar corresponds to the Greek ǽİީȢʌĮIJȒȡ [father Zeus], to the Latin Jupiter, and to the Germanic Zio or Ziu.8 Apart from this, however, the Indo-European religions also show various traces that indicate that the worship of light as an undivided whole was preceded here by a particular manifestation of individual heavenly bodies that appear only as bearers of light. In the Avesta, for example, Mithra is not, as he is later, a sun-god but the guardian spirit of the heavenly light. He appears on the mountaintops before the rising of the sun in order to cross the heavens in his chariot, which is drawn by four white horses, during the day, and when night descends, he, still on guard duty, continues to illuminate the surface of the earth with an indeterminate semblance. He is, as it is expressly said, neither the sun nor the moon nor the stars, but through them, as his thousand ears and ten thousand eyes, he perceives everything, watching over the world.9 In a way, it appears obvious to us here how mythical apprehension first grasps only the great fundamental qualitative contrast between light and darkness, and how it takes them as one essence, as a complex whole, from which particular configurations only gradually detach themselves. Like linguistic consciousness, mythical consciousness has the differences of individual figures only insofar as it continuously posits these 7. Konrad Theodor Preuß, Die Nayarit-Expedition I: Die Religion der Cora-Indianer (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), L. See further, Konrad Theodor Preuss, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker, 9ff. 8. On the justification of this linguistic-mythical equation, which admittedly has often recently been disputed, see, for example, Leopold von Schroeder, Arische Religion (Leipzig: Haessel, 1914), I, 300ff. 9. Yasht X, 145; Yasna I, ii (35); see Franz Cumont, Textes et monuments figurées relatifs aux mystères de Mithra (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1899), I, 225.

·84·

142

·85·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

differences and “singles them out” from an originally undifferentiated intuition of unity. With this insight into the determining and decisive achievement that myth, like language, brings to the spiritual construction of the world of objects, admittedly everything that a “philosophy of symbolic forms” can teach us would appear to have been exhausted. Philosophy as such cannot go beyond this point; it cannot presume to place before us in concreto the great process of separation that comes to fullness here, delimiting its individual phases over against each other. If philosophy, however, must be content with a general theoretical determination of the outlines of the image of this development, then perhaps research into language and myth can, in turn, supplement this mere outline, making clearer the lines that philosophical-speculative contemplation can only indicate. Hermann Usener has made a first and promising step in this direction in his work Names of the Gods. Usener subtitled his book “An Essay on the Theory of the Formation of Religious Concepts,” and by doing so, he expressly situated it in the established context of philosophical problems and systematization. A history of the figures of the gods—their gradual emergence and their particular development among individual peoples—explains Usener, cannot be a valid, attainable goal, only a history of representations. However colorful, however manifold and heterogeneous these representations may appear at first sight, they have their own inner law. They do not originate from the unrestrained capriciousness of the power of the imagination; rather, they move along definite paths of feeling and mental configuration. Mythology wants to demonstrate this law. Mythology is the theory (ȜȩȖȠȢ) of myth or the morphology of religious representations.10 Admittedly, Usener does not appear to expect from philosophers any help for his great task; and in this context, a clear and unambiguous rejection of them is made. As he explains: In their divine grandeur over the historical, our philosophers treat the formation and combination [Zusammenfassung] of concepts by reducing the individual to the species and genus as a self-evident and necessary process of the human spirit. They overlook that 10. Hermann Usener, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: Cohen, 1896), 330; see esp. vff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

143

which is beyond the dominance of our given logic and epistemology; a long section of development prevails which the human spirit slowly worked through, moving toward concepts and thinking that was subordinated to laws essentially different from those of representing and speaking. Our theory of knowledge will have to do without the necessary substructure until linguistics and mythology have thrown light on the processes of the spontaneous and unconscious representing. The leap from individual perception to the concept of genus is much greater than we, with our education and language, which think for us, are able to suspect. It is so great that I am not able to imagine if and how the human being would have been able to carry it out, if language itself—of which the human being is himself unconscious—had not prepared the process and brought it about. It is language that permits the gradual coming forth out of the mass of equivalent particular expressions; one that extends its domain over more and more cases until finally it is able to encompass all cases and become the concept of genus. ( p. 321) We are hardly able to counter the reproach that is directed here against philosophy with anything convincing: for, as Usener points out, almost all of the great philosophical systems—with the Platonic system being perhaps the sole exception—have indeed neglected to create that “substructure” for the theoretical theory of knowledge from this indispensability. Here, then, it is the philologist, as a student of language and religion, who has once again, through problems that come out of his own research, placed before philosophy a new question. And Usener has here not only indicated a new way; he has resolved to pursue it by employing the tools offered to him by the history of language and the exact analysis of words, especially the analysis of the names of the gods. This raises the question whether philosophy, which does not have such tools at its disposal, can, in turn, take up the problem that has been placed here by the human sciences, and by what intellectual means it can treat the problem. Is there a way other than the history of language and the history of religion for us to enter deeper into the spiritual genesis, into the origin of primary linguistic and religious concepts? Or does the insight into the psychological and historical emergence of these concepts fall together with the insight into their spiritual essence, into their fundamental signification and

·86·

144 ·87·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

function? The following reflections will attempt to answer this question. They will take up Usener’s problem precisely in the form he has stated it; they will attempt, however, to approach it from another direction, attacking it with means other than those of philology and linguistics. Usener himself is right to have indicated the justice and even the necessity of such a reflection, insofar as he formulates his basic question not only as a question for the history of language and the general history of spirit but also as a question for logic and epistemology. The underlying assumption is that these two disciplines have to keep in mind the problem of linguistic and mythical concept formation, and that they have to treat it with their own methodological means. Only in this expansion, in this apparent impingement on the sphere of logical tasks will philosophy’s own determination be clearly denoted and will the sphere of pure theoretical knowledge clearly delimit itself over against other domains of spiritual existence [Sein] and spiritual forming. 2 Before we move on to this general task, it is essential to grasp the individual facts that Usener’s examination of the history of language and religion has brought to light in order to have a firm foothold for our own theoretical interpretation and construction. In the formation and configuration of the concepts of the gods that Usener pursues with the names of the gods, he distinguishes three basic phases of development. The formation of the “gods of the moment” stands out for us as the most ancient distinguishable stage of mythical thought. In these gods, neither a general power of nature personified nor any specific dimension of human life, nor a regularly recurring feature or consistent existence, is captured or transformed into a permanent mythico-religious image; rather, it is essentially something momentary, an ephemeral arousal, a fleeting, quickly surfacing and quickly vanishing mental content, which, in that it objectifies itself and discharges itself outside, creates the figure of gods of the moment. Every impression that human beings encounter, every desire that stirs in them, every hope that lures them, and every urgency that approaches them, can, in this way, become for them religiously effective. When momentary sentiment attaches to the thing before us or the state in which we find ourselves, the effective

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

145

energy that surprises us, with the value and, as it were, the accent of the divine—then the momentary god is felt and created. It stands before us in immediate detail and uniqueness; not as part of a force that can reveal itself here and there, in different locations in space, at different points in time, to different subjects—rather it is present, as something to one subject only here and now, in the undivided moment of lived-experience that descends upon this subject with its presence and casts its spell over him. Through examples taken from Greek poetry, Usener has shown the extent to which this fundamental and original religious sentiment was still very much alive in the ancient Greeks, and how it was constantly effectuated in them. “Because of this mobility and sensitivity of religious sentiment, any random concept, any random object, that rules all thought for the moment can without further ado become raised to a divine status: understanding and reason, wealth, chance, the decisive moment, wine, the joys of the meal, the body of a beloved being [. . . . ] What comes to us suddenly like a stroke of fate from above, what makes us happy, what saddens and oppresses us, appears to enhance the sensation as a divine nature [Wesen]. As far back as we can trace the Greeks, they have possessed the generic concept įĮȓȝȦȞ [dæmon] for it” (pp. 290ff.). However, over these dæmons of the moment, which come and go, which emerge and vanish like the subjective sensation from which they originate, another series of gods, which have their origin not in momentary sensation but in the permanent well-regulated activity [Tun] of the human being, now begins to rise up. The further spiritual and cultural development progresses, the more the passive comportment of human beings toward the external world is changed into active comportment. The human being ceases to be the mere plaything of outer impressions; he intervenes in events with his own will in order to regulate them according to his desires and his needs. This regulation has in itself its own measure and its own periodicity: it consistently exists in that the same series of human actions, in which one and the same permanent effect is secured, repeats itself at certain intervals, in the uniform return from day to day, month to month, year to year. However, again, as before with its suffering, the I can bring its activity [Tun] to consciousness only by projecting it outside and representing it before itself in a fixed intuitive formation. Every particular direction of this activity [Tun], however, now originates from and corresponds to a particular god. These gods, too,

·88·

·89·

146

·90·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

however, which Usener designates as the “special gods,” still have no essentially general function and signification; they do not yet penetrate being in its whole scope and depth but remain limited to a sector, to a very specific quarter of it. Within this narrower sphere, however, they have determination and duration, and with this, they acquire a certain generality. For instance, Occator, the god in charge of harrowing, does not merely influence this year’s tillage or this or that individual field; rather, he is the god of harrowing in general, annually hailed as the protector and guardian of all those united by the return of this rural business. Thus, he exhibits a single, and perhaps in itself minor, rural activity, but he portrays it universally (p. 280). In the so-called Indigitamenta gods of the Romans, Usener shows how rich and versatile the manifestations of this type of “special god” were in Roman religion. The first breaking of fallow fields, as well as the second plowing, the sowing, the weeding, the cutting of the grain and its harvesting—each has its particular god; and no one of these activities can succeed if the god is not called in the right way and by its right name. Usener has shown the same typical organization of the divine world according to individual spheres of activity in his treatment of the Lithuanian gods. And he draws from this, as well as from analogous observations in the history of Greek religion, the conclusion that the figures and names of such special gods in a specific phase of religious development must return in essentially the same way. They are the necessary passageway that religious consciousness must pass through in order to reach its final and highest formation, the formation of personal gods. However, according to Usener, only the history of language can illuminate the path that religious consciousness must traverse, for “the condition for the genesis of the personal God is a linguistic-historical process” (p. 316). Wherever the special god is first grasped, wherever it stands out as a determined figure, it possesses a specific name taken from the particular sphere of activity of which it is in charge. This is the case so long as this name is understood, so long as it is felt in its original signification—so long as the limits of the name correspond to those of the god, a god that is also restricted through its name to the narrow domain for which it was originally created. It is, however, otherwise, if by phonetic change or by the stem of the word dying out, the naming of the god loses its interconnection with the living vocabulary and thus its intelligibility. The name, then, whether it is pronounced

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

147

or heard, no longer awakens in consciousness the representation of an individual activity to which the subject named by it remains exclusively restricted. The name has become, rather, a proper name—and this leads, like the given name of a human being, to the thought of a certain personality. Now, a new being [Wesen] that further constructs itself according to its own law has emerged. The concept of the special god, which expressed a certain activity [Tun] more than a certain being, now gains lived embodiment and, so to speak, flesh and blood. The god is now able to act and to suffer like a human; it operates in a different way, not simply becoming absorbed in a single activity [Tun], but confronting it as an independent subject. The many names of the gods, which were previously used to designate so many sharply distinguished special gods from one another, now contract into expressions for one personal being [Wesen], which emerges in this way; these expressions become appellations of this being [Wesen], designating the different aspects of its nature, its force, and its effectiveness (301ff., 325, 530ff.). What fascinates us about Usener’s results, which we have attempted to poignantly and briefly reproduce, is not primarily their pure content but the method by which they were achieved. Usener believes his results to have been reached purely by way of an analysis of words, and he does not tire of emphasizing that the examination of the forms of words in which individual religious representations find their sedimentation—that is, so to speak, in their Ariadnian thread—is the only hope we have of finding a certain orientation in the labyrinth of mythical thought. Philological and etymological dissection, however, is not, for him, an end in itself; rather, it only serves as an instrument in the service of resolving a deeper and more extensive problem. For what should be understood and recognized is, above all, not the historical change of the names and figures of the gods as such but the “origin” of these names and figures. Usener’s investigation attempts to move toward a point at which both the god as well as its name first arise in consciousness. This “arising,” however, is not thought of as purely chronological, it is not taken as a unique historical process that plays itself out in a specific, empirically demonstrable time; rather, Usener seeks to understand [verstehen] it as essentially tied to the fundamental structure of linguistic and mythical consciousness, to a general law of linguistic and religious concept formation. Here, we stand not on the ground of history but on that of the

·91·

148

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

phenomenology of spirit. Thus, as he already emphasizes in the preface to his work: Only through devoted preoccupation with the spiritual traces of vanished times, and thus through philological work, are we able to teach ourselves to empathize with the past; then can related chords gradually resonate and sound in us, and then can we discover in our own consciousness the threads that connect the old and the new. Richer observation and comparison allow us to go further, and we proceed from the particular to the law. It would be terrible for human science if whoever engaged in research into individual facts had to wear chains that prevented him from pursuing the whole. The deeper one digs, the more one is rewarded by more general knowledge.11

·92·

Thus, from the beginning, Usener’s examinations do not take place in the framework of individual languages and individual historical cultures. If he takes his examples and his evidence from the history of Greek and Roman religion, he nevertheless leaves no doubt that these examples are used only as a paradigm for a general interconnection. This emerges with particular clearness if one places his evidence alongside other evidence that has only become known through the ethnological research of the past decades. Usener himself uses comparative material from primitive cultures and religions only sparsely, even though he expressly confesses and emphasizes that he has gained his understanding of many important basic facts of the history of Greco-Roman religion through the detailed study of the Lithuanian world of gods. However, in other spheres, and above all in the sphere of American and African religions, surprising parallels are also often found that confirm and illuminate his basic historical and philosophical theses of religion. In the very detailed and careful presentation on the religion of the Ewes, Spieth provides a portrayal of the Ewes’ world of the gods that can serve perfectly as a classic example of that phase of religious development which Usener designates as the “gods of the moment.” Although Spieth seems 11. [Hermann Usener, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: Cohen, 1896), vii.]

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

149

here to refer to Usener, it is not obvious and is hardly likely that the theologian and missionary was influenced by the theories of the classic philologist, as his intention was directed not toward any general and theoretical considerations but toward the simple presentation of facts he observed. All the more remarkable in our context is the report that Spieth gives not only of the nature [Wesen] of the Ewe gods, of the nature [Wesen] of the trõwo, but also of their genesis: Once the inhabitants of the city of Dzake in Peki had settled into their current place of residence, a farmer searched for water in the fields in which he labored. In a trough-shaped hollow he thrust his machete into the moist earth. Suddenly, a blood-like juice came toward him, which he drank and which refreshed him. He recounted this to his relatives and made them go with him to the place in order to sacrifice to that red juice. Gradually, the water became clear and the whole family drank from it. From then on the water was the trõ of its discoverer and the family members. [. . .] With the arrival of the first settlers of Anvlo, a man must have stood in the jungle before a large, thick monkey-bread tree. The sight of these trees frightened him. He thus went to a priest in order to have this event interpreted. The answer he received was that that the monkey-bread tree was a trõ that lives with him and wants to be admired by him. The angst was thus the sign by which that man recognized that a trõ revealed itself to him. If somebody escapes into a termite mound from his animal or human persecutors, he says afterward: “The termite mound saved my life.” It is the same if a human being finds safety in a brook from a shot and wounded animal or a family or whole tribe is rescued from the enemy in a mountain. In each case, the rescue is ascribed to a power existing in the object or place by which or through which one has experienced the rescue.12 12. Jakob Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-Togo (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1911), 7ff. See esp. Spieth’s work on the Ewe tribes (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1906), 462, 480, 490. The examples given here are particularly suited to refuting Wundt’s objection that Usener’s “momentary gods” are “not so much real empirical starting points as logical postulates” (Volkspsychologie 2, IV, 561).

150 ·93·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

The value of such observations for the general history of religion consists above all in the fact that a dynamic concept of the gods has taken the place of the static one with which both are in the habit of operating, that the god or dæmon is no longer described merely according to what it signifies and is, but rather that the law of its formation is pursued. Its birth in the mythico-religious consciousness is supposed to be observed; indeed, its hour of birth is announced. If empirical science, in the domains of linguistics, the history of religion, and ethnology, finds itself placed before these sorts of questions, then no one can deny them to philosophy, especially if it takes up these questions and attempts to illuminate them from the standpoint of its own basic problems. 3

·94·

In order to understand [verstehen] the formation of mythico-religious concepts, not only in terms of its results, but also in terms of its principle, and in order to comprehend how the formation of linguistic concepts is related to that of religious concepts and in what essential features both agree, we must admittedly go back a long way. We cannot avoid here a detour through general logic and epistemology, for only on this basis can we hope to determine more precisely the function of linguistic and religious concepts and to separate them clearly from that of the theoretical concepts of knowledge. Usener himself was aware that this problem was concerned not only with the history and philosophy of religion but also with purely theoretical knowledge; for what he wanted to shed light on through his research was nothing less than the old fundamental question inherent in all logic and epistemology, namely, the question of how the spiritual process that elevates the individual to the universal, how the transition from individual perceptions and ideas to the concept of genus, is carried out (see 12ff.). On the way to the history of language and religion, he considered the clarification of this issue not only possible but necessary, which indicates that he did not feel satisfied with it and was not reassured by the logicians’ usual explanation of the relationship of the universal to the individual and particular. Indeed, what this explanation renders most objectionable for the linguist, provided he seeks to penetrate more deeply into the fundamental spiritual principles of language, can easily be indicated. The concept, as logic is in the habit of teaching,

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

151

originates in that several objects [Objekte] that agree in certain features and, consequently, in part of their content are combined [zusammengefaßt] in thought, in that from the dissimilar features the similar but fixed ones are abstracted, by which the general representation of a class of objects [Objekte] in consciousness arises. Consequently, the concept (notio, conceptus) is the representation in which the totality [Gesamtheit] of the essential features, i.e., the essence of the object [Objekt] in question, is represented.13 In this seemingly simple and plausible explanation, everything comes down to what one understands here by “feature,” and how one understands these features to be created. The formation of a general concept presupposes the determination of features: only if certain identifying marks through which these things can be recognized as similar or dissimilar, as coinciding or not coinciding, exist does the possible of the combination [Zusammenfassung] of the similarities together into a genus exist. However, we must necessarily inquire further: How do such marks exist prior to language, prior to the act of naming, or, rather, are they not grasped only by means of language, only in the act of naming itself ? And, if the latter be the case: According to what rules, according to what criterion, does this act proceed? What is it that compels language to collect these representations into a unity and to designate them with a particular word? What induces it to draw out certain figures from the flowing and always uniform series of impressions that meet our senses or that originate from the inner activity of spirit, to dwell on and stamp them with a certain “signification”? As soon as the question is formulated in this way, traditional logic leaves linguists and philosophers of language at a loss. For its explanation of the emergence of general ideas and of concepts of genus presupposes that which is sought for and whose very possibility is in question, namely, the formation of linguistic concepts themselves.14 The problem becomes all the more difficult, however, and at the same time all the more urgent as soon as we consider that the form of the ideal combination [Zusammenfassung], which leads to primary linguistic concepts and particular signification of words, is not 13. See, for instance, Friedrich Überweg, System der Logik und Geschichte der logischen Lehren (Bonn, 1874), §§ 51ff. 14. For more detailed discussion of this point, see my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, 206ff.

·95·

152

·96·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

dictated to us unequivocally and one-sidedly by the object [Objekt]. But even here, the freedom and specific spiritual particularity of language express themselves. Admittedly, this freedom, too, must have its rule, this original and inventive power must also have its law. Can this law be demonstrated, and how is it related to the rule that prevails in the creation of other ideal spheres of signification, in particular, in the formation of our mythical and religious concepts, as well as the concepts of purely theoretical knowledge and those of the natural sciences? We begin with the latter so as to demonstrate that all intellectual work, which spirit brings to fruition in the forming of individual impressions into “general” representations and concepts, is essentially directed toward freeing the particular, the given here and now, from its isolation, that it be seen in relation to and collected with other particulars into the unity of a comprehensive order, into the unity of a “system.” The logical form of the concepts, understood in the sense of theoretical knowledge, is nothing other than preparation for the logical form of judgment; all judgments, however, aim at dispelling and overcoming the appearance of isolation that attaches itself to every particular content of consciousness. The apparently singular, insofar as it “subsumed” under a general idea, insofar as it grasped as a “case” of a law or as a member of a manifold or series, is recognized, understood, and comprehended. In this sense, every real judgment is synthetic: for it desires and strives for precisely this synthesis into a whole, the coincidence of particulars into a system. This synthesis cannot be carried out immediately or with a single blow, rather it must be worked out step by step, such that the individual intuitions or the particular sensory perceptions are progressively set in relation to one another, and then joined together into relatively greater complexes, until finally the union of all of these separate complexes yields an integrated image of the totality of the appearances. The will to this totality is the enlivening principle in the formation of our theoretical and empirical concepts. This necessarily proceeds, therefore, “discursively”; that is to say, it takes the specific case as its starting point, not in order to immerse itself in it as such or to remain in its intuition, but in order to run it through the whole of being in certain directions that the empirical concept just designates and fixes. In this process of running through, of discursive thought, the individual now receives its theoretically fixed “meaning” and its determination. It appears differently according to the

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

153

ever-broadening interconnections in which it is placed: the place that it takes in the totality [Gesamtheit] of being or, rather, that it is assigned in this totality [Gesamtheit] by the continuous movement of thought, determines at the same time its content, what it theoretically signifies. How this ideal of knowledge governs the construction of natural science, in particular the construction of mathematical physics, needs no further explanation. All concepts of theoretical physics have no other goal than to reshape the “rhapsody of perceptions”15 with which the world of the senses first confronts us, into a system, into a unified embodiment of laws. The individual appearance only becomes a phenomenon and the object of “nature” in that it meets this requirement—for, in the theoretical sense of the word, nature is, according to the Kantian definition, nothing other than the existence of things insofar as it is determined according to general laws. Admittedly, it might seem that this Kantian concept is too narrowly grasped, that it immediately fails as soon as we move from the “nature” of physics to that of biology and descriptive natural science, from the theoretical-constructive concepts of the exact sciences to “living” nature. For here, at least, each individual signifies something itself; here, it does not stand as an instantiation of a law that classifies it; rather, here, it presents itself as an individually limited and, through just this limitation, significant existence. Closer consideration teaches us, however, that even here this determination includes no opposition to universality; rather, it demands universality as its supplement and necessary correlate. We can visualize this more clearly if we keep in mind the methodology of Goethe’s examination of nature—a methodology which is not only distinguished by a certain type of thinking about nature that confirms itself in the greatest clarity and liveliness, but which, at the same time, knows about this exercise, which it recognizes and expresses as its inner norm. Goethe repeatedly demands the complete concretion, the perfect determination of the intuition of nature, in which every particular should be seen and grasped as such in the clear outline of its individual figure; however, with no less clarity, he states that the particular is subject to the eternal universal, and that it is constituted and becomes comprehensible in its particularity only through it. For this very form and character of living nature determines that 15. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 195.]

·97·

154

·98·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

nothing exists in it that is not bonded with the whole. Of this fundamental law, under which his research stood, Goethe said: “Physical investigations forced me to the conviction that in every observation of objects, the very condition under which a phenomenon appears, the highest duty is to meticulously search out and strive for the most complete whole of the phenomenon possible, because, in the end, they are compelled to join together with each other or, rather, in each other, and to form a type of organization for the intuition of the researcher; their inner living whole must be manifested.” Universality, thus, does not appear here, as in mathematical physics, in the figure of an abstract formula, but rather emerges as a concrete “living whole”; here, it is a matter not of the mere subsumption of the individual case under the law but of an “organization” in which, if it ascribes the part to the whole, the form of the whole at the same time also appears immediately in the part. The discursive character of thinking, however, remains lively and effective in the middle of this seeing. For the object does not stand still before the intuition simply in its individual determination and particularity but begins to stir before intuition. It does not merely present a simple figure but unfolds into a series and a wealth of figures: it falls under the law of “metamorphosis.” And this metamorphosis does not end before the ambit of the contemplation of nature has been measured. This ambit exists for the outlook of the researcher only in that, in the progress from one object to another, it gradually becomes apparent through the steady stringing together of cases.16 In this sense, Goethe praised the “maxim” of metamorphosis, saying that it had safely escorted him through the whole sphere of the comprehensible and, in the end, led him to the frontier of the incomprehensible, before which the human spirit has to be content. In this form of consideration, everything that exists is taken for itself, but at the same time, it is grasped as an “analogy of all that exists,”17 so that existence always appears to us at the same time separated and united. 16. See, in particular, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1793), in Werke, vol. XI, 21ff.; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Einwirkung der neuern Philosophie, in Werke, vol. XI, 48; for more details, see my essay “Goethe und die mathematische Physik,” in Idee und Gestalt (Berlin, 1924), 33ff. 17. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen. Nach den Handschriften des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs (Nr. 554), ed. Max Hecker (Weimar, 1907) (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, vol. 21), 120.]

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

155

This form of seeing is not counter to that of the “derived”; rather, each penetrates and rises up out of the other: “I do not rest,” says Goethe, “until I find a most pregnant point from which a great deal has been derived or rather from which a great deal voluntarily produces itself and confronts me.”18 And in the end, historical concepts, like the morphological and biological concept of form, stand under the same law of our thinking. Attempts have been made to separate the “individualizing” of historical formation of concepts from the “generalizing” formation of concepts of the natural sciences. If this latter sees in the individual case nothing other than the representative [Repräsentanten] of the law, if the “here” and the “now” only become significant for it because and insofar as they render a universal rule visible, then history inquires after the here and now in order to grasp and to know more clearly the individual case as such. Its intention, therefore, is directed neither toward any particular type of concept that can realize itself more uniformly in the majority of cases and, from the perspective of the concept, in indifferent copies, nor toward a repeatable, recurrent event; rather, it is absorbed in the individuality and peculiarity of concrete facts, in the factually singular and unique. However, here, too, it is clear that the uniqueness and singularity that forms the matter of history, and of the science of history, does not contain in itself its specific form. For here, too, every individual gets its meaning only by virtue of the connection into which it enters. If it cannot be grasped as an instance of a general law, then, in order to be thought of as historical at all, in order to become a subspecies of history, it must take its place as a member in certain events or in a certain teleological nexus. Its temporal determination is consequently the strict opposite of its temporal isolation, for historically it signifies something only if it points back to the past and forward to the future. Accordingly, as with Goethe’s morphological consideration, all genuine historical consideration, instead of losing itself in the intuition of the merely unique, must advance toward the “most pregnant” points of events, in which, as in focal points, the whole series of events concentrates itself. For historical conception and understanding [Verstehen], widely separated temporal stages are united 18. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Bedeutende Förderniß durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort, in Werke, vol. XI, 63.

·99·

156

·100·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

in them into one. As certain moments are singled out from the uniform stream of time, relating to one another and combined into a series, the origin as well as the goal of events, their whence and whither, are first illuminated. The historical concept is also characterized here by the fact that a thousand connections are forged by one strike, and that which we call the specific historical “meaning” of appearances, historical signification, is constituted not in the intuition of the individual but in the consideration of these connections. We will, however, no longer dwell on these general observations, as our intention here is not directed toward the structure of theoretical concepts of knowledge as such; we want to elucidate from this structure another, namely, the form and particularity of primary linguistic concepts. So long as this is not done, the pure logical theory of the concept remains incomplete. For all of the concepts of theoretical knowledge form, as it were, only a logical upper stratum, which is grounded in another stratum, namely, the stratum of linguistic concepts. Before the intellectual work of conceiving and understanding [verstehen] appearances can begin, the work of naming must have advanced to a certain point. For it is this work that transforms the world of sensuous impressions, which the animal also possesses, into a spiritual world, a world of ideas [Vorstellungen] and signification. All theoretical knowing takes its departure from a world already formed by language: the natural scientist, the historian, the philosopher, all initially live with objects only as language gives these objects to them. And this immediate and unconscious bond is harder to see through than anything that the spirit obliquely creates in the conscious activity of thought. It is rather obvious that logical theory, which allows the concept to be formed through generalizing “abstraction,” is of no further help here. For this abstraction consists of selecting from a wealth of given determined features certain ones that are common to different sensuous or vivid complexes. Here, however, it is a question not of selecting from already objectively present features but of extracting, of positing the features themselves. It is essential, here, to understand and to clarify the type and the direction of the “remarking” itself, which must intellectually precede the “naming.” Even those thinkers who have most vigorously concerned themselves with the problem of the “origin of language” have believed it necessary to stop at this point, in that they took for granted that this act of “remarking” was essentially an original “ca-

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

157

pacity” of the human soul. As Herder says in his treatise on the origin of language, “When the human being assumed the state of reflection that is his own, and when this reflection is rendered free for the first time, language was invented.” When we think of a definite animal—a lamb, for instance—that passes before the eyes of a human being, what image, what intuition of it will form itself in human consciousness? Not the same image that would arise for a wolf or a lion, which smells and, in its mind, already tastes the lamb, which is overpowered by sensuousness, whose instinct throws it upon the lamb, nor for any other animal indifferent to the sheep, which would thus let it wander into the dark clearing, because its instinct would have turned it toward something else. Not so with the human being! As soon as he comes to the demand to know the sheep, no instinct disturbs him, no sense seizes him to approach nearer to it, or away from it; he stands there, just as it expresses itself in his senses. White, gentle, woolly—his self-reflective soul seeks a characteristic—the sheep bleats! He has found the characteristic. The inner sense is activated. This bleating, which made the strongest impression on him, which broke free of all the other properties of sight and touch, sprang forth, penetrating the depths, remains with him. . . . “Ha! you are the bleating one,” he feels inside; he has recognized it humanly, he clearly recognizes and names it, that is, with a characteristic. . . . And with a characteristic, then? What else was that other than an internal characteristic word? The sound of the bleating perceived by a human soul as the sign of the sheep, becomes, by force of this mindfulness, the name of the sheep, even though his tongue had never attempted to utter it.19 We clearly sense in these sentences the reverberation of those theories he sought to combat—Enlightenment theories of language that let language emerge out of conscious reflection and be “invented.” The human being seeks characteristics because he needs characteristics, because his reason, the specific faculty of “mindfulness” that is his own, demands it. This demand itself remains here something underivable—it is a “basic 19. Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, in Werke, vol. V, 35ff.

·101·

158

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

soul.”20

·102·

power of the The explanation has, of course, come full circle, for the end and goal of the formation of language—that positing and determination of characteristics—must at the same time be regarded as its beginning. The Humboldtian concept of the “inner form of language” appears to point to another direction of investigation. For, here, it is concerned no longer with the “whence” of linguistic concepts but with their pure “what,” not with their emergence but with the demonstration of their particularity. According to Humboldt, a special form of spirit, a special type of grasping and understanding [verstehen], manifests itself in the form of remarking that underlies all word and language formation. The difference between individual languages is thus one not of sounds and signs but of different views of the world. If, for instance, moon in Greek is designated as measuring (ȝȒȞ), in Latin as shining (luna), or, if in one and the same language, such as Sanskrit, the elephant is called here the one that drinks twice as much, there the two-tusked one, and elsewhere the one with one hand, this shows that language never simply denotes perceivable objects [Objekte] as such but always spontaneously forms concepts of the mind, such that the nature of these concepts always depends on the direction of intellectual contemplation. Even this concept of the inner form of language, however, must, in the end, presuppose that which it wants to show and derive. For on the one hand, language appears here as the vehicle for the extraction of every spiritual view of the world, as that medium through which thought must pass before it can discover itself, before it can give itself a specific theoretical form. On the other hand, however, even this form, even a specific theoretical view of the world must be presupposed in order to render the particularity of a certain language, the nature of its remarking and naming, understandable. So, the question of the origin of language, even with the thinkers who have grasped it most profoundly and have struggled the hardest with it, threatens again and again to become a veritable puzzle; all the energy of thought that is devoted to it appears, in the end, only to circle the question and leave us at the point from which we began. Nevertheless, it remains in the character of such fundamental questions that spirit, hope as it may to finally solve them, can never fully 20. [Immanuel Kant, Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren, in Werke, vol. II, 63.]

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

159

unveil them. And there arises a new hope of at least advancing toward the principle of a solution, if, instead of comparing the form of primary linguistic concepts with the form of logical concepts, we bring them together with the form of mythical concepts. What distinguishes both mythical and linguistic concepts from logical concepts, and what permits us to collect them together into an independent “genus,” is, above all, the circumstance that in them, both one and the same direction of spiritual apprehension appears to manifest itself, a direction opposed to that of the movement that takes place in theoretical thought. As we have seen, theoretical thought aims to free the sensuously or intuitively given contents from the isolation in which they immediately present themselves to us. It lifts these contents out of their narrowly restricted sphere and arranges them together with others; it compares them with others and arranges them in a determined order, into an all-inclusive interconnection. It proceeds “discursively” in that it takes the particulars, the here and now of objectively present content, only as a starting point from which it will run through the whole of intuition, from a manifold of directions, until it finally links them into a self-enclosed quintessence, into a system. In this system, there are no more isolated points: all members reciprocally refer to one another, point to, illuminate, and explain one another. Everything individual is increasingly spun together in theoretical thought, as if by invisible intellectual threads, which bind it to the whole. The theoretical signification it receives is stamped with the character of the whole. Mythical thought is, when we consider it in the earliest fundamental forms available to us, far removed from such a stamp; indeed, this stamp contradicts the authentic essence of mythical thought. For here, thought does not stand freely over against the content of intuition in order to refer and compare it to others in conscious reflection, rather here, it is, as it were, taken captive and held spellbound by this content as soon as it stands directly before it. It rests in it; it feels and knows only its immediate sensory present, which is so powerful that before it everything else vanishes. It is as if where the human being stood under the spell of this mythico-religious intuition, the whole world was lost to him. The particular momentary content, in which the religious interest extends itself, fills consciousness so completely that nothing exists beside or apart from it. In its most charged state, the I turns toward the one, lives and forgets itself in it. We find, here, instead of a widening

·103·

160

·104·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

of the intuition, its most extreme narrowing; instead of an expansion that gradually leads it through new spheres of being, a drive toward concentration; instead of an extensive diffusion, an intensive compression. This gathering of all forces upon one point is the prerequisite for all mythical thought and mythical configuring. When the I is, on the one hand, completely given up to a momentary impression and “possessed” by it, and, on the other hand, there is the utmost tension between the I and the external world, when external being is not simply considered and perceived but suddenly overcomes man in its sheer immediacy with the affect of fear or hope, terror or wish fulfillment, then, as it were, a spark jumps across, the tension finds a release, as the subjective excitement objectifies itself and presents itself before man as a god or dæmon. Here we stand before the mythico-religious originary phenomenon that Usener attempted to express through the concept of the “gods of the moment.” “The individual appearance is divinized, is idolized, in full immediacy without a very restricted concept of genus somehow intervening; the one thing that you see before you, and nothing else, is the god” ( p. 280). Even today, the life of primitive peoples shows us specific features in which this process clearly emerges. We may recall the examples of this process cited by Spieth: the water that a thirsty person finds, a termite mound that rescues and saves the life of someone being chased, any new object before which people are overcome by a sudden angst—all of these are immediately transformed into a god. Spieth summarizes his observations thus: “In the moment in which an object or any striking characteristic enters into any noticeable relationship to the human disposition and life, be it agreeable or repelling, that is the hour of birth of a trõ in the consciousness of the Ewe.”21 It is as if the isolation of an impression, through its being lifted out from the whole of common, everyday experience, renders with it at the same time its great intensive increase alongside a high degree of thickening, and, as if by virtue of this thickening, the objective figure of the god now comes about, as if it virtually sprang forth from it. And it is here, in this intuitive mode of configuration of myth, and not in the formation of our discursive theoretical concepts, that we must search for the key that may unlock for us the intelligibility of the original 21. [ Jakob Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer, 8.]

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

161

linguistic concept. We are not allowed to reduce its formation to any type of reflexive contemplation, to a static and tranquil comparison of given sense impressions or to the isolation of certain “characteristics,” but must turn from this static intuition to the dynamic process that produces the linguistic sound out of itself. It is not, however, achieved with this turn, and there now arises another, more difficult question, of how it is possible that out of this process anything permanent can detach itself, how, out of the undetermined seething and surging of sensory sensation and of sensory feeling, an objective, linguistic “formation” [Gebilde] can grow. In order to illuminate the “origin” of language, modern linguistic research has frequently reverted to Hamann’s dictum that poetry is the “mother tongue of the human race”;22 it has emphasized that language is rooted not in the prosaic but in the poetic side of life, that its final ground is, therefore, to be sought not in dedication to the objective intuition of things and their division according to certain characteristics but in the originary force of subjective sentiment.23 However, if this theory of lyrically musical expression seems to escape the circle in which the theory of logical expression becomes entangled, it nevertheless fails to bridge the gap between the purely expressive function of language and its function of signification. For a hiatus between the lyric and the logical sides of linguistic expression also exists in it; what remains unexplained is precisely the displacement by which the sound is transformed from the sound of the sensation into the sound of designation and signification. However, perhaps the recollection of the genesis and emergence of the primary mythical configurations of the emergence of the gods of the moment can guide us further. If the god of the moment has its origin in the birth of the moment, if it owes its emergence to an entirely concrete and individual situation that never recurs in the same way, it nevertheless gains a consistent existence that lifts it far above the accidental occasion of its emergence. As soon as it is raised up out of this immediate urgency, out of the care and hope of the moment, it becomes an independent being [Wesen] that henceforth lives according to its own law that has acquired a figure and duration. It confronts the human being 22. [ Johann Georg Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce. Eine Rhapsodie in Kabbalistischer Prose, in Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, vol. II (Berlin, 1821), 258.] 23. Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language (London: Swan, 1894), esp. 332ff.

·105·

162

·106·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

not as a creature of the hour but as a superior objective power, which the human being admires and to which, through the fixed forms of cult, he gradually gives a determined form. In the figure of the god of the moment, the memory of its original meaning and existence for the human being, the memory of the resolution of and deliverance from the fulfillment of a desire and a hope, is not only recorded but persists and remains long after this memory has faded and completely vanished. And we must ascribe to the sound of language the same function, the same tendency toward persistence found in the mythical image. Like the god or dæmon, the word, too, is, for the human being, not a creature that he himself has created; rather, it confronts him as a being in itself and as significant in itself, as something objectively real. As soon as the spark jumps across, as soon as the tension and affect of the moment finds its discharge into the word or the mythical image, a peripeteia effectively institutes itself in spirit: excitement as a merely subjective state is extinguished and is taken up into the formations [Gebilden] of myth or language. And now a progressive objectification can begin. To the extent that the human being’s own action [Tun] gradually extends itself to an ever-larger sphere and orders and organizes itself within this sphere, a progressive organization, an ever more determined “articulation” of the mythical as well as the linguistic world will also be achieved. In the place of the gods of the moment now arise the gods of activity, as Usener has demonstrated through the examples of the Roman Indigitamenta and the Lithuanian gods. Wissowa summarizes the basic character of the Roman religion thus: “The same gods are thought of, so to speak, from a purely practical point of view as being effective in all those things with which the Roman is occupied in the course of ordinary life; the local surroundings in which he moves, the different activities that make demands upon him, the events that decisively configure the life of the individual as well as the life of the community, they all stand under the rule of clearly conceived deities with keenly defined authority. Even Jupiter and Tellus are the gods of the Roman community, the gods of the house and the hall, of the forest and the pasture, of the forest and the harvest, of growth, flowers, and fruit.”24 Here, one can directly trace how the intuition of 24. Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1912), vol. 2, 24f.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

163

objective existence first opens itself up to the human being through the medium of his own activity [Tun] and through its continuous differentiation, which he grasps in clearly differentiated mythical images before logical concepts. And here, too, linguistic development now appears to be the counterpart of the development of mythical intuition and mythical thinking. For we cannot grasp the nature [Wesen] and function of linguistic concepts if we think of them as copies, as depictions of a fixed thing-world that, in its individual components, stands in stiff demarcation over against the human being from the outset. Rather, here, too, the limits must first be set, must be drawn by language; and this comes about as the activity [Tun] of the human being internally organizes itself, and through this, his representation of being receives an ever-clearer determination. It has already been seen that the primary achievement of linguistic concepts cannot be found in a comparison of the content of different individual intuitions or in the extracting of their common characteristics, but is directed toward the concentration of intuitive content, toward, so to speak, its distillation into a single point. The mode of this concentration, however, always depends here upon the direction of interest; it essentially depends not upon the content of the intuition but upon the teleological perspective under which it is configured. Whatever in some way appears significant for desire and willing, for hoping and caring, for doing and the drives [Treiben]—upon it alone is the stamp of linguistic “signification” pressed. Differences of signification first enable that thickening of the contents of intuition that, as we have seen, forms the presupposition for its naming, for its linguistic designation. For only that which somehow refers to the focal point, to the centers of desire and activity [Tun], that which proves itself to be promoting or hindering, important and necessary for the whole of activity [Tun] and the whole of life itself—only that which is singled out of the flowing, always uniform series of sense impressions—is “noticed” in the midst of these impressions, that is to say, is provided with a particular linguistic accent, with a mark. Without doubt, we must also ascribe the beginning of this remarking to the animal, insofar as in its world of representations, those elements to which it is drawn through the basic direction of its drives, through the specific direction of its instincts, are singled out. Only that which excites or is directly or indirectly interconnected with an individual drive, such as the nutritional or sexual drive, only that “exists” for the

·107·

164

·108·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

animal as an objective content of its feeling and representing. This being, however, fills only the prevailing moment in which the drive is actually evoked, in which it is immediately provoked. As soon as this arousal subsides, as soon as the drive is satisfied and fulfilled, being, the world of representations, collapses into itself once again. If a new stimulus meets the animal’s consciousness, this world may be resurrected again; however, it always remains within the narrow limits of actual stirrings and arousals. These individual beginnings always fill only the moment itself, without joining together into a series: the past is only dimly retained, the future is not erected into images, into foresight. Only symbolic expression creates the possibility of retrospection and foresight, for through it, certain distinctions are not only made within the whole of consciousness but are also fixed as such. Once the linguistic sound has impressed its seal and given it a determined character, the once-created, that which is separated out of the total sphere of representations, does not fade away again. Here, too, the determination and particularization of effective action precedes the determination of being. The correlations in being come about in accordance with activity [Tun], not according to the “objective” similarity of things, but according to the way in which the contents are grasped through the medium of activity [Tun] and classified together into a determined interconnection of purpose. This teleological character of linguistic concepts25 can be directly supported and clarified through various examples from the history of language. A large number of the phenomena that the science of language treats under the concept of “changes of signification,” can, from here, only be understood in principle. If, through the reconfiguration of the conditions of life, through the change and progress of culture, an alteration in the practical relationship of the human being to his surroundings has set in, the concepts of language no longer retain their original “sense.” They now begin to shift, to move about from place to place, to the degree that the borderlines set by activity [Tun] change and blur each into other. Wherever and for whatever reason the limits between two activities lose their importance, their “significance,” there frequently occurs a corresponding alteration in the signification of words, in the linguistic designations of these activi25. On the “teleological” structure of linguistic concepts see the more detailed study in my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, 225ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

165

ties. A characteristic piece of evidence for this process may be found, for example, in an essay that Meinhof has published under the title “On the Influence of Occupation on the Language of the Bantu Tribes in Africa.” According to Meinhof, “the Herero have a word for sowing, rima, that is phonetically identical with lima, which means ‘hoeing or plowing’ in other Bantu languages. The reason for the strange change in signification is that the Herero neither hoe nor sow. They are cow herders, and their whole language reeks of cows. In their eyes, sowing and plowing are not worthy occupations for a man. Accordingly, it is not worthwhile for them to take the trouble to distinguish between these contemptuous occupations.”26 The examination of primitive languages also offers various examples, for the form of the designation does not follow the external similarity of things or events, but whatever has the same name is linguistically assigned the same “concept” whenever its functional signification is the same, i.e., whenever they occupy the same or analogous position in the whole of human actions and human purposes. Accordingly, certain Indian tribes are said to use one and the same word for “dancing” and “working”27—not, obviously, because the intuitive difference between both activities does not immediately impose itself upon them, but because dance and field work essentially serve for them the same purpose of caring for life. For the growth and prosperity of the crops depends, for them, even more than on the prompt and proper cultivation of the fields, on the correct execution of their dances, of their magic and religious ceremonies.28 The fusion of names, of linguistic concepts, results from such weaving together of activities. When the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist was made known to them,29 the natives of the Swan River in Australia even named it a dance; what becomes apparent, again, is to 26. Carl Meinhof, “Über die Einwirkung der Beschäftigung auf die Sprache bei den Bantustämmen Afrikas,” Globus, vol. 75 (1899), 361. 27. “Die Tarahumara tanzen überhaupt nur zu Zauberzwecken bzw. als ‘Gebet.’ Tanzen ist ihnen daher . . . gleich arbeiten, was aus der Bedeutung des Wortes für tanzen nolávoa hervorgeht.” Konrad Theodor Preuß, “Ursprung der Religion und Kunst,” Blobus, vol. 87, 336. 28. See Konrad Theodor Preuß, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto (Göttingen and Leipzig: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1923), vol. I, 123ff.; vol. II, 637ff. 29. Élie Reclus, Le primitif d’Australie ou les non-non et les oui-oui. Étude d’ethnologie comparée (Paris: E. Deutu, 1894), 28.

·109·

166

·110·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

what extent a unity may be posed by language in spite of radical differences or even complete disparity between intuitive contents, so long as the contents are seen as corresponding, as being in accordance with one another in their teleological “sense”—here, according to their signification as cult.30 At the same time, we catch sight here of the basic motives by which mythical thought frees itself from the indeterminacy of “complex” intuition and proceeds to concretely determinate, sharply delimited individual formations. Here, too, so it appears, the direction of this progress is determined primarily through the direction of doing something; what is reflected in the form of mythical configuration is not so much the objective form of things as the form of human effective activity. As with the action of human beings, so also the action of the god, who is in charge of them, initially extends only to a narrowly determined vicinity to which it remains restricted. Not only does every particular activity have its particular god, but every individual segment of a determined doing, each independent phase, will also refer to the territory of an independent god or dæmon, which will also be bound to this region of effective action. The Roman Fratres Arvales, when making atonement for the removal of trees from the grove of the goddess Dia, divided the action into a number of individual acts, for each of which a special deity was invoked: Deferenda, for fetching the wood, Commolenda, for cutting it into pieces, Coinquenda, for chopping it up, and Adolenda, for burning the brushwood.31 Primitive languages tend to proceed in a very similar way; 30. Here we may give another characteristic example of this “teleological” construction of linguistic concepts, which I owe to an oral communication from my colleague Professor Otto Dempwolff. In the Kâte language, which is spoken in New Guinea, there is a word, bilin, which denotes a certain kind of grass with tough stems and roots that are wedged firmly in the soil: the latter are said to hold the earth together during earthquakes, so that it does not break apart. When nails were first introduced by Europeans, and when their use became popularly known, the natives applied this word to them, as well as to wire and iron rods, in short, to everything that served the “function” of holding things together. Similarly, one may often observe in the language of children the formation of such teleological units of signification, which do not meet our class concepts at all, and seem even to defy them. See Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache (Leipzig: Bath, 1906), 26, 172, et al. 31. Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 2, 25.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

167

instead of grasping the action in its generality and expressing it through a general verbal concept, they divide it into individual subsections, each of which is expressed by an independent verb, and thereby, so to speak, break it up into small pieces. It is perhaps no accident that, precisely in a language like that of the Ewes, which possesses, as is clear in Spieth’s presentation, a rich fullness of gods of the moment and special gods, this linguistic peculiarity is so strongly pronounced.32 And even where language and myth rise above the intuition that is bound to the moment and to concrete-sensory content, where they break through the barrier that initially seemed set before them, both remain joined insolubly together for a long time. This interconnection is so tight that it will probably never be decided, on the basis of empirical data, which of the two, myth or language, takes the lead and which follows in this progress toward the general, toward universal figures and concepts. Usener has, in a philosophically significant section of his work, attempted to prove that all general linguistic concepts have gone through a certain mythical stage. According to him, the fact that abstract nouns in the Indo-Germanic languages are usually formed by the feminine, with the ending -a (-Ș), contains a trace of an original stage in which that which is expressed by these feminine formations was not thought of as an abstract concept but immediately felt and imagined as a female deity. “Can there be any doubt,” he asks, “whether ĭȩȕȠȢ [Phobos] was earlier ijȩȕȠȢ [phobos], the divine figure or the condition? Why is it the male condition and not the neuter gender IJާįȑȠȢ [the god]? The first creation of the word must have had inherent in it the representation of a living personal being [Wesen], the ‘shooer’ or the ‘flight producer’; this idea still appears in countless applications of the seemingly abstract thing: İ‫ݧ‬ı߱ȜșİȞ or ‫݋‬ȞȑʌİıİijȩȕȠȢ [to enter into or to fall upon fear]. We must assume the same course of events for all of the feminine formations. The feminine adjective only became an abstraction in that it was denoted as a feminine personality, and in ancient times, this could only have been conceived divinely” (p. 375). However, do not the science of language as well as the science of religion also exhibit traces of a reverse impact: should we not assume that, for example, the way that inflected languages endow every name 32. Diedrich Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1907), 95.

·111·

168

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

with a particular “gender” must have decisively determined the intuition of the mythico-religious being and formed it according to itself ? Or was it an accident that where such differences in grammatical “gender” do not exist in language, where, rather, other essentially more complex features of classes are found in their place, the mythico-religious world also exhibits a very different structure, that it differentiates being according to totemic groups and classes, rather than placing and dividing it under personal, violent divine powers? We will content ourselves, here, with merely posing this question, which would have to be answered, if at all, by detailed scientific research. Whatever the answer might be, however, it is evident that in the progress from the momentary to the permanent, from sensory impression to “figure,” language and myth enclose the same general task and reciprocally condition each other in their solution. United, they prepare the ground for the great syntheses in which an intellectual structure, a general theoretical view of the cosmos, arises for us. 4 ·112·

If up to this point we have attempted to uncover the common root of the formation of linguistic and mythical concepts, now the question of how this interconnection exhibits itself in the structure of the mythical and the linguistic “world” arises. Here, a law reveals itself that is equally valid for all symbolic forms and that essentially determines their development. None of them immediately emerges as a separate, independent, and recognizable configuration, but each gradually detaches itself from the common mother earth of myth. All the contents of spirit, however much we are able to systematically assign them to their own domain and base them on their own autonomous “principles,” are factually first given to us only in this interpenetration. Theoretical, practical, and aesthetic consciousness—the world of language and knowledge, art, law, and ethics, the basic forms of the community and the state—all of these are originally bound to mythico-religious consciousness. This interconnection is so strong that wherever it begins to loosen itself, the world of spirit seems threatened by total disintegration; the individual forms, in that they emerge from and stand over against the whole with the claim of specific particularity, appear to uproot themselves and to give up a part

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

169

of their own nature [Wesen]. Only gradually will we learn that this selfabandonment only exhibits a necessary moment in its self-unfolding, that the negation contains the germ for a new position, that the separation itself becomes the basis of a new connection that arises from different presuppositions. The original bond of linguistic consciousness with mythico-religious consciousness expresses itself above all in the fact that all linguistic formations [Gebilden] appear at the same time as mythical formations [Gebilden] endowed with certain mythical forces such that the word of language turns into a type of original potency in which all being and all events are rooted. In all mythical cosmogonies, as far back as they can be traced, this dominant position of the word can be repeatedly shown. Among the texts that Preuß has collected from the Uitoto Indians is one which he included as a parallel to the opening passage of St. John, and which, in fact, in his translation, seems to agree almost completely with it. “In the beginning,” it says, “the word gave to the father the origin.”33 As surprising and striking as this echo may seem, no one would want to attempt to establish a direct relationship or even an analogy of the factual content between this primitive account of creation and the speculation of St. John. And yet, this echo places before us a certain problem; it points to the fact that there must prevail here a hidden, indirect relation that extends from the “primitive” beginning of mythico-religious consciousness to those highest formations in which it appears to have passed over into pure speculative consciousness. We will only be able to obtain a more exact insight into the nature and ground of this relation once we have succeeded in tracing the diverse examples of mythico-religious worship of the word provided by the history of religion from the common feature of the contents to the unity of the form. There must be some determined, essentially constant function that lends the word this distinguishing religious character, that raises it from its beginning into the religious sphere, into the sphere of the “sacred.” In the accounts of creation of almost all great cultural religions, the word always appears in alliance with the highest creator-god; it appears either as the tool he uses or virtually as the primary ground 33. Konrad Theodor Preuß, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, vol. I, 25ff., vol. II, 659.

·113·

170

·114·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

from which, like all being and every order of being, he, too, originates. Thought and its linguistic utterance are usually grasped immediately as one, for the heart that thinks and the tongue that speaks necessarily belong together. Thus, in one of the earliest documents of Egyptian theology, this originary force of “the heart and tongue” is attributed to the creator-god Ptah, through which he produces and rules all gods and men, all animals, and all that lives. Everything that is, comes to be through the thought of his heart and the commandment of his tongue: all psychic as well as all physical existence, the being of the Ka as well as that of all qualities of things, owe their genesis to him. Here, as has been emphasized, thousands of years before the Christian era, god was thus grasped as a spiritual being who thought the world before he created it, and the word was employed as the means of expression and the instrument of creation.34 And all physical and psychic existence [Sein], as well 34. See Alexandre Moret, Mystères égyptiens (Paris, 1913), 118ff., 138; see esp. Adolf Erman, “Ein Denkmal memphitischer Theologie,” Sitzungsbericht der königlichPreußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, XLIII (1911), 916ff.—An exact parallel to this may be found, for example, in a Polynesian creation hymn, which, according to Bastian, translates as follows: In the beginning of Space and Companion, Space in the height of Heaven, Tananaoa filled; he ruled the Heaven, And Mutuhei wound himself above it. In those days was no voice, no sound, No living thing yet in motion. No day there was as yet, no light, Only a gloomy, black-dark night. Tananaoa it was who conquered the night, And Mutuhei’s spirit the distance pierced. From Tanaoa Atea was sprung, Mighty, filled with the power of life, Atea it was, who now ruled the Day, And drove away Tanaoa. “The basic idea is that Tanaoa induces the process in that the original silence (Mutuhei) is removed through the production of Tone (Ono), and Atea (Light) is wedded with the Red Dawn (Atanua).” See Bastian, Die heilige Sage der Polynesier, Kosmogonie und Theologie (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1881), 13ff.; also Achelis, “Über Mythologie und Kultus von Hawaii,” Das Ausland, vol. 66 (1893), 436.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

171

as all moral bonds and all ethical order, are rooted in him. Those religions that ground their worldview and their cosmogony above all on a fundamental ethical opposition, on the dualism between good and evil, venerate in the word of language the originary force through which alone chaos was able to be formed into an ethico-religious cosmos. The entrance of the Bundahish, the cosmogony and the cosmography of the Parsis, portrays the battle between good and evil powers, between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, as beginning with Ahura Mazda’s reciting of the words of the sacred prayer (Ahuna vairya): He spoke that which consists of twenty-one words. The end, namely, his victory, the impotence of the Angra Mainyu, the decline of the Daevas, the resurrection and the future life, the ending of opposition against the (good) creation in eternity he showed to Angra Mainyu. . . . When a third of this prayer had been spoken, Angra Mainyu’s body doubled up in fear; when two-thirds had been spoken, he fell to his knees; and when the whole had been spoken, he was dismayed and powerless to commit indecencies against the creatures of the Ahura Mazda, and was in dismay for 3,000 years.35 Here, too, it is the words of the prayer that precede material creation and that continuously maintain it against the destructive powers of evil. Similarly, in India, the power of speech (Va¯c) is placed ahead of and above the power of the individual god. “All the gods, the animals, and people depend upon speech, all creatures are based upon speech. . . . Speech is the immortal, it is the primogeniture of the eternal law, the mother of the Veden, the navel of the world of the gods.”36 And to the primacy of its origin corresponds the primacy of its force. Often it is the name of the god, not the god himself, that appears as the authentic effective element.37 And knowledge of this name subjects the being [Wesen] 35. See Der Bundehesh, edited for the first time by Ferdinand Justi (Leipzig, 1868), chap. 1, 3. 36. Taittirîya Brahmana, 2, 8, 8, 4 (German by Geldner in Bertholet‘s Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch, 125). 37. According to the legends of the Maori, they did not bring their old gods with them when they first immigrated to New Zealand, only their mighty prayers, by virtue of which they were sure they could make the gods bend to their desires; see Daniel Garrison Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, 103ff.

·115·

172

·116·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

and will of the god to whoever possesses it. Thus, a famous Egyptian narrative relates how Isis, the great sorceress, cunningly brought the sungod Râ to reveal his name to her, and how through it, she won dominion over him and over all of the other gods.38 Every form of Egyptian religious life possesses this belief in the omnipotence of the name and in the magic violent power that dwells in it.39 In the ordination ceremony of the Egyptian kings, how the individual names of the god are to be transferred to the pharaoh is established by very determined regulation; each new name transfers to him at the same time a new attribute and divine force.40 This motive also plays a decisive role in the Egyptian belief in the soul and immortality. For their trip into the land of the dead, the souls of the dead must be given not only their physical belongings, such as clothing and food, but also certain magical equipment, which consists, above all, in the names of the gatekeepers of the underworld, for by this 38. “I am”—so speaks Ra in this story—“I am that with many names and many figures, and my figure is in each god. . . . My father and my mother have told me my name, and it has remained hidden in my body since my birth, so that no sorcerer should acquire magic power against me.” Here, Isis spoke to Ra (who has been stung by a poisonous snake formed by her and who now seeks with all gods a cure against the poison): “Tell me your name, divine father . . . , tell it to me, so that the poison may go out of you; for the man whose name is named continues to live.” The poison, however, burned greater than fire, so that the god could no longer resist. He said to Isis: “My name should pass out of my body into yours.” And he added: “You should conceal it, but you may reveal it to your son Horus as a powerful magic against each poison.” See Adolf Erman, Ägypten und ägyptisches Leben im Altertum, 11, 360ff.; Die ägyptische Religion, vol. 2, 173ff. 39. See the examples cited by Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic (London: T. Cook and Sons, 1911), vol. 2, 157ff.; see also Theodor Hopfner, Griechisch-Ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber (Leipzig: Haessel, 1921), 680ff. 40. See esp. George Foucart, Histoire des religions et méthode comparative (Paris: A. Picard, 1912), 202f.: “Donner au Pharaon un ‘nom’ nouveau, dans lequel entrait la désignation d’un attribut ou d’une manifestation de l’Épervier, puis, plus tard, de Râ et l’ajouter aux autres noms du protocole royale, c’était pour les Egyptiens introduire dans la personne royale, et superposer aux autres éléments qui la composaient déjà, un être nouveau, exceptionnel, qui était une incarnation de Râ. Ou, plus exactement, c’était bel et bien détacher de Râ une des vibrations, une des âmes forces, dont chacune est lui tout entier; et en la faisant entrer dans la personne du Roi, c’était transformer toute celle-ci en un nouvel exemplaire, un nouveau support matériel de la Divinité.”

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

173

knowledge alone can the doors of the land of the dead be opened. Even the boat that carries the dead, as well as all of its individual parts—the rudder, the mast, etc.—demand that he call them by their rightful names; only by this naming can he render them submissive and willing to take him to the desired place.41 The essential identity between the word and that which it designates emerges still more clearly if we consider the interconnection from the subjective rather than the objective side. For, the I of the human being, his self and his personality, are, for mythical thought, insolubly interwoven with his name. Here, the name is never a mere symbol but, rather, it too belongs in the immediate possession of its bearer, a possession that is carefully guarded and whose exclusive use is jealously watched over. From time to time, it is not only his proper name but also some other linguistic designation that are treated in this way as physical possessions and, as such, may be acquired and usurped. Georg von der Gabelentz, in his book on the science of language, mentions the edict of a Chinese emperor who, in the third century B.C., claimed sole application of a first-person pronoun that had, until then, been allowed for everyone.42 And the name even outgrows this more or less accessory signification of possession, provided it is taken as real, substantial being, as an integral component of the human being. As such, it equals his body or his soul. It is said of the Inuit that, for them, the human being consists of three parts: his body, his soul, and his name,43 and in Egypt we encounter a quite analogous view, according to which, alongside the physical body of the human being stands, on one side, his Ka and, on the other, his name, as, so to speak, a spiritual “doppelgänger” of the body. And of all three determinations, it is exactly the last that progressively becomes the actual expression of the “self,” the “personality” of the human being.44 Even in more advanced cultures, this interconnection between personality and name remains alive. When Roman law formulated the concept of legal personhood and denied certain physical subjects acknowledgment as legal subjects, those who were deprived of their 41. For further details see Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, 164ff. 42. Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, 228. 43. See Daniel Garrison Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, 93. 44. See Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, 157; also Moret, Mystères Egyptiens, 119.

·117·

174

·118·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

own legal existence were also deprived of their own name in the legal sense. In Roman constitutional law, slaves could not be given a name, as they were not permitted to function as independent personalities.45 In other ways, too, the unity and uniqueness of the name not only marks the unity and uniqueness of the person but also constitutes it; it is what first transforms the human being into an individual. Where this isolation does not exist, the borders of individuality also begin to blur. Among the Algonquins, someone with the same name as another is held to be that person’s other self, his “alter ego.”46 If, according to a widespread custom, the grandson receives the name of his grandfather, this expresses the belief that the grandfather is resurrected in the grandson, that he is reincarnated anew in him. As soon as a child is born, it must be determined, above all, which of his deceased ancestors has reappeared; only when this has been established by the priest can the act of naming take place, by virtue of which the child is named for this ancestor.47 And, furthermore, for basic mythical intuition, the individuality of the human being is not essentially constant and invariable; rather with each admission into a new, decisive phase of life, the human being acquires another being and another self, a change manifested above all in a change of name. The boy receives another name when he comes of age, because through the magic customs that accompany his initiation, he has ceased to exist as boy and is born again as another, as a man, in whom a forefather is reincarnated.48 In other cases, the change of name can be used to protect the human being from threatening violent powers: he escapes these vio45. Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, vol. III, I, 203; see Rudolph Hirzel, “Der Name—ein Beitrag zu seiner Geschichte im Altertum und besonders bei den Griechen,” Abhandlungen der sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. XXVI (1918), 10. 46. “The Expression in the Algonkin tongue for a person of the same name is nind owiawina, ‘He is another myself ’” ( Jean-André Cuoq, Lexique Algonquine, Montreal 1886, 113; quoted by Daniel Garrison Brinton, op cit., 93). See esp. Friedrich Giesebrecht, Die alttestamentliche Schätzung des Gottesnamens in ihrer religionsgeschichtlichen Grundlage (Königsberg: Pr. Thomas und Oppermann, 1901), 89. 47. See, for example, Jakob Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer, 229. 48. Characteristic examples of this are found in the initiation rites of the Australian native tribes; see esp. Alfred William Howitt, The Native Tribes of SouthEast Australia (London: Macmillan, 1904), and Edwin Oliver James, Primitive Ritual and Belief: An Anthropological Essay (London: Methuen, 1917), 16ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

175

lent powers in that, with the new name, he, so to speak, dresses himself in another self, and thus cloaked becomes unrecognizable. Among the Ewes, a name is given, especially to children whose earlier siblings have prematurely died, that suggests something repulsive in itself or that confers upon them a nonhuman nature: the Ewes believe that death will be frightened or deceived by the name so that it will pass them by as though they were not human.49 Likewise, the name of a sick or blood-guilty person will often be altered for the same reason, so that death will not find him. Even in Greek culture, this custom of altering names and its mythic motivation was maintained.50 In general, the existence [Sein] and life of the human being is so tightly linked with his name that, so long as the latter exists and is pronounced, the human being is still immediately thought of as present and felt as effective. The dead can, at any moment be, “invoked” in the literal sense, whenever those who survive them speak their name. As is known, with many primitive peoples, not only does the fear of such a return lead them to avoid mentioning the dead, which is scorned through certain taboos, but even the pronunciation of words or syllables that are similar to the name of a deceased is carefully avoided. Often, for example, a type of animal, after which the dead person was named, must receive another linguistic designation so that in the use of the animal’s name the dead person is not summoned at the same time.51 In many cases, the whole type of a language is decisively influenced and its vocabulary more or less altered through processes of this kind, whose motivation falls exclusively within the mythical sphere.52 And the further 49. See Jakob Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-Togo, 230. 50. Christian Hermippos, De astrologia dialogus, 26, 7: “įȚ੹ IJȠ૨IJȠ țĮȜ૵Ȣ ਲȝ૙ șİ૙ȠȚ țĮ੿ ੂİȡȠ੿ ਙȞȞįİȢ ਥȞȑıʌȚıĮȞ ਥȦĮȜȜȐIJIJİȚȞ IJ੹ IJ૵Ȟ ਕʌȠȚȤȠȝȑȞȦȞ ੑȦȩȝĮIJĮ, ੖ʌȦȢ IJȢȜȦȞȠ૨ȞIJĮȢ Į੝IJȠઃȢ țĮIJ੹ IJઁȞ ਥȞĮȑȡȚȠȞ IJȩʌȠȞ ȜĮȞșȐȞİȚȞ ਥȟૌ țĮ੿ įȚȑȡȤİıșĮȚ” (cited by Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie [Leipzig, 1903], 111ff.). 51. Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate, Notes éthnographiques sur les Comanches (Revue d’Éthnographie, IV), 131 (cited by Konrad Theodor Preuß, “Ursprung der Religion und Kunst,” Globus, vol. 87, 395). 52. Name taboos, as I understand from a personal conversation with Meinhof, play a vital role especially in Africa. Among many of the Bantu peoples, for example, women are not allowed to pronounce the name of their husband and their father, and, as they may also not use the relevant appellatives, they are forced to form new words.

·119·

176

·120·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

the power of a being [Wesen] extends, the more mythical effectiveness and “signification” it holds together, the further, too, does the signification of its name extend. The command of secrecy, therefore, applied first and foremost to the name of the god, for with its pronunciation, all the violent powers inherent in the god himself would be released.53 Here, again, we stand before one of the basic and originary motives that, rooted in the deepest stratums of mythical thought and feeling, maintains itself even in the highest configurations of religion. Giesebrecht has pursued the origin, the extent, and the development of this motive throughout the Old Testament in his work Names of God in the Old Testament. However, early Christianity, too, remained entirely under the spell of this intuition. Dieterich writes in his Mithras Liturgy: How the name enters as proxy for person, how the name named is tantamount to calling-a-person-into-existence [Ins-Dasein-rufen]; that a name is feared because it is a real force; that knowledge of it is sought because being able to speak it bestows control of that power on the knower—all these facts indicate clearly what the early Christians were still feeling and wanted to express when they said in God’s name instead of in God, or in Christ’s name instead of in Christ. . . . We can now understand such expressions as ȕĮʌIJȓȗİȚȞ İ‫ݧ‬ȢIJާ‫ݹ‬ȞȠȝȋȡȚıIJȠࠎ [to baptize them in the name of Christ] instead of ȕĮʌIJȓȗİȚȞ İ‫ݧ‬Ȣ ȋȡȚıIJȩȞ [to baptize them Christians]; the name is spoken over the water, and thereby takes possession of the water and pervades it, so that the person being baptized is quite literally immersed in the name of the Lord. The congregation, whose liturgy begins with the words, “In the name of God,” was thought at the time to be within the domain of the effect of the name (no matter how figuratively and formally the phrase is taken). 53. See, for the late-Greek magical practice, Theodor Hopfner, Griechishägyptischer Offenbarungszauber, § 701 (179): “The higher and more powerful the God was, the more powerful and more effective must his true name also be. Therefore, it is to be assumed quite logically that the true name of the one basic god, the demiurge (įȘȝȚȠȣȡȜȩȢ) of human beings is not at all bearable: for, in fact, this name was at the same time also the divine in itself in his highest potency, therefore much too great for the weak nature of the mortal; therefore, it would kill him to hear it.”

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

177

“For where two or three are gathered together in my name (İ߿ȢIJާ ‫݋‬ȝާȞ‫ݻ‬ȞȠȝĮ), there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20) means simply, “Where they pronounce my name in their assembly, there I am really present.” ݃ȖȚĮıșȒIJȦIJާ‫ݻ‬ȞȠȝȐıȠȣ [hallowed be thy name] had a much more concrete signification than one would ever suspect from the hermeneutics of the various churches and their doctrines.54 The special god, too, is and works only in the very particular circle to which his name assigns him and within which it holds him. Whoever wants to assure themselves of their protection and help must be careful that they are really integrated into this circle and that they address him by his “right” name. This care explains the changes that prayer and religious speech go through, particularly in Greece and Rome—changes in which the god’s name is constantly varied in order to escape the danger of missing the correct and crucial designation. With respect to the Greeks, this custom with prayer is demonstrated by a well-known passage in Plato’s Cratylus;55 in Rome, it led to a standing formula in which the various terms of invocation, corresponding to several aspects of the god’s nature [Wesen] and will, are strung together by either-or, “sivesive.”56 This formulaic type of invocation must be repeated every time; for each performance offered to the god, each desire directed toward him, will be accepted by him only insofar as he is addressed by his proper name in each case. Accordingly, the art of the proper invocation has virtually developed in Rome into its own priestly technology, which produced the Indigitamenta under the trust of the pontifices.57 We must stop here, however, for it is not our intention to accumulate religio-historical and ethnological material but, rather, to clarify and define the problem that this material brings to light. Such an interweaving, such being in one another as has been established here between the word of language and the different basic configurations of the mythicoreligious consciousness can be no accident, but must be grounded in the 54. Albrecht Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, 11, 114ff. 55. Plato, Cratylus 400 E. 56. For details, see Eduard Norden, Agnostos Theos: Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte religiöser Rede (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 143ff. 57. See Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, vol. 2, 37.

·121·

178

·122·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

essential features of language and myth themselves. In order to explain this interconnection, one has, from time to time, referred to the suggestive force of words, the spoken command, to which the “primitive” human being is particularly subject, and it has been thought that the magical and violent dæmonic power that all linguistic utterance has for mythic thought seems, for them, to be nothing more than an objectification of this grounding experience. We may not, however, locate the actual and genuine originary phenomena of linguistic and mythical consciousness on such a narrow empirical-pragmatic basis, on such details of individual or social experience. On the contrary, the question of whether their content-relations, which have been demonstrated between the formations [Gebilden] of language and those of myth, are not also understood [verstehen] here from the form of the forming itself, whether they have not been understood from the conditions that linguistic expression as well as mythical configuration are already subject to in their first unconscious beginnings, imposes itself more and more. We have found these conditions in a type and direction of spiritual apprehension that is opposed to that of theoretical, “discursive” thought. If the latter tends toward expansion, connection, and systematic coherence, then linguistic and mythical apprehension strives inversely toward thickening, concentration, and isolation. There, individual intuition is seen in relation to the totality [Gesamtheit] of being and events, and it is joined to this totality [Gesamtheit] with finer and tighter threads; here, it is taken not for that which it signifies in a mediated fashion but as what it directly appears to be—it is grasped and embodied in its pure presence. One comprehends that from this type of embodiment there must emerge another basic view of the word, of its content and its force, that holds for discursive thinking. For the latter, the word is essentially the vehicle for the basic task that theoretical thought sets for itself, i.e., for the production of a relation between the particular, currently present content of intuition and other contents that resemble or “correspond” to it in some way, that are connected with it by a certain law of correlation; its sense lies in the production and expression of such relations. Grasped thus, the word appears as something essentially ideal, as a “sign” or symbol whose content shows itself not in its own substantial existence but, rather, in the intellectual relations [Relationen] that it sets into itself. The word emerges, as it were, as a formation [Gebilde] of another order, another spiritual dimension, be-

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

179

tween the particular contents of intuition, as they impose themselves in the immediate here and now of consciousness; and it is precisely to this mediating position, this remoteness from the sphere of immediate existence, that it owes the freedom and ease with which it moves, with which it can link one content with another. However, this free identity, in which is found the core of its logical achievement, must necessarily remain foreign to the mythical view of the world. For only that which exhibits itself in real presence has for myth being and a meaning. Here, there is no mere “indicating” or “signifying”; rather, every content toward which consciousness is drawn and directed immediately transforms itself into the form of existence and the form of effective action. Consciousness does not stand over against the content in free reflection in order to clarify it in its structure and its lawful interconnections, in order to dismantle it into its individual parts and conditions; rather, it is captured by this content in its immediate totality [Ganzheit]. It does not unfold the individual content; it does not go forward and backward in order to observe it according to the aspect of its “grounds” or its “consequences,” rather it rests in its simple, consistent existence. When Kant defines the concept of “reality” such that every content of empirical intuition, provided that it is determined according to general laws and is classified by it into the uniform “context of experience,” is to be described as “actual,” he has exhaustively described the concept of reality of discursive thought. Mythical and primitive linguistic thought, however, knows no such “context of experience.” For its achievement exists, as we saw, much more in the breaking away, the almost violent withdrawal and isolation. Only when this isolation is successful, when intuition is concentrated into a single point and, so to speak, reduced to it, do mythical or linguistic formations [Gebilden] come about, do the words of language or the mythical momentary gods spring forth. And this form of genesis determines, at the same time, the content in which both belong. For here, where the process of spiritual grasping is directed not toward the expansion, broadening, and extensification of content but rather toward its highest intensification, this, too, must express itself in its reaction on consciousness. All other existence or events are for consciousness, henceforth, as if they have been absorbed; all bridges that connect the content of concrete intuition with the totality of experience as a cohesive system are as if they have been broken off: only that which mythical or linguistic apprehen-

·123·

180

·124·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

sion singles out fills the whole of consciousness. So it must now rule this whole with almost unlimited violent power. There is nothing, near or far, with which it could be compared or “measured”; rather, its simple presence [Präsenz], its simple present [Gegenwart], seizes the whole sum of being in itself. Here, therefore, the word does not express the content of intuition as a merely conventional symbol, rather it coalesces with it into an insoluble unity. The content of intuition not only in some way contracts into the word, rather it is completely absorbed by it. Whatever is once fixed in a word or name appears not only as something actual but literally as the actual itself. The tension between the mere “sign” and the “signified” no longer exists: in place of a more or less appropriate “expression,” there emerges a relationship of identity, a total convergence between “image” and “thing” [Sache], between the name and the object. And the substantial solidification that the word is granted here can be illuminated and rendered intelligible from another side as well. For we also meet the same consolidation, the same transubstantiation, in other domains of spiritual creation; it seems to constitute the basic rule of virtually all unconscious creation. Every work of culture, whether it is technically or purely intellectually oriented, takes place such that there gradually emerges a mediated relationship that replaces the immediate relationship in which the human being stands to things. If, in the beginning, the sensory drive and its satisfaction immediately and instantaneously follow one from the other, as culture progresses, more and more mediating links insert themselves between the will and its object. The will must seemingly distance itself from its goal in order to reach it; instead of appearing to move the object [Objekt] into its circle through a simple, almost reflexive sort of action, the will must differentiate its doing, distribute it to a larger sphere of objects [Objekte] in order to realize through the union of all acts, through the application of diverse “means,” the purpose that it sets before itself. In the technical sphere, this growing intercession expresses itself in the invention and use of tools. However, here, too, it may be observed that, as soon as the human being employs the tool, it is no longer a mere product in which he knows and recognizes himself as its creator. He sees in it not a mere artifact but an independent being, something that possesses its own powers [Kräften]. Instead of ruling it with his will, he turns it into a god or dæmon on whose will he depends and to which he feels himself subjugated and which he reli-

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

181

giously and ritually venerates. In particular, it seems to have been the axe and the hammer that carried such religious signification in earliest times;58 however, even today, among primitive peoples, the cults of certain implements and arms—the cult of the hoe or the fishhook, of the spear or the sword—are still alive. Among the Ewes, the smith’s hammer (Zu) is regarded as a mighty deity to whom they pray and offer sacrifices.59 And, even in Greek religion and classical Greek literature, the sensations that underlie this cult often still suddenly break through. As an example of this, Usener has drawn attention to a passage in Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus, in which Parthenopaios swears an oath on his spear, which he “honors more than god and higher than the eyes,” to destroy and plunder the Thebans. “Lives and victory depend upon the direction and force, so to speak, from the good will of the weapon; this sentiment uncontrollably boils in the crucial moment of the battle; the prayer does not evoke a god from afar to guide the weapon: the weapon itself is the helping, rescuing god.”60 So the tool is never regarded as something merely manufactured, as something devised and produced according to capriciousness, but as a “gift from above.” Its origin goes back not to the human being himself but to a “savior,” be it divine or animal. This affiliation of all cultural goods to a “savior” is so pervasive that from time to time some have even believed it possible to locate in it the core and origin of the notion of god.61 Again, we grasp here an essential feature of mythical thought, which distinguishes it in the sharpest way from the direction of “discursive,” theoretical reflection. This is characterized by the fact that, even in the apparently immediately given, theoretical reflection recognizes and singles out a share of the productivity of spirit. Even in pure matters of fact, it reveals moments of spiritual configuration: even in the data of the sensuous sensations and intuition, it tracks down the participation of the “spontaneity of thought.” However, if, in this way, the tendency of reflection is to sublate all receptivity 58. Examples of this may be found, e.g., in Karl Beth’s Einführung in die vergleichende Religionsgeschichte (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1920), 24ff. 59. Jacob Spieth, Religion der Eweer, 115. 60. Hermann Usener, Götternamen, 285. 61. See Kurt Breysig, Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heilbringer (Berlin: G. Bondi, 1905).

·125·

182

·126·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

into spontaneity, for mythical apprehension it is the inverse—namely, everything spontaneous is sublated into something merely receptive, everything generated with the participation of the human being becomes something that is simply received. And this holds true for the technical tools of culture as well as for its intellectual tools. For, in the beginning, there exists no sharp limit between them, only a fluid one. Even purely mental contents and products, such as the words of language, are initially thought of as the conditions of the physical existence and physical preservation of the human being. Preuß reports that the Cora Indians and the Uitoto believe that the “originary father” created human beings and things, but that, since completing this creation, he no longer intervenes directly in events. Rather, he gave human beings “words,” which constitute the cult and religious ceremonies that help them to master nature and attain whatever is necessary for the survival and flourishing of the human race. Without words, without the sacred sayings that were given to him from the beginning, the human being would feel completely helpless, for nature yields nothing in return for his mere work.62 Among the Cherokees, too, it is an accepted belief that the tracking down and killing of wild things either by hunting or fishing is accomplished chiefly by the use of certain words, certain magic formulas.63 It is a longer course that human intellectual development must traverse in order to progress from here, from the belief in the physico-magic force that is summed up in the word, to consciousness of its intellectual force. In fact, it is the word, it is language that actually first opens for the human being the world that stands even nearer than the physical existence of objects [Objekte], and that even more directly affects his welfare and his woes. Through it alone does existence and life in the community become possible; and in it, in the community, in the relation to a “you” does its own I, its subjectivity, first assume a determined figure. However, here, again, we see not only that this creative performance in which it takes place is grasped as such but that 62. For details, see Konrad Theodor Preuß, Die Nayarit-Expedition, I, LXVIIIf.; Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, I, 25f.; see also Konrad Theodor Preuß’s article: “Die höchste Gottheit bei den kulturarmen Völkern,” Psychologische Forschungen, II, 1922. 63. See James Monney, “Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee,” VIIth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution), 301–97.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

183

all the energy of spiritual activity [Tun] is transformed into the result of this activity [Tun], which seems bound up in the object from which it seems to radiate back as reflection. Thus, here too, as with the tool, all spontaneity is interpreted as receptivity, all creation as being, everything that is the product of subjectivity is interpreted as substantiality. And yet, this mythical hypostatization of the word holds decisive significance for the development of the human spirit. For it signifies the first form in which, in general, the spiritual force of the word and language can be grasped as such—the word must be understood in the mythical sense as a substantial being and a substantial force before it can be understood in the ideal sense as an organ of spirit, as a basic function for the construction and organization of the spiritual reality. 5 Usener considers the formation of those figures that he calls “momentary gods”—suddenly stepping forward, creatures born out of the urgency of the moment or from a very determined momentary affect, creatures that originate from the capacity to stimulate mythico-religious fantasy and in which their complete original mobility and volatility is evident—as the earliest stratum of religious formation of concepts that we can follow. Meanwhile, it appears as if the results that ethnology and the comparative history of religion have produced in the three decades since the appearance of Usener’s work place us in a position to step back even further. The work of the English missionary Codrington appeared a few years before Usener’s main work; with the appearance of The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore (1891), the general history of religion was enriched with a new and important concept. Codrington locates the root of all of the Melanesians’ religious representations in the belief in a “supernatural force” that penetrates all being and events, that is present and effective at one moment in mere things, at another in persons or spirits, but is never bound exclusively to any determined individual object or individual subject as its bearer, and may be passed from place to place, from thing to thing, from one person to another. The existence of things and the activity [Tun] of the human being appears in this intuition, so to speak, to be embedded in a mythical “force field,” in an atmosphere of effective action that penetrates every-

·127·

184 ·128·

·129·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

thing in order to thicken itself into extraordinary objects beyond the sphere of everyday life, in individual persons possessing powers, as in outstanding warriors or chieftains, wizards or priests. The core of this intuition, of the mana-idea, as Codrington describes it among the Melanesians, does not constitute, however, so much the idea of an individual particularization of power as simply the completely undetermined, in itself still fully undifferentiated representation of a “power” [Macht] in general, which manifests itself now in this form, now in that, now in one object, now in another, and which is venerated because of its “sacredness” and feared because of the perils it contains within itself. For that which is contained in a positive sense in the concept of the mana also corresponds to the negative aspect in the concept of the taboo. Each revelation of power, whether it shows itself in persons or things, as animate or inanimate, leaves the sphere of the “habitual” and joins a particular region of existence separated from the area of the everyday and profane by fixed borders, through certain measures of defense and protection. Since Codrington’s first findings, ethnological research has gone on to trace the diffusion of this basic idea across the whole earth. Not only among the South Sea Islanders but also among a large number of the tribes of Native Americans, as well as among indigenous peoples in Australia and Africa, terms that correspond precisely to those of the mana have been discovered. The same representation of a universal, initially in-itself undifferentiated power can be demonstrated in the manitu of the Algonquins, the wakanda of the Sioux, the orenda of the Iroquois, as well as in various African religions. On the basis of these observations, modern ethnology and the history of religion have often gone so far as to see here not only a universal phenomenon but the characteristic category of mythico-religious consciousness. The “taboo-mana formula” has been declared as the “minimum definition of religion,” that is, as the expression of a differentiation that constitutes, in general, one of the essential, indispensable conditions of religious life and that exhibits the lowest and most accessible originary vision that we know of.64 64. See especially Robert Ranulph Marett, “The Taboo-mana Formula as a Minimum Definition of Religion,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, XII (1909), and “The Conception of Mana,” Transactions of the 3rd International Congress for the History of Religion (Oxford, 1908), reprinted in The Threshold of Religion (London,

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

185

Admittedly, in present-day ethnolography, general agreement over the interpretation of this formula and over the exact meaning of the mana concept and similar or corresponding concepts has as yet not been reached. Rather, different interpretations and attempts at explanation immediately stand over against each other. “Preanimistic” views and explanations alternate with “animistic” ones; substantial interpretations that see in the mana something essentially material stand opposed to others that emphasize its energetic nature, that attempt to grasp it in a purely dynamic meaning.65 Perhaps this contradiction, however, can be used to lead us closer to the proper meaning of the mana concept. For it shows that this concept is completely indifferent to the wealth of distinctions that our theoretical observation of being and events and advanced religious consciousness make, that it acts toward them, so to speak, “neutrally.” An overview of the available material appears to show us that it is precisely this indifference that constitutes the essential characteristic of the mana concept—the more closely one attempts to “determine” it, that is, to fix it according to the sense of categorical differentiations and contrasts familiar to us, the further we necessarily remove ourselves from it. A first, obvious determination was tried by Codrington, who characterized the mana not only as a miraculous or magic power but also as spiritual, as “spiritual power.”66 The problematic nature of this characterization, however, already emerges in the examples he himself gives. For, in them, it becomes clear that the content and scope of the mana concept in no way agrees with our concept of “spiritual” existence, whether one introduces into the latter the determination of a personal being, or whether one contents oneself with the determination of life in contrast to the “inanimate.”67 For not everything living and animate befits 1909), 99ff. See also John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, “Orenda and a Definition of Religion,” American Anthropologist, N.S. IV (1902), 36ff. 65. An excellent critical survey of the various theories represented in ethnological literature may be found in Friedrich Rudolf Lehmann’s work Mana. Der Begriff des “außerordentlich Wirkungsvollen” bei Südseevölkern (Leipzig: Spamer, 1922). 66. [Originally in English.] 67. Hewitt demonstrates, through a detailed linguistic comparison, that the orenda of the Iroquois, too, is not equivalent to their concepts of either “mental” [seelische] forces or merely “life forces,” but is a concept and expression sui generis (op. cit., 44ff.).

186 ·130·

·131·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

mana, only that to which for some reason is ascribed the extraordinary ability of effective action, just as mere things are also suitable, provided they distinguish themselves as some uncommon form that excites mythical fantasy and thereby rise out of the sphere of the habitual. From this, it turns out that what is described in the mana concept, and in its corresponding concepts, is not a determined group of things—animate or inanimate, “physical” or “spiritual”—but, rather, a certain “character” that can be enclosed in the most diverse contents of being and events, provided they awaken mythical “astonishment,” provided they raise themselves up from the well-known, the accustomed and “average.” As Söderblom says in summarizing the result of his detailed and exact analysis of the concept: “The relevant words (mana, manitu, orenda, etc.) have varying significations and are translated in different ways—for example, remarkable, very strong, very big, very old, dangerous, magically powerful, magically informed, supernatural, divine, or in the substantive: power, magic, sorcery, luck, success, deity, pleasure.”68 A unity can be obtained out of such, for us, completely disparate significations only if we no longer seek this unity in a determined content but in a determined type of apprehension. Not the “what” but the “how” is decisive here; it comes not from the nature of the noticed but from the nature of the noticing, from its direction and property. Mana and its corresponding concepts do not express a determined and fixed predicate; however, in them, a particular, consistent form of predication can be recognized. And this predication can, in fact, be designated as the originary mythico-religious predication, insofar as through it the great separation, the spiritual crisis through which the sacred emerges out of the profane, through which the outstanding emerges out of the sphere of the equally valid in the religious sense, is carried out. The object of religious consciousness is, so to speak, first constituted in this process of separation; the sphere in which it is at home is delimited. However, we can now grasp the decisive element for our general problem. For, our purpose, set out from the beginning, is to grasp language and myth as spiritual functions, which do not presuppose a world of given objects divided according to fixed and finished “char68. Nathan Söderblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens. Untersuchungen über die Anfänge der Religion (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916), 95.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

187

acteristics” but actually produce this organization and make this positing of characteristics possible. The mana concept and its corresponding negative concept of taboo have shown us how this organization originally comes to be. However, from the fact that here we are moving on a level where the mythical and religious worlds do not yet confront us in a fixed coincidence and forming, but where we still see it before us, as it were, in statu nascendi [the state of being born], the sharp polysemy of the mana words and corresponding concepts also become comprehensible. It is characteristic that even the determination of the class of words to which the word mana belongs always seems to run up against new difficulties. According to our habits of thinking and speaking, the word can be grasped simply as a noun, as a noun substantive. Looked at in this way, mana becomes a sort of substance that exhibits the embodiment and combination [Zusammenfassung] of all the magic forces contained in individual things. It forms a self-existing unity that can, however, distribute itself over several beings [Wesen] or objects. And because this unity was thought of not only as that which exists but also as animate and personified, our basic representation of “spirit” was taken directly for the mana concept, as many have frequently seen in the Manitu of the Algonquins or in the wakanda of the Sioux nothing other than the designation of the “big spirit,” which they assumed, was worshipped as the creator of the world. A more precise analysis of the words and their signification, however, has nowhere confirmed this interpretation. It shows that, quite apart from the category of personal existence, which is never really strictly applicable here, even the concept of thing, the independent substantial being, proved to be too rigid to bring together the mobile and fleeting representation that has to be grasped here. Thus, McGee remarks that the reports of missionaries, according to which the wakanda of the Sioux was said to be an expression for “big spirit,” for the representation of a personal, originary being [Urwesen], have, without exception, been refuted by more precise linguistic studies. Among these tribes the creation and control of the world and the things thereof are ascribed to “wakan-da” (the term varying somewhat from tribe to tribe), just as among the Algonquian tribes omnipotence was assigned to “ma-ni-do” (“Manito the Mighty”

·132·

188

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

of “Hiawatha”); yet inquiry shows that wakanda assumes various forms, and is rather a quality than a definite entity. Thus, among many of the tribes the sun is wakanda—not the wakanda, but simply wakanda; and among the same tribes the moon is wakanda, and so is thunder, lightning, the stars, the winds, the cedar, and various other things; even a man, especially a shaman, might be wakanda or a wakanda. [ . . . ] In like manner many natural objects and places of striking character were considered wakanda. Thus, the term was applied to all sorts of entities and ideas, and was used (with or without inflectional variations) indiscriminately as substantive and adjective, and with slight modification as verb and adverb. Manifestly a term so protean is not susceptible of translation into our more highly differentiated languages. Manifestly, too, the idea expressed by the term is indefinite, and cannot justly be rendered into “spirit,” much less into “Great Spirit”; though it is easy to understand how the superficial inquirer, dominated by definite spiritual concept, handicapped by unfamiliarity with the Indian tongue, misled by ignorance of the vague prescriptorial ideation, and perhaps deceived by crafty native informants or mischievous interpreters, came to adopt and perpetuate the erroneous interpretation. The term may be translated into “mystery” perhaps more satisfactorily than into any other single English word, yet this rendering is at the same time much too limited and much too definite. [ . . . ] Indeed, no English sentence of reasonable length can do justice to the aboriginal idea expressed by the term wakanda.69

·133·

According to the accounts of linguists and ethnologists, much the same thing is apparently true for the name of the god, and the fundamental religious intuition it embodies, in the Bantu languages. Here, we can employ another linguistic criterion in order to appreciate correctly the character of this fundamental intuition, for the Bantu languages distinguish all nouns according to determined classes, and in this way they clearly separate the class of persons from the class of things [Sachen] so that, from subsumption of the name of the god under one of these classes, 69. William John McGee, “The Siouan Indians,” 15th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Smithsonian Institute, 1892–93), 182ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

189

a certain conclusion can immediately be made as to the underlying representation. Indeed, for example, in the East Bantu language, the word mulungu, which has been chosen by the missionaries as the translation for our word “God,” is characteristically assigned not to the class of persons but to the class of things [Sachen], and, according to its prefix and nominal character, it is seen as belonging to it. Now, admittedly, this fact leaves room for a double consideration. We can essentially see in it a phenomenon of decay, a decline of a previously higher stage of divine reverence. “The representation of God as a personal being [Wesen],” remarks Roehl in his grammar of the Shambala language, “has been practically lost among the Shambalas; they speak of God as an impersonal spirit, immanent in the whole of creation. The Mulungu lives in the forests, in individual trees, in cliffs, in caves, in wild animals (lions, snakes, cats), in birds, in locusts, and so on. For such a Mulungu as something absolutely impersonal there is no place in Class 1 (the ‘class of persons’).”70 The opposite interpretation has been given by Meinhof, who summarizes the results of an exact analysis, from a religious and linguistic perspective, of the mulungu concept to the effect that the word initially denotes the place of the ancestral spirits and then the power that is effective from this place. “However, this power remains ghostly, it is not personified; it is also not grammatically treated as a person, except where a 70. Karl Roehl, Versuch einer systematischen Grammatik der Schambalasprache (Hamburg: Friederichsen & Co., 1911), 45ff.—A very characteristic example of the “impersonal” character of the mulungu concept is found in Hetherwick’s account of the use of the word among the Yao of British Central Africa: “In its native use and form the word (mulungu) does not imply personality, for it does not belong to the personal class of nouns. . . . Its form denotes rather a state or property inhering in something, as life or health inheres in body. Among the various tribes where the word is in use as we have described, the missionaries have adopted it as the term for ‘God.’ But the untaught Yao refuses to assign to it any idea of being a personality. It is to him more a quality or faculty of human nature whose signification he has extended so as to embrace the whole spirit world. Once after I have endeavoured to impress an old Yao headman with the personality of the Godhead in the Christian sense of the term, using the term Mulungu, my listener began to talk of ‘The Mulungu,’ ‘Mr. God,’ showing that originally to him the word conveyed no idea of the personality I was ascribing to it.” (Hetherwick, “Some Animistic Beliefs among the Yaos of British Central Africa,” Journal of the Anthropology Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, XXXII [1902], 94.)

·134·

190

·135·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

foreign religion has brought this comparison to its essence.”71 Examples of this type are instructive because they show us that the level of mythical formation of concepts that we find here corresponds to a level of linguistic formation of concepts into which we may not properly insert our grammatical categories, our distinctions of more keenly distinguished classes of words. If we want to show any linguistic analogue to the mythical concepts that are in question here, we must, it would appear, return to the originary stratum of linguistic interjections.72 The manitu of the Algonquins, like the mulungu of the Bantu, is used in this way—as an exclamation that describes not so much a thing as a certain impression, and that is used to refer to anything uncommon, astonishing, admirable, or terrifying.73 We now recognize to what extent this level of consciousness, to which these mythical and linguistic formations belong, still precedes the stage in which the formation of the “momentary god” takes place. For the momentary god, with all of its fleetingness, always remains an individual, a personal figure, whereas here, the sacred, the divine, that which overcomes the human being with a sudden movement of terror or reverence, has a thoroughly impersonal, “anonymous” character. In this very namelessness, however, only the background is given, from which determined dæmonic and divine figures with determined names gradually detach themselves. If the “momentary god” is the first actual formation 71. Carl Meinhof, “Die Gottesvorstellung bei den Bantu,” Allgemeine MissionsZeitschrift, vol. 50 (1923), 69. 72. In a few cases, this connection would still appear to be shown etymologically; according to Brinton, for example, the wakanda of the Sioux goes back, etymologically, to an interjection of astonishment and amazement (Religions of Primitive Peoples, 60). 73. It is the custom among them (the Algonquins), when they notice something particular with men, women, birds, animals, or fish, to shout out: manitu, that is, “This is a god.” When, therefore, they speak among each other about English ships and big buildings, the ploughing of fields and particularly about books and letters, they end with “mannitowock,” that is, cummannittewock, “you are a God” (report by Roger Williams 1643; quoted by Söderblom, op. cit., 100. See, in particular, Hetherwick, op. cit., 94: “Mulungu is regarded as the agent in anything mysterious. It’s mulungu is the Yao exclamation on being shown anything that is beyond the range of his understanding. The rainbow is always ‘mulungu,’ although some Yaos have begun to use the Mang’anya term ‘uta wa Lesa,’ ‘bow of Lesa.’”

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

191

in which the mythico-religious consciousness asserts itself in a lively and creative way, then the general potentiality of the mythical-religious sentiment underlies this reality.74 The separation of a “sacred” world from a “profane” world as such is the first presupposition for the formation of individually determined, created divine figures. The I now feels itself as immersed in a mythico-religious atmosphere, which surrounds it constantly and in which it exists and lives; it takes only a spark, a particular opportunity, for the god or dæmonic to emerge out of it. The outlines of such dæmonic figures may at first be undetermined;75 nevertheless, they designate the first step along a new path. Now, myth moves from its initial, as it were, “anonymous” stage to the exact opposite, to the stage of “polyonymy.” Every personal god unites in itself a wealth of attributes, which originally belonged to the special gods that experienced their combination [Zusammenfassung] in them. However, not only the attributes but also the names of these gods—not as proper names, but as appellatives— are transferred to the new god, for the name of the god and its essence are one. Thus, the polyonymy of the personal gods really constitutes a necessary feature of their nature and disposition. “For religious sentiment, the predominance of god expresses itself in the fullness of surnames; polyonymy (ʌȠȜȣȦȞȣȝȓĮ) appears to be a demand and presupposition for a higher personal god.”76 In Egyptian writings, Isis appears as the

74. This expression of “potentiality” has been worked through in the fact that the mana-idea and its corresponding ideas were sought to be described. See, for example, Hewitt’s definition on 38. “Orenda is a hypothetical potency or potentiality to do or affect results mythically.” See also Edwin Sidney Hartland’s Presidential Address in A Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (York, 1906), 678ff. 75. On the other hand, language, in its designation for such dæmonic beings, frequently offers indications for this particular “indetermination.” In the Bantu language, for example, the names of such beings are not given the prefix of the first class, which includes the “independent acting personalities.” Rather, there exists here a proper prefix, which, according to Meinhof, is used for ghosts [Geister], insofar as they “are not thought of as independent personalities, but rather animate or that which befalls a human being; thus they apply to sickness, distant smoke, fires, streams, the moon, as natural power.” Carl Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantu-Sprachen (Berlin, 1906), 6ff. (See above, 57 note 1.) 76. Hermann Usener, Götternamen, 334.

·136·

192

·137·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

thousand-named, even ten-thousand-named, the myrionyma,77 just as Allah’s power is, in the Koran, pronounced in his “hundred names.” This wealth of names for the god is also evident in the religions of the American native, especially in the Mexican religions.78 Thus, the representation of the god first receives, so to speak, its concrete embodiment and its inner fullness through language, through the word. As it enters into the bright light of language, it ceases to be silhouette and shadow. However, a counter-instinct, which is no less grounded in the nature of language, also comes to life again. For just as language tends toward individuation, regulation, and determination, it also tends toward generalization. So, guided by language, mythico-religious thinking is brought to a point where it is no longer content with the manifold, the difference, the concrete fullness of divine attributes and divine names, where the unity of the word becomes the means through which it attempts to penetrate to the unity of the god concept. This thinking, however, now pushes even further beyond this level, to a being that, as it is no longer limited in individuals, is no longer named by any name. The cycle of mythico-religious consciousness has, in this way, come full circle, for as in the beginning, consciousness of the divine now stands over against the “nameless.” However, the beginning and the end do not resemble each other, for we have only here entered into the sphere of genuine generality from the sphere of mere indeterminateness. Instead of being integrated into the infinite multiplicity of qualities and proper names, instead of being integrated into the colorful world of appearances, the divine separates itself from this world as being without qualities, for every mere “property” would limit its pure essence: omnis determinatio est negatio [every determina77. See Heinrich Karl Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Ägypter (Leipzig, 1888), 645; for the expression “Isis myrionyma,” which is also found in Latin inscriptions, see Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, vol. 2, 91.—In magical practice, this idea of the “polynomy” of gods has condensed itself into a fixed pattern. Thus, the Graeco-Egyptian magical prayers and magical formulae/invocations of Dionysius and Apollo, in which the individual names by which they are denoted appear in alphabetical order, so that a letter of the alphabet is allotted to each verse. For details, see Theodor Hopfner, Griechisch-ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber, § 684 (175). 78. For more details, see Daniel Garrison Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, 99.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

193

tion is a negation]. It is, above all, the mysticism of all times and all peoples that must, again and again, wrestle with this twofold intellectual task, with the task of grasping the divine in its totality, in its most concrete innerness and contentfulness, and yet, at the same time, of keeping it safe from every particularity of name and image. Thus, all mysticism aims at a world beyond language, a world of silence. God is, as Meister Eckhart has called Him, “the simple ground, the still, silent desert, the simple still silence,” for “that is his nature, that he is without nature.”79 The spiritual force and depth of language, however, now shows itself in that it prepares the ground for this last step, in that it first clears the way for the goal of its own overcoming. Two basic concepts of language that, perhaps, present the most characteristic and most difficult spiritual achievement are the concept of being and the concept of the I. In their pure manifestation, both would appear to belong to relatively late stages of the development of language; both clearly exhibit in their configuration the difficulties before which linguistic expression was placed here and which it was able to overcome only step by step. With regard to the concept of being, a glance at the development and basic etymological signification of the copula in most languages shows how linguistic thought was only very gradually able to move toward obtaining the expression of pure “being” from that of “being-a-certain-way.” The “is” of the copula goes back almost without exception to a sensuously concrete, fundamental signification: instead of a simple “existence” or a general “comportingitself,” it originally indicated an individual, determined mode and form of existence, especially a being at this or that place, at a certain position in space.80 When, however, language arrives at freeing the thought and the expression of “being” from this constraint to a particular form of existence [Existenz], then a new vehicle, a new mental tool, has been created for mythico-religious thought. Admittedly, critical, “discursive” thought finally arrives at a point in its progress where the expression of being presents itself as the expression of a pure relation, and thus, where, to speak with Kant, being no longer appears as the “possible predicate 79. See Franz Pfeiffer, Deutsch Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. II: Meister Eckhardt (Leipzig, 1857), 160. 80. Illustrations of this principle may be found in my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, 313ff.

·138·

194

·139·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

of a thing” and, consequently, not even as the predicate of God. However, for mythico-religious consciousness, which knows no such critical separation, which proceeds rather more “objectively” to its highest formations, being becomes not only a predicate but at a certain stage in its development, the predicate of predicates—it becomes the expression that allows one to subsume all individual attributes, all the characteristics of God, under a single condensed seizing. Wherever in the history of religious thought the demand for the unity of the divine arises, there it clings to and finds its surest support in the linguistic expression of being. This direction of religious thought can be found even in the history of Greek philosophy—in Xenophanes, the unity of the divine is deduced and proven from the unity of being. However, this interconnection is not restricted to philosophical speculation; rather, it extends back to the earliest known, originary records in the history of religion. Already in the early Egyptian texts, in the midst of all of the individual figures of the gods and animals of the Egyptian pantheon, we encounter the idea of the “hidden god,” who is described in the inscriptions as the one whose figure no one knows, for whose image no one has searched: “he is a secret for his creature,” “he is a secret name for his children.” There is only one designation that can be given to this god as the creator of the world, as the one who forms men and gods: simply, being. He begets and is not begotten, he bears and is not born, he is being, he himself, the constant in all, the permanent of all. Thus, he “is from the beginning,” “from the outset”; everything that is, came after he was.81 Here, all the separate, concrete, and individual names of the gods are taken up into the one name of being; the divine excludes all particular attributes from itself, it can no longer be designated by anything else, and can be predicated only of itself. From here, only a single step is needed to arrive at the basic idea of pure monotheism. This fundamental idea is reached as soon as the unity that is grasped and pronounced here from the perspective of the object is turned into that of the subject, as soon as the signification and meaning of the divine, instead of being sought in the being of things, is sought in the being of the person, in the being of the I. The same is equally 81. Compare the excerpts and translation from inscriptions in Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Ägypter, 56ff., 96ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

195

valid, in the linguistic sense, for the expression of the “I” as for the expression of being; it, too, must be found through the long and difficult detour of language, and intellectually worked out, step by step, from concrete-sensuous beginnings.82 As soon as it is coined, however, a new category of religious consciousness develops with it at the same time. Again, it is religious speech which quickly seizes upon this expression, which, so to speak, uses it as a step ladder to climb upward to a new spiritual height. The form of the “I-predication,” the form of the selfrevelation of God, in which He reveals, through a repeated “I am . . . ,” the different sides of His uniform nature [Wesen], originates in Egypt and Babylon, and afterward, in later stages, it develops into a typical stylistic form of religious expression.83 This form first stands before us, however, in a perfect figure once it suppress all others, when the only “name” of the deity that remains is the I. When God reveals himself to Moses, Moses asks what name he should give to the Israelites if they desire to know which God has sent him, and he receives the answer: “I am, that I am. So, shalt you say to them: ‘I am’ has sent me unto you.” Only with this transformation of objective existence [Existenz] into personal being is the divine truly raised to the sphere of the “unconditioned,” to a domain that cannot be described through any analogy to things or the names of things. For its designation there remains, from all the means of language, only the personal expression, the personal pronoun: “I am He; I am the First, the Last,” as it is written in the prophetic books.84 Finally, both ways of consideration—the way through being and the way through the I—are brought together into a unity in Indian religious speculation. It, too, takes its departure from the “sacred word,” from the Brahma. In the Vedic books, all being, even God, is subject to the force of this sacred word. The word regulates and guides the course of nature; through knowledge and mastery of the word, the informed are bestowed 82. For details, see my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 247ff. 83. For the origin and dissemination of this form, see the exhaustive studies by Norden (instructive also for students of philosophy of religion): Agnostos Theos, 177ff., 207ff. 84. Isaiah 48:12; see 43:10. For the significance of the “I am He,” see Ignaz Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1876), 359ff.

·140·

196

·141·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

with the power to rule over the whole world. At first, the word is grasped entirely as an individual, which is subordinated to a specific individual being. In its application, in its use by the priest, the most scrupulous precision is necessary; any deviation in a single syllable, any change in rhythm or meter would render the force of the prayer ineffective. However, the progress of the Veda to the Upanishads shows us how, more and more, the word is removed from this narrowness of magic, how it was configured into a universal intellectual potency. From the essence of particular things, thought, as it is expressed in its individual, concrete designations, strives toward the unity in which it encloses and brings these things together. The force of particular words is thickened, as it were, into the originary and basic force of the Brahman, the essential word.85 In this, all particular being, everything that seems to have an “essence” of its own, is taken into account; however, with this, at the same time, it is sublated as a particular. In order to express this relationship, religious speculation again reaches for the concept of being, which, in order to grasp its pure content, now appears in a sort of heightened intensification in the Upanishads. As Plato contrasted the ‫ݻ‬ȞIJĮ [existents], the world of empirical things, with the ‫ݻ‬ȞIJȦȢ‫ݻ‬Ȟ [true existents], the pure being of the idea [Idee], so we find in the Upanishads the individual and particular existence opposed to the Brahman as the “existingbeing” [Seiend-Seiende] (satyasya satyam).86 And with this development, the one now meets and interpenetrates the other, which takes its departure from the opposite pole—an intellectual progression that treats, not being, but the I, as the center of religious reflection. Both directions arrive at the same goal, for being and I, Brahman and Atman, are sepa85. On the fundamental signification of Brahma as the “sacred word,” as prayer and spell, see Hermann Oldenberg, in the Anzeiger für indogermanische Sprach- und Altertumskunde, vol. VIII, 40; also, therefore, Oldenberg, Die Religion der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1915), 17ff., 38ff., 46ff. A somewhat divergent explanation is given by Hopkins, who regards the concept of “power,” which has been transferred to the word of the prayer and its magic effectiveness afterward, as the fundamental signification of the Brahma: Edward Washburn Hopkins, Origin and Evolution of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 309. 86. Examples may be found in Paul Deussen, Philosophie der Upanishads (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1899), 119ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

197

rated only in expression, not in content. Only the self that does not age and wither, that is unchangeable and immortal, is the true “absolute.” However, with this last step, with the identity of Brahma and Atman, religious consciousness and religious speculation have again broken their initial limits, the limits of the word. For the words of language are no longer able to grasp this unity of “subject” and “object” [Objekt]. Language steps between the subject and the object [Objekt]; it constantly moves from this to that, and from that back to this, but while constantly joining them, it must nevertheless look upon them as always separate. In that religious speculation sublates this separation, it tears itself away from the power of the word and the leadership of language: however, it thereby arrives at the essentially transcendent, which remains, for the word as well as for the concept, unapproachable. The only name, the only designation that remains for this All-One is the expression of negation. The being of the Atman, which is called here “no, no”—beyond this “thus it is not,” there is nothing higher. Thus, this attempt at liberation, which cuts the bond between language and mythico-religious consciousness, also confirms yet again how strong and solid this bond is—as myth and religion strive beyond the limits of the linguistic, with this striving they at the same time reach the limit of their own possibilities of configuration. When, in the year 1878, Max Müller published his Lectures on the Origin and Development of Religion, he leaned on the first reports that he received by letter from Codrington concerning the mana of the Melanesians, using them to support his basic philosophical thesis of religion, namely, that all religion establishes itself on the ability of the human spirit to grasp the “infinite.” He remarks: What I hold is that with every finite perception there is a concomitant perception, or, if that word should seem too strong, a concomitant sentiment or presentiment of the infinite;87 that from the very first act of touch, or hearing, or sight, we are brought into contact, not only with a visible, but at the same time with an invisible world. 87. [Cassirer’s original gives “a concomitant sentiment or presentiment of the infinite” in English.]

198 ·142·

·143·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

And in the word mana, which he interpreted as a “Polynesian name for the infinite,” he saw one of the earliest and clumsiest expressions for that which may have been the first stage of the grasping of the infinite.88 The increasing acquaintance with the sphere of mythico-religious representations from which the concept and expression of mana originated, however, seems to have thoroughly destroyed this halo of the infinite and transcendent that the word envelops here. It has shown how thoroughly the “religion” of the mana is bound up not only in sensory intuitions but also in sensory drives, in absolutely “finite” practical purposes.89 Indeed, Müller’s interpretation was only possible because, as he expressly explained, he equated the “infinite” with the “indefinite,” the “eternal” with the “indeterminate.”90 However, the fluidity of the mana-representation, which renders it so difficult to fix in our intuition and for which it has been so difficult to find an adequate expression in our linguistic concepts, has nothing to do with the philosophical and religious idea [Idee] of the infinite. If the latter is beyond the possibility of linguistic determination, so the former still stands before this determination. Language moves into the middle realm between the “undetermined” and the “infinite”; it transforms the undetermined into the determined and holds on to it in the sphere of finite determination. So, there is, within the mythico-religious intuition, a different “nameless” order that constitutes the lower and upper limits of linguistic expression; however, between these two limits, through the hidden limits of its own form, language can now move freely, can demonstrate the entire direction and the concrete wealth of its power of configuration. Here, too, a type of consciousness beyond its basic relationship to language can be made out in myth, even though, in accordance with this particularity, it can bring its own type of consciousness to expression not in abstract concepts of reflection but only in images. It transforms the ideal process of coming to light, which in language takes place in some88. See Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (London: New Impression, 1898), 46ff. 89. “All Melanesian religion,” says Max Müller, citing a letter of Codrington’s, “in fact, consists in getting this Mana for oneself, or getting it used for one’s benefit— all religions, that is, as far as religious practices go, exist as prayers and sacrifices.” 90. “What I want to prove in this course of lectures is that indefinite and infinite are in reality two names of the same thing” (Max Müller, 36).

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

199

thing objective, and presents it as a cosmogonic process. Thus Jean Paul once said: “It seems to me that ( just as the speechless animals that drift through the outer world as though in a dark, deadening, and undulating sea), the human being would be lost in the starry vastness of external intuition if he were not able to divide that vague brightness into constellations through language, and thus resolve the whole into its parts for consciousness.”91 Within its sphere and in its own language of images, myth presents this emergence from the dull fullness of being into a world of clear, linguistically tangible configurations through the opposition between chaos and creation. For, once again, the word constitutes here the means; it is speech that constructs the bridge from the figureless, originary ground to the form of being, to its inner organization. Thus, the Babylonian-Assyrian history of creation portrays chaos as the state in which the heavens were still “unnamed” and where, under them on the earth, no one yet knew the names for anything. In Egypt, too, the time before creation is called the time in which no god yet existed, and in which no one knew the names of anything.92 An originary determination worked itself out of this indeterminateness when the creator-god first pronounced his own name, and by virtue of the violent power dwelling in that word, called himself into life. Thinking that this god is nothing other than his own ground, a causa sui, the mythical expresses itself in the idea that the god brings himself forth by virtue of his name. Before him, there was no other god, nor is there another god beside him: “There was for him no mother who made his name for him, nor a father who pronounced him in that he said: I have begotten him.”93 In the Book of the Dead, the sun-god Râ is described as his own creator because he names himself, that is to say, he has even given himself his essential natures [Wesenheiten] and his forces.94 And from this originary force of speech, 91. [Jean Paul, Levana oder Erziehlehre (chap. 2, § 131), in Werke, vol. XXIIC (Berlin, 1842), 78.] 92. See Alexandre Moret, Le rituel du culte divin journalier en Égypte (Paris: E. Leroux, 1902), 129. 93. From a Leyden papyrus. See Alexandre Moret, Mystères égyptiens, 120f. [“. . . il n’existait point de mère pour lui qui lui ait fait son nom; point de père pour lui qui l’ait émis en disant: ‘C’est moi (qui l’ai créé).’”] 94. Totenbuch (ed. Naville), 17, 6; see Adolf Erman, Die ägyptische Religion (Berlin: Reimer, 1909), 34.

200 ·144·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

which dwells in the demiurge, arises everything that has existence [Existenz], that has a determined existence [Dasein]: when he speaks, he signifies the birth of the gods and of peoples.95 The same motive appears, in another turn and in a new depth, in the biblical account of creation. Here, too, it is the word of God that divides the light from the darkness, that lets heaven as well as earth emerge from himself. The names of the earthly creatures, however, are no longer directly given by the creator himself but are assigned only by man. After God has formed all the animals of the field and all the birds of the heavens, he brings them before man to see how he will name them: “Then as man names them, so shall they be called” (Genesis 2:19). In this act of naming, the human being takes possession of the world, as it were, physically and mentally; through this naming, it submits to his knowledge and rule. Thus, in this individual feature is revealed the general, basic nature and the ideal achievement of pure monotheism that Goethe described by saying that the belief in the unique God always has a spiritually uplifting effect, in that it brings the human being back to his own inner unity. Admittedly, this unity cannot be discovered otherwise than, by virtue of language and myth, in concrete formation, by revealing, embodying itself in a world of objective figures, from which it is gradually reclaimed through progressive reflection. 6 The preceding considerations have made us understand, above all, the close interweaving of mythical and linguistic thought; they have shown how the construction of the mythical and linguistic worlds is determined and ruled for a long time by the same spiritual motives. However, a basic motive, in which, as it appears, this relation not only actually shows itself 95. See this documentation in the passage of “Le mystère de verbe createur” by Alexandre Moret, Mystères ëgyptians, 103ff., as well as Lepsius, Älteste Texte des Totenbuches, 29. How this Egyptian idea of the power of the word to create joins with the fundamental ideas and intuitions of Greek philosophy, and the significance of this development for the formation of the Christian theory of logos, has been set forth by Reitzenstein in his Zwei religionsgeschichtliche Fragen (Strasbourg: K. J. Krübner, 1901), esp. 80ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

201

but from which it can also be understood [verstehen] in its ultimate ground and origin, has so far remained unnoticed. That myth and language are subordinated to the same or analogous spiritual laws of development can, in the end, be truly comprehended only if we succeed in demonstrating a common root from which both spring. The commonality in their achievements, in their configurations, also clearly points here to an ultimate commonality in the function of configuring itself. In order to make out this function as such, and to present it purely for itself, we must pursue the ways that the development of myth and language have undergone, not forward but backward—we must return to the point from which the two lines diverge. And this indeed seems to be demonstrable, for however much the contents of myth and language can be distinguished, one and the same form of spiritual apprehension is effective in both. It is this form that we can describe as the form of metaphorical thought. It appears that we must return to the essence and meaning of the metaphor if we want to grasp the unity, on the one hand, and the difference, on the other hand, of the mythical and linguistic worlds. It is frequently emphasized that it is the metaphor that ties the spiritual bond between language and myth. In the precise determination of this process and the direction that it follows, however, theories differ greatly from each other. In one, the real origin of the metaphor is sought first in linguistic formation, in another it is sought in mythical fantasy. Sometimes it is the word that begets the mythical metaphor through its originally metaphoric character, and it must constantly supply the metaphor with new nourishment; sometimes, on the contrary, it is the metaphoric character of words that is regarded as an indirect result, as an inheritance, that language receives from myth and that it holds in fee from it. Herder, for example, has emphasized this primary mythical character of all verbal and linguistic concepts in his excellent essay On the Origin of Language. Given that the whole of nature resounds: nothing is more natural for a sensory human being than that it lives, speaks, and acts. The savage sees the high tree with its splendid summit and admires— the summit rustled! That is a stirring deity! The savage falls down and prays! See, here, how the history of the sensory human being, the dark bond, comes out of the verbis nomina [verbal nouns]—and

·145·

202

·146·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

with it the easiest step toward abstraction! For the savages of North America, for example, everything is still animated; every object has its genius, its spirit, and that this has also been so with the Greeks and the East may be seen from their oldest dictionaries and grammars—they are, as the whole of nature was to their inventor, a pantheon! An empire of animate, acting beings! . . . The raging storm and the sweet zephyr, the clear spring and the mighty ocean—their whole mythology lies in the treasure troves, in the verbis and nominibus of the old languages, and the oldest dictionary was such a sounding pantheon.96 Romanticism has pursued Herder’s fundamental intuition further: Schelling, too, sees in language a “faded mythology” that preserves in abstract and formal differences what mythology grasped as living and concrete differences.97 “Comparative mythology,” especially as practiced by Adalbert Kuhn and Max Müller, took up precisely the opposite approach of explanation when it attempted to substantiate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century. They methodically based mythical comparison on the results of linguistic comparison; the conclusion regarding content seemed to result from the primacy of the linguistic formation of concepts over the mythical formation of concepts. Consequently, mythology became a product of language. The “radical metaphor” that underlies the formation of all myths was interpreted and understood [verstehen] in its necessity as an essentially linguistic formation [Gebilden]. The identity or harmony of linguistic designation initially cleared and pointed the way to the mythical fantasy. The human being, whether he wanted to or not, was forced to speak metaphorically, not because he could not curb his poetic fantasy, but rather because he had to exert it on the most outward in order to find expression for the increasingly growing demands of his spirit. Under metaphor, one should no longer simply understand the carefully considered activity of a poet, the conscious trans96. Johann Gottfried Herder, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, in Werke, vol. V (Berlin, 1877), 53f. 97. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sämtliche Werke, 2nd div., vol. I, 52.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

203

ference of one word for an object to another. This is the modern, individual metaphor that generates from the fantasy, whereas the old metaphor was much more frequently a matter of necessity, and in most cases, was less the transfer of one word for a concept onto another than the creation or closer determination of a new concept by means of one of the old names. What we commonly call mythology is, thus, only a small remnant of a general level in the development of our thought, a faint living on of what once formed a complete empire of thought and language. We will never gain an understanding of mythology before we have learned that what we call anthropomorphism, personification, or animation is absolutely necessary for the growth of language and reason. It was entirely impossible to grasp and to hold onto, to know and to understand, to comprehend and to name the external world without this fundamental metaphor, this universal mythology, this bubble of our own spirit in the chaos of objects [Objekte] and re-creating according to our image. The beginning of this second creation of spirit was the word, and we can add, in truth, that everything was done through this word, that is to say, everything was named and known and that, without it, nothing of what has been done would have been done.98 Before we can attempt, in this multiplicity of contradictory theories, to take a position in the debate over the status of the temporal and spiritual priority of language over mythology or myth over language, it is essential to delimit and sharpen the basic idea of metaphor itself. We can take this concept in the limited sense as being restricted to the conscious substitution of the designation of the content of one representation by the name of another content that is in some features similar or that offers some indirect “analogies” to it. In this case, metaphor is a genuine “transference”: the two contents, between which it goes back and forth, have been fixed as self-determined and independent significations, 98. Friedrich Max Müller, Das Denken im Lichte der Sprache (German translation, Leipzig, 1888), 304f., see esp. 443ff. See also Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. II, 8 (London, 1873), 368ff. (see also, above 3ff.).

·147·

204

·148·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

and between them, as fixed beginning and end points, as a given terminus a quo and terminus ad quem, the movement of the representation that leads from the one to the other takes place, and the one, in accordance with the expression, is substituted for the other. Any attempt to penetrate the phenomenal causes of this substitution of representation and expression and to explain its extraordinarily rich and manifold use, in particular the use that primitive forms of thought and language have made of this type of metaphor, of the deliberate identification of two contents that are understood and known to be different in themselves, leads us back to a foundational layer of mythical thought and feeling. Werner, in his study in developmental psychology on the origins of the metaphor, has most likely shown that certain motives arising from the magical view of the world, and in particular, certain kinds of names and linguistic taboos, play an important role in this type of metaphor, in the transcription of one expression by another.99 This use of the metaphor, however, obviously assumes the sensory content of individual formations [Gebilden], as well as their linguistic correlates, as already given, as fixed quantities; only after these elements have been linguistically determined and fixed as such can they be exchanged for one another. This transposition and exchange, which already exchanges the vocabulary of language with its material, must be distinguished from the genuine “radical” metaphor, which is a condition of the formation of language as well as the mythical formation of concepts itself. Indeed, the most primitive linguistic articulation already necessitates the transposition of a determined content of intuition or feeling into sound, thus into a content that is itself a foreign, even disparate medium, just as the simplest mythical figure only originates by virtue of a transformation through which a determined impression of the sphere of the ordinary, the everyday, and the profane is relieved and moved to the sphere of the “sacred,” the mythico-religiously “significant.” What takes place here is not simply a transfer; rather, it is a genuine ȝİIJȐȕĮȚȢİ‫ݧ‬ȢܿȜȜȠȖȑȞȠȢ [a transformation into a wholly other genus]. It is not simply a transition from one already existing genus to another but the very creation of the genus itself to which the transition proceeds. If we now ask ourselves, however, which of these two forms of metaphor 99. Heinz Werner, Die Ursprünge der Metapher (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1919), esp. chap. 3, 74ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

205

evokes the other, whether the ultimate ground of the metaphorical expression of language lies in the mythical attitude, or inversely, whether this attitude itself could only have taken shape and developed from language, the preceding considerations have shown us that this question is essentially invalid. For, here, it obviously cannot be about empirically establishing a temporal “earlier” or “later”; rather, it is concerned only about the ideal relationship in which the linguistic form stands vis-àvis the mythical form, with the way the one intervenes in, and, in its content, conditions the other. This conditioning, however, can itself be grasped only as absolutely reciprocal. Language and myth originally stand in an insoluble correlation, from which they only gradually resolve into independent members. They are different shoots of one and the same drive of symbolic forming, which emerges from the same basic act of spiritual elaboration, the concentration and increase of simple sense intuition. In the sound of language as in primary mythical configurations, the same inner process finds its conclusion: both are the resolution of an inner tension, the presentation of psychic stirrings and arousals in certain objective formations and structures [Gebilden]. As Usener emphasized: The naming of things is not established through an arbitrary act. One does not constitute just any sound-complex in order to adopt it as the sign of a certain thing as one would for a coin. The mental excitement that is evoked by a being that is confronted in the outside world is simultaneously the stimulus to and the means of naming. Sense impressions are what the I receives from its collision with a not-I, and the liveliest of these push forward by themselves to phonetic explication: they are the bases of individual namings, which speaking people attempt. (p. 3) And this genesis of naming corresponds, feature for feature, as we have seen, to the genesis of the “momentary gods.” Thus, the meaning of the linguistic and the mythical “metaphor” will only reveal itself—and the spiritual force that lies in both can only be completely understood—if we trace them back to this common origin, if we seek them in every particular combination [Zusammenfassung], in every “intensification” of sense intuition, which lies at the base of all linguistic as well as all mythicoreligious forming. If we again assume as our starting point the opposition presented to

·149·

206

·150·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

us by the formation of theoretical or “discursive” concepts, then, indeed, it would appear that the different direction in which the formation of logical-discursive concepts and the formation of linguistic-mythical concepts move come to clear expression in their results. The former begins with an individual particular intuition in order constantly to widen it, in order to go beyond its initial limits to ever-new relations that we discover in it. The intellectual process that plays itself out here is a process of synthetic supplementation, uniting and completing individuals into the whole. In this relation with the whole, however, the individual does not give up its concrete determination or its limitation. It fits into the whole, into the totality of phenomena, but at the same time it stands over against this totality as something independent and unique. The ever-narrower connection that the individual intuition gains in relation to others does not mean that it disappears into these others. The individual “exemplar” of a species is “contained” in this species; the species is “subsumed” under a higher genus. At the same time, however, they remain separated, they do not coincide. This basic relationship expresses itself in the simplest and most meaningful way in the well-known schema that logic conventionally uses for the presentation of this hierarchy of concepts, this superordination and subordination of species and genus. Here, the logical determination is presented geometrically: every concept has a determined “sphere” through which it distinguishes itself from other conceptspheres. These spheres are able to interlock in numerous ways, mutually covering and intersecting with one another. Nevertheless, there belongs to each a fixed, delimited place in the sphere of concepts. In it, the concept also maintains itself in its synthetic extension and continuation: the new relations it enters into lead not to its boundaries being blurred but to their being more sharply grasped and recognized as such. If we compare this form of the logical concepts of species and genera with the originary form of linguistic and mythical concepts, it immediately appears that they each belong to a quite different tendency of thought. If, in the one case, there occurs a concentric expansion over ever-wider spheres of intuitions and concepts, in the case of linguistic and mythical concepts, the very opposite movement of the spirit emerges. Intuition is not widened but compressed; it is, so to speak, concentrated into a single point. In this compression, only one element, on which the accent of “signification” is placed, is found and singled out. All light is thus gath-

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

207

ered here into one point, the focal point of “signification,” while everything that lies outside this focal point of linguistic and mythical apprehension remains essentially invisible. It remains “unremarkable” because and insofar as it remains without any linguistic or mythical “marker.” In the conceptual sphere of logic, a more diffuse light prevails—and the further that logical analysis progresses, the more this even light and clarity extend. In the intuitional space of myth and language, however, next to positions from which the most intensive luminosity radiates, others, which appear wrapped in darkness, are always found. While individual contents of intuition become centers of linguistic-mythical force, centers of “significance,” there are others that remain, so to speak, below the threshold of signification. And the fact that primary mythical and the primary linguistic concepts constitute such punctual unities accounts for the fact that they leave no room for further quantitative differentiations. With each relation of concepts, logical contemplation must pay careful attention to the scope of relationship of concepts, and classic “syllogistic logic” is ultimately nothing other than a systematic directive by which concepts of different scope can be connected and super- and subordinated to each other. Mythical and linguistic concepts, however, must be taken not in extension but in intension, not quantitatively but qualitatively. Quantity is reduced to a merely accidental element, to a relatively indifferent and meaningless difference. If two logical concepts are studied under a next-higher genus as their “genus proximum,” their specific difference is nevertheless carefully observed in this connection. In linguistic and, above all, mythical thought, the opposite tendency, without exception, prevails. Here, a law that one might call the law of leveling down, the obliteration of specific differences prevails. Each part of a whole appears to be equivalent to the whole itself, each exemplar of a species or genus appears to be equivalent to the genus as such. The part not only represents [repräsentiert] the whole but is the whole, the individual or the species not only represents the genus but is the genus; they each not only present both part and whole for immediate reflection but immediately grasp the force, signification, and reality of the whole in itself. Here, we are reminded, above all, of that principle that can be designated as the original fundamental principle of linguistic as well as mythical “metaphor”: the principle customarily expressed as “pars pro toto” [part for the whole]. As is well known, all magic thought is ruled and

·151·

·152·

208

·153·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

permeated by this principle. Whoever takes hold of any part of the whole attains with it, in the magical sense, violent power over the whole. What significance this part possesses for the structure and coherence of the whole, what function it fulfills within this structure, is relatively unimportant here; it is enough that it belongs or has ever belonged to the whole, that it is, however loosely, linked to it in order for it to secure its full magical force and significance. For example, in order to procure magic mastery over the body of another person, it is enough to attain possession of his nail clippings or a lock of hair, his saliva or excrement; even the shadow, reflection, or footprint of the person achieves the same purpose. Among the Pythagoreans, there existed a directive to smooth the bedding as soon as one rose so that the imprint of the body could not be used to harm the person.100 Most forms of so-called analogy-magic also originate from this basic intuition; however, in this way, they show that it is a question not of a simple analogy but of a real identity. If, for example, in rain-magic the rain is lured through the sprinkling of water or is driven away by pouring water onto red-hot stones that suck up the water by hissing,101 both ceremonies receive their true magical “meaning” from the fact not only that the rain is pictorially presented but that it is felt to be really present in each drop of water. The rain as mythical force, the “dæmon” of the rain, exists as whole and undivided in the sprinkled or evaporating water and is thus immediately accessible to the magic effect. And the same relation between the whole and its parts exists between the genus and its species, between the species and each of its exemplars. Here, too, the borders flow completely into one another: the species or genus is not only represented [repräsentiert] by the individual but exists and lives in it. If, for example, in the totemistic worldview, a group or a clan structures itself along totemistic lines, and if particular individuals name themselves according to their totem animals or plants, then not only is it always a question of an arbitrary demarcation through conventional linguistic or mythical “signs” it also concerns here a real commu100. Iamblichus, Protreptichos, 108, 3; quoted by Ludwig Deubner, Magie und Religion (Freiburg: Freiburger Wissenschaftliche Gessellschaft, 1922), 8. 101. See Richard Heinrich Robert Parkinson, Thirty Years in the South Seas, 7; quoted by Heinz Werner, Die Ursprünge der Metapher, 56.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

209

[Wesen].102

nity of beings In other respects, too, whenever a genus is involved at all, it always appears to be wholly present and effective. The god or dæmon of vegetation works and lives in each individual sheaf in the field. Therefore, an ancient but still generally popular custom demands that the last sheaf be left when gathering the harvest, for the force of the fertility-god, from which the harvest of the coming year should grow, is concentrated in it.103 In Mexico, among the Cora Indians, every corn stalk, indeed, every grain of corn contains the deity of the corn completely and fully. The Mexican corn-goddess Chicome coatl is, as a young girl, the corn stalk, as an old woman, she is the corn harvest; she is also, however, in every individual grain of corn and in every special dish. Likewise, various gods of the Cora represent certain kinds of flowers, but they are named according to the individual flower; this is also true for all dæmonic animals: the cicada, the cricket, the grasshopper, the armadillo are essentially treated as a unity.104 If, therefore, the old rhetoric, as a main type of metaphor, led to the substitution of the genus for the species, the whole for the part, or vice versa, then it is obvious to what extent this form of metaphor follows directly from the spiritual nature [Wesen] of myth. At the same time, however, it turns out that for myth itself, this concerns something completely different and much more than a simple “substitution” or a linguistic rhetorical figure [Figur]; that which appears to our retrospective reflection to be a mere transfer is, for myth, rather a genuine and immediate identity.105 And from this essen102. See my study The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thought, 12ff. 103. See Wilhelm Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte, 2nd ed., vol. I (Berlin, 1904–1905), 212ff. 104. See Konrad Theodor Preuß, in Globus, vol. 87, 381; see esp. Die NayaritExpedition, vol. I, XLVIIff. 105. This is more obviously valid if we consider that, for mythico-magical thought, an image is never given as a mere image, but every image contains the “nature” of the thing, i.e., its dæmon or its “soul.” See, for example, Ernest Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, 65: “[I]t has been said above that the name or the emblem or the picture of a dog or a dæmon could become an amulet with power to protect him that wore it and that such power lasted as long as the substance of which it was made lasted, if the name, or emblem, or picture was not erased from it. But the Egyptians went a step further than this and they believed that it was possible to transmit to the figure of any man, or woman, or animal, or living creature the soul

·154·

210

·155·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

tial feature of the mythical metaphor, we can determine and understand more precisely the sense and effectiveness of what one is in the habit of calling the metaphoric function of language. Quintilian has already indicated that this function does not amount to a part of language but extends over the whole of language and characterizes this whole: “paene quidquid loquimur figura est [nearly all that we speak is configured].”106 If this is so, however, can we understand metaphor, in the general sense of the term, not as a determined direction in language, but as one of its constitutive conditions? Thus, once again, we are led back from our effort to understand metaphor to the basic form of the formation of linguistic concepts. Ultimately, it derives from that act of concentration, of compression of the intuitively given that already constitutes the indispensable presupposition for the formation of every individual linguistic concept. Let us assume that this concentration takes place with respect to different contents and in different directions, that, in two complex intuitions, the same element is grasped as “essential” and significant, as the giving of signification; as a result of this, the closest interconnection and cohesion between the two that language as such is able to give is created. For, as the undesignated does not “exist” at all for language, as it has the tendency to darken completely, so everything with the same designation must appear as essentially homogeneous. The sameness of the elements that are fixed in the word progressively withdraws from all other heterogeneity belonging to the intuitive contents, and, in the end, lets them disappear completely. Here again, the part sets itself in the place of the whole; in fact, it becomes and is the whole. By virtue of the principle of of the being which it represented, and its qualities and attributes. The statue of a god in a temple contained the spirit of the god which it represented, and from time immemorial the people of Egypt believed that every statue and figure possessed an indwelling spirit.” The same belief is still found everywhere today living among the “primitives.” See, for example, Hetherwick, “Some Animistic Beliefs among the Yaos of British Central Africa” (see footnote above, 189): “The photographic camera was at first an object of dread, and when it was turned upon a group of natives they scattered in all directions with shrieks of terror. . . . In their mind the lisoka (Seele [soul]) was allied to the chiwilili or picture and the removal of it to the photographic plate would mean the disease or death of the shadeless body” (89ff.). 106. [Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae libri duodecim (book 9, chap. 3, sec. 1), ed. Eduard Bonnell (Leipzig, 1866), 111.]

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

211

“equivalence,” contents that, from the point of view of our immediate sensual intuition or from the point of view of our formation of logical classes, appear very different can be treated alike in language, so that each statement that holds for one is transferred and applied to the other. “If the Cora,” Preuß remarks in a description of complex magical thought, “consider the butterflies quite absurdly to be birds, then, in their eyes, everything that they distinguish as the individual characteristics of an object [Objekt] must belong together in a completely other way from that which we assume to be the case on the basis of our analytic-scientific observations.”107 The apparent absurdity of these and other correlations immediately disappears, however, if we remember that all such formations of primary concepts come about only as they are guided by language. For instance, if we assume that, in the designation and consequently in the linguistic concept “bird,” the element of “flight” is singled out as crucial and essential, then by virtue of this element and through its intercession, the butterfly, in fact, belongs to the class of birds. Our languages, too, still create correlations that conflict with our concepts of empirical-scientific classes and species, such as, for example, in the Germanic languages, in which the designation of butterfly as “butter-bird” or “butter-fly” (Dutch botervlieg, English, butterfly) is common. And at the same time, we understand how such linguistic “metaphors” act further on, and must always prove to be an ever-fertile source for, the formation of mythical metaphors. Every characteristic feature that once provided a starting point for the formation of qualifying concepts and for the qualifying designation can now serve to set the objects that were expressed by this designation immediately into one. If the intuitive image of lightning, in the treatment it undergoes by language, is brought together with the impression of the “form of a snake,” then lightning has become a snake; if the sun is called that which flies in the heavens, then it thus appears as an arrow or bird, as does, for example, the sun-god of the Egyptian pantheon, which is shaped with the head of the falcon. For, here, there are no merely “abstract” designations; rather, each word immediately changes into a concrete mythical figure, into a god or dæmon. Every undetermined sense impression can, in this way, provided it is lin107. Konrad Theodor Preuß, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914), 10.

·156·

212

·157·

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

guistically fixed, become the starting point for the formation and naming of a god. In the table of names of Lithuanian gods given by Usener, the snow-god, the “glimmerer” Blizgulis, is located alongside the god of cattle, the “roarer” Baubis, but also represented here are the bee-god Birbullis, the “buzzer,” and the god of the earthquake, the “thresher” Drebkulys.108 And once a “roarer god” was conceived, he had to be recognized as one and the same being [Wesen] in the most diverse phenomena, he had immediately to be heard in the voice of the lion as well as in the bellow of the storm or the thunder of the sea. Again and again, myth in this sense is revitalized and enriched by language, as is language by myth. And at the same time in this continuous combining and interpenetration, the unity of the spiritual principle, from which both originate and of which both are only different expressions, different manifestations and levels, demonstrates itself. And yet, in the progress of spirit, even this very close and apparently necessary connection also begins to work itself loose and to resolve itself. For language does not belong exclusively to the realm of myth; rather, from its beginning, another force, the power of logic, is effective in it. How this power gradually grows stronger, how it is refracted in language and by means of language cannot be pursued further here. In this development, the words of language increasingly become mere conceptual signs. And this process of separation and liberation is paralleled by another: art, like language, also appears in its beginning to be closely bound up with myth. Myth, language, and art form a concrete and still undifferentiated unity, which only gradually resolves itself into a triad of more independent spiritual modes of configuration. The same mythical animation and hypostasis that the word undergoes are thus also accorded to the images and to every form of artistic presentation. Especially in the magical view of the world, the magical word appears everywhere alongside the magical image.109 The image, too, achieves its purely presentative, specifically “aesthetic” function only insofar as the magic circle in which it remains entranced in mythical consciousness is broken through, and it is recognized as a particular form of configuration instead of as a mythico-magical figure. However, if language as well as art remove 108. See Hermann Usener, Götternamen, 85ff., 114. 109. For further details, see my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. II, esp. 40ff.

LANGUAGE AND MYTH

213

themselves in this way from the mother earth of myth, the ideal, the spiritual unity reestablishes both at a new level. If language is to develop into the vehicle of thought, if it is to form itself into the expression of concepts or judgments, this forming can take place only through its evergreater renunciation of the fullness of immediate intuition. In the end, nothing more than the mere skeleton of the concrete content of intuitions and feeling that originally belongs to it, of its living body, appears to remain. There is one domain of spirit, however, in which the word not only preserves its original image-power but within which it constantly renews it, in which, so to speak, it experiences its constant palingenesis, its simultaneously sensuous and spiritual rebirth. This regeneration takes place in that it forms itself into artistic expression. Here, it is accorded once again the fullness of life; however, this is no longer the mythicalbound life but an aesthetically freed life. Of all the types and forms of poems, it is the lyric that reflects most clearly this ideal development. For, the lyric poem is not only rooted at the beginning in certain magical-mythical motives but also continues to maintain the interconnection with myth in its highest and purest products. The really great lyric poets, such as Hölderlin, for example, are those in whom the mythical vision develops itself once again in full intensity and full objective force. However, this objectivity has now shed itself of all tangible compulsion. The spirit lives and prevails in the word of language as well as in the mythical image without being mastered by either. What achieves expression in poetry is no longer the mythical world of dæmons and gods, nor is it the logical truth of abstract determinations and relations. The world of poesie severs itself from both as worlds of mere semblance and play; however, it is in this world of semblance that pure feeling first achieves articulation and comes to full and concrete actuality. The word and mythical image that initially confronted spirit as hard, real powers have now cast off all reality and effectiveness; they are only a light ether, in which spirit freely moves without hindrance. This liberation comes about not because spirit discards the sensory cover of the word and the image but because it uses both as organs by which it comes to understand them for what they are, in their most profound ground, as its own selfrevelations.

·158·

Eidos and Eidolon: The Problem of Beauty and Art in the Dialogues of Plato (1924)

·1·

If we can measure the greatness of a thinker by the vast opposition that envelops his thinking, forcing it into a unity, then certainly Plato belongs to a clearly unique phenomenon in the history of spirit. All the problems with which Greek philosophy had up until then wrestled are organized by Plato into a completely new tension and seen with a very different intensity. If we compare Plato’s world with the image of the cosmos sketched out by Pre-Socratic philosophy, we sense that the latter, in the overall manifold of its configurations, still adhered to a certain simplicity, a certain archaic “naïveté.” It is the highest concept of being by which each of these worldviews is centered and by which each is finally stabilized. It is in Plato and the Platonic dialogues that Greek thought first becomes genuinely dialectical in the strict sense. And this objective dialectic of thought is traced back to a subjective dialectic in Plato’s spirit. The highest power of the configuration of the will merges in this spirit with the clarity of a pure “theoretical” contemplation of the world; mythical fantasy actualizes itself throughout in abundance, and yet, at the same time, it shows itself in this abundance to be bound by demands set by the rigorous concept of knowledge [Wissen] and the general methodology of knowledge. This methodology can, however, exhibit itself in

[First published as and translated from “Eidos und Eidolon, das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen,” in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 2 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924), 1–27.] 214

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

215

no other way than as a unity of opposites. Its essential achievement consists in the perfect intellectual balance produced between the function of division and that of combination, between that of the quiet depth of pure vision and that of the highest spiritual liveliness of mediated thought. With Plato’s characteristic tendency to “provide justifications,” he has not only realized this balance in his doctrine but has also consciously established it as a postulate for all philosophical knowledge. All knowledge is, for him, at once analysis and synthesis, įȚȐțȡȚıȚȢ and ıȪȖțȡȚıȚȢ of concepts. There is no genuine knowledge [Wissen] that does not precede the exact and artful separation of concepts. As the priest does not cut the sacrificed animal into pieces as he likes but dismantles it in accordance with the natural structure of its limbs, so too the dialectician renders visible this inner articulation and organization of structure in concepts.1 This power of segmentation, however, must be equal to that of uniting: the įȚĮȚİ߿Y [splitting/cutting], the IJȑȝYİȚYțĮIJߩİ‫ݫ‬įȘ [in accordance with the idea] knows no other goal than to bring together anew the separated elements into one unitary figure. Thus, the dialectician is not only inadvertently or subsequently a synoptist, but by virtue of his first and original endeavor, he is simultaneously a synoptist; so, only the synoptist can be the true dialectician.2 In the connection and integration of that which has been separated with great precision, ıȣYȐȖİȚY [the bringing together] and ıȣȞȠȡߢȞİ‫ݧ‬Ȣ‫ݐ‬Ȟ [the bringing all being together] constitute the meaning and unity of logos itself.3 And this relationship holds as much for the construction of Plato’s world of objective thought as for the whole interior of his intellectual world. In this heterogeneous, even contradictory stance, basic orientations of reflection remain very close to one another. From time to time, the attempt has been made to cope with this “multiplicity of views” of the Platonic spirit by separately establishing all the different aspects that rise out of it, as, for example, the famous modern account of Plato that treats in one and the same 1. See on this point Plato, The Statesman 286 Dff., Plato, Phaedrus 265 Dff. 2. Plato, Republic 537 C: “੒ȝ੻ȞȖ੹ȡıȣȞȠʌIJțઁȢįȚĮȜİIJȚțȩȢ੒į੻ȝ੽Ƞ੡ [“The dialectician is a synoptist, the nondialectician is not a synoptist.”] 3. See, for example, Plato, Sophist 259 E: “ǻȚ੹Ȗ੹ȡIJ੽ȡਕȜȜȒȜȦȞIJ૵Ȟİੁį૵Ȟ ıȣȝʌȜȠț੽Ȟ੒ȜȩȖȠȢȖȑȖȠȞİȞਲȝ૙Ȟ.” [“Because that which we have given birth to in discourse is it the reciprocal interweaving.”]

·2·

216

·3·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

paragraph the man, the teacher, the writer, the philosopher, the theologian, and the social politician. Describing and labeling the scope of Plato’s theory in this way, however, does not grasp its essential content or its original, ideal center, its personal intellectual focus point. The pure encyclopedic concept of philosophy as a theory of the “whole” of the world that builds itself upon the theory of its individual “parts” is foreign to Plato. For no other great thinker embodies in greater measure than Plato the principle that Goethe once summarized in the dictum that everything humans undertake to achieve, whether it is brought about by the act or the word, must arise from the complete unity of powers, and that, accordingly, “everything that is isolated is abject.”4 It was given to Plato to immediately embody a unification that modern thought had sought from different avenues. Being and theory interpenetrate in him such that the question as to which of the two elements is first, which is second, which determines and has formed the other can no longer be posed. And yet there exists a vast sphere of problems for which this unity seems to have been sublated, in which a clear rupture seems to have occurred between who Plato was and what he taught. Plato the ethicist, the religious thinker, the mathematician, has created in dialectics the tool that was appropriate for him and was the adequate conceptual expression of his basic intuition. The first step in the realm of dialectics already seems, however, to exclude the artist Plato, seems to demand the conscious renouncement of everything that was animated by his artistic powers and tendencies. An ancient report recounts how the young Plato, after his first encounter with Socrates, at a time when he felt gripped by the meaning of the Socratic question, had burnt his poetry. And as a more mature man at the height of his works and thought, he had in his outline of the Republic not only demanded the expulsion of the poets but also denied art as such an intellectual right to a home in the whole of his theory. The Platonic theory of ideas [Ideen] has in its original conception and grounding no place for an independent aesthetics, for a science of art. For art adheres to the sensuous phenomenon of the thing by which it can never provide rigorous knowledge [Wissen], only opinions and beliefs. As measured by the whole of Plato’s personality, this phenomenon 4. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit. Dritter Theil, in Werke, vol. XXVIII (Weimar, 1887–1919), 108.]

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

217

appears paradoxical, and this paradox is intensified even further if we consider the theory of ideas [Ideen] in its purely objective structure and its objective historical fate. For no philosophical theory has ever more vigorously and more fully begun from aesthetic effects than this system, which abnegates a separate, independent, and valid existence [Sein] to aesthetics. It is no overstatement to say that basically every systematic aesthetics that has arisen in the history of philosophy up to now has been and has remained Platonic. Wherever, in the course of a century, a theory of art and beauty has been sought, there again our view is directed back, as under a theoretical constraint, toward the concept and term “idea” [Idee] from which, like a later offshoot, the concept of the ideal emerges. And not only the theoreticians of art but the great artists too are witnesses to this interconnection that has remained alive throughout the centuries. The succession that leads from Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Marsilio Ficino, from him to Winckelmann and to Schelling, corresponds to the succession of great artists who, each in his own way and yet as if under the spell of a continuous tradition, have sought and found their way to Plato. It is enough to name here Michelangelo and Goethe in order to bring to consciousness the force and diversity of this spiritual and historical interconnection. If Platonism, however, had expressed the same force in the history of science, if, in particular, the founders of modern mathematical physics had declared themselves to be his students, they would only have taken up certain motives that are already described more clearly in Plato himself. Galileo and Kepler are steeped in the same temperament of thought that runs through Plato’s late dialogues and, in particular, that found its expression in the Timaeus and in the Philebus. They fulfill the schema of exact science that was drafted here in its fundamental features with a completely new concrete content; however, in purely methodological terms, they hardly needed to add any essential feature to this schema. The development that Platonic thought experiences within the general theory of art and within art itself proves to be far more difficult and more complex. For here, a peculiar oscillation, an opposition between intellectual attraction and repulsion, governs. In attempting to ground itself in Platonism, art must always at the same time attempt to free itself from its spell. For the theoretically deepened and developed concept of form in Platonic philosophy constantly threatens to bring about the fate that it sublates in truth its own concept

·4·

218

·5·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

of form in the endeavor to generalize and purify it. Again and again, the history of aesthetic idealism stands before this antinomy, before the question of how the fundamental idea of form, as it had appeared and was determined by Plato, could be rendered fruitful for aesthetics without thereby letting the specific object of aesthetics, the particular mode and direction of artistic configuration, lapse into a merely universal, englobing abstraction. The struggle between motives that breaks out here can be clearly designated if we begin from the opposition of two concepts, which for Plato have an essentially more fundamental signification and which effectively form the two focal points around which his thinking turns. Eidos and eidolon, figure and image—this pair of concepts encompasses, as it were, the whole expanse of the Platonic world, and constitutes its two most external limits. It is a testimony to the tremendous force of Plato’s language that he is successful, with a single variation, with a light coloration of expression, to fix a difference in signification that had for him no equal in systematic sharpness and pregnance. Eidos and eidolon—two terms that descend from the same linguistic root, that unfold from one basic signification of to see, ‫ݧ‬įİ߿Ȟ [to see, to look], and that imply for Plato, in the specific meaning he gave to them, two essentially different directions, two “qualities” of seeing diametrically opposed to one another. In the one case, seeing possesses the passive character of sensible sensations, and only strives to take up and copy an external sensuous object; in the other case, it becomes free vision [Schauen], the grasping of an objective figure that can, however, fulfill itself in no other way than in an intellectual act of configuration. If at first we remain with this one side of the opposition, then it can be said that the originality and depth of Platonic philosophy generally consist in raising philosophical contemplation for the first time out of the sphere of mere “being” into the sphere of “form.” Pre-Socratic philosophy also strove to conceive being as the unity of form, as being ruled by a general law of form; however, it was able to articulate this law in no other way than by repeatedly giving it the color of being. Thus, the Ionian philosophy of nature places the origins of being [Sein] in an individual concrete being [Seiende], no matter whether it is described as water, air, or fire. Where this substantial reflection transforms itself, however, where, instead of an ‫ݎ‬ȞțĮIJ‫ޟ‬IJ‫ޣ‬Ȟ‫ވ‬ȜȘȞ [being in materiality], one seeks ‫ݐ‬ȞțĮIJ‫ޟ‬IJާȞȜȩȖȠȞ [being according to

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

219

reason], this very logos, this pure concept of being, in its articulation and configuration, is still bound to some image, to a kind of sensible substrate. With the Pythagoreans, with the Eleatics, with Heraclitus, it is no longer a question of the unity of the world-stuff but a question of a unity that belongs to a completely other dimension of thought. Instead of taking the world in its simple existence, it must be understood by its “principle,” and the Pythagorean number, the Eleatic One, the Heraclitean Logos are erected as such principles. However, just as the general idea of logos, as the intuition of the universal rule of events, condensed itself for Heraclitus into the image of eternal living fire that glows and fades according to its intensity, so too Parmenides’s idea of one being, in which all arising and passing away and all sensuous qualities and differences must be eradicated, can only be secured by making it rest on the intuition of the cosmos as a well-rounded and closed sphere. Only with Plato is such a sensuous schema of the pure concept of being overcome once and for all. A clear cut now separates the world of ‫ݻ‬ȞIJĮ [existents] from that of ‫ݻ‬ȞIJȦȢ‫ݻ‬Ȟ [true existents], the mere existence of phenomena from the content and truth of pure forms. It is not possible to arrive at the authentic and true origins, at the “principle” of the sensible world, so long as we search for this principle in it or think of it as in some way containing sensuous determinations. Plato establishes this fundamental unity of thought in three different directions of reflection. He begins from the spheres of pure will and pure knowledge [Wissen]—he grounds his thinking in the validity and truth of ethical norms and mathematical concepts. And from here he continues indirectly to the problems of nature. For nature, too, is no mere incarnation of material things and forces; rather, it partakes, by virtue of the eternal order that prevails in it, in the realm of pure form. It does not belong to mere existence; rather, it embodies the essence and the pure laws of essence, to the extent that such a presentation in the domain of becoming proves to be possible. Thus, for Plato, there exists in the progression from the problems of ethics to those of mathematics, and from the problems of mathematics to those of nature, a rigorous continuity of thought; as different as the contents that are grasped here are and as entangled as they become in the sphere of thought, they are all rigorously encompassed by a unitary question of thought and are mastered by it. This question, however, is inadequately formulated if, in order to

·6·

220

·7·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

designate it, we link it, as is ordinarily done, to the opposition of the universal and the particular. So long as we see the essential element of the Platonic idea [Idee] and its intrinsic logical character as presenting the unity and universality of the generic concept of particular things over against their multiplicity and particularity, we have not fundamentally gone beyond the standpoint of medieval universals. In truth, however, the original problem, with which Plato always begins, is not so much the problem of universals as the problem of the determined. To find an absolute over against the relative, an unconditional over and against the conditioned, a determined over and against the undetermined: this is the demand, without whose fulfillment neither true knowledge [Wissen] nor authentic will is possible. The students of Socrates first grasped this demand from the side of the will. As Plato understood the question of Socrates, it signified for him nothing else but the question about the concept, about the eidos of the will itself. Our activity [Tun] should not dissolve into the manifoldness of individual and accidental actions, it must not be abandoned for each arbitrary external stimulus and impulse; rather it must find in itself a fixed norm, a lasting standard by virtue of which it is bound as if by iron chains. This bond is the fundamental character of everything ethical. There is an implicit order in that which is moral, an inner measure of the relationships of the will whose consistent existence and validity are to be compared to the pure relationships of mathematical measure. Through this mediating concept of order, through the concept of IJȐȟȚȢțĮ‫ޥ‬ıȣȝȝİIJȡȓĮ [the orderly arrangement of proportion], the world of knowledge [Wissen] is internally joined together with that of the will. Both the order in being and the order in activity [Tun] now appear as different articulations of one and the same principle by which the cosmos first constitutes itself as such.5 With the extension of the ethical cosmos that comes to fullness itself in this analogy, however, Plato has, of course, already overstepped the 5. See in particular Plato, Gorgias 507 Ef.: “ijĮıȚ įૃȠੂįȠijȠੂțĮ੿Ƞ੝ȡĮȞઁȞ țĮ੿ ȖોȞ țĮ੿ șİઃı țĮ੿ ਕȞșȡȫʌȠȣȢ IJ੽Ȟ țȠȚȦȞȓĮȞ ıȣȞȑȤİȞ țĮ੿ ijȚȜȓĮȞ țĮ੿ țȠıȝȚȩIJȘIJĮ țĮ੿ ıȦijȡȠıȪȞȘȞ țĮ੿ įȚțĮȚȩIJȘIJĮ țĮ੿ IJઁ ੖ȜȠȞ IJȠ૨IJȠ įȚ੹ IJĮ૨IJĮ țȩıȝȠȞ țĮȜȠ૨ıȚȞ.” [“Wise men, Callicles, say that the heavens and the earth, gods and men, are bound together by fellowship and friendship, and order and temperance and justice, and for this reason they call the sum of things the ‘ordered universe,’ my friend, not the world of disorder or riot.”]

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

221

Socratic sphere. The main focus of the actual foundation is now shifted from ethics to dialectics. However, this is in general the theory of the object insofar as it is grasped as the pure object of knowledge [Wissen]. There is no true certainty and determination of knowledge [Wissen] if there is no content of knowledge [Wissen] that is in itself persistent and changeless. Nowhere does the sensible world, the world of immediate sensation and perception, show us this constancy, this uniformity of content with itself. Moreover, one of the main features here is that all content, no sooner than it has been posited, annihilates itself. The sensuous world is a sphere of contradiction—it knows both a fixed determination and a series of determinations that alternatively sublate one another. Thus, there are in it no independent “properties” existing for themselves that can be clearly fixed and held on to in thought; rather, wherever we believe to have grasped something or anything given, a IJȓ [what] or a ‫ݸ‬ʌȠȚȞȠࠎȞ [predicate], it immediately dissolves into a mere becoming or into an embodiment of mere relations.6 Against this hovering and oscillation of sense perception and representation, thought has perhaps nothing else to do but withdraw in the certainty of its own nature [Wesen]. It would be futile to search for some persistence in the content of knowledge [Wissen] if it were not grounded in the persistence of the pure form of knowledge [Wissen]. Only if we have ascertained it ourselves are we sure that not everything dissolves into continuous motion, that everything is not drawn to and fro in the ebb and flow of our subjective “phantasms,” that it possesses its own “nature,” a consistent, logical existence. Only by means of the stable resistance of knowledge can we arrive at the stable resistance of being, for it is only when knowledge itself does not give up its nature that there is something like a knower and a known, that there is a subject and an object [Objekt] of knowledge [Wissen].7 6. See, in particular, Plato, Theaetetus 152 D. 7. See Plato, Cratylus 386 Df.: “ȅ੝țȠ૨ȞİੁȝȒIJİʌ઼ıȚʌȐȞIJĮਥıIJੁȞ੒ȝȠȓȦȢਚȝĮ țĮ੿ਕİȓȝȒIJİਦțȐıIJȦੁįȓĮਪțĮıIJȠȞįોȜȠȞį੽੖IJȚĮ੝IJ੹Įਫ਼IJ૵Ȟ਩ȤȠȞIJȐIJȚȞĮȕȑȕĮȚȩȞ ਥıIJȚIJਕʌȡȐȖȝĮIJĮȠ੝ʌȡઁıਲȝ઼ıȠ੝į੻ਫ਼ijૃਲȝ૵ȞਦȜțȩȝİȞĮਙȞȦțĮ੿țȐIJȦIJ૶ ਲȝİIJȑȡ૳ijĮȞIJȐıȝĮIJȚਕȜȜ੹țĮșૃĮਫ਼IJ੹ʌȡઁıIJૈȞĮਫ਼IJ૵ȞȠ੝ıȓĮȞ਩ȤȠȞIJĮૌʌİȡ ʌਥijȣțİȞ.” [“But if neither is right, and things are not relative to individuals, and all things do not equally belong to all the same moment and always, they must be supposed to have their own proper and permanent essence: they are not in

·8·

222

·9·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

This determination and uniformity of the pure form of will, as it presents itself from the perspective of the problems of ethics, and this determination of the pure form of knowledge [Wissen], which for Plato manifest itself, above all, in mathematics, now stand over against both domains in which there exists no fixed and true configuration of being, but where the movement of representation and fantasy only feigns the image of such a configuration. Both the appearance of nature and the appearance of art belong to this sphere of mere images; neither of them brings anything of its own, neither brings to expression some unchanging logos; rather, both are subjected to the rule of įȩȟĮ [doxa], that is, subjective opinions and conjectures. Nature falls under Heraclitus’s verdict concerning the flux of things. The changeability and fleetingness, the thorough relativity of its objects, correspond to the relativity and changeability of any knowledge [Wissen] that is at all possible from these objects; Heraclitus’s objective thesis displaces the subjective thesis of the Sophists, which has its own place in the world of perception in which each of its perceptions is true. No true knowledge [Wissen] may penetrate into the world of becoming, for the concept of knowledge [Wissen] excludes that of becoming. Right up to his last works, in which the concept of “movement” receives in this respect a completely other signification and evaluation, as it becomes in the concept of țȓȘıȚȢ [movement from dynamis to energeia] a systematically fundamental concept of Platonic logic, Plato had steadfastly held onto this decision against a mere natural becoming. From that which itself hovers in fluctuating appearance, no rational insight about any knowledge worthy of the title of rigorous truth can be given.8 Thus, none of the so-called sciences of nature shows us the way to the realm of pure forms. From the perspective of the dialectician, the grandeur and greatness with which these sciences embellish themselves reveals itself to be deceptive. This tone of thought relation to us, or influenced by us, fluctuating according to fancy, but are independent and maintain to their own essence the relation prescribed by nature.”] 8. See, for example, Plato, Phoebus 59 B: “ʌİȡ੿Ƞ੤ȞIJ੹ȝ੽țİțIJȘȝȑȞĮ ȕİȕĮȚȩIJȘIJĮȝȘįૃਲȞIJȚȞȠ૨Ȟʌ૵ı઼ȞʌȠIJİȕȑȕĮȚȠȞȖȓȖȞȠȚșૃਲȝ૙ȞțĮ੿੒IJȚȠ૨ȞȠ੝įૃ ਙȡĮȞȠ૨ıȠ੝įȑIJȚȢਥʌȚıIJȒȝȘʌİȡ੿Į੝IJȐਥıIJȚIJੑ ਕȜȘșਥıIJĮIJȠȞ਩ȤȠȣıĮ.” [“And how could we ever hope to achieve any kind of certainty about subject matters that do not in themselves possess any certainty? . . . Then there can be no reason or knowledge that attains the highest truth about these subjects!”]

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

223

reaches particular characteristic and pregnant expression in the passage in the Republic in which Glaucon, Socrates’s interlocutor, cites astronomy among those sciences that should be called upon to bring about the “conversion” of the soul and to satisfy its urge for something higher. You seem to me in your thought to put a most liberal interpretation on the “study of higher things,” [Socrates] said, for apparently if anyone with thrown-back head should learn something by staring at decorations on a ceiling, you would regard him as contemplating them with the higher reason and not with the eyes. Perhaps you are right and I am a simpleton. For I, for my part, am unable to suppose that any study turns the soul’s gaze upward other than that which deals with being and the invisible. But if anyone tries to learn about the things of sense, whether gaping up or blinking down, I would never say that he really learns—for nothing of the kind admits of true knowledge—nor would I say that his soul looks up, but down, even though he study floating on his back on sea or land.9 Measured by this standard, even the stars themselves are only a “colorful work in the heavens” in whose splendor the sensory human may be captivated, but which, for those who truly live in the world of ideas [Ideen], become something completely different. For the latter never understand the stars as what they themselves expose in the sensible appearance but rather according to what they signify for our knowledge. And their deepest signification consists in the tasks they provide spirit, in the stimulus on the mathematical showing [Schau] that they imply. The dialectician must learn to consider them, not as physical bodies, though they may appear sublime and monumental, but as examples and reproaches, as ʌĮȡĮįİ‫ޥ‬ȖȝĮIJĮ [patterns] and ʌȡȠȕȜȒȝĮIJĮ [problems] of mathematical speculation. Then, said [Socrates], we must use the blazonry of the heavens as patterns to aid in the study of those realities, just as one would do who chanced upon diagrams drawn with special care and elaboration by Daedalus or some other craftsman or painter. For anyone 9. Plato, Republic 529 Aff.

·10·

224

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

acquainted with geometry who says such designs would admit the beauty of the workmanship but would think it absurd to examine them seriously in the expectation of finding in them the absolute truth with regard to equals or doubles or any other ratio. [ . . . ] It is by means of problems then [ . . . ] as in the study of geometry, that we will peruse astronomy too, and we will let be the things in the heavens, if we are to have a part in the true science of astronomy and so convert to right use from uselessness that natural indwelling intelligence of the soul.10

·11·

Here, to take the example of nature, the opposition between the sensible figure and the ideal figure, between İ‫ݭ‬įȠȢ [eidos—figure] and İ‫ݫ‬įȦȜȠȞ [eidolon—image], clearly takes shape, although the opposition is not exclusive to this domain; for it, a mediation is not only possible but directly demanded. For Plato’s theory of ideas [Ideen] is equally ruled by the thought of the separation between “idea” [Idee] and “appearance” and by the thought of the connection between the two. We cannot understand the systematic meaning of separation, of ȤȦȡȚıȝȩȢ [separation], without the meaning of participation, without ȝȑșİȟȚȢ [participation]. In that it is differentiated from the world of pure forms, the appearance is not condemned to complete negativity, to absolute nothingness. For simple nothingness, in which no trace of essence or truth remains, cannot as such ever appear. However, the natural appearance, the phenomenon of nature, is such that it does not simply dissolve for us into something indeterminate, rather in it a constant existence shines through. In every becoming of nature, above all in that prototype of all becoming that represents for us the movements of the heavens, the orbits of the stars, we grasp not only its pure “thatness,” the mere empirical fact of translocation but its “how” and “why.” In it, a constant order, a manifoldness constantly measured in itself, discloses itself. In fact, nature could never be made a problem of mathematics if, independently of our consideration, of the subjective reflection of dialecticians, an inner relation to mathematics, an inner measure and an inner figure, did not inhere in it. The more Plato entered into this thought, the more the way to a scientific construction of natural being and natural becoming freed itself. 10. Plato, Republic 529 Aff.

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

225

Certainly, he differentiated with great methodological foresight and rigor this way from that of pure rational knowledge: he always insisted on delimiting myth, which necessarily enters into every presentation of natural becoming, against the truth of logos. However, myth may not be arbitrary fiction; rather, it has in itself the imprint of “plausibility” [Wahrscheinlich]. In this concept of plausibility (İ‫ݧ‬țȩȢİ‫ݧ‬țĮıȓĮ [a showing forth, an appearing]), the accent is placed equally on the opposition between pure and unmixed truth existing in itself and on the relation to which it adheres. And this latter positive element asserts itself with growing force in the progress of Plato’s thought. From the Phaedo to the Republic and the Timaeus, we can follow the development of a certain problem in which the progressive reconciliation of the realm of nature with the realm of pure forms is carried out by means of mathematics. In the Phaedo, the constant mood of the flight from the world, the quest for release “as quickly as possible” from the chains of the living body, turn into the flight from nature. The fact that the endeavor to grasp the “reason” of the world has remained within the limits of nature, that instead of becoming logic and dialectics it has remained cosmology and cosmophysics, Plato feels to be the deepest methodological lacuna of all speculation, a lacuna that only appears to have been overcome by Anaxagoras’s theory of ȞȠࠎȢ [nous]. However, the journey into the land of ideas [Ideen], the įİȪIJİȡȠȢʌȜȠࠎȢ [second voyaging or second-best method] of the Phaedo requires another guiding principle. . . . it occurred to me that I must guard against the same sort of risk which people run when they watch and study an eclipse of the sun; they really do sometimes injure their eyes, unless they study its reflection in water or some other medium. I conceived of something like this happening to myself, and I was afraid that by observing objects with my unprotected eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether. So I decided that I must have recourse to theories, and use them in trying to see the truth about things.11 What is demanded here is achieved in the middle books of the Republic by virtue of the position that the science of nature takes in them. 11. Plato, Phaedo 99 Df.

·12·

226

·13·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

There is no science of nature for the sake of itself, with the intent to grasp and exhaust nature’s concrete sensuous fullness and manifoldness; however, there is, arguably, a pure theory of nature that constitutes a particular case and special application of mathematical theory—that transforms the things of nature into problems of mathematics and that thus places them under a completely new perspective of reflection. Only in this way do we arrive at a philosophy of nature as it is presented to us in its general outline in the Timaeus. Here, too, the endeavor that seeks to find the essential elements of physis in the physical itself is, from the beginning, rejected. Whoever does not stray from the domain of reason into that of mere opinion, whoever does not want to blur the limits of ‫݋‬ʌȚıIJȒȝȘ [justified knowledge] and of ‫ݷ‬ȡș‫ޣ‬įȩȟĮ [correct opinion] cannot look upon sensuously perceived things such as air or fire, earth or water, as the true elements of the physical. The authentic originary elements, individuals that prove themselves as the true beginning and which, as such, stands up to our thoughtful examination, is found rather in pure mathematical constructions [Gebilden]. The universe is no mere mixture of stuff but is configured in itself—configured according to figures [Figuren] and numbers. The philosophy of nature in the Timaeus hopes to demonstrate these geometrical and arithmetic structural elements. The particular stuff, which, in the ancient philosophy of nature, was simply accepted as such in its sensuous givenness and properties, sublimates here into particular figurative formations and orders. That which we designate in simple perception as fire shows itself now as determined by the form of the tetrahedron, air by the form of the octahedron, while the figure of the icosahedron and the hexahedron are, as it were, propped up and intellectually structured by the substrates of water and earth respectively.12 And just as we recognize here in the polyhedron the general model and schema according to which the corporeal world is built, so also the becoming now undergoes, as it were, a new purely mathematical elucidation. If its content is opposed to the pure being of the idea [Idee], a certain inner form nevertheless is at work in it. For all becoming fulfills itself in the unity of time, which itself does not dissipate but persists. This unity has its own unchangeable measure, its periods and 12. Plato, Timaeus 48 Bff., 55 Aff.

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

227

rhythms, in which an enduring ordering of the limits of the world is revealed in the middle of time and, as it were, in the mobile background of time. Thus, time becomes the “mobile copy of eternity”—an image of eternity and the One that remains in itself, an image that is in accordance with number.13 The theodicy of becoming and of nature in the Platonic system are such that in them, through the mediation of the mathematical concepts of number and time, a fixed order finally becomes visible—a necessary bond that is, if not equal to the eternal determination of the pure idea [Idee], nevertheless at least analogous to it. The awe before nature, as the merely sensuous, now wanes. As image, it has itself become the image of something purely thinkable (‫ݧ݋‬țޫȞIJȠࠎ ȞȠȘIJȠࠎ [aesthetic god, image of the noetic]). The suddenness with which Plato the dialectician, who seems to resist imposing figures on the world of the senses, no longer stands up against the intuition of nature as a mathematical cosmos, is already asserted in the Republic in order to clear the way to the world of pure concepts. Certainly, in the Timaeus too, the contemplation of that which becomes is, in the beginning, nothing other than a rest the thinker allows himself in his vision [Schau] of eternal being.14 The end of the dialogue, however, goes beyond even this final reservation. It risks the image, fundamentally paradoxical in Plato’s system, of the world as the perceivable God. The limit that the rigorous ideal of dialectical knowledge [Wissen] has erected over against sensuous reality is broken through—the myth of the creation of the world and of the creator of the world ends in a pure hymn to the physis, to the world of ordered appearance. The world has received living being, mortal and immortal, and is fulfilled with them, and has become a visible living being containing the visible—the perceivable God who is the image of pure 13. Plato, Timaeus 37 D: “Ǽੁț੩įૃਥʌȚȞȠİ૙țȚȞȘIJȩȞIJȚȞĮĮੁ૵ȞȠȢʌȠȚોȢĮȚțĮ੿ įȚĮțȠȢȝ૵ȞਚȝĮȠ੝ȡĮȞʌȠȚİ૙ȝਦȞȠȞIJȠȢĮੁ૵ȞȠȢਦȞਦȞੁțĮșૃਕȡȚșȝઁȞੁȠ૨ȢĮȞĮੁȫȞȚȠȞ İੁțȩȞĮIJȠ૨IJȠȞįȞį੽ȤȡȩȞȠȞ੩ȞȠȝȐțĮȝİȞ.” [“Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we call time.”] 14. See Plato, Timaeus 59 C, D.

228

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

thought, the greatest, best, fairest, most perfect—the one onlybegotten world.15

·14·

However, once again, and in all its clarity, the conflict between the world of pure forms and the world of mere images, the conflict between İ‫ݭ‬įȠȢ [eidos] and İ‫ݫ‬įȦȜȠȞ [eidolon] is placed before us, no longer in the domain of nature, but in the domain of art. For art raises the claim to hold up before us a “second nature”; however, in this a renewed breaking takes place; a doubly reflected, thoroughly mediated image of being is created. Instead of ascending toward the unconditioned, it descends even deeper into the realm of the merely derived and mediated. Subjectivity in all its power and fullness prevails in it; however, at the same time, it is purely unbounded arbitrariness. The free activity of the creator, which does not inquire into any objective measure or rule, declares itself here to be sovereign; the force of įȩȟĮ [doxa], which is clearly opposed to that of the concept, continually generates those formations [Gebilde] that recognize no judge other than įȠȟȐȗİȚȞ [forming doxa] itself as sensuous representation and fantasy. If, in fact, the phenomena of nature were flowing and changeable but allowed in this flow an objective rhythm, a mathematically tangible regularity of becoming itself to be recognized, then the last barrier that art builds before us in the world would appear to be removed. No more limits are set for the flowing phantasms. Thus, for Plato, artists are on one and the same level as the Sophists because they are both genuine masters, great virtuosos of subjectivity. Plato persistently maintains this parallelism, which begins in the Republic and finds its systematically rigorous grounding in the substantial reckoning with the Sophists contained in his older work, the Sophist. If the philosophical thinker aspires to the sphere of pure forms, and if, by virtue of reason, he applies himself to the display [Schau] of eternal beings, then the Sophist and the artist enthrall us with colorful images of the world of appearances to which they and we hold tight. For the dialectician, the researchers of ideas [Ideen], confronts both as mere imagemakers, as İ‫ݧ‬įȦȜȠʌȠȠȓ [makers of images]. The activity of the artists, like that of the Sophists, is grasped under the general concept of imitation, 15. See Plato, Timaeus 92 B (German translation by Otto Apelt, Philosophische Bibliothek, vol. 1, 79).

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

229

of ȝȓȝȘıȚȢ [mimesis], and by virtue of this generic concept is devalued.16 There arise those threefold successive stages that are established in the famous part of the beginning of Book Ten of the Republic. One concept, one eidos, is established by the dialectician for all multiplicity that is grasped by one signification and denoted by one name. And whoever wants to fabricate it by means of craft or technology, whoever wants to actively bring forward some individual object, must necessarily look to this unity of the archetype [Urbild]. Thus, the cabinetmaker does not create the eidos, nor the essential form of beds or tables, but these serve him as previously existing patterns from which he manufactures a particular table or a particular bed as a concrete, sensible, individual thing. However, there exists another creator of the work [Werkbildner], who is not limited to the production of an individual implement, but whose art seems to grasp the art of every other creator [Bildner]. Ah, but wait, and you will say so indeed, for this same handicraftsman is not only able to make all implements, he produces all plants and animals, including himself, and thereto earth and heaven and the gods and all things in heaven and in Hades under the earth.— A most marvelous Sophist, Glaucon said.—Are you incredulous? Said I, tell me, do you deny altogether the possibility of such a craftsman . . . , or do you admit that in a sense there could be such a creator of all these things, and in another sense not? Or do you not perceive that you yourself would be able to make all these things in a way?—And in what way, I ask you, Glaucon said.— There is no difficulty, said I, but it is something that the craftsman can make everywhere and quickly. You could do it most quickly if you should choose to take a mirror and carry it about everywhere. You will speedily produce the sun and all things in the sky, and speedily the earth and yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and all the objects of which we just now spoke.— Yes, Glaucon said, the appearance of them, but not the actuality and the truth.—Excellent, said I, and you come to the aid of the argument opportunely. For I take it that the painter too belongs to this class of producers, does he not?—Of course.—However, you 16. See, in particular, the Sophist 233 Eff., 239 D, and 254 A; Republic 605 C.

·15·

230

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

will say, I suppose, that his creations are not real and true. And yet, after a fashion, the painter too makes a couch, does he not?—Yes, Glaucon said, the appearance of one, he too.17

·16·

Thus, the divine creator, as author of the pure essential forms, confronts the human craftsman—the producer of actual-physical individual things—and the artist, as mere imitators, as builders of appearances.18 And what most deeply debases art is that it is most removed from the original creation, that in it the force of the original creation is as good as extinguished. For Plato, there is no sort of creation that is not conditioned and directed by a pure vision [Schauen]. Even the creator of the world, even the demiurge of the Timaeus, can bring forth the sensible world in space and time only insofar as he looks to the idea [Idee] of ȞȠȘIJާȞȗࠛȠȞ [the knowing life] as well as to the eternal model in order to configure that which becomes according to this “paradigm.” And the technician, the artisan, must also do so insofar as he is really productive, insofar as a new formation [Gebilde] emerges from the work of his hands or, at least, has a mediated part in this ideal showing [Schau]. The artisan who produces the loom does not imitate an individual sensible thing; rather, what stands before his eyes is the form of the loom as such, that is, for what it is determined and in what its function consists, what its proper telos is. And if the loom should break in the course of working, then he can create another, by looking not to the broken one but to that originary form according to which he formed [gebildet] the first one.19 The “free” art of the painter, however, seems to be created from nothing. And yet, according to Plato, the unilateral dependence on the sensuous model manifests itself in it, except here, instead of being recognized as a mere copy [Abbild], it is transformed into an archetype [Urbild], into a binding norm for artists. We stand, here, at a point at which the path of Plato and the path of later theories of art largely derived from Plato most clearly separate from one another. Later theory attempted to bridge the oppositions that are opened up here, to free art from the reproach of mere “imitation” by 17. Plato, Republic 596 D–E. 18. Plato, Republic 596 Aff. 19. Plato, Cratylus 389 Af.

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

231

substituting for the rigorous Platonic concept of idea [Idee] the dazzling and ambiguous concept of the “ideal.” As a consequence, the two concepts tend to clash in the historical presentation and interpretation of the Platonic intellectual world, and play off one another in many different ways. Not only was the aesthetics of modern philosophy, in that it began from the concept of the ideal and advanced to the midpoint, convinced it was following the Platonic path, but inversely, the attempt to derive from this late intellectual offshoot the original meaning and the systematic tendency of the Platonic idea [Idee] has often also been made. Thus, Karl Justi has, in his work Aesthetic Elements in Platonic Philosophy, attempted to provide the proof that the idea [Idee] gains its basic signification not so much from a logical or ethical object as from an aesthetic one—that the artist’s creation is an objectivation and hypostatization of that internal intellectual models that stand before the eyes of the artist in intuitive clarity. “It is thus”—says Justi—“precisely the element that we miss in Plato’s theory of art: the presentation of the ideal and improvement of nature that receives its place here in the object of philosophy; because it found the essence of beauty there where it does not belong, it misrecognized it where it had claimed recognition.”20 This accusation of an uncritical blurring of the borders between philosophy and art, however, does not do justice to the dialectician, the diäretiker Plato. The aesthetic “ideal” is and remains, if we take it in its conventional signification, of a hybrid nature insofar as it is authentically indigenous neither to the world of the sensuous nor to that of the intelligible but, to a certain extent, hovers between them in an undeterminable middle. The formation of the ideal cannot refrain from sensuous foundation; however, it does not hang onto one single formation of meaning but runs through a series of sensuous configurations in order finally to encounter in it a subjective “selection.” For Plato, such an apparent justification of artistic activity would have signified, rather, its clearest disavowal. For clearly, the basic systematic concept of Platonism opposes itself to this view of artistic “invention,” to this view of the “inventio.” According to Plato, the unity of the form or eidos can absolutely never be obtained by gathering it out of a sensory multiplicity. Such a gathering would di20. Karl Justi, Die ästhetischen Elemente in der Platonischen Philosophie. Ein historischphilosophischer Versuch (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1860), 62.

·17·

232

·18·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

rectly contradict the authentic synoptic vision [Schau] of the dialectician, the ıȣȞȠȡߢȞİ‫ݧ‬Ȣ‫ݐ‬Ȟ [the togetherness of all being]. Instead of being raised above the world of multiplicity, we are all the more strongly involved in it; instead of penetrating to the true generality of form, we are abandoned to an endless series of numerous appearances. The true unity can absolutely never be the result and the mere sum of individuals—for unity and multiplicity belong to completely different dimensions, to different “dwellings” (‫ݏ‬įȡĮȚ [abodes]). The pure figure can never arise out of the flowing together of so many merely sensuous images. As in mathematics, the idea [Idee] of equality [Gleichen] is completely mistaken and misunderstood if we attempt to grasp it as an abstraction from different cases of real identity [Gleichheit,], as an abstraction from similar timbers and stones. This also holds for the ideas [Ideen] of the just, the good, and beauty.21 Plato sharply draws the border between merely curious onlookers, who content themselves with the observation of many and diverse beautiful things, and those true seers who penetrate the originary form of beauty itself.22 The former reacts to the latter as those who dream to those who are awake: “He, then, who respects beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it—do you think that his life is a dream or a waking? Just consider. Is not the dream state, whether the man is asleep or awake, just this—the mistaking of resemblance for identity?”23 Every vivid sensory appearance, no matter whether it is spun 21. See Plato, Phaedo 74 Aff. 22. Plato, Republic 476 Af.: “IJĮȪIJૉIJȠ੝ȞȣȞ . . . įȚĮȚȡ૵, ȤȦȡ੿Ȣ ȝ੻Ȟ Ƞ੠Ȣ Ȟ૨Ȟ į੽ ਩ȜİȖİȢ ijȚȜȠșİȐȝȠȞȐȢ IJİ țĮ੿ ijȚȜȠIJȑȤȞȠȣȢ țĮȓ ʌȡĮțIJȚțȠȪȢ, țĮȓ ȤȦȡ੿Ȣ Į੣ ʌİȡ੿ੰȞ੒ ȜȩȖȠȢ, Ƞ੢Ȣ ȝȩȞȠȣȢਙȞ IJȚȢੑȡș૵Ȣ ʌȡȠıİȓʌȠȚ ijȚȜȠıȩijȠȣȢ. [ . . . ] ȅੂȝȑȞ ʌȠȣ, ਷Ȟ įૃ ਥȖȫ, ijȚȜȒțȠȠȚ țĮȓ ijȚȜȠșİȐȝȠȞİȢ IJȐȢ IJİ țĮȜ੹Ȣ ijȦȞ੹ȢਕıʌȐȗȠȞIJĮȚ țĮ੿ȤȡȩĮȢ țĮ੿ ıȤȒȝĮIJĮ țĮ੿ʌȐȞIJĮ IJ੹ਥț IJ૵Ȟ IJȠȚȠȪIJȦȞ įȘȝȚȠȣȡȖȠȪȝİȞĮ, Į੝IJȠ૨ į੻ IJȠ૨ țĮȜ૨ ਕįȪȞĮIJȠȢ Į੝IJ૵Ȟ ਲ įȚȐȞȠȚĮ IJ੽Ȟ ijȪıȚȞ ੁįİ૙Ȟ IJİ țĮ੿ ਕıʌȐıĮșĮȚ.” [“This . . . is my division. I set apart and distinguish those of whom you were just speaking, the lovers of spectacles and the arts, and men of action, and separate from them again those with whom our argument is concerned and who alone deserve the appellation of philosophers or lovers of wisdom. . . . The lovers of sounds and sights, I said, delight in beautiful tones and colors and shapes and everything that art fashions out of these, but their thought is incapable of apprehenidng and taking delight in the nature of the beautiful in itself.”] 23. Plato, Republic 476 C.

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

233

out of elements of reality or subjective fantasy, remains, in fact, for Plato, a mere oneiric image that fades into the night as soon as the bright light of day, the light of dialectical knowledge and of the genuine philosophical vision of essences, falls upon it. The tension between “form” and “image,” between İ‫ݭ‬įȠȢ [eidos] and İ‫ݫ‬įȦȜȠȞ [eidolon], has now reached its zenith; the opposition between them appears essentially irreconcilable. In fact, in the domain of art, the motive of mediation that we actively detect in the domain of nature also appears to fail. Certainly, we could raise the question whether the thought of the ȤȦȡȚıȝȩȢ [separation] must not also stand aside here for the thought of ȝȑșİȟȚȢ [participation]—that is, could not the image, essentially different as it is from the pure idea [Idee], nevertheless share in it and indicate it? In nature, this indication appears to be fulfilled: it is the phenomenon of becoming itself, by the pure relationships of number that emerge in it, by the mathematical orders into which it fits, that indicates the realm of eternal forms of being, that not only, therefore, conceals them but also equally reveals them. Are the formations [Gebilde] that the artist creates not, in the same sense, just as much a revelation as a concealment? Would it be possible, even if art is never tantamount to the idea [Idee], even if it does not create an adequate expression of it, to nevertheless give it symbolic expression? Reconciliation through the medium of mathematics seems, in fact, to offer itself here without being forced. For there is no doubt, at least for Plato, that all beauty, whatever its individual nature and whether we think of it as the beauty of nature or the beauty of art, rests in the final analysis on the pure determinations of number and measure. We bump into the genuine ground and the most quintessential imprint of beauty, for Plato is in no way willing to admit that any sensuous figure could ever be equal in beauty to that of the pure figures of mathematics and, in particular, the regular bodies of stereometry.24 Thus, beauty and truth are joined together through the mediating concept of measure. And consequently, in the Philebus, a “pure pleasure” is expressly recognized in the concordant, in the harmony and proportion that, as such, are of a thoroughly particular nature and incomparable to 24. Plato, Timaeus 53 E: “IJȩįİȖ੹ȡȠ੝įİȞȚȢȣȖȤȦȡȘȢੑȝİșĮțĮȜȜȓȦIJȠ੝IJȦȞ ੒ȡȫȝİȞĮȢȫȝĮIJĮİੇȞĮȓʌȠȣțĮșૃ ਨȞȖȑȞȠȘਪțĮȢIJȠȞ ੕Ȟ.” [“For we shall not be willing to allow that there are any distinct kinds of visible bodies fairer than these.”]

·19·

234

·20·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

the sensation of sensuous pleasure. Authentic beauty is probably not that which the majority would like to understand by it, namely, the beauty of the living body or of certain paintings; rather, the beauty of such surfaces and bodies is determined by rules and measures of angles. “Things like that [ . . . ] are not, like most things, beautiful in a relative sense; they are always beautiful in their nature, and they carry pleasures peculiar to themselves (Ƞ‫ݧ‬țİȓȞĮȢ‫ݘ‬įȠȞȐȢ [those at home with themselves]), which are quite unlike sensuous titillation.”25 Through this concept of “pure pleasure,” the sphere of aesthetics seems to be admitted into and reconciled with the world of pure forms. For everywhere in Plato, this expression of țĮșĮȡȩȞ [an independent pure act] has systematic signification for differentiating the objective essence from the mere subjective appearance, the absolute determined and standardized in itself from the changeable, moving, and arbitrary. In this function, the concept of the pure, whose basic original signification plunged into the religious sphere, is included and used in Plato’s ethics as well as in his theory of knowledge. However, it is precisely now, with true beauty having been transferred into certain objective relations of measure, that the verdict pronounced on purely imitative art is not only confirmed but reinforced. For the artist, insofar as he intends mere imitation, does not inquire into the objective measure of things; rather, he exhibits them with all their changes and vicissitudes, in all the accidental natures of their external appearance. He gives them not as they are determined in themselves but as they exhibit themselves to the observer, relative to his position and location as well as to other external circumstances, e.g., relative to the change in light. He does not omit these subjective elements; rather, he seeks them out and deliberately stresses them. Instead of the reality of the figure, he arranges only its simulacrum, marked by all sorts of alterations, shortenings, and distortions.26 Instead of freeing us from the sensuous immediateness of impressions, the imitator seeks to capture us precisely in this immediacy, which he presents as the authentic and ultimate, as, quite simply, the “being” [Seiende]. The concept of the “pure,” formulated in Plato’s dialectics according to different designations such as țĮșĮȡȩȞ [an independent pure act] and ܻțȡȚȕȑȢ [exact], ܿȝȚțȠȞ [intact], and İ‫ݨ‬ȜȚțȡȚȞȑȢ [pure or with25. Plato, Philebus 51 C. 26. See especially Plato, Sophist 233 Eff., Plato, Republic 605 Cff.

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

235

out offense], rises up against this attempt. All of these designations insist on a clear and precise, a truly “exact” separation of the spheres of being; they separate with complete rigor the essence and the appearance, the pure form and the sensuous impression. The first step of the mimetic artist, however, is to sublate this separation. His realm is the realm of illusion, of the interplay and reciprocal merging of semblance and reality. Every stimulus that the works of the imitative artist exert on us is based on a dangerous magical spell, for the arts of the poet, the painter, and the sculptor are, in fact, identified by Plato not only with the Sophists but also with magicians.27 Whereas the dialectician teaches us to recognize the shadows on the wall of the cave as that which they are, as shadows, whereas he accomplishes the great “turning of the soul toward the light,”28 the imitator is opposed to this turning around. Instead of advancing toward the truth of the pure figure and pure being, he remains in that twilight middle in which the borders of light and darkness blur together; he rests, as Goethe’s Epimetheus put it, “in the murky realm of possibility that mélanges the figures.”29 It is, above all, this mélange, this undetermined hovering between the two worlds of form and image, for which Plato reproached imitative art. The artist, too, no longer lives immediately in the world of sensuous appearances as if it were the only world that was given—for him, too, it has become a sort of phantasmagoria and silhouette; however, all his strivings are directed to breathing life into this very shadow and to cloaking it with the semblance and allure of being. And from here, what appears at first sight to be one of the strangest and most paradoxical features of the Platonic theory of art can also be explained. All subsequent theories of art adhere to the correlation of art with the beautiful, which they accept almost as a self-evident assumption. 27. Plato, Sophist 234 C, see also Plato, Philebus 44 C. 28. See especially Plato, Republic 521 C: “IJȠ૨IJȠįȒ, ੪Ȣ਩ȠȚțİȦ, Ƞ੝țੑȢIJȡȐțȠȣ ਗȞİ੅ȘʌİȡȚȢIJȡȠij੽ ਕȜȜĮȥȣȤોȢʌİȡȚĮȖȦȖȒ, ਥțȞȣțIJȡȚȞોȢIJȚȞȠȢਲȝȑȡĮȢİੁȢ ਕȜȘșȚȞ੽ȞIJȠ૨ ੕ȞIJȠȢȠ੣ȢĮਥʌȐȞȠįȠȢ, ਸ਼Ȟį੽ijȚȜȠȢȠijȓĮȞਕȜȘșોijȒȢȠȝİȞİ૙ȞĮȚ.” [“So this, it seems, would not be a whirling of the shell in the children’s game but a conversion and turning about of the soul from a day whose light is darkness to the veritable day—that ascension to reality of our parable which we will affirm to be true philosophy.”] 29. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pandora. Ein Festspiel, in Werke, vol. 12, 299.]

·21·

236

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

For Plato, however, this correlation transforms itself into its opposite. The crucial position that Plato gives the idea [Idee] of beauty is well known. The depiction of the soul’s ascent toward the idea [Idee] of beauty as it is given in Diotima’s discourse in the Symposium and in the third great discourse on love in the Phaedrus belongs to the masterpieces of the Platonic presentation of art that have infused all subsequent centuries with their radiance and intensive intellectual brilliance. Not only did the Renaissance elaborate from this theory of art a more profound understanding of Plato, but also, later, all great epochs of artistic creation and of reflective contemplation on art returned again and again to the Platonic theory of eros as the genuine speculative authentication and justification of all artistic figures. The interconnection that history, however, has established here did not exist for Plato himself in this form. The art of love that he praises is not the art of poets and image-makers but the Socratic art, the art of dialectic. The same is true of the most profound characteristics of the figure of Socrates, as Plato has portrayed him in the Symposium with immortal features, namely, as with the problem of truth, Socrates also has a specifically ambiguous, genuinely “ironic” relationship to the problem of beauty. He is like the Silenoi who, hidden and invisible, contains within himself a divine image. He exhibits the idea [Idee] of beauty by negating it in its sensuous appearance. In this sense, its essence contains a constant appeal that at the same time signifies a constant warning. And in a more profound way, Plato always adopted this warning as his own. The more fully the Socratic question was configured for him, the more clearly the limits between the purely sensuous form and the intellectual form determined themselves. Thus, the higher the idea [Idee] of beauty moved, the more deeply did the husk of imitative art peel away for it. For the consideration of the sensory figure in which the artist loses himself is certainly one of the first steps, and a point of passage, in the ascension to the world of beauty; however, it must not be more than a point of passage. Authentic eros does not stop with the sensuous-corporeal figure that first sparked it, but from the beauty of the living body it drives further to the beauty of the soul, to the beauty of actions, efforts, and knowledge. ·22·

Whoever has been initiated so far in the mysteries of love and has viewed all these aspects of the beautiful in due succession, is at last

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

237

drawing near the final revelation. And now, Socrates, there bursts upon him that wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for. It is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way, the same to every worshipper as it is to every other. [ . . . ] And if [ . . . ] man’s life is ever worth the living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. And once you have seen it, you will never be seduced again by the charm of gold, of dress, of comely boys, or lads just ripening to manhood.30 Imitative art, however, knows nothing of this “transcendence” over all that is sensuously limited and unique. Instead of risking the ascent “beyond being” (‫݋‬ʌȑțİȚȞĮ IJ߱Ȣ Ƞ‫ރ‬ȢȓĮȢ),31 the artist laboriously gropes along with the crutches of imitation, with the sensuously given. It is dialectics that first shows us the true way here—the way to the high sea of beauty.32 Thus, we see that it is one and the same unyielding mood of thought, one and the same systematic and thoroughly structured fundamental opposition, that determines all of Plato’s judgments on art and beauty. And yet, if we let the Platonic dialogues as a whole take effect, we often sense a completely other intonation that is not in accordance with this mood. It is precisely these tonal variations in the Platonic dialogues, which are entirely directed toward the presentation of determined objective thought, and which give the dialogues their allure, that never quite merge. In addition to the systematic objective of concepts, the subjective movement and vitality of the process of thought develops in the dialogues; in addition to the general content of the problem of the individual, the psychological problematic of the thinker develops itself. Neither one ever imposes itself immediately on the other, thereby arriving at a full congruence. Rather it is often as if within this resonance of the most personal and the most individual in Plato certain subtle beats, cer30. Plato, Symposium 210 Eff. 31. [Plato, Republic 509 B.] 32. Plato, Symposium 210 D: “ਥʌ੿IJઁʌȠȜઃʌȑȜĮȖȠȢIJİIJȡĮȝȝȑȞȠȢIJȠ੣țĮȜȠ૨.” [“And thus, by scanning beauty’s wide horizon.”]

238

·23·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

tain faint tones of difference, are audible. And these differences, this inner tension, manifest themselves perhaps most clearly in Plato’s judgments about artists and works of art. The more resolutely he warns about the deceptive and magical work of art, the more perceptible becomes the extent to which he himself is gripped by this magic and how difficult it is for him to break free from it. How deeply Greek poetry, Homer in particular, have affected him becomes clear in that famous passage of the Republic in which he reduces tragic poetry, and its master Homer, to the mere image-makers of “phantasms” and, in the name of logos, bans them from the republic.33 And in the Phaedrus, which erects once again the pure concept of knowledge, the concept of dialectics over against every art of speech, against every attraction and temptation of rhetoric, here, too, he fought at the same time for the most profound rights of the șİȓĮȝĮȞȓĮ [god-mania] of artists.34 Now, as resolutely as the “transcendence” of the idea [Idee] was championed, a sensuous copy of the idea [Idee] of the beauty is at least equally admitted. “For the copies [Abbilder] of justice and temperance and all those other prized possessions of the soul have no luster; nay, so dull are the organs wherewith men approach their images [Bildern] that hardly can a few behold even approximately recognize in them the nature of the archetype [Urbildes]. However, beauty was not only resplendently to be seen when the souls enjoyed with the blessed choral the most marvelous sight and spectacle, but we still grasp it now in its light with the brightest of our senses.”35 We can follow this duality of Plato’s position vis-à-vis the problem of sensuous beauty just until the unique style of the Phaedrus. For nowhere else is the realm of pure forms—the colorless, figureless, untouchable being that can only be seen by reason itself—proclaimed with greater energy and more vigorously differentiated from every sensuous existence of phenomena. And yet, however, in no other work than this has Plato so powerfully established the force of his sensuous-plastic narration. The landscape of the shores of the Ilissos on which Socrates and Phaedrus confer clearly stands before us, graspable in all its individual features. Here, everything is not only seen in the most reliable outlines of 33. Plato, Republic 598 Eff. 34. Plato, Phaedrus 244 A. 35. Plato, Phaedrus 250 Bff.

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

239

individual figures but is at the same time painted with the most delicate and luscious colors. Here, those oppositions, which in Plato’s philosophy, in his theory of ideas [Ideen], must necessarily be identified and maintained, come into contact and are reconciled in Plato himself. Just as Socrates, according to the presentation in the Phaedo, immediately before his death attempts the production of poems because he has come to doubt whether he has, with his philosophy, truly and entirely fulfilled the demand of the gods to carry out the service of the muses,36 so Plato’s Phaedo, which develops, on the one hand, the concept of dialectics with the greatest clarity and sharpness, also contains, on the other hand, a kind of palinode of those judgments of disavowal by virtue of which he attempted to ban and restrict art to the sphere of ȝȓȝȘıȚȢ [mimesis]. For Plato himself discovered and practiced here, as in the Timaeus, a new art that was not merely imitative but configurative in the true sense: the art of mythical speech that, however little it claims the title of absolute truth, is thus not merely deception but the truth itself rendered visible in the images of the “true semblance.” And yet, from the opposite side, certain motives exert an influence that leads to a type of easing of the tension produced by the great polar opposition on which Plato’s system rests. For, increasingly, it appears that even the image as such is not exclusively indigenous to the sphere of art, but that its particular achievement extends as far as the domain of pure knowledge. For mathematical knowledge, which tends toward the idea [Idee] in its consistency and eternity, in its pure being-in-itself, can in no way do without sensuous help and support. It is able to present the nature of the universal and imageless only in the image, only in the sensuous individual case. And it is this very relation and adhesion to the image that constitutes the particular separating border between the procedures of mathematicians and those of the dialecticians. Thus, a sharp methodological cut—a IJȝ߱ȝĮ [cut, incision], as Plato expressively calls it—not only separates the sensory from thinking but also goes straight through the middle of the realm of pure thought itself. For, in one part of the thinkable, the soul exclusively deals with the latter, grasping the pure relationships of truths as such and tracing them back to their last premiseless and imageless beginning. In the other part of the thinkable, however, 36. Plato, Phaedo 60 Dff.

·24·

240

·25·

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

the soul makes use of visible images and refers to them in its deliberations without taking into account that it does not itself make sense of these images, but of another that resembles them.37 And even at this point, the bond of thought to images does not stop. Even the dialectician, even the philosopher, who, in pure thought and on the basis of logical conclusion, rests with the vision [Schau] of eternal entities,38 feels ensnared by the power of the image as soon as he attempts to grasp in words the result of this vision [Schau] in order to teach and communicate it. For every rendering into words is a thoroughly mediated presentation that remains clearly inadequate to the object itself, which it attempts to designate and express. Now, that is why—in the long philosophical parenthesis of Letter VII—Plato shows, for instance, that, next to the sensuous physical model, in which we sketch out the presentation of the pure concept of a circle, we also project the linguistic presentation in a certain word, and both the sensible image and the phonetic and linguistic image are, from the standpoint of pure knowledge, now subjected to the same conditions and the same limitations. Name and image, ‫ݻ‬ȞȠȝĮ [name] and İ‫ݫ‬įȦȜȠȞ [image], are equally far from the pure signification of the circle itself, from the Į‫ރ‬IJާȢ‫ݸ‬țީțȜȠȢ [circle itself ]. The tragedy here is to search for something ultimate and unconditioned and yet to be bound, in the presentation of this unconditioned, to the insurmountable dependence on mediated expression. The dialectician, as well as the artist, encounters this tragedy. He too, provided he undertakes to formulate his latest knowledge linguistically, cannot move beyond the domain of mediation, and thus, beyond the domain of ȝȓȝȘıȚȢ [mimesis], if one takes this concept in its widest sense. Even mediation, however, is not to be understood and valued purely negatively; rather, it signifies an indispensable preliminary stage for the highest philosophical knowledge. For only for those who have gone through it, who, in tireless work, have traversed the domain of the name and linguistic definition, the domain of sensuous intuition and perception, does the reasonable insight over everything insofar as it is granted in general to human nature 37. See Plato, Republic 510 Aff. 38. Plato, Sophist 254 A: “੒įਦȖİijȚȜȩȢȠijȠȢIJૌIJȠ૨੕ȦIJȠȢਕİ੿įȚ੹ȜȠȖȚȢȝ૵Ȟ ʌȡȠȢțİȓȝİȞȠȢੁįȑĮ.” [“Whereas the philosopher, whose thoughts constantly dwell upon the nature of reality.”]

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

241

finally light up. Thus, for the later Plato, the final and ultimate tension of thought leads directly to its final and most profound self-modesty—to a self-modesty that no longer spurns the medium of images because it is the specifically human expression that we are able to give to the highest spiritual things.39 Of course, insofar as art does not rise above the domain of mere reproduction, no place is reserved for it in the construction and development of the philosophical system; for it does not yet show itself equal to the strict dictates of logos. As Plato says in the Republic: But nevertheless let it be declared that, if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason to exist in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit here, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell. However all the same it would be impious to betray what we believe to be the truth. [ . . . ] Yes, for great is the struggle [ . . . ] a far greater contest than we think it, that determines whether a man proves good or bad, so that not the lure of honor or wealth or any office, no, nor of poetry either, should incite us to be careless of righteousness and all excellence.40 So, all the pathos of the logician and the moral philosopher goes to work against the temptations and charms of art. Plato’s system knows as such no philosophy of aesthetics; it does not even know of its possibility. We can no longer follow any further the paths and the historical meditations by means of which the fundamental assumptions of aesthetics have nevertheless grown out of this system. Only one intellectual motive that already lives in Plato himself will be briefly indicated here, even though it only attains full effectiveness in Neoplatonism. The basic idea of the 39. Plato, Letter VII 342 Aff.; see, in particular, 344 B: “ਚȝĮȖ੹ȡĮ੝IJ੹ ਕȣȐȖțȘ ȝĮȣșȐȞİȚȞ, țĮ੿IJઁȥİ૨įȠȢਚȝĮțĮ੿ ਕȜȘș੻ȢIJોȢ੖ȜȘȢȠ੝ȢȓĮȢ, ȝİIJਕIJȡȚȕોȢʌȐȢȘȢ țĮ੿ȤȡȩȞȠȣʌȠȜȜȠ૨ȝȩȖȚȢį੻IJȡȚȕȩȝİȞĮʌȡઁȢਚȜȜȝȜĮĮ੝IJ૵ȞਪțĮȢIJĮ, ੑȞȩȝĮIJĮ țĮ੿ȜȩȖȠȚ, ੕ȥİȚȢIJİțĮ੿ĮੁȢșȒȢİȚȢ. . . . ਥȟȑȜĮȝȥİijȡȩȞȝȢȚȢʌİȡ੿ ਪțĮȢIJȠȞțĮ੿ȞȠ૨Ȣ, ȢȣȞIJİȓȞȦȞ੖IJȚȝȐȜȚȢIJૃİੁȢįȪȞĮȝȚȞਕȞșȡȦʌȓȞȘȞ.” [“It has occurred to me to speak on the subject at greater length, for possibly the matter I am discussing would be clearer if I were to do so. There is a true doctrine, which I have often stated before, that stands in the way of the man who would dare write even the least thing on such matters, and which it seems I am now called upon to repeat.”] 40. Plato, Republic 607 Cff.

·26·

242

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

Platonic theory of love is that all authentic eros must be creative eros. Every true intellectual force in human beings, regardless of which direction they may go in and whether they have an effect in thinking, acting [Tun], or forming [Bilden], is a generative force. True eros aims neither at the possession nor at the simple intuition of beauty but at the “creation in beauty.” We are all of us prolific, Socrates, in body and in soul, and when we reach a certain age our nature urges us to procreation. Nor can we be quickened by ugliness, only by the beautiful. Conception, we know, takes place when men and women come together, but there’s a divinity in human propagation, an immortal something in the midst of man’s mortality which is incompatible with any kind of discord. [ . . . ] Well then, she went on, those whose procreancy is of the body turn to woman as the object of their love, and raise a family, in the blessed hope that by doing so they will keep their memory green, “through time and through eternity.” However, those whose procreancy is of the spirit rather than of the flesh—and they are not unknown, Socrates—conceive and bear the things of the spirit. And what are they, you ask? Wisdom and all her sister virtues; it is the office of every poet to beget them, and of every artist whom we may call creative (țĮ‫ ޥ‬IJࠛȞ įȘȝȚȠȣȡȖࠛȞ ‫ݼ‬ȢȠȚȜȑȖȠȞIJĮȚİ‫ރ‬ȡİIJȚțȠ‫ޥ‬İ‫ݭ‬ȞĮȚ).41 ·27·

In this concept of procreative configuring and procreative discovering, in this concept of heuretic, which is not denied to the artist, the concept of ȝȓȝȘıȚȢ [mimesis] already receives from Plato its first important counterweight. In art, too, mere ȝȓȝȘıȚȢ [mimesis] does not prevail; rather, an authentic procreative function prevails; it is not taken as essentially reproductive but as an independent form of configurative presentation. Plato takes up this motive and weaves it into his theory of “intelligible beauty.” When Phidias created Zeus, he did not form him according to any individual sensuous model; rather, he gave him the figure that Zeus would have given himself if he had sensuously incarnated himself. In this composition, a new, systematic esteem for art announces itself within the history of Platonism. Now, it is no longer a reproduction and copy41. Plato, Symposium 206 Bff.

EIDOS AND EIDOLON

243

ing of the configured world; rather, it returns to the principles, the basic forces of configuration. Thus the true artist joins the ranks of the divine demiurge, who produces the world of the senses from the vision [Schau] of the ideas as eternal models. Through the mediations of Augustine and Marsilius Ficino, of Giordano Bruno, Shaftesbury, and Winckelmann, this basic insight increasingly became the common intellectual property of modern times. Since the Renaissance, a new form of aesthetics and theory of art has arisen, which, based upon Plato himself and constantly looking back to him, now secures for the world of art the theoretical and systematic “justification” that Plato had refused it and that, from the systematic presuppositions of his doctrine, he had to refuse.42

42. For this development, which cannot be perused further here, I direct the reader to the excellent work of Erwin Panofsky, which, in connection with the problems treated here, pursues the influence of Plato’s basic ideas on aesthetics and the theory of art in modern times: “Idea”: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. V (Leipzig, 1924).

The Meaning of the Problem of Language for the Emergence of Modern Philosophy (1927)

·274·

If we take as fixed and generally valid the traditional claim that the history of modern philosophy begins with Descartes, if we see in his seminal methodological works the first characteristic expression of the modern mode of philosophical thought, then this beginning exists and indeed this mode of thought embodies itself here for the first time in a closed system. This system, as well as the fundamental philosophical theory of Descartes, stands before us without historical presuppositions or ties, arising as if from nowhere. It consciously cuts every interconnection with the past; it wants to stand on its own and to be understood on its own. Reason does not wish to be deterred from its pathway by looking back to authority and history. As Descartes’s student Malebranche so sharply and poignantly formulated it: the philosopher has no need of history; he should face nature and reality as Adam faced it. And yet, Descartes’s teachings are nevertheless unconsciously linked by invisible threads with the past. For, even for the self-certainty of pure thought, the autonomy of reason, which, viewed systematically, stands at the beginning of Cartesian philosophy, forms, when viewed historically, a late and mediated result. The demand of this autonomy would not have been

[First published as “Die Bedeutung des Sprachproblems für die Entstehung der neueren Philosophie” in Festschrift für Carl Meinhof (Hamburg: L. Friedrichsen, 1927), 507–14. Translated from Ernst Cassirer: Geist und Leben Schriften (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993), 274–86.] 244

T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY 245

achieved had it not been formed by that enormous spiritual struggle for freedom at the turn of the fifteenth century; nearly two centuries were required before it was recognized and understood in its most profound and unique tendency of thought in Descartes. We must return to this “renaissance” of thinking not only if the system of modern philosophy is to be seen as a fixed and logically closed structure but also if we are to grasp the historical-spiritual conditions and the general spiritual impulses by which it was formed. A large array of historically problematic considerations and investigations confront us: here, however, only one specific motive is to be extracted from it. We are inquiring into the role language and the philosophy of language play in this process of freeing and renewing thought. This role is rarely taken into consideration in research into the history of philosophy and the history of spirit. Just as a new view of nature and history developed in the Renaissance, so too, artistic and religious ideas [Ideen], as well as concepts of the law and state, changed and demanded new forms—all this has often been investigated in detail. Are we, however, to assume that this whole spiritual process of change was carried out without actually being connected to a comprehensive view of language and without the transformation of a new course of thinking? Whoever takes up the relationship of thought to language in the way Wilhelm von Humboldt does, whoever sees in language not only an expression and reverberation of thought but an organon [instrument] of thought in language, sees a fundamental element in thought’s formation that, from the outset, is bound to assume a more profound interconnection between the two. The following lecture can only demonstrate in a brief outline1 how this conclusion is confirmed—how, from the living development of language and from the conscious reflection on the particular way linguistic form constantly gave rise for thought new problems and proposals that have, in a profound and decisive way, intervened in its own configuration. 1. For further details and a more thorough explanation concerning the implications of what is said here, I would refer the reader to a more in-depth study published under the title: Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, in Studien der Bibliothek, Volume 10 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927). [The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, tr. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).]

·275·

·276·

246 T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY

·277·

This process of reciprocal influence and reconfiguration can be followed in three main motives. The first motive, going deeper into the world of language, arises from the new literary and social power by which the entire spiritual form of the Renaissance was initially brought to its maturity and its specific shape. The educational ideal of humanism grows out of a new fundamental view of the essence and value of language. From the outset, with all its weaknesses and one-sidedness, what raised humanism up beyond a mere scholarly movement, what lent it universal signification, was the fact that it remained preoccupied with language and with the literary monuments of antiquity, but not for their own sake; rather, a new cosmical-concept and concept of human beings arises out of its scholastic-concept. Petrarch, the actual founder and original discoverer of humanism, also proceeds from here. He is the first of those who felt the internal interwovenness of spiritual content with linguistic expression, and he strongly emphasized it. It is here that his concept and ideal of “eloquence” is rooted, which is, for him, more than rhetorical ornamentation; it is, for him, a revelation and confirmation of the inner essence of the spiritual itself. In Cicero’s style, in the style of classical Latin, he discovers the heights of antiquity, its form of life and its form of humanity. If he repeatedly returns from the new to the classical model, then it must nevertheless be at the same time more than a mere model, for each genuine form must fulfill itself with individual content if it is not to remain a mere abstract rule and external schema. In the individuality of style and speech, the individuality of the human being proves and completes itself: suus stilus cuique formandus servandusque est [his style must form and serve him].2 Petrarch’s work De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia [On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others] literally expresses the principle of humanism by emphasizing that the clarity of thought and the clarity and beauty of linguistic expression are bound together, for no art is able to extract clear speech from an unclear and dark mind. The same principle is defended more consciously, more decidedly, more pointedly and forcefully by Lorenzo Valla; it becomes an actual weapon in his arsenal against medieval, “barbarian” philosophy. Does the mode of thinking of this philosophy not manifest itself 2. [Francesco Petrarca, Brief an Johannes de Certaldo, in Epistolae familiares (Venice, 1492), fol. 22b.]

T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY 247

directly in its form of language? Are the linguistic deformations of scholastic Latin, are coinages such as haecceitas, quidditas, and so forth, not clear signs of a way of thinking whose interconnection with the living intuition, with the concrete reality of things, has been lost, instead indulging in a world of self-creative conceptual fantasies? We return to the clarity and simplicity of language, whereby this abstract logical fabrication will become invalid. Thus, on the “elegance” of Latin, Valla expects of his work a reconfiguration and a new formation of dialectic. Because logic and rhetoric, dialectic and stylistics, can only develop together, they are but different fruits from the same tree of knowledge that mature as well as wither together at the same time. So, true rebirth, the renaissance of the spirit and education of antiquity, can only take place through the reestablishment of the language of antiquity. This is a veritable universal power and, at the same time, reserves the lightest and the most apparent world power in the realm of spirit. This humanistic ideal of the Renaissance, however, was not able to remain standing; it contained, upon closer considerations, the motive of its own overcoming, its dialectical subversion within itself. For, if it was true that each individual must speak his own language, is the proposition not also valid for the individuality of nations and historical epochs? Does the living development of thought let itself become constricted into the forms of a finished language, which, however complete it may be, would signify in this completion an end, a conclusion, and a solidification? With this question, the Renaissance’s consideration of nature and its empirical science of nature stand in opposition to the requirements of humanism. The more this knowledge grows stronger, the more it also endeavors to create an independent language and to represent its own rights. From this type of effort, from the demands of technical knowledge [Wissen] and the mathematical knowledge of the natural sciences, develops the demand for a linguistic instrument that is mobile and flexible enough to adapt itself to every step thought takes on this new path. In classical Latin such plasticity is found wanting; it is only an expression of what has already been and not an organ of what is coming to be in thought. For this reason, empiricism, mathematics, and technology all insist clearly and impatiently on the liberation from this world domination by Latin that humanism had announced. Now they create almost exclusively for their own ideal tasks and needs the new tool of national languages. It is here

·278·

248 T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY

·279·

·280·

that the primacy of the education and language of antiquity is first vanquished; the rights of the “volgare,” the language of the people, are secured. Leon Battista Alberti, one of the leaders of this spiritual movement, already in 1441 seizes upon the plan to organize a contest around philosophical themes that should be discussed in the language of the people in order to prove its equivalence and intellectual equality to classical Latin. In his History of New Linguistic Scientific Literature, Olschki exhibited the interrelationship of these two spiritual motives, how, step by step, on the one hand, the new techno-mathematical mode of thought that begins in the fifteenth century was stimulated and promoted by the development of “modern” languages and, on the other hand, how that mode of thought constantly reacted to language.3 Inventors of technology and artists, mathematicians and natural scientists—men such as Brunelleschi and Alberti, Leonardo and Galileo—are involved in this process of the development of a new linguistic and scientific “style.” However, alongside these opposing movements that arise from humanism and from the growth of empirical science there now stands another movement, which, in a certain sense, encompasses and unites them. Both distinct currents of humanistic education [Bildung] and the mathematical formation [Bildung] of the natural sciences had already met each other in one thinker, who embodied, like no other before him, the ideal of Renaissance knowledge [Wissen] in its totality and in its internal dialectical tension. In the system of this thinker, in the speculation of Nicholas of Cusa, an important place is also assigned to language. Here, language appears again not only at the center of the battle between the conflicting formational interests of the time but also at the center of its whole structure of thought. Perhaps, then, this structure, the structure of Renaissance thought, stands out nowhere more clearly today than with Nicholas of Cusa. He still seems to stand completely under the spell of scholasticism; he writes and speaks medieval Latin, as in his philosophical terminology, which he directly ties to medieval linguistic concepts. At the same time, however, there stirs everywhere here a new spirit that makes itself manifest as much in the metaphysics and speculative 3. Leonardo Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, vol. I: “Die Literatur der Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance” (Heidelberg: Winter, 1919).

T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY 249

theology as in the mathematics and cosmology. And now both parts of Nicholas of Cusa’s work are brought together in a peculiar and original way by his theory of language. It forms an intellectual center and focus of his system, a focus from which rays radiate out in all directions. The teachings of Nicholas of Cusa do not possess, of course, an independent “philosophy of language” as an integrated part of the overall system. Only occasionally, only suggestively does Nicholas of Cusa appear to turn to the problems of language. However, just these scarce hints show everywhere the strongest intellectual pregnance. They reach to the very depths; they are not content with raising individual sides of the problem but infer a certain form of thought, a general category of language under which the whole consideration of the world is compressed. Nicholas of Cusa proceeds from the same problem that had occupied Christian medieval thought for centuries: it asked the basic question concerning the relationship between God and the world. Two solutions to this question seem to present themselves, one from the viewpoint of substantiality and the other from the viewpoint of causality. The first seeks to ground a common essence between God and the world; the other situates between them, if it is necessary to do so, an accidental causal relation. In the one case, the being of the world is enclosed and originally determined in the being of God; in the other case, it comes about through emanation or through a free act of creation. Nicholas of Cusa’s speculation is not far from both viewpoints, as he has been described in the history of philosophy, for whomever it suits best, a “theist,” a “pantheist,” or a “panentheist.” However, all these determinations do not correspond with the actual new moment that gives its stamp to Nicholas of Cusa’s theory of God. The relation between God and the world, between God and the human spirit can, strictly speaking, be grasped, according to Nicholas of Cusa, neither as a “whole” to its “part” nor as a “cause” to its “effect.” Here prevails another relationship that Nicholas of Cusa designates in terms of the relation between “presentation” [Darstellung] and the “presented” [Dargestelltem], between a linguistic-mental symbol and its signification. Is the sound of speech a part of the meaning that embodies itself in it? Does it constitute a substantial element of this meaning, which stands next to another elemental part and which is ordered to it? Certainly not: for how would it be able to fulfill its task, which consists in nothing other than bringing to expression the whole

·281·

250 T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY

·282·

and unbroken meaning, if there is no difference to be found between them? Does this expression, however, imply that no congruence or identity exists between the sound of speech and what it means? Rather, must not meaning and sound, in order to refer to one another, remain strictly divorced from each other, must they not belong to very separate spheres? The connection that produces itself between them does not sublate this principal difference, it demands it. The sound is an image, a presentation, a representative [Repräsentant] of meaning; however, it is only able to fulfill this function because it is not the meaning itself but is in some way fundamentally other than it. And, according to Nicholas of Cusa, we must assume the same relation, the same coincidence [Koinzidenz] of “unity” and “alterity,” in the relationship between God and the world. No proposition that is valid about God is in the same sense valid about the world, and vice versa. If we begin from the world to rise to God, the only way that remains open to us is that of “negative theology”: for each predicate we attribute [zusprechen], we must negate [absprechen] another. The distance between both poles is and remains infinite, so that it can be reduced by no effort of discursive thinking, by no process of logical mediation. According to Nicholas of Cusa, however, it is just the concept of symbols that, to a certain extent, bridges this infinite distance. Human knowledge never grasps the divine other than symbolically, but it does so in the manifold of symbolic expressions that shapes this knowledge, there are different ranks and degrees of “adequation.” There are dark and cloudy effigies [Abbilder] as well as sharp and precise effigies [Abbilder]. Nicholas of Cusa finds the latter exclusively in the domain of mathematics. From his earliest writings he turns to mathematics in order to deepen and enrich it further by important positive insights that will continue its intellectual development. And yet, in no way is mathematics an end in itself, nor does he exclusively need it as a vehicle and tool for exact knowledge of nature. Rather, he insists on its symbolic, its purely allegorical character. The mathematically infinite becomes the mirror image of the metaphysical infinite. The mirror image [Spiegelbild ] no more reaches the archetype [Urbild ] than it purely and genuinely reflects it, for the “precision” of mathematics and its “unshakeable certainty” impresses the seal of perfection on mathematical signs.4 And from here 4. See, for example, Nicolaus Cusanus, “De docta ignorantia,” Lib. I, chapter II.

T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY 251

on, from the basic relationship that is revealed to us in language (both in science and everyday life), we obtain an insight into the structure of being, into basic ontological determinations. We may like to designate God as a “cause” of being or as an absolute “substance”; this thought always requires, if it is to be taken with any real sharpness and removed from all its ambiguities, closer determination. And Nicholas of Cusa achieves this by considering God as the “meaning” of being. Between word and meaning there can never exist an identity, never any kind of substantial agreement. And yet, despite this fundamental “alterity,” the word points to its meaning and fulfills itself in its meaning. In the same way, all finite being aims at the infinite, all conditioned being finds in the absolute its fulfillment and its truth. Now, we can recognize the signification Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophy of language possesses for the whole of his system. It takes nothing less than the decisive category to form this system in accordance with it. Where Nicholas of Cusa seeks to make clear the relation between the sensible world and the intelligible world, he falls back upon the originary-phenomena of language and understanding [Verstehen] in which, according to him, this relation becomes directly illuminated. There are three ways in which we can think of how the sensory and intellectual are linked with one another. We can be turned toward the sensory appearance in such a way that we grasp nothing other than what makes itself known to immediate demonstration. We take up this position when we hear the word of a foreign language; we take up this word as a certain determined quality and strength of sound, but we understand nothing else in it, nothing beyond the mere phonetic phenomenon. In a different way, however, if we “understand” [verstehen] the word, if it “signifies” something to us, then the sensing of the sound serves us only as the medium by which and by means of which we grasp a certain “rational” content. And, finally, we are able to think an insight that is no longer dependent upon such sensory mediation, but whose intellectual being and intellectual signification is conceived purely in-itself. Of course, the human mind is not capable of direct intuition; it remains subjected to the nature [Wesen] that stands above it in the hierarchy of spirits.5 According to his nature and his being [Wesen], the 5. See Cusanus, “De conjecturis,” Lib. II, chapter XVI: “Dum enim quis Romanam loquitur linguam, ego (Cusanus) auditu vocem, tu vero (Caesarine)

·283·

·284·

252 T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY

·285·

human being is referred to a spiritual “middle point”—he has everything intellectual only so long as he visualizes it in signs and symbols. It is this capacity that determines his position in the universe. If he shares sensible sensation and imagination with animals, he rises above the animal world through his ability to form signs and to understand signs as such. And, finally, he creates signs that are of a purely “abstract” nature, which, however, represent [repräsentieren] only ideal significations and relations but not concrete tangible objects [Objekte]. Solus vero homo signum quaerit ab omni materiali connotatione absolutum penitusque formalem; simplicem formam rei, quae dat esse representans. Quod quidem signum sicut est remotissimum, quo ad res sensibiles, est tamen propinquissimum quo, ad intellectuales.6 [Certainly, only man seeks a sign, removed from every material connotation, almost completely formal, representing the simple form of the thing in question. For such a sign, as it is almost remote from sensible things, is most near to intellectual ones.] In this way, Nicholas of Cusa, while maintaining his view on the phenomenon of language and the human activity of speaking, penetrates from here to the real center of his philosophy. All knowledge—the mathematical-science of nature as well as metaphysical knowledge—becomes for him, in the end, language. Because the world is nothing else but a book God has written with His finger, its meaning has to be interpreted and appropriated by the human mind; he can only advance in this interpretation step by step and must understand how to spell it out, character by character, in order to solve gradually the signification of the individual sentences. However, the meaning, which has to be searched for in this toilsome work of spelling out, stands before him as a whole, for the whole, which he presupposes in the recognition of the parts, can prove and demonstrate itself only in the act, only by the constant progress of discovery. Thus, what is assumed in every investigation is the light that leads us to the object after which we inquire. We cannot pursue here how all these thoughts about the modern etiam in voce mentem attingis; intelligentia vero sine sermon mentem intuetur: ego enim irrationaliter, tu vero rationaliter, angelus intellectualiter.” [“Even for one who speaks the Latin language, I (Cusanus) hear by means of a voice, and you (Caesarino), certainly, touch the mind in the voice; certainly intelligence sees the mind without speech: even I without reason, you, certainly, with reason, the angel intellectually.”] 6. Cusanus, “Complementum theologicum,” chapter IV.

T HE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE FO R MO D E RN PHILO S O PHY 253

philosophy of religion, modern epistemology, and the modern theory of science have been elaborated.7 It might, however, already have become clear in this quick overview how tightly and insolubly the principal questions of the philosophy of language are interconnected to that very general philosophical weltanschauung, and how the direction in which they are to be answered rests upon the basic direction and figure of systematic philosophy.

7. For more details, see my work Individual and Cosmos in the Philosophy of the Renaissance, 57ff.

The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy (1927)

In philosophical essays written for the occasion of Eduard Zellers’s fiftieth doctoral anniversary about forty years ago, Friedrich Theodor Vischer focused attention on the concept of the symbol, which he had previously treated extensively in his aesthetics. On that occasion, he described this concept as a mutating Proteus, difficult to come to grips with and confine. In fact, there is probably no other concept in aesthetics that has proven to be so rich, so fruitful, and to have had so many applications as this one. There is, however, also almost no other that is so difficult to contain within the limits of a fixed definitional determination, so unequivocally restrictive in its use and signification. And this difficulty increases and intensifies if, as is the case in these considerations, we grasp the problem of symbolism so broadly that it does not belong exclusively to any single domain of spirit but rather becomes a systematic focal point toward which all of the basic disciplines of philosophy are directed— logic no less than aesthetics, the philosophy of language as well as the

[First published as “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie” in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 21 (Stuttgart: Enke, 1927), 191–208. Original English translation: “The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy,” tr. J. M. Krois, in Man and World 11 (1978), 411–28. The current translation is a modified version of Krois’s original translation from Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), 1–38.] 254

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

255

philosophy of religion. It is not difficult to show the signification of the concept and problem of the symbol for the internal development of thought in these domains. We need only turn to the historical progress of their basic problems to see it stand out clearly and distinctly. However, with every transition to a new sphere of the problem, there appears an enrichment as well as a new displacement of the problem; a true ȝİȐȕĮȚȢ İ‫ݧ‬Ȣ ܿȜȜȠ ȖȑȞȠȢ [a change to a wholly other genus] arises with consequences. When we look from the philosophy of religion to the philosophy of art, and from there to logic and the theory of science, and we find the problem of the symbol as an active and significant concern in all of them, the universality of this significance must unmistakably be paid for with a constant change of signification. It becomes something else depending upon the new spiritual atmosphere in which it stands. In the religious sphere, in which the concept of the symbolic is originally rooted, it appears above all to be taken in a purely thing-like and thoroughly “objective” sense. Here, the symbol does not resemble a merely mediated comparison, of a metaphor or “emblem”; it stands before us as an immediate actuality [Wirkliches] because it stands before us as an immediate effect [Wirksames]. In early Christianity, according to Harnack, symbolism was not thought of as the opposite of the objective or real but rather as the mysterious and sacred—the mysterious to which the natural, clear, and profane was opposed.1 However, symbolism immediately appears in another light as soon as we leave the sphere of religious meaning and look at aesthetic meaning. Here, its actuality [Wirklichkeit] and tangible reality [Realität] now seem in another light progressively to fade away—but a new, genuinely ideal element now appears all the more distinctly. In the whole of speculative aesthetics from Plotinus to Hegel, the concept and problem of the symbolic arise precisely at that point where the relationship of the sensible world to the intelligible world, the relationship between the appearance and the idea [Idee], is to be determined. The beautiful is essentially and necessarily a symbol because, and to the extent that, it is split within itself, because it is always and everywhere unity and double. In this splitting, in its adherence to and its transcendence of the sensory, the tension that pervades the world of our conscious1. Adolph von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3rd ed. (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1894), vol. I, 198.

·2·

256

·3·

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

ness is not only expressed but it is also revealed in the original and fundamental polarity of being itself: in the dialectic that exists between the finite and the infinite, between the absolute idea [Idee] and its presentation and embodiment within the world of particular empirical existents. Yet, another relationship confronts us within the sphere of purely logical problems. Here, too, the construction and development of these problems show that the coherence of the logical world of form cannot be adequately grasped or exactly presented unless we use certain concrete, sensible signs for this presentation. Through them, as representatives [Repräsentanten] of logical meaning, its inner structure is truly opened up to us for the first time. In modern philosophy, it was Leibniz, above all, who first realized this fundamental relationship and pursued it in every direction. It is well known how this, his basic view, like his demand for a “universal characteristic” that should always accompany logic, proved itself in his work and showed its productive capacity in the creation of the algorithm of infinitesimal calculus. It has, however, been effective far beyond these quarters. In fact, it is no exaggeration to maintain that the entire scientific configuration of logic and mathematics, as it was carried out in the nineteenth century, stood under its influence. The constant and continuous formation of Leibniz’s guiding idea has, on the one hand, given rise to Hermann Grassman’s geometrical characterization and his theory of expansion and, on the other hand, provided the basis for the foundation of symbolic logic by Boole, Peano, and Russell. And today, a thinker such as Hilbert, the princeps mathematicorum [the prince of mathematicians], sees the sole salvation of mathematics, along these lines. His only hope for securing its foundations and a consistent proof of the absence of contradictions stems from a general “formalization” of mathematics that will be carried out to full completion. This tendency is so strong and dominant that, under its influence, a complete transformation in the view of the objects of mathematics has begun to assert itself. For the proper object of mathematics is henceforth no longer numbers or magnitudes but rather the sensibly intuitive signs themselves. “Because I assume this standpoint,” Hilbert emphasizes, “the objects of the theory of numbers are for me, in direct opposition to Frege and Dedekind, the signs themselves. . . . Herein lies the firm philosophical view which I hold to be requisite for the grounding of pure mathematics as well as all scientific thinking, understanding, and communication; in the

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

257

sign.”2

beginning—we must say—was the Certainly, we must not overlook or ignore the fact that this radical conclusion is still quite contested in mathematical circles today. A dangerous opponent to Hilbert’s attempt to reduce all mathematics to a “theory of signs” has arisen in the “intuitionist mathematics” represented by Brouwer and Weyl. The attempt, however, to fit the entire contents of mathematics into a “theory of signs” in this way is characteristic of a typical and fundamental direction of modern mathematical thought. And we need only indicate briefly how much this way of thinking has affected the framing of the concepts of the natural sciences and their epistemological foundations. As early as Helmholtz, the concept of the sign becomes central to the epistemology of the natural sciences. It is responsible for the unique form of his entire theory of perception and his construction of “physiological optics.” In addition, Heinrich Hertz has not only pursued this direction of thought further but also given it precise and explicit formulation in his Principles of Mechanics. According to Hertz, all natural scientific thought and all concept and theory formation in physics consists in a fundamental symbolic act: “We form for ourselves inner images or symbols of external objects; and the form that we give them is such that the necessary consequents of the images are always the images of the necessary consequents of the things pictured.”3 We must now ask ourselves, however, whether the very abundance of applications to which the concept of the symbol lends itself has not progressively eroded and destroyed its clear and determined content. Do we still have a basic, unified, systematic problem to deal with here, a problem that extends to all areas of knowledge [Wissen] and all domains of spirit? Or do we not, on the contrary, have a question possessing merely an apparent unity that dissolves into a mere word as soon as we try to grasp and define it more closely? Does the term “symbol,” as it is used today in the philosophy of religion, aesthetics, logic, and the theory of science, conceal some kind of unified content? Does it refer to an allembracing function of spirit that remains the same in its basic character2. David Hilbert, “Neubegründung der Mathematik,” Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar der Hamburgischen Universität, vol. 1 (1922), 162. 3. [Heinrich Hertz, Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. III (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1894), 1.]

·4·

·5·

258

·6·

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

istics even though it takes on a new and unique figure in each of its outgrowths? However, if this is so, where do we find the unifying bond that connects the fullness and manifold of significations that the concept of the symbol has gradually assumed in its immanent development? In the closely measured time that is available to me here, I cannot answer this question with any real exactitude and precision, let alone attempt to give a truly systematic foundation for the answer that I have in mind. I can only try to present a few guidelines that should serve more to suggest the course of investigation than provide you with any positive findings. Permit me, then, to begin with a simple concrete example that should place us at the center of the question. We start with a particular perceptual livedexperience, with a drawing that we see before us, which we take in some way as an optical structure and as a coherent whole. Here, we can be directed to the purely sensory “impression” of this drawing. We grasp it, for example, as a simple drawn line that differs and stands out from others through certain visible qualities and basic traits of its spatial form. We do not need to concern ourselves for the time being with whether spatial configuration is already included and imparted in this simple sensory impression or if this organization itself only results through the cooperation of “higher” mental functions. Nor need it concern us now if, perhaps, what we usually refer to as the immediate “perception” of space already embraces definite intellectual processes such as “unconscious inferences.” The lived-experience of perception itself as a purely phenomenal givenness, in any case, exhibits no such separation. It is only first introduced after subsequent psychological or epistemological analysis. However, while devoting myself to the impression of this simple lived-experience of perception, while I follow the individual lines of the drawing in their visible relationship, in their lightness and darkness, in their contrast against the background, and their upward and downward design, the drawn line suddenly begins, as it were, to animate itself from within as a whole. The spatial formation [Gebilde] becomes an aesthetic formation [Gebilde]. In it, I grasp the character of a particular ornament that combines, for me, a certain artistic meaning with a particular artistic significance. I can be engrossed in the pure contemplation of this ornament, I can place it before myself, so to speak, as something timeless, or instead I grasp in and through it something else; it presents itself to me as an excerpt and expression of an artistic language in which I

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

259

recognize the language of a particular time and the style of a historical epoch. As Mr. Frankl most “sensibly” observed yesterday, the style, the time’s characteristic “will-to-art,” stands all at once pregnant with meaning and alive before me in the concrete lived-experience of the line drawing. Once again, the form of consideration can change so that what at first presented itself to me as a pure ornament discloses itself as the bearer of mythic-religious signification. In the instant in which, with reflection, I not only grasp from the outside this signification but also am seized inwardly by it so that I live and am in it, the figure that I see before me is as though saturated and impregnated with a new meaning. It is beset by a tinge of magical enchantment. It no longer acts as a mere aesthetic form but is like a primeval revelation from another world, from the world of the “sacred.” Here, in the middle of sensory lived-experience, it overwhelms whoever is open to it with mystery and awe. Finally, we can deliberately draw a sharp contrast between this form of apprehension and inner appropriation, and another one that is diametrically opposed to it. Where the aesthetic observer and connoisseur devotes himself to the intuition of pure form, and where the form reveals a mystical meaning to the religiously moved, the formation [Gebilde] that is visible to the eye can also offer itself to thought as an example of a coherent purely logical conceptual structure. As Plato said, the constellations themselves signify nothing to the calculating astronomer, but serve him only as “paradigms” through which he becomes conscious of the purely mathematical nature of movement and the timeless ideal essence of “faster” and “slower.” Thus, for the mathematical mind, the line drawing becomes nothing but a visible graphic representation [Repräsentation] of a certain functional process. In its immediately given figure, it grasps something that is completely beyond intuition as such. It sees in it the image of a law, a form of ideal correlation, which is the ultimate foundation of all mathematical thought. And here, too, it is the whole of the intuitive figure, not merely a part or fragment of it, which is configured from this specific “point of view” and is accordingly imbued with a certain content of meaning. Where aesthetic direction of contemplation perhaps sees a beautiful line in the style of Hogarth, the view of the mathematician sees the image of a certain trigonometric function, such as the image of a sine curve, while the mathematical physicist perhaps recognizes in this same curve the law of a certain natural process, such as the law of peri-

·7·

260

·8·

THE PROBLEM O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

odic oscillation. We attempt to express this systematic interconnection by considering the fundamental sensory lived-experience with which we are dealing, in this case, as received into, determined by, and configured through various “symbolic forms.” This way of speaking, however, must not be understood as though we were dealing here with a mere separation or temporal succession of “form” and “matter.” If we may distinguish, by employing Husserl’s terminology, between the sensory material and “animating acts,” between the sensual ‫ވ‬ȜȘ [hyle] and intentional ȝȠȡijȒ [morphe], this abstract distinction can never mean that these may be separated in the phenomenon or that in itself formless matter, which is gradually taken up into various forms of bestowing meaning and subsequently configured by them, is given. Whoever in this way converts the Kantian “dualism” of form and matter, which is a difference of signification and transcendental “validity,” into a divergence and juxtaposition of things in real existence, has thereby already missed the decisive point of view needed for the profound understanding of this difference. For us, in any case, it is certain that pure phenomenological “sensation” and “sensebearing” are only given as an indivisible unity. We can never completely separate the sensory as such, as some naked “raw material” of sensation, from the whole complex of meaning. Yet, we can indicate the different ways it configures itself and how it means and “says” differently, according to the characteristic perspective of meaning, the focal point under which it comes. Philosophy must not permit itself to be content to fix itself to one of these focal points, no matter how comprehensive it may appear to be. Rather, it must attempt to encompass them all in a higher synopsis and to understand [verstehen] each of them in their constitutive principles, for it is precisely the totality [Totalität] of these principles that constitutes the objective unity and totality [Ganzheit] of spirit. A strictly “critical” philosophy cannot direct its attention toward schematically simplifying the richness and fullness that is offered in the various basic orientations of cultural consciousness by trying to force them together into a general form. We must try to grasp in concreto the particular manner in which the sensory becomes the bearer of meaning within each of these domains, and attempt to show in their resoluteness the fundamental laws under which all of these various processes of forming stand. Here, we can see in all of these particular worlds of form, no matter how much they differ in principle and structure, that there is nonetheless

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

261

a certain direction of construction in their order and a certain manner in which they develop from elementary figures to more complex figures. By trying briefly and, therefore, of course, only in an abstract and schematic way to indicate the guidelines of this development, we can introduce a very broad relational system of thought, according to which we can describe and ascertain the “orientation” of each symbolic form. Just as we can completely render the figure of a spatial curve by introducing three vertical axes one after another, measuring the distance of every point of the curve from these axes, so it is permissible to distinguish three different dimensions of symbolic forming. The simplest and, in a certain sense, the most original and primitive type of this relation confronts us wherever some sensory lived-experience becomes imbued for us with a certain meaning-content to which a characteristic expressive value adheres and appears saturated by it. Even here, we are essentially beyond the abstraction of a “mere” sensible sensation, as dogmatic sensationalism understands it. This is because the sensible content stands before us, to speak with Spinoza, not as a mute image on a tablet but, rather, immediately in its objective existence and its being-a-certain-way through which it communicates to us from its inner life. This transparency of the sensory is as such inherent in every aesthetic intuition as such; however, it is by no means restricted to the domain of the aesthetic. Rather, it can be recognized in every sound of language and in every elementary figure of myth. We are not inquiring here into the possibility of this interconnection, nor are we attempting to know whether it is grounded in either the metaphysical or the basic psychological determinations that possess an external and sensory power to express some “internal” being in this way, immediately revealing it to us. The answers that have been proposed to this question either misinterpret the problem that we are dealing with here, by substituting a foreign fact for it, such as the logical fact of an analogical inference, or, at best, merely create another designation for the phenomenon by speaking of a symbolic “empathy” of the internal with the external. Yet, the more problematic that all theories of the originary phenomenon of expression prove themselves to be, the more clearly and definitely it stands before us as a phenomenon. However, on the other hand, a look at language, and especially the linguistic sentence, which can be identified more rightly than the word as the proper structural element of language, shows that language does not remain in this

·9·

·10·

262

·11·

THE PROBLEM O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

first sphere, the sphere of expression; rather, it must necessarily transcend it in order to fulfill its particular task. For in every sentence there is always a certain positing that aims at an objective fact that language seeks to contain and describe in some way. Here, it is no longer the mere conditioned state spoken of that is mediated through speech; rather, a relation in being is expressed that is supposed to persist “in itself ” and is thought to be accessible and ascertainable in its consistence by every sensitive, intuitive, and thinking subject. The copula “is” is the purest and most pregnant imprint of this new dimension of language, which can be signified with the term that Bühler introduced with reference to Husserl as the function of presentation [Darstellungsfunktion]. However, another, third sphere now rises above this function of presentation, which we will designate as pure signification [reine Bedeutung]. It is separated from the sphere of presentation in that it has freed itself from the ground of intuitional configuration in which presentation is rooted and out of which it continuously draws its strength. It is suspended, so to speak, in the free ether of pure thought. The sign, in the sense of the sign of pure signification, neither expresses nor presents. It is a sign in the sense of a mere abstract correlation. It maintains a reciprocal relation and correspondence that is grasped as a general law. We must, however, refrain from thinking of the elements that enter into this relation as an autonomous consistence and content that exist and signify something beyond this relation. This relationship is perhaps most clearly expressed in the modern foundations of geometry introduced by Pasch and brought to completion by Hilbert. In their system, points, lines, and planes, which, according to older interpretations, we are accustomed to viewing as intuitive formations [Gebilde], do not lose all of their presentative meaning. They only serve as signs for a certain content of signification—for that mathematical meaning-content that is expressed in the axioms of geometry. Whatever fulfills these axioms can be chosen as representative [Repräsentant] of this meaning-content, for in every genuine geometric proposition there is the constitutive law of this content, not the intuitive determination of the elements themselves. Thus, the points and straight lines in this “abstract” geometry can be replaced in a certain manner by structures [Gebilde] of a completely different intuitive nature without these different intuitive interpretations changing anything of the character of the logical content of the particular geometry in question, because this is based solely

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

263

upon the pure form of the axioms themselves, that is, on general principles of correlation and not on particular figures and formations [Gebilde]. If we take this general differentiation of the functions of expression, presentation, and signification as our basis, which I can, of course, no more than sketch for you, then we possess a general plan of ideal orientation within which we can now indicate to a certain extent the position of each symbolic form. Of course, this position cannot be fixed once and for all such that it could be referred to within the basic plan by a fixed point. On the contrary, it is characteristic for each form that, in the various phases of its development and in the different stages of its spiritual construction, it has a different relationship to the three basic poles that we have tried to distinguish here. It shifts from place to place in this development, and by virtue of this movement it is able to attain its own area of being and meaning; it reaches its completion and internal limits. Let us try to make this clear once more with the example of language. There can be no doubt how very much and how strongly language, from its most primitive configurations to its highest stages, is founded on and rooted in the purely expressive. As one-sided and insufficient as it is to attempt to understand language merely as expressive movement, as did Wundt, and to attempt to determine its spiritual nature [Wesen] from that perspective, there can be no doubt that a certain expressive or “physiognomic” character still adheres in the words of our highly developed language. The modern psychology of expression has called direct attention to these features of language. Heinz Werner has recently undertaken experiments in the Hamburg Psychological Laboratory to try to shed light on this physiognomic side of the lived-experiences of language. On the other hand, there is no question that only a single motive and, as it were, single dimension of linguistic expression is concerned and that language as a whole is truly constituted and perfected only when it goes beyond this motive. In order to make the nature and continuity of this process clear to us, we need only observe the procedure that is usually employed in language to coin the first designation for spatial relationships. Language has a new task wherever such relationships are signified linguistically, where “here” is distinguished from “there,” where the location of the speaker is distinguished from that of the one spoken to, or where greater nearness or distance is rendered by various indicative particles. Here, the merely subjective sensation and stimulus are transformed into

·12·

264

·13·

THE PROBLEM O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

an objective intuition: natural sounds of pure feeling give way to the sounds of presentation. However, the continuity of development that is manifested here consists in the fact that the new form to which language is now elevated still uses the older material means. The components of pure emotive expression are not discarded but are preserved though, at the same time, they change their figure; they are given a new meaning and, as it were, a new life. This two-sided relationship, or bipolar character, is clearly recognizable in basic indicative words, the demonstrative pronouns of primitive languages. They come from a purely “physiognomic” determination—shading and coloration of the vowel. In this sensory coloration of tone, however, they contain certain basic determinations of objective intuition. The sharper vowel, for instance, designates nearness to the speaker, whereas the duller, greater distance; and in a similar manner, the direction from I to you, that is, the centrifugal direction, is distinguished from the opposite centripetal direction. Temporal distinctions can also be differentiated solely by tone in this way. In the Somali languages, for example, the vowel “a” serves as a suffix to a noun in order to designate it as temporally present, whereas the vowel “o” designates the temporally absent, the past or the future. Thus, language proceeds from expressive meaning to pure presentative meaning, and from this it is constantly directed toward the “third realm,” the realm of pure signification. Language is not confined to the sphere of the intuitive and tangible but attempts to grasp what is ultimate and highest in the realm of thought. However, of course, the limits of language become visible in this attempt. For even where language is elevated to the expression of pure relations, the sensory coloration still adheres to the expression. Language repeatedly attempts to grasp expression of purely logical determinations and relations in images, which it takes from the immediately intuitable sphere. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the most universal expression of relation, the copula of the predicative sentence. The pure “is” of predicative statements is designated in the majority of languages, including highly developed and refined ones, in such a way that a clearer auxiliary meaning adheres to it so that logical “being” is replaced by the spatial being-there [Da-Sein] and being-over-there [DortSein]. The validity of a relation is, therefore, replaced by an existential statement, a proposition about a particular existence [Dasein], and the character of this existence. A basic characteristic of language shows it-

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

265

self in this kind of substitution, which it cannot abandon without forfeiting its own nature. Philosophical sensationalism frequently liked to refer to this fact in order to conclude, on the basis of language’s inability to break through the sphere of sensory intuition, that the same inability holds for thought. Locke made use of the theory of language as one of the foremost pieces of evidence for his theory of knowledge. However, the most essential element is thereby overlooked because, although pure knowledge can in no way dispense with language as a genuine organon of thought, it changes this instrument in its very employment. It is not bound to the limits of phonetics and the words of language but extends beyond them by making them serviceable for its own ends. Here, as already foreseen by Descartes and Leibniz, a general universal language or lingua universalis is generated as a necessary organ for the progress of scientific thought. Only today, in modern mathematics and symbolic logic, which serve as its foundation, has it reached its proper development and structural perfection. In it, language has completely left the domain in which it is originally rooted. It has, once and for all, cast aside everything that is merely the concern of expression. Nothing adheres to the signs of the symbolic language of mathematics and logic that in any way includes a relation to the “subject” or to the individual world of feeling and sensation. They serve exclusively the representation [Repräsentation] of the most general, objective, and necessary facts. However, the world of intuition, to which the function of presentation of language is always directed, now progressively begins to recede until it finally disappears completely in the new world that now emerges here and imposes and asserts its own rights ever more clearly and consciously. In a well-known, humorous definition of pure mathematics, Russell says that it is a domain in which one never knows [weiß] about what one is speaking or if that which one says is true. Naturally, this definition seeks in no way to deny the specific significance of pure mathematics or, what, for Russell, is synonymous with it, pure logic. It does deny, however, that this signification requires any intuitive substrate or intuitive object. Here, the final radical step has been taken; the realm of pure relations and signification has become self-supporting and has absolved itself from every bond to an intuitively accessible existence. The specific nature and tendency of this separation is particularly prominent where it is not confined to the sphere of pure mathematics as a

·14·

·15·

266

·16·

THE PROBLEM O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

theory of abstract formal relations but extends to the knowledge of reality and defines it in accordance with this new ideal. It can be said that it is precisely this new methodological approach and revision of the basic view of the meaning and means at the disposal of the knowledge of nature that is responsible for the crisis in modern mathematical physics. What principally differentiates the worldview of classical mechanics from the worldview of the general theory of relativity is the different roles and importance they assign to intuition in the construction and constitution of the object of the natural sciences, the object of experience. Of course, the classical Newtonian system is also based upon concepts that are principally of a nonintuitive nature. Newton’s absolute space and time, which flow evenly according to their own nature and separately from all relations to an external object, have no intuitive content. When, however, we consider their structure more closely, it turns out that they refer to the field of intuitional being and that they are derived from it by a continual process of progressive idealization. They merely follow through to the end the path that intuition points out. They subjugate physical being to a fixed geometric intuitional schema within which all natural processes are to be ordered. Space and time appear here, at least, as analogies of empirical intuitive objects. Even in their absoluteness, they are still understood as thing-like, concrete formations [Gebilde]. The concept of mass in Newtonian physics also has this concrete, substantial character. A piece of matter can be fixed as a self-identical thing and be recognized in various locations in space as being one and the same. It can, to an extent, be followed by our gaze in all phases of its movement. The infinite number of positions it can occupy in space at different times form, nonetheless, a readily comprehensible whole insofar as they steadily emerge from one another and are all bound to the same given, intuited substratum. However, it is precisely this substantiality of space, time, and mass that has been progressively abandoned by modern physics. Maxwell’s theory of light and electricity forms, here, an important and methodologically essential beginning. The mechanical theory of light had to attempt to explain optical phenomena by thinking of them as the image of a determined movement that was configured on the pattern of the movement of solid bodies. Even after it had progressed from emission theory to wave theory, light waves were still considered as something concrete, as a movement of

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

267

particles, which propagated themselves in the medium of ether in the same manner that a wave spreads out in water or the vibration of an elastic string spreads through the air. Maxwell’s theory, on the other hand, broke through this manner of explanation. In place of this kind of description of physical processes, which is like a transcription into known intuitive accessible relationships, he gives a purely mathematical determination. Every unique position of the ether is associated with a determinate state, and the periodic changes of these states, as expressed by determinate equations, replace the metaphorical figurative expression of the “light wave.” The character of the ether is restricted to the fact that, for every one of its points, two directed magnitudes—the magnetic and the electrical vector—are given. It is well known how modern theory has progressed in this direction to become pure field physics. It could only complete this transformation, however, by increasingly freeing itself from the conditions of clarity upon which the older theory was based. In his Leiden lecture on ether and relativity theory, Einstein maintained that general relativity did not need to abandon the concept of ether; it only had to deny that it lay in a determined state of movement. However, such an ether, about which we can say neither that it rests nor that it circulates with a determinate velocity (it is, of course, no longer a physical “thing”), is configured analogically to a thing given to intuition: it has become a pure symbol of order. And it is also symbols of order of this kind that we have before us in the concepts of time and space in the general theory of relativity. For, on the one hand, the interchangeability of space and time that is maintained here must appear for intuition as unattainable. On the other hand, “the” time and “the” space as such ceased to be something objectively independent, something measurable. Space no longer has a fixed “structure” as such that we might determine as Euclidean or non-Euclidean. Rather, for each position there is a particular determination of mass, which depends upon the form of certain physical magnitudes, on the magnitudes that determine the gravitational field for the place in question. I do not need to enter any further into all of these interconnections; here they should only serve as a confirmation of how the “symbols” with which the modern physicist describes the processes of nature have, in fact, taken the last decisive step and left the area of intuition and presentation for the domain of pure signification. Recent mathematics and physics have not gone this way by means of

·17·

268

·18·

THE PROBLEM O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

a short cut; rather, they have been led to it, with factual necessity, by the peculiar character of their methods and their objects. Of this there can be no serious doubt. The kind of symbolic forming of thought that is effected here, however, now stands out all the more sharply from the basic attitudes of other spiritual domains. In this context and before this audience, I do not need to enter into the particularity of aesthetic forming. One thing is immediately clear: The aesthetic object is rooted in the world of perception and its conditions in a wholly other and far deeper sense than is the case with the empirical physical object. No matter how far or how high aesthetic presentation reaches beyond the sensory givenness of appearances, or how much it strives toward the ideal—the domain of ȞȠȘIJȩȞțȐȜȜȠȢ [the beautiful known object]—it is and remains restricted to intuitional being and must closely cling to it. It appears to have become more difficult for aesthetic theory to understand the relations maintained within aesthetic apprehension and configuration, between the world of pure expression and the world of pure presentation. The attempt has been made, not infrequently, to relate the aesthetic exclusively or, at least, chiefly to one of these two poles, thereby giving it a foundation. There are aesthetic systems that try so much to restrict art to the emotional and have it so fully absorbed by the pure lived-experiences of expression that, as a result, that which is characteristic of the aesthetic object is almost lost. There are others, however, that try to separate the aesthetic in the strict and proper sense from its roots in subjective “feeling” so that, for them, it becomes nothing but a definite, basic form of objective comprehension and knowledge, which, as such, stands on the same level as the theoretical knowledge of nature. It is unmistakable, however, that through this isolation and abstract juxtaposition of the “subjective” and the “objective” elements, the specific form of the aesthetic is destroyed rather than recognized. For what is unique about the nature [Wesen] and the basic character of the aesthetic form of meaning is that, in it, these two motives, which prove to be separable and relatively independent of each other in other forms of meaning, are no longer separated, and stand instead in a purely correlative and mutually determining kind of relationship. Here, we can no longer ask which of these two elements—the element of expression or the element of presentation—is the ʌȡȩIJİȡȠȞIJ߲ijȪıİȚ, what is, by nature, earlier and later. For the nature of the aesthetic itself excludes every such relationship of earlier and

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

269

later, every relation of one-sided and univocal dependence, dependence of the one on the other. It is the merging [Aufgehen] of the one into the other, the ideal balance that presents itself between them, that constitutes aesthetic comportment as well as the aesthetic object. Here I would like to appeal to what Mr. Prinzhorn presented yesterday on the problem of rhythm. The gist of his characterization of rhythm was precisely that it is the “equilibrium of the polar tension between expression and presentation.” If we look back once more to language, we see that the language of poetry is different in nature from that of ordinary life and that of science in that, for it, there is no opposition and separation of presentative meaning from expressive meaning. It seeks in expression, and by virtue of it, pure presentation, as in pure presentation it seeks pure expression. Every perfect poem by Goethe, for instance, presents us with both an indissoluble unity and whole [Ganzheit]. It is completely submerged in and saturated with a particular mood in every tone and in its entire rhythmical movement. It is precisely in this melodic-rhythmic expressive content, however, that a new figure of the world, which then appears before us in pure objectivity, is constructed for us. The various art forms—poetry, music, and the spatial arts, including painting and sculpture—may attain this unity in various ways and by different means, but it is absent in none of them because it belongs to the essence of artistic forming as such. I cannot enter more closely into the host of interesting specific questions that a treatment of the theme demands. I have only attempted here to sketch a general outline of the problem. I only wanted to create a framework for a treatment of the problem of the symbol, realizing that I cannot fill it out in any fashion. Filling out this framework must be left to the individual lectures, each of which will illuminate the problem from a particular angle. By way of conclusion, I may at least say a few words about a very general, basic question that arises with the analysis of every symbolic form. We cannot even use the terminus “symbol” without raising the general question that we may designate as the truth-question. A symbol would not be a symbol if it did not lay claim to a kind of truth. A mere sign that is detached from every relation to something that is to be signified or to a signification that it grasps and brings to expression would thereby no longer be a sign. It would be reduced to a mere existence in which the character-

·19·

·20·

270

·21·

THE PROBLEM O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

istic sign function was extinguished. The difference, therefore, between our idealistic conception of symbolic forms and a realistic view does not lie in any denial of the objective certainty of these forms. On the contrary, the attempt here is to establish this certainty and to understand it by means of a general principle. Kant saw the basic character of Platonic idealism in the fact that Plato did not stop with the “copy view of the physical world order”4 but elevated himself instead to an intuition of its “architectonic connection.” In this sense, the standpoint of the mere “copy view” must be exchanged for that of the “architectonic connection” in every sphere of objectivity, no matter of what kind or type. Such a sphere cannot, by the simple imitation and rendering of some pre-given being, evidence the truth and objectivity that characteristically belongs to it; rather, it accomplishes this in the meaningful order of the construction that it carries out by virtue of an original principle of giving form. It is well known how this basic thought has proven itself in the “Copernican turn” that Kant executed in his attempt to lay the foundations of knowledge. The object [Objekt] of knowledge, i.e., nature, stands under the pure laws of the understanding because it is there alone that we are able and allowed to spell out appearances as experiences, that is, so that we can combine them into objective unities. However, we also have to realize that, beyond this purely theoretical domain, the respective form of combination, the synopsis, does not imitate the object seen in this synopsis but constitutes it. To be sure, aesthetics, like the critique of knowledge, has also taken centuries to learn to grasp and determine the concept of “natural truth” in this sense. Again and again, it was forgotten that nature, as “beautiful” nature, is neither given nor set before the sculptor or painter as the goal of imitation but rather is the mode and direction of artistic configuration out of which the individual arts’ intuition of nature grows. Thus, the law of style and, hence, the law of inner truth under which every individual art stands cannot be extracted from some fixed “nature of things.” It is, rather, the independent originality and autonomy of this law that itself determines this truth. The agreement with this inner norm, which is a norm of forming [Bilden], gives the formed [Gebilde] its stable order. In this sense, the aesthetic of the eighteenth 4. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 370.]

THE PROBLE M O F THE SYMBO L IN PHILO S O PHY

271

century, the aesthetics of Mendelssohn and Lessing, already pronounced this thought by asserting that we must begin with the kind of signs that each art uses in order to reach a certain demarcation of its domain and possibilities. The determination of an art lies in what it is capable of by virtue of its specific signs, not in what the other arts are just as much or more capable of accomplishing. In the end, this principle of Lessing informs us that it is none other than the style of each art that is decisive in determining its immanent truth and its objectivity, not the other way around. If we conceive this basic thought in general terms, then we are thereby required, as in the case of the individual arts, to inquire into the law of forming in all domains of spirit as such, and into the understanding of the objective structures that become visible in them. Let us recall, once again, our example of the line drawing that could first be taken as an aesthetic ornament, then as a magical-mythical insignia, and then again as a mathematical curve that served as the designation of a functional process. And in each of these versions, a thoroughly different objective imprint was attained. Thus, in this way, it now becomes clear how that which we call the object is to be understood not in the manner of a fixed and rigid forma substantialis [substantive form] but as a functional form. At the same time, it can be seen how the richness of being originally unfolds out of the richness of meaning, and how the manifold character of the significations of being does not stand in contradiction to the demand for the unity of being; rather, it is just the proper fulfillment of this demand that is exhibited.

Form and Technology (1930)

1 ·39·

If we judge the signification of the individual subdomains of human culture primarily by their actual effectiveness, if we determine the value of these domains according to the magnitude of their direct accomplishments, there can hardly be any doubt that by this measure technology claims first place in the construction of our contemporary culture. Likewise, no matter whether we reproach or praise, exalt or damn this “primacy of technology,” its pure factuality seems to be beyond question. All the forces of configuration in contemporary culture are increasingly concentrated on this one point. Even the strongest counterforces to technology, even those spiritual potencies that are most distant from technology in their content and meaning, seem able to actualize themselves only insofar as they become conjoined with technology and, through this alliance, become imperceptibly subjected to it. Today, many consider this subjugation the ultimate goal of modern culture, and its inevitable fate. However, even if we think it impossible to constrain or stop this course of things, a final [First published as “Form und Technik” in Kunst und Technik, ed. Leo Kestenberg (Berlin: Volksverband der Bücherfreude-Verband, 1930), 15–61. Translated from Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), 39–90. The current translation is a collaborative effort by Steve Lofts, Antonio Calcagno, John Krois, and Wilson Dunlavey.] 272

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

273

question remains. The essence and basic determination of spirit does not tolerate any external determination. Even where it entrusts itself to a foreign power and sees its progress determined by it, spirit must at least attempt to penetrate the core and meaning of this determination. Spirit thereby reconciles itself with its fate and becomes free. Even if spirit is not able to repel and conquer the power to which it is subjected, it nevertheless demands to know this power and to see it for what it is. If this demand is made in earnest, it does not possess a merely “ideal” signification and is not limited to the realm of “pure thought.” From the clarity and certainty of seeing follows a new force of effective action, a force with which spirit strikes back against every external determination, against the mere fatality of matter and the effects of things. Insofar as spirit is mindful of the powers that seem to determine it externally, this mindfulness already contains a characteristic turning back and turning inward. Instead of grasping outwardly at the world of things, it now turns back onto itself. Instead of exploring the depths of effects, it returns to itself and, by means of this concentration, achieves a new strength and depth. Admittedly, we are still far away from fulfilling this ideal demand today, particularly in the domain of technology. A gulf that separates thought and activity [Tun], knowledge [Wissen] and effective action repeatedly emerges. If Hegel is correct when he states that the philosophy of an age is nothing more than that very age “grasped in thought,” and if this philosophy, understood as the idea of the world, only appears after reality has completed this process of formation and so “finished itself,”1 then we would have to expect that the incomparable development of technology over the course of the past century corresponds to a change in the way of thinking. If, however, we look at philosophy’s present situation, this expectation has been only partially fulfilled. Admittedly, from approximately the middle of the nineteenth century onward, problems that had their origins in the realm of technology have increasingly made their way into abstract “philosophical” examinations, thereby giving them a new goal and direction. Neither the theory of science nor the theory of value has escaped this influence. The theory of knowledge, the philosophy of cul1. [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, ed. Eduard Gans, in Werke, vol. VIII (Berlin, 1833), 19f.]

·40·

274

·41·

·42·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

ture, and metaphysics all attest to technology’s breadth and growing power. This interconnection exhibits itself most clearly in certain currents of the modern theory of knowledge, which attempt to transform the traditional relationship between “theory” and “praxis” into its opposite, defining theoretical “truth” merely as a special case of “utility.” Beyond these properly “pragmatic” trains of thought, however, the growing influence of technical concepts and questions on philosophy as a whole is unmistakable. Even modern Lebensphilosophie is often subject to it, though Lebensphilosophie believes it takes the most vigorous stand against it. It, too, is not free from the chains that it mocks. However, all of these inevitable points of contact between the domains of technology and philosophy in no way prove that an inner communality is being initiated and built up between the two. Such a community can never result from a mere sum of external “influences,” however manifold and strong we may think them. While philosophy and technology have jointly entered into the systems of positivism and empiricism—we need only think of Mach’s principle of economy as the basis of a theory of knowledge— this bond must not produce the semblance of a true unification of the two. Such unification would be reached only if philosophy succeeded in fulfilling, on this point, the general function that it has increasingly fulfilled with ever-greater clarity for other domains of culture. Since the days of the Renaissance, philosophy has brought all the powers of modern thought before its forum, questioning them about their meaning and right, their origin and validity. This question of the ground of validity, the quid juris as Kant calls it, is directed to all of the formal principles of spirit; in posing this question, the grounds of their specific characteristics are first uncovered, their own proper meaning and value discovered and assured. Philosophy has achieved such assurance, such “critical” mindfulness and justification, for mathematics, the theoretical knowledge of nature, the “historical” world, and the human sciences. Although new problems constantly arise here, although the work of “critique” will never come to an end, the direction of this work has been set since the days of Kant and his founding of “transcendental philosophy.” Technology, however, has not yet been seriously integrated within this circle of philosophical self-reflection. Technology still seems to retain a singularly peripheral character. Genuine knowledge of technology, insight into its spiritual “essence,” has not kept pace with the growth in its scope. A fundamental

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

275

motive for the inner tension and antagonism found in the formative tendencies of our epoch lies precisely in this disparity: in this impotence of “abstract” thought to be able to penetrate into the core of the technological world. A resolution of this tension can never be hoped for or sought by adjusting the extreme points of the tension or by effecting a mere compromise between them. Rather, their possible unity requires the insight and clear and frank acknowledgment that this particular case involves more than a mere difference; it is a genuine polarity. This fact determines the task that philosophy has to fulfill with respect to the current development of technology. This task cannot be limited to assigning technology a predetermined “place” in the whole of culture and, therefore, in the whole of a systematic philosophy that aims to be the intellectual expression of culture. Technology cannot simply be placed next to other areas and formations [Gebilden], such as “economics” and “the state,” “morality” and “law,” “art” and “religion.” For in the realm of spirit, separate domains never stand simply together or next to one another. Here, the community is never spatially static but possesses a dynamic character. One element is found “with” the other only to the extent that both assert themselves in opposition to each other, thereby mutually “setting each other into opposition” [auseinandersetzen]. Thus, every introduction of a new element [Element] not only widens the scope of the spiritual horizon in which this confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] takes place but also alters the very mode of seeing. This process of configuration not only expands outwardly; it also experiences in itself an intensification and heightening so that a simultaneous qualitative transformation, a specific metamorphosis, occurs. It is not enough for modern philosophy simply to find a “space” for technology in the edifice of its doctrine. A space that is created in this way will always remain an aggregate space and never become truly systematic. If philosophy wants to remain loyal to its mission, if it wants to maintain its privilege, so to speak, of representing the logical conscience of culture, it must also inquire into the “conditions of possibility” of technical effective action and technical configuration, just as it inquires into the “conditions of possibility” of theoretical knowledge, language, and art. Here, too, philosophy will be able to ask the questions of being and validity only when it has clarified the question of meaning. This clarification, however, cannot succeed so long as one’s considerations are limited to the sphere of the works of technology in the

·43·

276

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

domain of the effected and created. The world of technology remains mute as long as we look at it and investigate it from this single point of view. It begins to open up and to divulge its secret only if we return from the forma formata to the forma formans, from that which has become to the very principle of becoming. Today, the urgency to return to this principle is felt much more by those who work in technological fields and are engaged in its productive labor than by those who work in systematic philosophy. In technology, the power of “materialistic” ways of thinking and questioning has been given up. The search for the purpose and legitimacy of technology requires posing this question ever more clearly and ever more consciously in reference to the “idea” [Idee] it embodies and the essential spiritual determination that is fulfilled in it. “The origin of technology,” as expressed in one of the newest works in the philosophy of technology, “lies in the idea [Idee].”2 Another author formulates the task as follows:

·44·

We will examine technology as the organic partial appearance of a larger phenomenon, the development of culture as such. We will attempt to understand it as the corporal expression, as the historical fulfillment of a basic idea [Idee] required for a system of cultural ideas [Ideen] where the tangible material of technological creations comes to be inwardly mastered, regardless of how varied the articulation of the idea [Idee] is in the battle of motives and tendencies among those engaged in these activities. It is essential to see the transpersonal, above the lower sphere of interests of mediating subjects, as an overall ideal commonality in the history that determines human actions—not as a kind of blind law, but as something they freely take up, in order to become historical reality.3 Whatever the answer, the question itself is transferred to the level where all genuine historical decisions belong. The question also leads the problem back to its initial historical origin and is linked to it in a remarkable and surprising way. Just as a modern thinker standing in the midst of the con2. Friedrich Dessauer, Philosophie der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Bonn: Cohen, 1927), 146. 3. Ederhard Zschimmer, Philosophie der Technik. Vom Sinn der Technik und Kritik des Unsinns über die Technik ( Jena: E. Diederichs, 1914), 28.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

277

crete existence and life of technology comes to see the crux of the problem, so too the discoverer of the “Idea” [Idee] and the “World of Ideas” conceived it more than 2,000 years ago. When Plato develops the relationship between “idea” [Idee] and “appearance” and seeks to justify it systematically, he seeks to ground it not in the figures of nature but in the works and formations [Gebilde] of IJȑȤȞȘ [techne]. The art of the “craftsman,” the “demiurge,” provides him with one of the great examples and models with which he exhibits the meaning and signification of the idea [Idee]. According to Plato, this art is no mere reproduction [Nachbildung] of something that is objectively present and existing [Vorhandenen und Daseinden]; rather, art is possible only on the basis of a prototype [Vorbildes] and archetype [Urbildes] to which the artist looks in his creative work. The artist who first invented the loom did not initially find it as something given in the sensible world; rather, he introduced it into the sensible world by looking toward the form and purpose, toward the eidos and telos of the tool itself. Today, the constructor [Bildner] of the loom still looks to that form. For instance, if a loom is broken and a new one must be constructed, the broken loom is not used as a model and pattern; rather, what gives direction to his labor is his gaze upon the original form as exhibited in the spirit of the first inventors. This general form, however, and not an individual thing existing in the sensible world, grounds and constitutes the true and proper “being” of the loom.4 Is it a coincidence, then, that this basic motive of Platonism is also increasingly asserting itself in contemporary reflections on the meaning and essence of technology? Dessauer, for example, remarks: From a higher sphere of power and reality, through the spirit and hands of the technician and worker, an immense stream of experience and power descends into earthly existence. A spiritual stream pours into the chaotic material world, and everyone, from the creator to the final worker, takes part: all are recipients. Similarly, Max Eyth writes: Technology is everything that gives the human will a corporeal form. Here, human willing coincides with the human spirit, which contains an unending number of externalizations and possibilities 4. Plato, Cratylus 389 A (for details, see my presentation of the history of Greek philosophy in Max Dessoir, Lehrbuch der Philosophie, vol. I, 92ff.).

·45·

278

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

of life. Thus, technology, despite being bound to the material world, also received something of the boundlessness of the pure life of the mind.5

·46·

Such remarks clearly illustrate that the modern mindfulness of the ground and essence of technology is no longer satisfied with viewing it merely as an “applied natural science” that is somehow harnessed and captured in the concepts and categories of the thinking of the natural sciences. What is sought, rather, is technology’s relation to cultural life in its totality and universality. This relation, however, is to be found and established only when we focus on the concept of form rather than on the concept of being of natural science, and when we reflect on its ground and origin, its content and meaning. For it is only by the concept of form that the expanse of spirit first becomes accessible and that its scope and its horizons are first determined for us.6 If, instead of beginning from the existence of technological works, we were to begin from the form of the effective action of technology and shift our gaze from the mere product to the mode and type of production—and to the lawfulness revealed in it— then technology would lose the narrow, limited, and fragmentary character that otherwise seems to adhere to it. Technology adapts itself—not directly in its end result, but with a view to its task and problematic—into a comprehensive sphere of inquiry within which its specific meaning and original spiritual tendency can be determined. In order to penetrate this sphere and truly grasp its core, another fundamental and purely methodological mindfulness is needed. The particular character of the question of meaning that confronts us here repeatedly threatens to become obscure; its borders repeatedly threaten to become blurred because of other motives that not only join it but also gradually and imperceptibly lead to its displacement. Such a displacement has already occurred if we believe that the question of meaning can be equated with the question of value, and that such a starting point can bring about a genuine solution to the question. In this identification of “mean5. Friedrich Dessauer, op cit., 150; Max Eyth, Lebendige Kräfte. Sieben Vorträge aus dem Gebiete der Technik, 4th ed. (Berlin: J. Springer, 1924), 1ff. 6. In the scope of this work, I can only state this thesis. For the development and the systematic justification of this claim, I refer the reader to my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 vols.) (Berlin, 1923–29).

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

279

ing” and “value,” a deferral of the problem has already taken place. Admittedly, this logical lacuna continues to be largely unnoticed because it not only belongs to the problem being investigated here but also extends to the whole expanse of the “philosophy of culture” and spans all of its tasks. So often in the history of thought, the “transcendental” question is posed about the “possibility” of culture, its conditions and principles, but rarely has this question been held on to and explored with great acuity, especially concerning its pure essence [Ansich]. It constantly slid away in two different directions: the question concerning cultural achievement has been subordinated to the question concerning its content. We could understand the measure of this achievement from the viewpoint of the most different spiritual dimensions, but no matter how high or how low we might estimate it, this would not rectify the mistake committed in the first statement of the problem. This state of affairs already emerges with the first real “critic” of modern culture, Rousseau. When Rousseau placed the whole of the intellectual and spiritual formation of his time before the real questions of conscience and destiny, the framing of his question was dictated by external sources, that is, the competition sponsored by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. The question was whether the rebirth of the arts and sciences had contributed to the ethical perfection of humanity (si le rétablissement des Sciences et des Arts a contribué à épurer les mœurs).7 According to Rousseau, who typified the basic orientation of Enlightenment ethics, this perfection was reached by fulfilling desire and enjoying a standard of “happiness” won through humankind’s transition from the state of “nature” to that of culture. “Happiness” and “perfection” are the two dimensions within which he sought the answer to his problem. They provide the standards by which his responses are to be adjudicated. It was not until German Idealism that a crucial turn was brought about; German Idealism was the first to pose the “question of essence” with great acuity and clarity, disengaging it from the accessory questions of happiness and moral “perfection.” Thus, for instance, in the Critique of Judgment, the realm of the beautiful could be philosophically grounded 7. [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours qui a remporté le prix a l’Académie de Dijon, en l’année 1750. Sur cette question proposée par la même Académie: Si le rétablissement des sciences et des arts a contribué à épurer les mœurs, in Collection complète des œuvres, vol. XIII (Zweibrücken, 1782), 27–62.]

·47·

280

·48·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

through the autonomy, the self-legislation, and the self-signification of the beautiful, which is discovered and guaranteed in opposition to the feelings of pleasure and displeasure as well as to the norms and rules of the ethical “ought.” If we turn to the realm of technology and to the ever-intensifying struggle that goes on within it in order to grasp its specific meaning and content, we discover that the struggle remains for the most part at a preliminary stage, a stage through which the other domains of spiritual culture have long since passed. We may bless technology or curse it, we may admire it as one of the greatest possessions of the age or lament its necessity and depravity—in judgments such as these, a measure that does not originate from it is applied to it. Consciously or unconsciously, purposes are ascribed to it that are foreign to the pure creative will [Gestaltungswillen] and pure creative power [Gestaltungskraft] of technology. And yet, an authentic judgment can come only from within technology itself, that is, only from insight into its own inherent, immanent law. The philosophy of technology, at least, is tied to this demand. Admittedly, philosophy confronts the contents of spiritual culture not only by observing and testing them but also by judging them. It does not want merely to know them but wants also to approve and reject, assess and evaluate, adjudicate and pass judgment upon. This philosophy can and must do. Its intellectual conscience, however, forbids it to make a judgment before it has penetrated into the essence of that which is being judged, grasping it on its own terms. This freedom of the philosophical gaze, however, is rarely found in modern apologias for technology or in the attacks and accusations directed against it. Again, we are tempted to employ the maxim that Spinoza formulated in his political philosophy for the accused as well as the plaintiff: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere [Do not laugh, do not lament, even do not hate; rather, understand].8 The determination of “being” and “being-a-certain-way,” the intuition of what technology is, must precede the judgment of its value. 8. See, for example, the disparate judgments over the meaning and worth of technology, which Zschimmer has summarized in his Philosophie der Technik, e.g., 45ff., 136ff. [Baruch de Spinoza, Tractatus politicus. In quo demonstratur, quomodo societas, ubi imperium monarchicum locum habet, sicut et ea, ubi optimi imperant, debet institui, ne in tyrannidem labatur, et ut pax, libertasque civium inviolata maneat, in Opera postuma (Hamburg, 1677), 268.]

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

281

Here arises a new dilemma: the “being” of technology permits itself to be grasped and exhibited in no way other than in its activity. It appears only in its function. It exists neither in its external appearance nor in what it externalizes; rather, it exists in the manner and direction of the externalization itself, in the impulse and process of configuration to which this externalization is subjected. Thus, being can become visible only in becoming, work can become visible only in energy—but this particular difficulty clears the way and indicates the direction for further consideration. For here, at this point, the affinity and internal relation between technology and the pure form and principle of other basic powers of culture [Geist], no matter how different they may be with respect to their content, become clear. What Humboldt has proven for language is also valid for these other powers: the genuine conceptual determination, the only true “definition” that can be given for these powers, is a genetic one. They cannot and must not be understood as “dead products,” but as a way and basic direction of production. It is from this intellectual tendency that we should inquire into the essence of technology. Goethe says that when a human being acts meaningfully, he always and simultaneously acts as a lawmaker. It belongs to the essential task of philosophy to penetrate into this human lawgiving, to measure and penetrate its unity and internal differences, its universality and particularity. Only through such a comprehensive endeavor can we secure a basis for a detailed judgment. What is hoped for is the determination of a norm above all merely subjective expressions of praise and reprimand, favor and displeasure, seizing instead the authentically objective “form” of the perceived object in its nature and necessity.

·49·

2 Max Eyth, one of the most enthusiastic and eloquent pioneers of the spiritual sovereignty of technology, begins his lecture “Poetry and Technology” from the known relationship between the function of technology and the function of language. Two things essentially distinguish animals from human beings, understood from the perspective of their external appearance: the word and the tool. The ability to create words and tools has . . .

·50·

282

·51·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

made the human being out of the animal. How these abilities have come into the world will undoubtedly remain an eternal puzzle that no theory of evolution will be capable of solving, because they originate in a spiritual wellspring from which no animal has ever drunk. Both abilities were imperative for the survival of the human being in a hostile world in which he, physically more helpless, weaker, and less resistant than most animals, would undoubtedly have quickly perished. What saved him . . . in the sphere of knowledge [Wissen] was language; in the sphere of ability, the tool. The power that turned the mere defenseless human being into the sovereign over every living thing on earth rests on knowledge [Wissen] and ability, on the word and the tool. . . . In prehistoric times, far from the beginnings of culture, the tool undoubtedly played the primary role in the configuration of human existence. . . . Later, a decisive alteration in the relationship between word and tool emerged. Language, just because it can speak, knew how to create for itself a superior, one might say improper meaning. In the sensibility of human beings, the mute tool was increasingly relegated to the background. Knowledge [Wissen] was master and ability served. This relationship continued to intensify and has continued to be accepted until now. Today we stand amid a fierce struggle that is endeavoring, if not to alter, then to return the relationship of the two to its proper foundation. In its growing domination, language exalted its improper claim to be the only tool of the spirit. In general, language believes this still today. Concerning the tool of the spirit, language forgets the spirit of the tool. Both word and tool are a product of the same originary spiritual force that has made the animal homo into the human being, homo sapiens, as it is called by the scholars who, of course, allude only to the human being’s knowledge [Wissen] and forget the skill that has rendered all his knowledge [Wissen] possible.9 I have singled out these sentences by a technician and a thinker of technology because a real philosophical problem is hidden in the parallel 9. Max Eyth, “Poesie und Technik” (op. cit., 12ff.); see the lecture “Zur Philosophie des Erfindens” (op. cit., 230ff.).

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

283

asserted here between language and tools. It is not merely wit, or an external analogy, that brings together language and tools and attempts to understand them by one spiritual principle. The idea of such an essential relation was not foreign to the first “philosophers of language” within European thought. They did not primarily preconceive the word and language as the mere means of presentation, as the means for the description of external reality. Rather, they saw in language a means for the mastery of reality. For them, language became a weapon and a tool that human beings employed in order to compete in the struggle with nature and with their peers in social and political conflict.10 “Logos” itself, as the expression of the particular intellectuality of the human being, appears here to have a “theoretical” as well as an “instrumental” signification. Yet, implicitly contained in this is the counter-thesis that the power of logos also rests in every simple material tool, in every application of a material thing that serves human will. Thus, the determination of essence, the definition of the human being, develops in this twofold direction. The human being is a “rational” being [Wesen] in the sense that “reason” comes from language and is insolubly bound to it; ratio and oratio, thinking and speaking, become interchangeable concepts.11 However, at the same time, and no less originally, man appears as a technical, a tool-forming being [Wesen]—“a tool-making animal,”12 to employ Benjamin Franklin’s words. The power with which man asserts himself against external reality, and by virtue of which he first gains a mental “image” of this reality, is determined by these two sides of his essence. All spiritual handling of reality is bound to this double act of “grasping” [Fassen], of “conceiving” [Begreifen] reality in linguistic-theoretical thought and “comprehending” [Erfassen] through the medium of effective action the intellectual and technological giving of form. In both cases, it is essential to guard against a misunderstanding in 10. For details about this “analogical character of logos” in the theory of language of the Sophists, see the explanation of Ernst Hoffmann, Die Sprache und die archäische Logik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1925), 28ff. 11. [The original text reads: “ratio and oratio, speaking and thinking.” However, as thinking corresponds to ratio and speaking to oratio, we have inverted the terms.] 12. [Verified by James Boswell (conversation on April 7, 1778), in Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. II (London: Macmillan, 1900), 425.]

·52·

284

·53·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

order to penetrate into the actual meaning of this giving of form. The “form” of the world, whether in thinking or doing, whether in speech or in effective action, is not simply received and accepted by the human being; rather, it must be “formed” by him. In this respect, thinking and doing are originally united; they both stem from this common root of forming figures, gradually unfolding and branching off from it. Wilhelm von Humboldt13 has shown this basic relationship in language. He demonstrates how the act of speaking is never a mere receiving of the object, a reception of the existing form of the object in the I. Rather, it contains in itself a real act of world-creation, the raising up of the world to form. The idea that different languages only denote the same mass, independent of the objects and concepts available to them, is, for Humboldt, truly pernicious for the study of language. This view masks that which constitutes language’s genuine meaning and value. It conceals language’s creative role in the laying out, production, and securing of the intuitive worldview. The difference among languages is not a difference between sounds and signs, rather it is “a difference of worldviews.”14 Correctly understood, what is said here about the use of language also holds for each use of the material tool, however elementary and “primitive.” Here, too, that which is crucial is never found in the material goods that are gained through it, in the quantitative expansion of the sphere of influence through which, little by little, one part of external reality after another is submitted to the will of the human being. The will that initially seemed limited by its proximity to the lived human body, to the movement of its own limbs, gradually explodes and breaks through all spatial and temporal barriers. In the end, this overcoming would be fruitless if spirit only contained and dragged along with it new world-matter. Here, a more genuine and greater profit lies in the gaining of “form,” in the fact that the expansion of effective action changes along with its qualitative meaning, creating the possibility of a new aspect of the world. Effective action, in its continuous increase, in its expansion and intensification, 13. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke (Akademie-Ausgabe), vol. VII, part I, 119; for more details see my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, Language (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1923). 14. [Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung, in Werke, vol. IV, 27.]

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

285

would finally have to be recognized as powerless, as internally aimless and weak, if an inner transformation, an ideal turn in its meaning, were not simultaneously being prepared and constantly carried out. What philosophy is able to achieve for technology, for its understanding and legitimacy in thought, is the demonstration of this turn in meaning. To do this, however, philosophy must reach deep into the past. It must seek to penetrate back to when the secret of the “form” first opened itself to the human being, when it began to rise up in thought and accomplishment— in order, admittedly, to cloak itself just as much as to reveal itself—so as to exhibit itself only as in a puzzling mist, in the “twilight of the idols” of the magical-mythical worldview. If we compare the worldviews of various civilized peoples to those of primitive peoples, the deep opposition between them reveals itself perhaps no more sharply than in the direction the human will adopts in order to become master over nature and gradually to take possession of it. A type of a technological will and accomplishment confronts the type of magical will and accomplishment. Attempts have been made to derive this originary-opposition from the totality [Gesamtheit] of differences that exists between the worlds of civilized peoples and those of primitive peoples. Humans from an earlier stage are distinguished from those of a later stage, just as magic is distinguished from technology. The former may be designated as homo divinans and the latter as homo faber. The whole development of humanity presents itself, then, as a completed process, containing innumerable intermediary forms through which the human being moves from the initial stage of homo divinans to the stage of homo faber. If we accept this distinction, as Danzel has forcefully maintained in his Culture and Religion of Primitive Man,15 then we have not reached a solution to the problem; rather, we have only acquired a perspective, a formulation of the problem. For it would only be an assertion and extrapolation if ethnology, from which this distinction originates, attempted to explain it by attributing to the comportment of “magical” man a predominance of “subjective” determinations and motives more than purely “objective” ones. The worldview of homo divinans is supposed to come about through the projection of his own states onto reality; he sees in the 15. Theodor-Wilhelm Danzel, Kultur und Religion des primitiven Menschen (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1924), 2ff., 45ff., 54ff.

·54·

286

·55·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

external world what is going on within himself. Inner processes that take place entirely within the psyche are transferred to the outside. Drives and stirrings of volition are interpreted as forces that intervene directly into events, steering and altering them. However, from a purely logical perspective, this explanation is marred by a petitio principii—it confuses that which is to be explained with the ground of explanation. When we reproach primitive peoples for “confusing” the objective and subjective, for letting the borders of both areas flow into one another, we are speaking from the standpoint of our theoretical observation of the world founded on the principle of “reasons,” on the category of causality as the condition of experience and the objects of experience. For these borders are not “in themselves” objectively before us; rather, they must first be set down and secured, they must first be erected by the labor of spirit. The manner of setting these borders takes place differently according to the overall attitude in which spirit exists and according to the direction in which it moves. Each transition from one comportment and direction into another always ends in a new “orientation,” a new relationship between the “I” and “reality.” This relation is not set down as unique and unambiguous from the beginning; rather, it first comes to be because of the manifold ideal processes of “setting into opposition” [Auseinandersetzung] as in myth and religion, language and art, science and the different basic forms of “theoretical” comportment in general. For human beings, a fixed representation of subject and object according to which they comport themselves does not exist from the beginning; rather, in the entirety of these comportments, in the entirety of his lived bodily and his psycho-spiritual activities, there first arises knowledge [Wissen] of both subject and object; the horizon of the I first separates itself from that of reality.16 There is no fixed, static relationship between them from the outset, rather there is, as it were, a fluctuating back-andforth movement. From this movement, a form gradually crystallizes in which the human being first grasps his own being as well as the being of objects. If we apply this general insight to the problem presented here, we see 16. For a more detailed argument see the Introduction to my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, 134ff.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

287

that, for the human being, in his magical as well as in his technological comportment, the world does not already have a determined form; rather, he must search for this form and must find it in various ways. The way in which he finds it depends on the dynamic principle that the general movement of spirit follows. If we assume that the principle of “causality” [Kausalität] and the question concerning the “reasons” of being and the “causes” [Ursachen] of events already prevail in the magical apprehension of nature, then the barrier between magic and science falls away. In his work The Magic Art, J. G. Frazer, one of the best specialists on magical phenomena, expressly draws this conclusion in his attempt to lay out completely the factual sphere of the magical arts; at the same time, he links a certain theory about the meaning and origin of magic to his description of this factual sphere. On Frazer’s account, magic amounts to nothing more and nothing less than the beginnings of “experimental physics.” In magic, the human first acquires an intuition of objective being and events, which are ordered according to fixed rules. The course of things now presents itself to him as a closed nexus, a chain of “causes” and “effects” in which no supernatural power [Macht] can arbitrarily intervene. According to Frazer, it is here that the world of magic is clearly separated from the religious world. In religious intuition, the human is subjected to foreign violent powers to which he entrusts the whole of his being. Here, there is still no fixed natural course, for as yet the world does not have its own figure and its own power; rather, it is a plaything in the hands of superior transcendent forces. It is, however, just this basic view against which the magical view of the world protests. It grasps nature as a strictly determined sequence of events and seeks to penetrate into the essence of this determination. It knows no coincidence; rather, it rises to the intuition of a strict uniformity of events. And, in this way, it achieves, in contrast to religion, the first stage of scientific knowledge of the world. Admittedly, magic differs from science in its result, but not in its principle and its problem. This is the case because the principle “like causes, like effects” governs it as well, giving it its imprint. That it is not able to employ this principle in the same sense as the theoretical science of nature is due, according to Frazer, not to a logical reason but only to a factual one. It is “primitive” not in its form of thought but in the measure and the security of its knowledge content. The circle of observation is too

·56·

288

·57·

·58·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

narrow, the nature of observation too fluctuating and uncertain, for it to be able to erect truly durable empirical laws. The consciousness of lawfulness as such, however, has been awakened in it and is tightly and steadfastly held on to by it. Thus, in the end, Frazer sees in both fundamental forms of magic nothing other than the application and variation of the “scientific” principle of causality, which he understands and expounds here in accordance with the views of English empiricism: “sympathetic” magic and “homoeopathic” or “imitative” magic are both founded on the fundamental laws of ideal association that rule over all causal thinking. In the case of the former, it results in the law of “association by similarity,” and in the case of the latter, it results in the law of “association by contact” and becomes the guiding principle of theoretical and practical comportment.17 The flaw in Frazer’s theory upon which a large number of ethnologists have remarked, can be stated as follows: it awards magical comportment a signification that vindicates it as an achievement that is reserved for technological comportment. Magic may differ from religion insofar as the human being is able to escape the merely passive relationship to nature —that is, he no longer receives the world as the mere gift of a superior divine power but wants to take possession of it and stamp it with a determined form. The manner of this appropriation, however, is entirely different from the appropriation carried out by the effective action of technology and in the thinking of the natural sciences. The magical human being, the homo divinans, believes, in a certain sense, in the omnipotence of the I. This omnipotence expresses itself, however, only in the force of a desire. In its highest intensification and potency, reality is not able in the end to elude desire. It is connected and subjected to it. The outcome is linked to a particular activity [Tun] in the following way: the goal of the activity [Tun] is precisely anticipated in the representation, and the image of this goal is worked on and held to with great intensity. All “real” actions, if they are to be successful, need such magical preparation and anticipation. Warring or raiding, fishing or hunting can succeed only if every individual phase is magically anticipated and at the 17. See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, Part I: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (London: Macmillan, 1911), vol. I, chapters 3 and 4.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

289

way.18

same time “rehearsed” in the right Already in the magical view of the world, the human being tears himself away from the immediate presence of things and builds his own empire, with which he reaches out into the future. However, if, in a certain sense, he is freed from the power of immediate sensation, he has only exchanged it for the immediacy of desire. In this immediacy, he believes he is able to seize reality directly and to conquer it. The totality [Gesamtheit] of magical practices is, so to speak, only the interpretative laying out [Auseinanderlegung], the progressive unfolding of the desired image that the spirit carries within itself to the goal. The simple, ever more intense repetition of this goal is already regarded as the way that must inevitably lead to it. Herein originate the two originary-forms of magic: word-magic and image-magic. Word and image, then, are the two ways in which the human being embraces a nonpresent thing as present, by which he, as it were, places [hinstellen] something desired and longed for before [vor] himself, in order, in this very act of “representing” [Vorstellen], to enjoy and make it his own. That which is spatially remote and temporally distant is “called forth” in speech or is “imagined” [eingebildet] and “prefigured” [vorgebildet]. Already here, the regnum hominis [reign of man] is sought after, but it immediately escapes the human being and dissolves into a mere idol. Undoubtedly, magic is not simply a mode of the apprehension of the world, rather within it is found the real seeds of the configuration of the world. The medium in which it moves, however, does not let these seeds develop. For experienceable reality is still not seen in its orders and rules; rather, it is enveloped more densely in a simple, wishful dream that conceals its own form. Moreover, this accomplishment of “subjectivity” is not to be assessed in an exclusively negative fashion, for it is already a first and, in a certain sense, crucial step when the human being does not simply abandon and submit himself to the impressions of things, to their mere “givenness,” but instead changes them, generating a world out of himself. When he is no longer satisfied by mere existence but demands being-acertain-way and being-otherwise. However, this first active direction in 18. Rich ethnological material for this fundamental view can be found in Lévy-Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvölker [La Mentalité primitive] (German translation, Vienna, 1921).

·59·

290

·60·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

which the world of being faces the world of doing still lacks the means of actuation. Because the will jumps directly toward its goal in the magical identification of “I” and “world,” no true “setting into opposition” [Auseinandersetzung] between them occurs. For every such confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] calls for proximity as well as distance, empowerment as well as relinquishment, the force of grasping but also the force of distantiation. It is precisely this double process that is revealed in technological comportment, which specifically differentiates it from magical comportment. Here, the power of the will replaces the power of mere desire. This will reveal itself not only in the force of the forward-driving impulse but also in the way in which this impulse is led and mastered. It reveals itself not only in the ability to seize its goal but also in the particular ability to distance itself from the goal and to leave it at this distance, “letting it stand” there. It is only this letting-stand of the goal that makes an “objective” intuition possible, an intuition of the world as a world of “objects.” For the will, the object is just as much the guiding principle and thread that first gives it its determination and its solidity as it is the limit of the will, its counterpart and its resistance. The strength of the will first grows and becomes stronger on the strength of this limit. The will can never succeed in its implementation simply by making itself stronger; rather, success demands that the will intervene in an originally foreign order and that it know and recognize this order as such. This knowing is at the same time a mode of recognition. Nature is not, as in magic, merely repressed by desiring and believing; rather, its own independent being is acknowledged. And the true victory of thought is only achieved in this self-modesty. Natura non vincitur nisi parendo:19 victory over nature is only achieved through obedience to it. By means of this obedience, which lets the forces of nature prevail and no longer seeks to captivate and subjugate it magically, a new figure—in a purely “theoretical” sense—of the world emerges. Human beings no longer attempt to make reality amenable to their desires with various methods of magic and enchantment, rather they take it as an independent and characteristic “structure.” In this way, nature has ceased to be an amorphous material that yields to 19. [Francis Bacon, Novum organum, in Works, ed. Robert Leslie Ellis, James Spedding, and Douglas Denon Heath, vol. I (London, 1858), 157.]

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

291

every metamorphosis and, in the end, allows itself to be forced into any figure through the power of magical words and images. In place of magical compulsion emerges the “discovery” of nature, which is contained in all technological comportment, no matter how simple and primitive the application of the tool may be. This discovery is a disclosure; it is the grasping and the making one’s own of an essential and necessary interconnection that previously lay hidden. Thus, only here are the fullness and the limitless changes of the figures of the magical-mythical world traced back to a fixed norm, a determined measure. And yet, reality does not become a rigid existence [Sein] through a reduction to its inner relationship of measure; rather, its inner mobility has been preserved. It has lost nothing of its “plasticity.” However, this plasticity, this “formability,” is now set as if in a fixed intellectual framework that is limited by certain rules of the “possible.” This objective possibility now appears as the border where the omnipotence of desire and affective fantasy are placed. In place of merely libidinous desire, there first emerges a genuine, conscious relationship of the will—a relationship in which ruling and serving, demanding and obeying, victory and submission are united. In such a mutual determination, a new meaning of the “I” and a new meaning of the world are grasped. The arbitrariness, self-will, and obstinacy of the I withdraw, and, insofar as this happens, the proper meaning of existence and events, reality as cosmos—as order and form—stands out. To make this clear, we need not look at the complete unfolding and present configuration of technology; rather, a fundamental comportment presents itself in the most ordinary and inconspicuous phenomena, in the first and simplest beginnings of tool use, more clearly than in almost all the marvels of modern technology. Already, here, we penetrate, from a purely philosophical perspective, to the core and heart of the problem. Although the distance between the most cumbersome and imperfect tools and the results and achievements of technological execution appears vast, at least with respect to their content, if we focus on the principle of action, we find that the gap is much smaller than the gulf that separates the first invention and application of the crudest tool from mere animal behavior. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the transition to the first tool not only contains the seeds of a new mastery of the world but also marks a turning point in knowledge. The mode of action established here grounds and steadies, for the first time, a type of mediacy that belongs

·61·

292

·62·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

to the essence of thought. All thought in its pure logical form is mediated. It is directed to the discovery and extraction of a mediating structure that joins the opening sentence and the ending sentence of a communicative chain. The tool fulfills the same function, presented here in the logical sphere, in the objective sphere. It is grasped, as it were, in objective intuition; it is not merely the terminus medius of thinking. It sets itself between the first position taken by the will and its goal. Only in this inbetween position is it permitted to separate them and set them at a proper distance. So long as the human being makes use only of his limbs, his bodily “organs,” in order to achieve his goals, such distancing is not yet reached. Admittedly, he effectively acts on his environment—however, there is a great distance between this effective activity and the knowledge [Wissen] of this effective activity. Whereas all human doing is absorbed in apprehending the world, human beings cannot yet comprehend [ergreifen] it, because they do not yet conceive [begreifen] of it as an objective figure, as a world of objects. The elementary taking-possession-of, immediate physical grasping [Fassen], is not a constructive “comprehending” [Erfassen]. It does not lead to a construction in the region of pure looking or in the region of thinking. In the tool and its use, however, the goal sought after is, for the first time, moved off into the distance. Instead of looking spellbound at this goal, the human being learns to “fore-see” it. It is initially this “fore-seeing” that becomes both a means and a condition of attaining the goal. This form of seeing is all that distinguishes human “intentional” doing from animal instinct. This “fore-seeing” [Ab-Sicht] establishes “fore-sight” [Voraus-Sicht]; it establishes the possibility of directing attention to a goal, toward something spatially absent and temporally remote, rather than acting on an immediately given sensuous stimulus. It is not so much because animals are inferior to the human in bodily skill, but because this line of sight is denied to animals, that there is no genuine tool use in animal existence.20 And it is also from this line of sight that there first arises the thought of causal connection in the strict and genuine sense of the word. If one takes the concept of causality so casually and loosely that it can be present wherever spatial and temporal coextension occurs through mere “association,” then the origin of this concept must be considered to be much earlier. There is no doubt that 20. For details, see Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. III, 226ff.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

293

association is present in the mythical world and that the pure magical effective action is filled by the pervaded “association.” Frazer follows this view of causality when he subordinates the world of magic to the principle of causality, when he sees in magic the true beginning of “experimental physics.”21 However, another picture—and judgment—of the spiritual interconnections and spiritual differences between the basic forms of the apprehension of the world emerges if we take the concept of causality in the sharper and stricter sense Kant gave to it in his criticism of Hume’s theory of causality. The main focus of this critique lies in the proof that it is in no way the merely habitual combination but the thought of a “necessary connection” that determines the nucleus of the concept of causality as a category of “pure understanding.” And the correctness of this concept is to be proven by showing that, without it, the relation of our representations to an object would not be possible. The concept of causality belongs to the originary forms of synthesis through which alone it is possible to give representation an object. It is, as the condition of possibility of experience, the condition of possibility of the objects of experience. The mythical-magical world knows nothing about a sense of causality that both constructs and renders possible the sphere of objects, making them accessible to thought. For the mythical-magical world, the whole of nature dissolves into a play of forces, into actions and reactions. These forces, however, are essentially of the sort that the human being lives with and experiences in his immediate drives. They are personal, dæmonic-divine powers which direct and determine events, and whose participation human beings must secure in order to influence these events. With the creation of the tool and by means of its regular use, the limits of this type of representation were first breached. 21. “Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus, its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects. Thus, the analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of them, the succession of events is perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance and of accident are banished from the course of nature” ( James Frazer, The Magic Art, I, 220ff.).

·63·

294 ·64·

·65·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

Here we encounter the “twilight of the gods” of the magical-mythical world. Only here does the thought of causality emerge from the limitations of “inner experience,” from being bound to the subjective feelings of the will. The tool becomes a bond that joins pure objective determinations together and sets down a fixed rule for their mutual dependence. The tool no longer belongs immediately, like the lived body and its limbs, to the human being: it signifies something detached from its immediate existence, something that has itself consistence, a consistent existence that can far outlast the life of the individual human being. This determined “tangibility” and “actuality” does not, however, now stand alone; rather, it is truly actual only in the effect it exerts on other beings. This effect is not simply joined to the tool externally; rather, it belongs to its determined essence. The intuition of a certain tool—for instance, the intuition of an axe or a hammer—never exhausts itself in the intuition of a thing with particular characteristics, of materials with certain qualities. Here, its use—its authentic function—becomes apparent in its very stuff. The form of its activity comes to be in “matter.” They are not separated from one another but are apprehended and comprehended as an insoluble unity. The object is determined as [als] something only insofar as it is for [zu] something. This is because in the world of tools there are no mere things with properties; rather, there are only, to use a mathematical expression, ensembles of “vector-magnitudes.” Although every being is determined here in-itself, it is, at the same time, the expression of a certain performance [Verrichtung]; and in the intuition of this performance, a fundamentally new direction of seeing [Blickrichtung] opens up for the human being: the apprehension of “objective causality.” Of course, when we consider the achievement facilitated here, we should bear in mind that the gap between the two different aspects of the world confronting one another cannot be leaped over all at once. The distance between the two poles continues to exist and can be traversed only step by step. Long after the human spirit has produced, in both language and tools, the most important means of its liberation, these means still appear enveloped in the magical-mythical atmosphere that it is supposed to overcome in its final and highest development.22 The 22. Ludwig Noiré in his book Das Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Mainz: I. Diemer, 1880) has emphasized that the

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

295

world of language, like that of tools, is in no way immediately conceived as the creation of the human spirit but is conceived as the efficacy of foreign and superior forces. The dæmonic character that belongs to the mythical view as such also includes these two worlds and at first threatens to draw them completely under its spell. The whole of the word and the whole of the tool appear as a kind of pandemonium. Originally, language is not the means of a matter-of-fact presentation, a medium of mere communication that serves to bring about reciprocal understanding in the logical sense of the word. The more we attempt to return to the “origins” of language, the more its purely “thing-like character” is lost. Herder says that the oldest dictionary and grammar of humanity were nothing more than a “pantheon of tones,” a realm consisting less of things and their names than of animate, acting beings. The same held for the first and most primitive tools. They, too, are regarded as “given from above,” as gifts from a God or savior. They are worshipped as divine. The Ewe tribe in southern Togo still regard the blacksmith’s hammer as a mighty deity, to which they pray and offer sacrifice. The traces of this sentiment and intuition can be seen in the great cultural religions.23 This awe, however, subsides. The mythical darkness that surrounds the tool gradually begins to clear to the degree that it is not only used but also, through this very use, continually transformed. So the human becomes increasingly conscious of being a free sovereign in the realm of tools. Through the power of the tool, the tool user comes, at the same particular signification of the work tool, in its purely spiritual sense, lies in the fact that it represents a basic means in the process of “objectivation” out of which alone the world of “language” and the world of “reason” emerge. “The great importance of the work tool,” so he emphasizes, “lies mainly in two things: first in the solution or selection of causal relations by which the latter receives in human consciousness an ever growing clarity and, secondly, in the objectivation or the projection of his organs which had up to now taken place only in the darkness of the consciousness of an instinctual function.” This thesis remains valid, even if the justification given by Noiré—a justification that is founded mainly on linguistic-historical facts and on a certain theory about the origin of the language—does not follow. 23. For details, see my work “Sprache und Mythos. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternnamen,” Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 6 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1925), 48ff. and 68f. [“Language and Myth: A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of the Gods,” pp. 180ff. and 191ff. in this volume.]

·66·

296

·67·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

time, to a new intuition of himself, now as the administrator and producer of the tool. “The human being experiences and enjoys nothing,” says Goethe, “without at the same time being productive. This is the innermost quality of human nature. We can even say without exaggeration that it is human nature itself.”24 This fundamental force of the human being reveals itself perhaps nowhere as clearly as in the sphere of the tool. The human works with it only insofar as he, in some way, even if initially with only modest results, works on it. It is not merely his means for reconfiguring the world of objects—rather, in this process of the metamorphosis of the objective, the tool experiences in itself a transformation and moves from place to place. And in this change, the human now experiences a progressive intensification, a particular strengthening, of his self-consciousness. A new world-attitude and a new world-mood now announce themselves over and against the mythical-religious view of the world. The human being now stands at that great turning point in his destiny and self-knowledge that Greek myth embodied in the figure of Prometheus. Titanic pride and consciousness of freedom confront fear and reverence for dæmons and gods. The divine fire is wrested from the seat of the immortals and placed in the sphere of the human being, in his home and hearth. The world of desire and dreams in which magic had enveloped the human being is destroyed. Man sees himself led into a new reality that receives him with a seriousness, severity, and necessity that obliterate all of his desires. However, if he cannot escape this necessity, and he is no longer able to control the world according to his desires, he now learns to master it increasingly with his will. He no longer attempts to control its course; he falls into line with the iron law of nature. This law does not, however, enclose him like the walls of a prison; rather, by means of this law, he tests and wins a new freedom. For reality shows itself, regardless of its strict and irrevocable lawfulness, not as an essentially rigid existence, but rather as a modifiable, malleable material. Its figure is not finished and complete. Rather, it offers human will and activity [Tun] enormous latitude. And it is by moving about in this latitude, in the whole of that which is achieved through his labor, and through which his labor first becomes possible, that the human progressively builds 24. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Werke, vol. XLVII (Weimar, 1887–1919), 323.]

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

297

up his world, his horizon of “objects” [Objekte], and his intuition of his own essence. He now sees himself expelled from that magical realm of immediate wish-fulfillment that magic had enticingly placed before him. He is expelled onto a limitless path of creative work that promises him no essential goal, no more final stop or resting point. In lieu of all this, however, a new determination of value and meaning is now established for his consciousness: the genuine “meaning” of doing is no longer measured by what it brings about and finally achieves; rather, it is the pure form of doing, the type and direction of the constitutive force as such, that determines this meaning. 3 The indispensable participation of technological creation in the conquest, securing, and consolidation of the world of “objective” intuition has become clearer through the preceding considerations. It has also become increasingly clear that a certain misgiving not only threatens to problematize the value of technological achievements but also to turn them directly into their opposite. Is not what was regarded here as the authentic achievement of technology nothing other than the basic evil from which it suffers? Does not this exploitation of the world of objects [Objekte] at the same time necessarily result in the estrangement of human beings from their own essence, from what they originally are and feel? With the first step into the world of facts that technological labor secures and constructs for him, the human being also appears to be subjected to the law, to the brute force of factual matters. And is this brutality not the strongest enemy of the inner life enclosed in his I, in the being of his soul? All technology is a creation of spirit; spirit can only ground its own mastery in this way because it conquers all the forces that find themselves enclosed within it, despotically holding them down. To become master, it must not only restrict the free realm of the soul but also deny and destroy it. No compromise is possible in this conflict. Spirit, whose goal and power emerge in technology, is the irreconcilable opponent of the soul. And as it progressively estranges the human being from his own center of life, the same thing occurs concerning the human relationship to the whole of nature, insofar as this is not taken in one of the senses already distorted by technology, insofar as it is not thought of as a mere

·68·

298

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

mechanism obeying general laws, but is felt in its organic peculiarity and fullness of life. The more the power of technology grew within the spheres of modern culture, the more passionately and inexorably did philosophy levy this complaint and accusation against it. As Ludwig Klages, the most eloquent and radical proponent of this fundamental idea, writes:

·69·

Whereas all living creatures except for human beings beat with the rhythm of cosmic life, the human being has severed the law of spirit from this. What appears to him, the bearer of I-consciousness, in light of the superiority of anticipatory thinking over the world, appears to metaphysicians, when they penetrate deeply enough, in light of the enslavement of life under the servitude of concepts. [The human being] has himself fallen out with the planets that bore and nurtured him, even with the cycle of change of all heavenly bodies, because he is possessed by this vampiric and souldestroying power.25 We miss the actual meaning of these accusations, if we believe ourselves able to moderate or overcome them by simply remaining here with the observation of appearances, with the bare effects. Here, it does not suffice to compare the pernicious effects of the rational-technical spirit, which are perfectly clear, with other pleasant and beneficial consequences, drawing an acceptable or favorable balance out of this comparison by a “hedonistic calculus.” For the question is directed not to the consequences but to the ground, not to the events but to the functions. It is from such functional considerations and analysis that the critique of a determined cultural content and cultural domain must begin. At the center of this critique must always stand the question about the human being himself, about his signification and “determination.” In this sense, Schiller, standing at the apex of a determined epoch of aesthetic-humanist culture, poses the question about the signification and value of the “aesthetic.” And he answers this question by saying that art is no mere human possession, just as little as it exhibits a mere achievement or feat of the human being; rather, it must be understood as a neces25. Ludwig Klages, Vom kosmogonischen Eros (Munich: G. Müller, 1922), 45; see Mensch und Erde (Munich: G. Müller, 1920), 40ff.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

299

sary path toward becoming human and as a particular phase along this path. It is not the human being who, as mere natural being [Wesen], as a physical-organic being [Wesen], becomes the creator of art; rather, it is art that proves to be the creator of humanity, that first constitutes and makes possible the specific “mode” of being of the human. The ludic drive upon which Schiller grounds the region of beauty does not simply enter alongside the mere natural drives such that it would be a broadening of their scope; rather, this drive transforms their specific content, first opening up and conquering the proper sphere of “humanity.” “The human only plays where he exists in the genuine meaning of the word ‘human,’ and he is completely human only when he plays.”26 This totality of humanity appears to have been realized in the same sense and to the same measure in no other function as in art. We could easily trace how in German intellectual history this purely aesthetically composed and grounded “humanism” gradually grew, and how another spiritual power locates itself, independently and equally, next to art. For Herder and Humboldt, it is language that shares with art the role of creator and seems to be the basic motive for the real “anthropogeny.” The domain of effective activity of technology seems, however, to be denied any such acknowledgment. For this effective activity appears to be completely subjected by the mastery of those drives that Schiller characterizes as the sentient impulse or as the “material drive.” The urge toward the outside, that typically “centrifugal” impulse, manifests itself in it. It brings one piece of the world after another under the dominion of the human will; however, this spread, this expansion of the periphery of being, thereby leads further and further away from the center of the “person” and personal existence. Thus it seems that every advance in width must be bought at the cost of a loss in depth. Can it in any way be said of such a function, even if we turn to the most indirect sense of the word that Schiller has stamped on art, that it is not only a creation of the human being, it is also his “second creator”? Certainly, a general consideration arises against the view that wants to see technology as an endeavor directed only toward an outside. Here, 26. [Friedrich Schiller, Über die äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1793/94), in Philosophische Schriften, vol. II (Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Spemann, 1905), 59.]

·70·

300

·71·

·72·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

Goethe’s claim that nature has neither core nor shell rightly applies to the totality [Gesamtheit] of spiritual activities and energies. Here, there is no separation, no absolute barrier between the “outer” and “inner.” Each new figure of the world opened up by these energies is likewise always a new opening out of inner being; it does not obscure this being but makes it visible from a new perspective. We always have before us a manifestation from the inner to the outer and from the outer to the inner—and in this double movement, in this particular oscillation, the contours of the inner and the outer world and their two-sided borders are determined. This is also true for the effective activity of technology, because it is in no way directed toward the seizing of a mere “outside”; rather, it encloses in itself a particular turn inward and backward. Here, too, it is not about breaking free of one pole from another but about both being determined through each other in a new sense. If we move from this determination, then it would appear at first that knowledge [Wissen] of the I is tied in a very particular sense to the form of technical doing. The border that separates purely organic effective activity from this technological doing is likewise a sharp and clear line of demarcation within the development of I-consciousness and authentic “self-knowledge.” From the purely physical side, this exhibits itself in the fact that a determined and clear consciousness of his own lived body, both a consciousness of his corporeal figure and his corporeal functions, first grows in the human being after he turns both of these toward the outside and, so to speak, regains both from the reflection of the external world. In his Philosophy of Technology, Ernst Kapp sought to think through the idea that the human being is granted knowledge of his organs only by a detour through organ-projection. By organ-projection, he understands the fact that an individual limb of the human body does not simply work outward but creates in the external existence, so to speak, an image of itself. Every primitive work tool is just such an image of the lived body; it is a contrary playing-out and reflection of the form and relationships of the lived body in a determined material formation [Gebilde] of the external world. Likewise, every hand tool appears in this sense as a further positing and re-formation, as an exteriorization, of the hand itself. In all of its conceivable positions and movements, the hand has provided the organic originary form after which the human being has unconsciously formed his first necessary pieces of equipment. Hammers and axes, chisels and drills, scissors and

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

301

tongs are projections of the hand. “In their organization, the parts of the hand, the palm, thumb and fingers, the open, hollow, finger-spreading, turning, grasping and clenched hand are, either alone or simultaneously with the stretched or bent forearm, the common mother of the hand tool named after it.” From this Kapp draws the conclusion that the human being was only able to gain insight into the composition of his body, into his physiological structure, through the artificial counterimage, through the world of artifacts he himself created. Only insofar as he learned to produce certain physical-technical apparatuses did he truly come to know, in and through them, the structure of his organs. The eye, for example, was the model for all optical apparatuses. The properties and function of the eye, however, have only been understood through these apparatuses: Only as the sight organ had projected itself into a number of mechanical tasks, thus preparing their relation back to its anatomical structure, could this physiological puzzle be solved. From the instrument unconsciously formed according to the organic tool of seeing, the human being has, in a conscious manner, transferred the name to the actual focus of the reflection of light in the eye— the crystal lens.27 We cannot closely follow the metaphysical content of this thesis or the metaphysical foundation that Kapp has given for it. Insofar as this foundation is based upon essentially speculative assumptions, including Schopenhauer’s theory of the will and Eduard von Hardmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” it is justly disputed and sharply criticized.28 This criticism, however, does not destroy Kapp’s essential perspective and insight that technological effective action, when directed outward, always exhibits a self-revelation and, through this, a means of self-knowledge of the human being.29 Admittedly, if we assume this view, a radical consequence cannot be avoided, namely, that with this first enjoyment of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, the human being has cast himself 27. Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig: G. Westermann, 1877), 41ff., 76ff., 122ff. 28. See, for example, Max Eyth, Zur Philosophie des Erfindens (see 234ff.); Eberhard Zschimmer, Philosophie der Technik, 106ff. 29. Ernst Kapp, Philosophie der Technik, 26.

·73·

302

·74·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

forever from the paradise of pure organic existence and life. We may still, with Kapp, attempt to understand and interpret the first human tools as mere continuations of this existence; we may rediscover in the shape of the hammer, axe, chisel, drill, and tongs nothing other than the being and structure of the hand itself. If we go one step further, however, and enter into the sphere of advanced technology, this analogy immediately breaks down. For this sphere is governed by a law that Karl Marx called the law of the “emancipation of the organic barrier.” What separates the instruments of fully developed technology from primitive tools is that they have, so to speak, detached and dissociated themselves from the model that nature is able immediately to offer them. What these instruments have to say and accomplish—their independent sense and their autonomous function—completely comes to light only because of this “dissociating.” As to the basic principle that rules over the entire development of modern mechanical engineering, it has been pointed out that the general situation of machines is such that they no longer seek to imitate the work of the hand or nature but instead seek to carry out tasks with their own authentic means, which are often completely different from natural means.30 Technology first attained its own ability to speak for itself by means of this principle and its ever-sharper implementation. It now erects a new order that is grounded not on contact with nature but rather, not infrequently, in conscious opposition to it. The discovery of new tools exhibits a transformation, a revolution of the previous types of effective activity and the mode of labor itself. Thus, as we have emphasized, with the advent of the sewing machine comes a new way of sewing, with the steel mill a new way of smithing—witness the problem of flight, which could only finally be solved once technological thought freed itself from the model of bird flight and abandoned the principle of the moving wing.31 Once again, a penetrating and surprising analogy appears here between the technical and the linguistic function, between the “spirit of the tool” and “the tool of the spirit.” For language, in its beginning, still seeks to hold fast to the “proximity with 30. See Franz Reuleaux, Theoretische Kinematik. Grundzüge einer Theorie des Machinenwesens (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1875). 31. For more details, see Friedrich Dessauer, Philosophie der Technik, 40ff. Zschimmer, Philosophie der Technik, 102ff.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

303

nature.” It devotes itself to the direct sense-impression of the thing, and then strives to hold on to its sound and, as much as possible, to its soundimage, and, in a sense, to exhaust itself in it. The further it progresses on its way, however, the more it dissociates itself from this immediate constraint. It abandons the path of onomatopoeic expression; it wrestles itself free from the mere metaphor of sound in order to turn into the pure symbol. And with this it has found and established its own spiritual figure; the power dormant in it has arrived at a true breakthrough.32 Thus, here, too, the march of technology is mastered by a universal norm that rules the whole of cultural development. However, the transition to this norm cannot, of course, take place here, as in the other domains, without struggle and the sharpest opposition. The human being faces the risk of absolving himself from the guardianship of nature, standing purely on his own and on his own wanting and thinking. He has herewith renounced all the benefit that is contained in his immediate proximity to nature. And once the bond that binds him to nature is cut, it can never again be tied in the old way. The moment the human being devotes himself to the hard law of technological labor, the abundance of immediate and unbiased happiness that organic existence and pure organic activity had given him fades away forever. From the first and most primitive levels, it appears as if a close interconnection still existed between the two forms of effective action, as if there occurred between them a constant, almost unremarkable transition. Karl Bücher, in his book Work and Rhythm, explains how the simplest works accomplished by humanity are still closely connected and related to certain originary forms of the rhythmic movement of one’s own body.33 They appear as the simple continuation of these movements; they are not so much directed by a determined representation of an external goal as they are inwardly motivated and determined. What is represented in these works, and what directs and regulates them, is not a goal-conscious will but a pure expressive impulse and a naïve joy of expression. Even today, this interconnection can be directly detected in the widespread customs of native peoples. It is reported that in many indigenous tribes, dance and work are designated by the same word: for both are, for 32. For more details, see my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, 184ff. 33. Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1899), 24ff.

·75·

304

·76·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

them, phenomena so immediately related and so insolubly bound together that they cannot linguistically or intellectually be distinguished from one another. In the case of his tribe, the success of agricultural labor depends not only upon certain external technical performances but also upon the correct execution of their cultural chants and dances; it is the one and the same rhythmic movement that both forms of activity enclose, bringing them together into the unity of a singular, unbroken feeling of life.34 This unity appears immediately endangered and threatened as soon as activity [Tun] acquires a mediated form, as soon as the tool comes between the human being and his work. For the tool obeys its own law, a law which belongs to the world of things, and which, accordingly, breaks into the free rhythm of natural movements with a foreign dimension and norm. The organic corporeal activity asserts itself over and against this disturbance and inhibition insofar as it manages to include the tool itself in the cycle of natural existence. This inclusion appears to succeed without difficulty at the relatively early stages of technological activity. Organic unity and coherence reinstate and reproduce themselves insofar as the human being continues to “grow together” with the tool he uses, so long as he does not look upon the tool as merely stuff, a mere thing composed of matter, but instead, relocates the tool to the center of its function and, by virtue of this shifting of focus, feels a kind of solidarity with it. It is this feeling of solidarity that animates the genuine craftsman [Handwerker]. In the particular individual work [Werk] created by his hands he has no mere thing before him; rather, in it, he sees both himself and his own personal activity [Tun]. The further the technology progresses and the more the law of “emancipation from the organic barrier” affects it, the more this original unity slackens until it finally breaks up completely. The interconnection of labor [Arbeit] and work [Werk] ceases in any way to be an experienceable [erlebbarer] interconnection, because the end of working, its proper telos, is now entrusted to the machine, while the human being essentially becomes, in the whole of the work process, something dependent—a section or part that is in34. For more details, see Konrad Theodor Preuß, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, vol. I (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht and Leipzig: J. L. Hinrichts, 1923), 123ff., as well as Preuß’s essay “Der Ursprung der Religon und Kunst,” Globus, 1905, vol. 87.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

305

creasingly converted into a mere fragment. Simmel sees the essential reason for what he calls the “tragedy of modern culture”35 in the fact that all creative cultures increasingly set out certain orders of things [Sache] for themselves that confront the world of the I in their objective being and in their being-a-certain-way. The I, the free subjectivity, has created these orders of things [Sache], but it no longer knows how to grasp, how to penetrate them. The movement of the I breaks upon its own creations; the greater the scope and stronger the power of this creation become, the more its original tide of life subsides. This tragic impact of all cultural development is, perhaps, no more evident than in the development of modern technology. Those who turn away from it on the basis of this state of affairs forget, however, that, in their damning judgment of technology, they must logically include the whole of spiritual culture. Technology has not created this consistent existence; rather, it merely places an especially remarkable example urgently before us. It is, if one speaks here of suffering and sickness, not the ground of suffering but merely a manifestation, a symptom of it. What is crucial here is not an individual domain of culture but its function, not a particular way that it follows but the general direction it takes. Thus, technology may at least demand that the complaints raised against it not be brought before the wrong court. The standard by which it alone can be measured can, in the end, be none other than the standard of spirit, not that of mere organic life. The law that one applies to it must be taken from the whole of the spiritual world of forms, not merely from the vital sphere. Thus grasped, however, the question of the value and demerit of technology immediately receives another meaning. It cannot be resolved simply by considering and setting off against each other the “utility” and “disadvantages” of technology. We cannot judge it by comparing the good that it gives to humankind with the idyll of some pretechnological “state of nature.” Here, it is about neither pleasure nor displeasure, neither happiness nor sorrow; rather, it is about freedom and bondage. If the growth of technological ability and wares necessarily and essentially secures in itself an ever-stronger measure of servitude, such that it increasingly enslaves and constrains humanity rather than being a vehicle for its 35. [See Georg Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,” in Philosophische Kultur (Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1923), 236–67.]

·77·

306

·78·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

self-liberation, then we no longer control technology. If the reverse is the case—that is, if it is the idea of freedom itself that shows the way and finally breaks through in technology—then the significance of this goal cannot be curtailed by looking at the suffering and troubles along the way. For the path of spirit stands here, as everywhere, under the law of renunciation, under the command of a heroic will that knows it can only reach its goal through such renunciation, establishing itself through it and renouncing all naïve and impulsive longings for happiness. 4

·79·

The conflict generated between the human longing for happiness and the demands imposed on it by the technical spirit and technical will is, however, in no way the sole or strongest opposition that emerges here. The conflict becomes deeper and more menacing when it emerges in the domain of cultural forms. The true battlefront first appears where the mediating spirit no longer merely struggles with the immediacy of life, when the spiritual tasks become increasingly differentiated and simultaneously estrange themselves further from one another. For then, it is not only the organic unity of existence but also the unity of the “idea” [Idee], the unity of the direction and positing of a goal, which are threatened by this estrangement. What is more, as it unfolds, technology does not simply place itself next to other fundamental directions of spirit, nor does it order itself harmoniously and peacefully with them. Insofar as it differentiates itself from them, it both separates itself from and positions itself against them. It not only insists on its own norm but threatens to posit this norm as an absolute and to force it upon the other domains. Here, a new conflict erupts within the sphere of spiritual activity [Tun], indeed, in its own womb. What is now demanded is no simple confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with “nature” but the positing [Setzung] of a boundary within spirit itself—a universal norm that both satisfies and restrains individual norms. The determination of this boundary is most easily configured in technology’s relationship to the theoretical knowledge of nature. Here, harmony seems to be given and guaranteed from the beginning; here there is no struggle for superiority and subordination but a reciprocal giving and taking. Each of the two basic orientations stands on its own. Even this

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

307

independence, however, unfolds freely and spontaneously in an unforeseen manner toward a pure subservience to the other and with the other. The truth of Goethe’s words—that doing and thinking, thinking and doing constitute the sum of all wisdom—appears nowhere more clearly than here. For it is in no way the “abstract,” pure theoretical knowledge of the laws of nature that leads the way, showing first the technical aspect of the problem and its concrete technical activity. Rather, from the very beginning, both processes grasp one another and, as it were, remain in balance. This relationship of one with the other can be made clear historically when we look back at the “discovery of nature” that has taken place in European consciousness since the Renaissance. This discovery is in no way the work of only the great researchers of nature—rather it returns, essentially, to an impulse originating out of the questions of the great inventors. In a spirit like that of Leonardo da Vinci, the intertwining of these two basic orientations appears with a classic simplicity and depth. What separates Leonardo from mere bookish learning, from the spirit of “litterati,” as he himself called it, is the fact that “theory” and “praxis,” “praxis” and “poise” penetrate one another in his person in a completely different measure than ever before. Foremost an artist, he became a technician and then a scientific researcher. Likewise, for Leonardo, all research transformed directly into technical problems and artistic tasks.36 This is hardly a question of a mere one-time combination but, rather, a basic factual relationship that pointed the way, from here onward, for the entire science of the Renaissance. The founder of theoretical dynamics, Galileo, also began from technical problems. In his book on Galileo, Olschki rightly places the strongest emphasis on this element. He notes: Very few of the biographies have directed attention to this side of Galileo’s creations and scientific development. To be more precise, however, this more original and persistent of his varied dispositions constituted the main focus of his seemingly disparate life works. . . . One must keep in mind the fact that each of Galileo’s 36. For more details, see my book Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, in Studien der Bibliothek, volume 10 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927). [The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, tr. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).]

·80·

308

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

discoveries in the domains of physics and astronomy are closely linked to some instrument of his own invention or to some special set-up. His technical genius is the authentic prerequisite for the scientific efforts through which his theoretical originality first received its direction and expression.37

·81·

The authentic explanation of these circumstances lies in the fact that theoretical and technical activity not only touch one another externally, insofar as they both operate on the same “material” of nature, but, more importantly, insofar as they relate to one another in the principle and core of their productivity. For the image of nature that thought produces is not captured by a mere idle beholding of the image, rather it requires the use of an active force. The more one steeps oneself in critical epistemological reflection about the origins and conditions of this image, the more it becomes clear that this image is no simple copy, that its outline is not simply drawn from nature, but that it must be formed by an independent energy of thought. Here we have arrived at the point where reason, to speak with Kant, appears as the “author of nature.” This authorship, however, assumes another direction and attests to a new path as soon as we consider the domain of technological creation. Technical work and theoretical truth share a basic determination in that both are ruled by the demand for a “correspondence” between thought and reality, an adaequatio rei et intellectus [adequateness of thing and intellect]. That this “correspondence” is not immediately given but is to be searched for and continuously produced, appears, however, even more clearly in technological creation than in theoretical knowledge. Technology submits to nature in that it obeys its laws and considers them the inviolable requirements of its own effective action. Notwithstanding this obedience to the laws of nature, however, nature is never for technology something finished, wherein laws are merely posited. It is something to be perpetually posited anew, something to be repeatedly configured. Spirit always measures anew objects in relation to itself and itself in relation to objects in order to find and guarantee in this twofold act the genuine adaequatio, the genuine “appropriateness,” of both. The more this movement takes hold, the more its force grows, the more the spirit feels and knows its 37. Leonardo Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, vol. III, Galilei und seine Zeit (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1927), 139f.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

309

reality to have “grown.” This inner growth does not simply take place under a continuous leadership, under the rule and guardianship of the actual; rather, it demands that we constantly return from the “actual” into a realm of the “possible,” and see the actual itself according to this image of the possible. Acquiring this point of view and orientation signifies, from a purely theoretical perspective, perhaps the greatest and most memorable achievement of technology. Standing in the middle of the domain of necessity and remaining within the intuition of necessity, it discovers a sphere of free possibilities. There is no uncertainty, no subjective insecurity attached to these; they confront thought as something thoroughly objective. Technology does not initially ask what is but what can be. This “ability,” however, designates no mere assumption or supposition but an assertive claim and certainty—a certainty whose final authentication, of course, is to be sought not in mere judgment but in the output and production of certain formations [Gebilden]. In this sense, every truly original technological achievement has the character of both a discovering and an un-covering. A certain state of affairs is, in a sense, extracted from the region of the possible and transplanted into the actual. Here, the technician is similar to the activity Leibniz, in his metaphysics, ascribes to the divine “demiurge” who does not create the essence or possibility of objects but selects only one, the most perfect, among those possibilities that exist in themselves and are objectively present. Thus, technology repeatedly teaches us that the sphere of the “objective,” which is determined by fixed and general laws, never coincides with the sphere of that which is objectively present, that is, which is sensibly actualized.38 Pure theoretical natural science can, of course, never know 38. In his Philosophie der Technik (47), Dessauer keenly and poignantly remarks: “The reunion of an inventor with the ‘object’ that he once produced first is an encounter of great vitality and revelation. The inventor looks at that which was achieved by his work, though not by it alone, not with a “I have made you,” but with a “I have found you.” You were already somewhere, I had to search long for you. . . . That you only now are comes from the fact that I only now found that you are so. You could no sooner appear, filling your purpose, as until you were so in my look, as you are in yourself, because you can only be so! Now, though you are in the visible world, I have found you in another world, and for a long time you refused to cross over into the visible realm, just until I rightly saw your true Gestalt in that other realm.”

·82·

310

·83·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

the actual without constantly reaching out into the realm of the possible, the purely ideal. In the end, however, the only reality to which its gaze appears to be directed seems itself to be exhausted in the clear and distinct description of the factual processes of nature. A technological creation, however, never binds itself to this pure facticity, to the given look of objects; rather, it obeys the law of a pure anticipation, a forwardlooking vision that in anticipating the future ushers in a new future. With the insight into this state of affairs, however, the authentic center of the world of technological “form” now seems increasingly to shift, and to cross over from the pure theoretical sphere into the domain of art and artistic creation. Here, we need not prove how tightly both spheres are interwoven with one another. A glance at the general history of spirit suffices to teach us how fluid the transitions are in the concrete becoming, in the genesis, of the technological world of form and in artistic form. Again, the Renaissance, with its formation of the “uomo universale” [universal man] in spirits such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, provides us with great examples of the constant interweaving of technical and artistic motives. Nothing appears more natural and more enticing than concluding that a factual union can come from such a personal union. There are, in fact, those among the modern apologists of technology who believe that they can serve their cause in no better way than by equating it with the cause of art. They are, as it were, the romantics of technology. They attempt to ground and justify technology by dressing it up with all the magic of poetry.39 However, poetic hymns about the achievements of technology cannot, of course, raise us above the task of determining the difference between technical and artistic creation. This difference immediately emerges if we consider the kind of “objectification” that is actual in the artist and in the technician. In the current literature on the “philosophy of technology,” we repeatedly encounter the questions of whether and to what extent a technical work is capable of producing pure aesthetic effects and to what extent it is subject to pure aesthetic norms. The answers given to these questions are diametrically opposed to one another. “Beautiful” is quickly claimed and praised as an inalienable good of technical products, and 39. One thinks here, in particular, of the essay by Max Eyth, “Poesie und Technik” (see 9ff.).

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

311

just as quickly rejected as a “false tendency.” This battle, often fought with great bitterness, wanes when one considers that, in the thesis and antithesis, the concept of beauty is, for the most part, taken in an entirely different sense. We grasp the norm of “beauty” so widely that we speak of it everywhere there emerges a victory of “form” over “stuff,” “idea” [Idee] over “matter,” such that there can be no doubt as to the great extent of technology’s direct role. However, this beauty of form encompasses, as such, the whole expanse of spiritual activity and configuration in general. Understood in this sense, there is, as Plato said in the Symposium, a beauty not only of physical formations but also of logic and ethics, a “beauty of knowledge” and a “beauty of custom and endeavors.”40 To reach the special region of artistic creation from this all-embracing concept of form, an essential limitation and a specific determination are required. This results from the particular relationship in which all artistic beauty stands vis-à-vis the fundamental and originary phenomenon of expression. In an absolutely unique way that is reserved for it alone, the work of art permits “figure” and “expression” to merge into one another. It is a creation that reaches out into the realm of the objective and places before us a rigorous objective lawfulness. This “objective,” however, is in no way a mere “external appearance,” rather it is the externalizing of the interior that is, as it were, transparent within it. The poetic, painted, or plastic form is, in its highest perfection, in its pure “detachment” from the I, still flooded by the pure movement of the I. The rhythm of this movement lives on mysteriously in the form and speaks to us immediately in it. The outline of the figure repeatedly turns back here to a certain trait of the soul that manifests itself in it; and, in the end, it is to be rendered understandable only through the whole of this soul, from its totality that is enclosed in each true, artistic, individual thing. Such wholeness and individual particularity are denied to technological work. Admittedly, if one observes the pure content of lived-experience of technological and artistic creations, nowhere is a strict border between the two manifest. In no way is one inferior to the other in terms of intensity, fullness, and passionate emotion. It is no less a psychicalspiritual shock when the work of the discoverer or the inventor, after being 40. [Plato, Symposium 210 C (“ਥʌıȚȘȝ૵ȞțȐȜȜȠȢ”) and 211 C (“IJ੹țĮȜ੹ ਥʌȚIJȘįİȪȘĮIJĮ”).]

·84·

312

·85·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

carried within for years and decades, first breaks through into reality than when the poetic or plastic figure detaches itself from its originator, confronting him as a formation [Gebilde] existing in its own right. After this separation has taken place even once, however, a quite different relationship between the creator and his work prevails in the purely technical sphere as compared to the artist and his work. The accomplished configured work in reality belongs henceforth to this reality. It is situated in a pure thing-world whose laws it obeys and by whose measure it must be measured. It must henceforth speak for itself, and it speaks only of itself and not of the creator to whom it originally belonged. This type of detachment is not demanded of the artist, nor is it possible for him. Even when he becomes completely absorbed in his work, he does not become lost in it. The work always simultaneously remains, insofar as it stands purely on its own, the testimony of an individual form of life, an individual existence [Dasein], and a being-a-certain-way [So-sein]. Technological creation can neither reach nor aspire to reach this sort of “harmony” between the beautiful work and beautiful expression. When, with the erection of the Eiffel Tower, the artists of Paris united and rallied in the name of artistic taste to object to this “useless and monstrous” construction, Eiffel answered that he was firmly convinced that his work had its own beauty: Are the right conditions of stability not always in agreement with those of harmony? The foundation of the architecture [Baukunst] is that the main lines of the building must completely correspond to certain rules. What is, however, the basic condition of my tower? Its resistance against the wind! And here I claim that the curves of the four pillars of the tower that climb higher and higher into the air in accordance with the fixed measurements of the weight of the base make for a powerful impression of force and beauty.41

·86·

This beauty, which originates from the perfect solution to a given problem, is, however, not of the same type and origin as the beauty that confronts us in the work of poets, sculptors, and musicians: for the latter beauty is not based on “being bound” by the forces of nature but exhib41. Quoted by Julius Goldstein, Die Technik (Die Gesellschaft, ed. Martin Buber, vol. 40), 51.

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

313

its a new and unique synthesis of I and world. If we can denote the world of expression and the world of pure signification as the two extremes between which all cultural development moves, then the ideal balance between them is, as it were, achieved in art. Technology combined with theoretical knowledge, to which it is closely related, increasingly renounces all that is measured by expression in order to lift itself up into the strictly “objective” sphere of pure signification.42 At the same time, it is indisputable that the gain achieved here contains a sacrifice. However, even this sacrifice and renunciation, this possibility to cross over and rise up into a pure world of things, shows itself to be a specific human power, an independent and indispensable descriptor of “humanity.” A deeper and more serious conflict, however, erupts before us if, rather than measuring effective technological activity and creations by aesthetic norms, we ask after its ethical right and its ethical meaning. The instant this question is vigorously put forth and understood in its severity, the answer seems already to be apparent. The skeptical and negative critique of culture, which Rousseau introduced in the eighteenth century, seems to be able to give no more weighty evidence, no stronger example than the development of modern technology. Does this development not, under the promise and alluring image of freedom of the traveling juggler, involve human beings even more inexorably in un-freedom and slavery? By removing him from the bond with nature, has it not increased his social dependence to the point of being unbearable? The thinkers who have struggled most profoundly with the basic problem of technology are precisely those who have repeatedly indulged in this ethically damning judgment of it. Whoever does not from the beginning subscribe to the demands of simple utility, and instead treasures the meaning of ethical and spiritual standards, cannot carelessly pass over the grave inner damages of a lauded “technological culture.” Few modern thinkers have as keenly observed and forcefully uncovered this damage as Walther Rathenau,43 with growing energy and passion in his writing. On the one hand, there is completely soulless and mechanized labor, the 42. Concerning theoretical knowledge, this process is explained and developed further in my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. III, part III, chapters 5 and 6. 43. See Walther Rathenau, Von kommenden Dingen: Zur Kritik der Zeit; Zur Mechanik des Geistes (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1917).

·87·

314

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

hardest chore. On the other hand, there is the unrestricted will to power and will to rule, unrestrained ambition and meaningless consumerism. Such is, for Rathenau, the image of the times captured in the mirror of technology: If one considers . . . world production, the insanity of the economy appears to us terribly frightening. Superfluous, trivial, harmful, contemptuous things are heaped in our stores, useless fashion statements that should, in a few days, emit a false radiance, ways of getting intoxicated, stimulus, a numbing. . . . Every new financial quarter, all these worthless things fill stores and warehouses. Their manufacture, transportation, and consumption require the labor of millions of hands; they demand raw materials, machines, plants, occupying approximately one-third of the world’s industry and workers.44

·88·

Thus, modern technology—and the economy it has created and maintains with its own means—is truly the water jug of the Danaides. This image, already used by Plato in Gorgias to describe the vanity and absurdity of an ethics measured according to purely hedonistic criteria, spontaneously forces itself upon us when we read Rathenau’s description. Every satisfied need serves only to bring forth new needs in increasing measure; and, once you have entered this cycle, there is no escape from it. Seizing the human being even more relentlessly than the workings of his own drives is the working of the drives of his situation, the result [Ergebnisse] and product of technological culture; he is thrown by technological culture into a never-ending vertigo that moves from desire to consumption, from consumption to desire. So long as we remain in the sphere of its external appearance, its consequences and effects, the hard verdict cast here upon technology is without appeal. Only one question can still be asked: whether these effects can necessarily be attributed to its essence, that is, whether they are implicit in the configuring principle of technology, and whether they are demanded by it. When the problem is taken in this sense, a thoroughly different aspect of the observation and assessment emerges. Rathenau leaves no doubt that all the gaps and defects of modern technological 44. [Ibid., 91f.]

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

315

culture he inexorably uncovers are to be understood not so much in themselves as in terms of their connection with a certain form and order of an economic system and that every attempt at improvement must begin here. This connection does not originate in the spirit of technology. It is more the case that this spirit is made necessary and thrust upon one by a particular situation, by concrete historical circumstances.45 Once this interweave is established, however, it cannot be undone by means of technology alone. It is not enough to appeal to the forces of nature or to the forces of mere understanding by technological and scientific intellects; rather, here it suffices to indicate the point at which only the deployment of a new willpower can create change. In this construction of the realms of will and the basic convictions upon which all moral community rests, technology can only ever be a servant, never a leader. It cannot by itself determine the goal, although it can and should collaborate in carrying it out. It best understands its own meaning and its own telos when it is content with the fact that it can never be an end in itself. Rather, it has to fit itself into another “realm of purpose,” into a genuine and final teleology that Kant described as ethico-teleological. In this sense, the “dematerialization” of technology, rendering it ethical, forms one of the central problems of contemporary culture.46 Just as technology cannot immediately create ethical values out of itself, neither can there be an estrangement and opposition between technology’s values and its specific direction and basic convictions. This is the case because technology is governed by “specialized service thinking,” by the ideal of solidarity of labor in which all ultimately work for one and one works for all. It creates, even before the truly free community of wills, a sort of community of fate between all those who are active in its work. Thus, we can correctly define the implicit meaning of the technological labor and technological culture as the idea of “freedom through serviceability.”47 45. Concerning the necessary disjunction between the spirit of technology and the spirit of capitalist economy, see, in addition to the writing of Rathenau, the remarks by Zschimmer (see 154ff.) and Dessauer (see 113ff.). 46. The problem of this “moralization” is rightly placed at the focal point by Viktor Engelhardt, Weltanschauung und Technik (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1922), esp. 63ff., and by Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi, Apologie der Technik (Leipzig: Verlag der Neue Geist, 1922), 10ff. 47. Friedrich Dessauer, Philosophie der Technik, 86, especially 131ff.

·89·

316

·90·

FO RM AND TE CHNO LO GY

If this idea is truly to have an effect, it is, of course, necessary that it increasingly transform its implicit meaning into an explicit one. That which happens in technological creation must be recognized and understood in its basic direction if it is to be raised into spiritual and moral consciousness. Only if this happens does technology prove to be not only the vanquisher of the forces of nature but also the vanquisher of the chaotic forces of the human being. All the defects and failings of technology that one is in the habit of advancing today are, in the end, based upon the fact that until now it has not fulfilled its highest mission. In fact, it has hardly yet recognized it. All “organization” of nature, however, remains questionable and sterile if it does not lead to the goal of the formation of the will to work, and the real and fundamental work attitude. Our culture and our present society are still far from this goal. Only when this is understood as such and methodically and energetically grasped, however, will the real relationship between “technology” and “form,” its deepest form-forming force, be able to prove itself.

Mythic, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space (1931)

When we consider the position that the problem of space and time occupies in the whole of theoretical knowledge, and when we look back at the role that this problem has played in the historical and systematic development of the fundamental questions of knowledge, a characteristic and decisively essential element immediately emerges. When we grasp them solely as objects [Objekte] of knowledge, space and time occupy a special and outstanding position; they form within the architectonic structure of knowledge the two basic pillars that support and hold together the whole of knowledge. Their deeper signification, however, is not exhausted in this, its objective achievement. The purely ontological and objective characteristics of what space and time are do not at all penetrate to the core of the question; they do not reveal what they signify for the construction of knowledge. The specific signification of the question concerning the “what” of space and time seems rather to lie in the fact that it is in and through this question that knowledge gradually gains a new direction. Through this question knowledge first grasps the fact that and why a genuine turn outward can only be accomplished through a correspond[First published as “Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum,” in Vierter Congress für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, ed. H. Noack (Stuttgart: Enke, 1931), 21–36. First English translation: “Mythic, Aesthetic and Theoretical Space,” tr. D. P. Verene and L. H. Forster, in Man and World 2 (1969), 3–17. Revised translation from Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), 93–119.] 317

·93·

318

·94·

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICAL S PAC E

ing turn inward; it learns to see that the horizon of objectivity is only truly opened up when the eye of spirit is not only oriented toward the world of objects [Objekte] but also back toward its own “nature” and the proper function of knowledge itself. The more clearly, sharply, and consciously the question of the nature [Wesen] of space and time is formulated within the history of the problem of knowledge, the more evident it also becomes that this nature [Wesen] is not to be regarded as mysterious and, in the end, as something unknown that is placed before knowledge; rather, it is grounded and contained in its own being in some decisive way. Thus, in turn, the more deeply knowledge penetrates into the structure of space and time, the more certainly it returns into itself—it grasps them as the objective correlate and end limit of its own fundamental premises and particular principle. Knowledge wishes to encompass being in its whole scope, to measure it in its spatial and temporal infinity. It finally experiences, however, that this task of measuring can only be accomplished when it has first drawn up and secured the measurements for itself. Here, the insight that we gain into the framework of theoretical knowledge is thus itself put into play and broadened, if we consider other fundamental forms of spiritual configuration. Here, too, we come to the absolutely central signification of the question of spatial and temporal form. The outline of each particular world of form, the law to which it is subject, these can only be pointed to and grasped when the general fundamental question is clarified. It is not necessary to present in detail how strongly the appearance of this crisis has determined the basic orientation of the modern aesthetics and study of art, especially in Germany. Adolf von Hildebrand, for example, in his famous and groundbreaking The Problem of Form, discusses this problem. As he has stressed, the question of the nature [Wesen] of form can only be formulated and clarified once the prior questions of the nature [Wesen] of space and spatial presentation have been formulated and clarified. Hildebrand states at the beginning of his investigation: There is no need to justify the claim that our relationship toward the external world, insofar as this world obviously exists, is based mainly upon the knowledge and representation of space and form. An orientation in the external world is simply impossible without

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

319

this. We must, therefore, grasp the spatial representation in general and the representation of form as the delimited space in particular, as the essential content or the essential reality [Realität] of things. If we confront the object or the spatial representation of it with the changing appearance that we obtain from it, then all appearances only signify expressive images of our spatial representation, and the value of the appearance will be measured according to the strength of the expressibility that it possesses as an image of the spatial representation.1 Here, too, it is unavoidable that behind the question of the structure of painted, plastic, and architectural space, another all-encompassing question—that of the principle of artistic configuration in general— arises, and, with this, new possibilities for its formulation and solution are opened. If we pursue further the analogy between the problem of theoretical knowledge and the problem of aesthetics, perhaps, then, the hope seems justified that the problem of space itself could become the point of departure for a new self-mindfulness of aesthetics, a mindfulness that would not only make the particular object of aesthetics visible but also lead aesthetics to clarity about its own immanent possibilities, to the grasping of the specific laws of form under which art stands. Before I enter into a more specific discussion, however, another wholly general orientation to the problem must be attempted. If we attempt to reduce the epistemological development of the problem of space to a short formula, then it can be said that one of the basic tendencies of this development and one of its essential results is that out of the insight into the nature and properties of space, knowledge of the primacy of the concept of order over the concept of being is gained and increasingly established. The concept of being not only forms the historical beginnings and point of departure of scientific philosophy but also seems to systematically encompass the totality [Gesamtheit] of the possible questions and answers concerning it. According to the conviction of the founders of scientific philosophy and the creators of logic, this primacy of the concept of being is grounded on the pure form of the proposition itself. Yet, the 1. [Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1893), 3.]

·95·

320

·96·

·97·

MY THIC, A E STHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

formal character of predication necessarily contains that for which predication stands and that toward which it is directed, just as a being must be posited and determined. All judging demands as its “terminus,” its point of departure and basis, the being [Sein] about which the judgment is made; in a narrower sense, any “logical” capability, any ability to think and to speak, demands that that which is thought and spoken is. “Because not without the being [Seiende] in which it is determined,” as Parmenides formulates this identity, “will you find thinking.” In Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, this bond is made tighter and stronger in that being [Sein] or “substance” is expressly placed at the apex of all categories, as that which the țĮIJȘȖȠȡİ߿Ȟ [ predicate], the proposition itself, only makes possible and conditions. All positing of property and relation, all determinations as a “this” or “that,” as a “here” or “now,” must always presuppose a basic determination of being and be connected to this prior condition. However, this simple, natural, and self-evident point of departure of all logical considerations becomes difficult and problematic as soon as we attempt to deal with the “logic of space.” For we must now ask, What is the being of space? That we must speak about it as a being seems unavoidable. How otherwise would we be able to speak of it at all, how would we be able to determine and refer to it as a “this” or “that” and not as something else? When we insist, however, on this demand, a dangerous theoretical conflict arises. That the being of both space and time is not equivalent to the being of “things” but specifically different from them is grounded on their phenomenological character, on the simple evidence of space and time. If, however, we insist on putting “things” such as space and time under the genus of being as an all-encompassing primary concept, we find that this genus itself signifies only an illusory unity. It includes not only different things but opposing and conflicting ones. One of the most difficult tasks of metaphysics is how to resolve this conflict, how to unite the mode of being of space and time itself with the mode of being of the contents that allow them to be united with one another. This is not the place to lay out the dialectic of this problem and to pursue all the antinomies that have arisen from this root in the course of the history of theoretical thought. Not only the development of metaphysics but also that of classical physics is marked by these antinomies. The latter, namely, Newtonian physics, has not, despite the grandeur of its plan, succeeded in mastering these final meta-

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

321

physical difficulties. In the end, it must transform the “essence” of space and time that it seeks to uncover into a puzzle; it must make both, to speak with Kant, into “existing absurdities.”2 When it is brought under the category of thing, of the mere category of substance, and examined from this viewpoint, the absolute being of space soon becomes its nonbeing; it is transformed from an all-encompassing and all-foundational thing [Ding] to more of an absurdity [Unding].3 A fundamental solution to these difficulties was possible in philosophy as well as in the natural sciences only when both, in different ways, had obtained a new basic and overriding conception that gradually placed itself above the metaphysical category of substance. This achievement is attributed to the concept of order. The ensuing intellectual struggle comes to light, historically speaking, most clearly in Leibniz’s philosophy. Leibniz too places all beings from the one viewpoint of substance, and all metaphysical reality dissolves itself into one quintessence, into one infinite multiplicity of monads, of individual substances. As a logician and mathematician, however, he follows another line of thought. For his logic and his “mathesis universalis” are not exclusively based on the preeminence of the concept of substance; rather, both are expanded to the more encompassing doctrine of relation [Relation]. As he defines reality in terms of substance, so he defines truth in terms of the concept of relation [Relation]. The foundation of truth is found in relation. This concept of relation and order is for him the true nature of space and time, and this realization permits him to insert both into his system of knowledge without contradiction. Leibniz removes the contradictions that had resulted from Newton’s concept of absolute space and time by making both into orders rather than things. Space and time are not substances; rather, they are “real relations” [Relationen]. They have their true objectivity in the “truth of relations,” not in any kind of absolute reality. In this respect, Leibniz clearly anticipated the solution that modern physics found to the problem of space and time. For modern physics, there can no longer be 2. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 39/B 56.] 3. [The play in the German between thing (Ding) and absurdity (Unding) cannot be captured in English. In German, the prefix “Un” invokes more than simply a non-thing. Rather, it suggests that it is not even capable of being a thing; it is undoing itself as a thing.]

·98·

322

·99·

MY THIC, A E STHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

a being of space that somehow stands beside the being of matter and into which matter as physical mass only later enters; space is not something that is given prior to matter. Space ceases to be a “thing under things”; it is stripped of the last remainder of physical objectivity. The world is neither defined as a whole of bodies “in” space nor as an occurrence “in” time, rather it is viewed as a “system of events,” as Whitehead says.4 Space and time enter into the determination of these events, into their lawful order, as conditions, as essential and necessary moments. However, ladies and gentlemen, with these considerations it may seem as if I have deviated from the subject at hand. For what is the interconnection, if you were to ask me, between these changes in the theoretical idea and the grounding of space, and the problems of artistic intuition and configuration? Does this configuration not follow its own independent law, does it not go its own way, untouched by all the arguments of metaphysics and unperturbed by all the laws of the scientific interpretation of the world? And yet, as much as we must recognize this independence and self-sufficiency, this peculiar “autarchy” of the aesthetic, might it not be exaggerated? For in the realm of spirit, there are definite contours and figures that are firmly set off against each other; however, here more than anywhere else, we should not make these differences into rigid barriers; we should not make these differences into caesurae. In the case of the spiritual universe, that principle which Greek speculation has established as the basic law of the physical cosmos—the principle of ıȣȝʌȐșİȚĮIJࠛȞ‫ݺ‬ȜȦȞ [sympathy]—takes on a more encompassing and deeper meaning, namely, that each individual string that is touched causes the whole to immediately vibrate and resound; each transformation of an individual element implicitly contains a new form of the whole. Thus, the transformation of the concept of being into the concept of order, as we have shown in the sphere of theoretical contemplation, conceals a universal and extremely fruitful problem, one that is also essential to the way of formulating questions in pure aesthetics. When we consider the category of being, it is evident that, despite all the boundless applications of which it is capable, the category undergoes in these applications no inner change or reconfiguration. This is because absolute identity, unity, and 4. [More precise would be: “an occurrence [Geschehen] ‘in’ time, rather it is viewed as a ‘system of events’ [Ereignissen], of ‘events,’ as Whitehead says.”]

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

323

uniformity alone constitute the basic logical character of being. Being cannot transform its nature without denying and losing itself, without falling victim to its opposite—nonbeing. The unbreakable identity of being was recognized by its first philosophical discoverer, Parmenides: “Abiding the same in the same place it rests by itself, and so abides firm where it is; for strong necessity holds it firm within the bounds of the limit that keeps it back on every side.” In contrast to this unity and rigidity of the concept of being, the concept of order is, from the beginning, pointed to and distinguished by the moment of differentiation and inner multiplicity. As identity is the life-element of being, so the manifold is certainly the life-element for order; it is only through this that order can exist and form itself. As the concept of being is correlated with unity, as, following the Scholastic formulation ens et unum convertuntur [being and one are mutually convertible], so there exists an analogous correlation between multiplicity and order. As soon as the point of gravity in the total theoretical view of reality and, specifically, in the theoretical apprehension and interpretation of space shifts from the pole of being to the pole of order, then a victory of pluralism over abstract monism, of a multiplicity of forms over a single form, is established. The most diverse intellectual formations [Gebilde] and manifold principles of configuration can exist together freely and easily under the dominance of the concept of order; in their mere being, in the solid space in which things [Sachen] encounter each other, they seem to be at odds with and to exclude each other. Certainly, the pure function of the concept of order is one and the same regardless of what specialized matter and within what special area of spirit it takes effect. Generally speaking, it is always a question of limiting the unlimited and determining the relatively undeterminable. This universal task of determination and limitation, however, can be accomplished only from very different viewpoints and by means of different guidelines. When Plato contrasts appearance and idea [Idee], multiplicity and unity, the unlimited with the limited, he accomplishes this contrast, above all, through the function of logical or, broadly speaking, “theoretical” determination. The essential and indispensable means for limiting and binding the limitless is the pure function of thinking. Only it renders possible the passage from becoming to being, that is, from the flow of appearances to the realm of pure form. Thus, all organization of the manifold is bound together by the form of the conceptual acts of

·100·

324

·101·

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICAL S PAC E

combining and separating, by a synopsis that is at the same time a diaeresis. The labor of the dialectician moves in this twofold direction, which is the basic direction of the logical in general. Just as the priest does not arbitrarily cut the sacrificial victim but skillfully dissects it along its natural joints, so the true dialectician knows and separates being into its genera and species. These ways of dividing and organizing—this įȚĮȚȡİ߿ıșĮȚ țĮIJ‫ޟ‬ȖȑȞȘ [the fact of dividing according to species], this IJȑȝȞİȚȞțĮIJߩ İ‫ݫ‬įȘ [cutting according to the idea or to what is seen]—constitute the essential task incumbent on him and toward which he directs all his thinking. However, no matter how indispensable this art of separating and connecting, of dissecting and putting together again, is to the theoretical world-concept, it is not the only way in which spirit conquers and configures the world. There are other original modes of configuration in which the basic forms of differentiation and connection, organization and synopsis, prove themselves, and in which both still stand under another governing law and another principle of form. The theoretical concept is not the only one to possess the power to determine the undetermined, to transform chaos into cosmos. The function of artistic intuition and presentation is also governed by this basic power and is primarily fulfilled by it. In it also lives a distinctive means of separation that at the same time is a means of connection, a connection that is also a separation. Both of these, however, are accomplished not in the medium of thought and the theoretical concept but in the medium of pure figure. What Goethe says of poetry is true for each kind of artistic configuration: it divides the same flowing stream of events “into an enlivening way so that it moves rhythmically.”5 This “vitalizing division” does not lead, as it does within the logical, theoretical sphere, to the distinction of genera and species, to a network of pure concepts that are classified over and under each other according to the degree of their generality such that they finally present through this hierarchy of thought the hierarchy of being. Instead, it remains faithful to the basic principle of life; it generates individual formations [Gebilden], which the creative fantasy from which they originate revives with the breath of life, endowing them with freshness and the immediacy of life. The same force of creative imagi5. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Eine Tragödie, part I, in Werke, vol. 14, 13 (Weimar, 1887–1919).]

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

325

nation is also peculiar to myth, even though it stands under a different law of form and moves, so to speak, in another “dimension” of forming. For myth possesses its own way to penetrate, vitalize, and enlighten chaos: it does not remain with a confusion of individual violent, dæmonic powers that rise up out of the instant and are engulfed by the instant. Rather, it faces these forces in strife and conflict against each other—and in the end, it lets the image of a unity arise up out of the strife itself that encompasses all being and events, binding and ruling of humans and gods in the same way. There is no thoroughly formed system of mythology and no great world religion that has not arisen in some way from entirely “primitive” beginnings to this representation of an overall order of events. In the Indo-Germanic world, this intuition of the all-embracing rule that all events follow is expressed by the concept of Rita. “According to the Rita,” we read in a song in the Rigveda, “the rivers flow, the dawn rises; the Rita follows the path of order, knowing it does not miss the directions of the heavens.”6 We shall pursue this interconnection, however, only insofar as it serves to provide us with a deeper insight into the unfolding of the order of space and into the diversity of the possible configurations of space. Here, there is a unique and decisive point: there does not exist a general, universal, essentially fixed intuition of space; rather, space receives its determined content and its particular coincidence by means of the order of meaning with which it configures itself in each case. Depending on whether it is thought of as mythic, aesthetic, or theoretical order, the “form” of space changes, and this transformation not only concerns individual and subordinate features but also relates to space as a whole, to its principal structure. Space does not possess an absolutely given, final, and fixed structure; rather, it acquires this structure only by virtue of the general coherence of meaning within which its very construction is accomplished. The function of meaning is the primary and determining one; the structure of space is a secondary and dependent element. That which links all these spaces of different characters and provenances of meaning (that which links the mythically, aesthetically, and theoretically united spaces with one another) is simply a pure formal determination that is 6. Rigveda I, 124, 3; German trans. Hillebrandt, Lieder des Rigveda, 1; cf. also Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. II, 107ff.

·102·

326

·103·

·104·

MY THIC, A E STHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

expressed most clearly and concisely in Leibniz’s definition of space as the “possibility of coexistence” and as the order of possible coexistences (l’ordre des coexistences possibles). However, this purely formal possibility experiences very different kinds of realization, actualization, and concretization. So far as mythic space is concerned, it originates, on the one hand, from the characteristic mythic form of thinking and, on the other hand, from the specific feeling of life that is inherent in all formations [Gebilden] of myth, lending them their particular coloring. When myth separates right and left, above and below, when it separates the different regions of the heavens—east and west, north and south—it is not concerned with locations and places in the sense of empirical-physical space, nor with points and directions in the sense of geometrical space. Rather, each location and direction is charged, and, so to speak, loaded, with a certain mythical quality. Its whole content, its meaning, its specific difference depends on this quality. What is being sought after and held on to here are neither geometrical determinations nor physical “properties”; they are certain magical features. Holiness [Heiligkeit] or profanity [Unheiligkeit], accessibility or inaccessibility, blessing or curse, familiarity or strangeness, promise of happiness or threat of danger, these are the characteristic features according to which myth separates localities in space from each other and on the basis of which it distinguishes directions within space. Each place has a particular atmosphere and creates its own magical-mythical aura around itself; it exists only through the fact that certain effects adhere to it, that salvation [Heil] or damnation [Unheil], divine or dæmonic forces, emanate from it. The whole of mythical space is structured, and with it, the whole of the mythical world, along these magical lines of force. As in the space of our experience, our geometricalphysical space, each being has its determined assigned position, as the heavenly bodies possess their locations and circle in fixed paths, so each being has its position in mythical space. There is no being or event, no thing or incident, no element of nature, and no human activity that is not spatially fixed and predetermined in this way. The form of this spatial bond and the peculiar destined necessity, which is inherent in it, are inviolable; there is no escape from them. Through the worldview of certain primitive peoples we can directly apprehend today the violent power that is inherent in this view of space. Cushing has portrayed this well in his excellent presentation of the worldview of the Zuni Indians. For these

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

327

tribes, not only the apprehension of physical space, of the space of natural things and events, but also the apprehension of the entire life-space are formed according to a fixed mythical model. Not only the different elements such as air and fire, water and earth, but also the different colors, the different genera and species of living beings, of plants and animals, belong to their own particular spatial region, to which they are related and linked by virtue of an inner original magical sympathy; the same affiliation also determines the order and organization of society and penetrates all common doing and life. The physical and social cosmos are conditioned in the smallest and finest detail by the mythical differentiation of spatial localities and spatial directions; both are nothing but the reflection of the spatial intuition upon which it is based. In a wellknown precritical work, Kant has posed the question of “on the ultimate ground of the differentiation of regions in space.” If the same question is posed for mythical space instead of the space of mathematics and natural science, then it seems that the decisive motive that lies at the basis of all mythical differentiation of localities and directions is to be sought in the inner connection, which mythical feeling and mythical fantasy apprehend between the determinations of space and those of light. While feeling and fantasy diverge, day and night, light and darkness mutually exclude one another and immerse themselves in their origin, they first separate out into the various determinations of space; they are not separated according to purely objective characteristics in the mere “world of things”; rather, each of them appears with a different nuance and coloring, each seems immersed in its own basic psychical emotion. The east is at once the source of light as well as the source and origin of life; the west is the place of decline, of dread, of the realm of death. I cannot go into the details and manifold nuances of this basic intuition. I have here only stressed the essential and decisive main feature for our problem. Only through the universal function of meaning of myth and in the constant referring back to it can the form of the mythical space as a whole, as well as its configuration and organization, be rendered intelligible, can its nature [Wesen] and particularity be grasped. Let us now turn to a consideration of aesthetic space, in particular to a consideration of space as it is constituted in the fine arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture; here, we are immediately surrounded by another atmosphere. We find ourselves suddenly transplanted into a

·105·

328

·106·

MY THIC, A E STHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

new sphere, the sphere of pure presentation. All genuine presentation is by no means a merely passive reproduction of the world; rather, it is a new relationship to the world into which the human being places himself. In his letters on aesthetic education, Schiller says that contemplation, “reflection,” which he sees as the basic prerequisite and fact of artistic intuition, is the first “liberating” relationship of man to the universe that surrounds him. “When desire immediately seizes its object, contemplation puts its object at a distance. [ . . . ] The necessity of nature, which ruled man in his state of mere sensation with undivided violent power, lets go of him through reflection; a momentary joy is felt by his senses. Time itself, the eternally changing, stands still while the dispersed rays of consciousness gather, and an after-image of the infinite, form reflecting itself, makes an imprint on the fleeting ground.”7 The characteristic feature and source of artistic form corresponds to this characteristic feature of aesthetic space. We can compare aesthetic space with mythical space in that both, in contrast to the abstract schema of geometry, are thoroughly concrete modes of spatiality. Aesthetic space is also a genuine “life-space,” which is formed out of the powers [Kräften] of pure feeling and fantasy, unlike theoretical space that is formed out of the power [Kraft ] of pure thinking. In aesthetic space, however, feeling and fantasy oscillate on a different level and, when compared to the world of myth, have certainly reached a new degree of freedom. Artistic space is also filled and permeated with the most intensive values of expression; it is vitalized and moved by the strongest dynamic, antithetical oppositions. And yet, this movement is not identical with the very immediate movement of life, which expresses itself in the basic mythical affections of hope and fear, in magical attraction and rejection, in the all-encompassing desire of seizing the “sacred” and in the horror of the touch of the forbidden and unholy. For as the content of artistic presentation, the object [Objekt] shifts to a new distance, to remoteness from the I; only in this does it gain its own independent being and create a new form of “objectivity.” It is this new objectivity that distinguishes aesthetic space. The dæmonic of the mythical world is conquered and broken in it. Man is no longer sur7. [Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1793/94), in Philosophische Schriften, Eduard von der Hellen, vol. XII (Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta, 1905), 99.]

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

329

rounded by secret and unknown forces, no longer under a magic spell; rather, by virtue of the basic function of aesthetic presentation, it only now gains the true content of representation. Genuine “representation” is always at the same time an oppositional-stance; it originates from the I and develops from the formative forces of the I, but it recognizes at the same time that what is formed has its own being, its proper essence, and its own law. It lets it arise [erstehen] out of the I, in order simultaneously to let it exist [bestehen] according to this law, showing itself in this consistent objective existence [Bestand]. Thus, aesthetic space is no longer like mythical space, a mutual seizing and play of interchanging forces that seize man from without, overwhelming him by virtue of their violent affective power; rather, it is a quintessence of possible ways of configuration, and within each, a new horizon of the world of objects opens up. I shall not discuss here the question of how this general function of aesthetic space occurs in the individual arts and how it is particularized in them. In the course of our congress, this will be the subject of penetrating investigations by highly qualified experts, and I feel neither qualified nor able to anticipate them. I wish, however, to make only a very general methodological remark. Since Lessing first formulated his fundamental principle that to attain a true distinction between the individual arts we must begin with the nature of sensible signs, which all art employs, the principle has been repeatedly and successfully realized. Just as Lessing, delineating between painting and poetry on the basis of this principle, attributes to the former “figures [Figuren] and colors in space” and to the latter “articulated sounds in time,”8 and as he develops and systematically sets limits on the basis of this embodiment of the possible objects of poetic and pictorial presentation, so Herder has applied this same principle to music and sculpture. According to him, the division between the different senses and spheres of sensation produces the natural demarcation and organization of the individual arts. “We possess one sense that apprehends things external or next to each other, another that apprehends them after each other, and a third that apprehends them within each other—sight, hearing, and feeling”; out of this natural 8. [Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon: Oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie. Mit beläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte, in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, vol. IX (Stuttgart: G. L. Göschen, 1893), 94.]

·107·

330

·108·

MY THIC, A E STHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

threefold division arise the differences between the arts, out of this the boundary between poetry and music, music and painting, and painting and sculpture can be immediately derived.9 In more modern investigations into the nature of aesthetic space, this path has again been followed; the basic differences between “optical” and “haptic,” visual and tactile space have been specifically examined in order to gain clarity about the forming principle and proper sphere of the individual arts. I do not want to question the fruitfulness of these investigations; nevertheless, I believe they do not sufficiently reveal the actual core of the problem that lies at the base of our discussion. For the differences in the pure manner of presentation, of the particular mode of configuration that is alive in all art can never be fully understood and penetrated by an examination of the mere material of the presentation. As Lessing prefaces his Laocoon with the motto from Plutarch “੢Ȝૉ țĮ੿ IJȡȩʌȚȢ ȝȚȝȒıİȦȢ įȚĮijȑȡȠȣıȚȞ”10 [They differ in the material and in the modes of their expression], so we must, I believe, shift the point of gravity of the consideration from the first to the second moment and from the side of ‫ވ‬ȜȘ [hyle] to that of IJȡȩʌȠȢ [tropos]. To put this in the language of modern phenomenology, to speak in the terminology of Husserl, not the hyletic but the noetic element, not the sensible ‫ވ‬ȜȘ [hyle] but the intentional ȝȠȡijȒ [morphe] is decisive. I cannot begin to systematically develop or justify this view here. By way of conclusion, however, I wish to attempt a brief explanation by way of a single example. If we remain within the sphere of an individual art which, according to Lessing, is dependent upon and bound by a certain sphere of sensible signs, then any art embraces very different IJȡȩʌȠȚ [tropoi], very different ways and possibilities of spatial and temporal configuration. If, for example, we look at the art of poetry, the lyric poem, the epic, and drama, they move and are formed in their own temporal sphere and at a pace peculiar to them. Augustine has said in his analysis of the concept of time, which is a historical turning point and high point of phenomenological grasping and interpretation, that, fundamentally, three different times, namely, present, past, and future, do not exist; there are only three different aspects of time that are all comprehended in a single present. There is the presence of the past, the 9. Herder, Plastik, 1778, in Werke (Suphen), vol. VIII, 14ff. 10. [Lessing, Laokoon, 1.]

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

331

presence of the present, and the presence of the future; the first we call memory, the second, intuition, and the third, expectation. Poetic time can be divided on the basis of these three modes of time—memory, intuition, and expectation—and according to this threefold division, its species, the ȖȑȞȘ [genera] of poetry—epic, lyric, and dramatic art—can be determined and set off from each other. Each one of them, as it were, stands in another “sign” of time; each one of them gives a special nuance to time and makes it appear as if immersed in a particular “color.” The epic poem transforms everything it encompasses into the pure form of memory and thereby into the veil of the past; the lyric poem oscillates in the immediate present of feeling, generating an intuition of the present; the drama exists and lives in a movement toward the future, within the passionate tension that anticipates that which is to come, pushing ahead to that which is coming. The lyric poet is basically always rooted in the today, in the pure now point, but also turns toward the not now, the not yet, and the no more. You should not flee the day Because the day you overtake Is not better than today But if you gladly linger Where I do away with the world In order to make it part of me There you will find shelter with me Today is today, tomorrow, tomorrow And that which follows and that which is past Does not rend and does not remain.11 Thus speaks the great lyric poet Goethe; however, this characteristic pathos of time is not the pathos of the epic poem or drama. The epic poem submerges itself in the event as a pure having-been [rein-Gewesenes], 11. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Einladung, in West-östlicher Divan, Werke, vol. VI, 143: “Mußt nicht vor dem Tage Fliehen. / Denn der Tag, den du ereilest, / Ist nicht besser als der heut’ge; / Aber wenn du froh verweilest, / Wo ich mir die Welt geseit’ge / Und die Welt an mich zu ziehen, / Bist du gleich mit mir geborgen; / Heut ist heute, morgen morgen / Und was folgt und was vergangen, / Reißt nicht hin und bleibt nicht hangen.”]

·109·

332

·110·

MY THIC, A E STHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

and it must in a certain sense “remain hanging” in this event in order to be able to configure it according to its law of form. Drama, even historical drama where it would appear to be concerned with the past, stands, to speak with Shakespeare, “in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion”12 and gains from it its temporal dynamic, its power of swaying back and forth. Thus, this example makes clear how in any art, independent of the sensible material with which it deals, independent of its means of presentation, a particular direction and a particular meaning of presentation become real and alive, and how out of this meaning the form of its spatial and temporal intuition arises. Permit me, ladies and gentlemen, to conclude these considerations. The theme that I had originally posited has essentially been expanded insofar as the analysis of mythical and aesthetic space ought to connect itself to an analysis of “theoretical” space, the pure measured space of mathematics and mathematical physics. You will understand and forgive me, however, if I pass over this problem, which lies at the core of critical epistemological investigations of the foundation of modern physics, especially given that few moments for discussion remain. Please allow me again not to justify this side of the theme of my discussion, as a detailed exposition of it can be found in the third volume of my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Given the tension of duties between the real demands of the task placed before me and the rules of our congress, I would rather simply register my theme, especially since the congress and the future speakers would like to take a break. Least of all, as the first speaker of our meeting, I feel tightly bound to the rules of the congress and I do not want to evoke the danger of bad examples. In any case, the sense of the considerations that I have laid before you, the problem that I have posed for myself, none of these can be exhausted in this respect. These considerations can serve only as a prelude to the work of our congress. They seek to extend a sort of framework in which investigation and discussion can move. The completion of this framework I anticipate with great certainty in the following lectures, which accomplished scholars will deliver; they will discuss the particular problems of their specialized areas of study. So, ladies and gentlemen, I ask that you take my discussions as an attempt at a preliminary orientation and setting of borders. Theoretical 12. [Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act 3, scene 2.]

MY THIC, A ESTHE TIC, AND THE O RE TICA L S PAC E

333

thought, and philosophical thought in particular, can nowhere sacrifice this setting of borders; rather, such thinking must remain freely conscious of them such that what thought posits must never be allowed to become stiff, fixed limitations. They must remain borders capable of movement in order that they may grasp within themselves the fullness and movement of appearances. Here the validity of each double step of thought, every exchange of the setting and transgression of borders, is shown; it is identified in a small restorative verse from the “Wisdom of the Brahmans,” with which I would like to conclude. Whoever thinking limitations sets, these are not actually present, And so, when he thinks back again, he thinks he has understood the world. Like geometry that catches space with its nets of lines, So thought captures itself in its laws. One makes the world appear through maps, Now we must expect the star maps of the spirit. Meanwhile the spirit goes along its path, As if it were walking through a field, Facing the danger of losing the right direction.13 Allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to express my wish and hope that our collective work, free from any coercion, freely unfolds and comes to publication, and may it nevertheless contain a fixed and clear direction; may it lead us a step further in the direction of the “star maps of spirit” that again today we expect and do without.14

13. [Friedrich Rückert, Wer Schranken denkend setzt (part 1, no. 4), in Gesammelte poetische Werke, vol. VIII (Frankfurt a. M., 1868), 6.] 14. [The original German text includes a discussion between Richard Hamann, Moritz Geiger, Ernst Barthel, Erwin Panofsky, Albert Görland, and Cassirer. We have not included this discussion here.]

·111·

Language and the Construction of the World of Objects (1932)

1 ·121·

If we consider all the functions, which in their union and mutual penetration construct the figure of our psychological and spiritual reality, a twofold way of theoretically interpreting these functions presents itself. We can see in them an essentially imitative and, thus, secondary achievement or an archetypical and, thus, original achievement. In the first case, we assume that the world, the “reality” to which these functions refer as their object [Objekt], is already given as completed in its being as well as its structure—and it only remains for the human mind simply to take possession of this given reality. The “external” being and consistent existent should somehow “cross over” into consciousness, it should be transformed into an internal being; this transformation, however, adds no essentially new feature. The world is reflected in consciousness; the purer and truer this reflection is, however, the more it merely repeats the determinations which are objectively present in the object [Objekt] and which [First published as “Die Sprache und der Aufbau der Gegenstandswelt,” in Bericht über den XII. Kongreß der deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie in Hamburg am 12.-16. April 1931. Im Auftrage der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie hg. von Gustav Kofka ( Jena: Georg Fischer, 1932), 134–45. Translated from Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), 121–51.] 334

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

335

are clearly set out and separated in it. It is this repetitive character, this character of ȝȓȝȘıȚȢ [mimesis], that we can ascribe to knowledge, art, language, and from which we can attempt to understand [verstehen] their value and achievement. However, the history of philosophy—and in particular the history of the problem of knowledge—has long taught us about the defects and the principal limits of this view and approach. Since Kant’s “Copernican turn,” at least within the critique of knowledge, the conviction that the simple copy theory of knowledge does not accurately describe its essence has become more widely accepted. The “combination of a manifold,” Kant says in a crucial discussion in the Critique of Pure Reason, “can never come to us through the senses”; rather, it is “an act of the spontaneity of the faculty of representation.”1 He wants to capture this act by the name “synthesis”: “we can represent nothing to ourselves as combined in the object [Objekt] that we have not ourselves previously combined, and that of all representations combination is the only one that cannot be given through objects [Objekte]. Being an act of the self-activity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself ” (B 130). We must presuppose such a “synthesis” and consequently such an “act of spontaneity” for each mode, each basic direction of spiritual forming no less than for theoretical knowledge. It applies to every pure function of the image; it is as indispensable for knowledge [Wissen] of the world as for those modes of intuiting and configuring the world that take place in language as well as in art. Although we may continue to see in knowledge, in art, in language a mere reflection of the world, we must also remain conscious here that the image this mirror produces depends not on the nature of the reflected objects [Objekte] alone but also on our own nature; it does not simply repeat a design already given in the object but contains an originary act of designing. It is, therefore, never simply a copy but the expression of an original formative force. The spiritual reflections of the universe that we possess in knowledge, art, and language, are, to employ a Leibnizian term, “living mirrors” (miroirs vivants de l’univers). They are no mere passive receivers and recorders; rather, they are acts of spirit. Each one of these original acts builds for us a particular and new outline, a determined horizon of objectivity. They do 1. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 129f.]

·122·

336

·123·

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

not simply come from the finished object but lead to it and back up to it; they are constitutive conditions of its possibility. For the object of art, for the aesthetic object, this relationship can immediately be rendered obvious if one compares the modes of configuration and the formative “presentation” in the various arts. In the fine arts—in painting, sculpture, architecture—configuration is not based upon a determined image, upon a finished template of intuitional space into which it drags particular objects. None of them simply comes across space as already given before it; rather, they must obtain it, and each of them obtains it in its own and specifically characteristic way. They are not mere transformations and tracings of an established and objectively present space but are paths to space. They do not mechanically copy the existing “separateness” of things; rather, they are essential organs of the configuration of space. The problem of “form” in fine arts, as Adolf Hildebrand has shown in his seminal discussion, can only be solved if we return to these basic organic powers of their spatial configuration. And this basic relationship has also been clarified and guaranteed for language ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt, in close connection to Kant, saw the problem of a critical philosophy of language and sketched out its first systematic program. Humboldt pointed out that the widely accepted idea that different languages only designate the same mass of objectively given objects and concepts was “truly disastrous for the study of language.”2 Instead, he called for an understanding and analysis of individual languages by which it became obvious how each one of them is involved in the formation of objective representation and how each proceeded in this formation. He regarded the difference between languages not as a difference between sounds and signs but as a difference in worldviews. However, “in the formation and in the use of language, the entire mode of subjective perception of objects necessarily merges. For the word is generated out of this perception and is not an imprint derived from the object in itself but the image that it produces in the soul.”3 2. [Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI, 119.] 3. [Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VII, 59f.]

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

337

2 With his attempt to trace the forms of language back to certain basic forms and content of the psyche, Humboldt also placed a new task before psychology. If we consider the general development of psychology in the past century, however, we find that it has only reluctantly and to a certain extent taken up this task. However, if psychology has not remained with the problems of individual psychology, it has advanced to questions of folk psychology—and for a while it was also believed to have placed the investigation of language on a firm and secure foundation in the principles and preparations brought together for this new discipline. And yet, every treatment of language that was undertaken within the framework of folk psychology exhibited a methodological flaw and common limitation. The analysis of language essentially rests here on the two basic concepts that have been decisive and guiding for all nineteenth-century psychology. For Lazarus and Steinthal, the founders of folk psychology, the Herbartian concept of apperception is central; it appears as the actual key with which the world of linguistic phenomena must be opened. So, too, with Wundt, who, in my view, goes beyond this first approach, such an important and central problem as that of linguistic signification and the mutation of linguistic signification remains completely enclosed and captive within the customary sphere of the psychology of association. Only gradually does the insight become generally accepted within modern psychology that these two basic concepts—Herbartian apperception as well as Wundtian association—were neither able to grasp nor able to provide an adequate expression of the nature [Wesen] of that real “synthesis” that lies in every original speech act. Thus, folk psychology remained essentially an elementary psychology; it, too, strove for that old ideal of knowledge—the encheiresis naturae [manipulation of nature] that believed to have more firmly and certainly in hand the parts of a whole the more it had loosened the “spiritual bond”4 between them. Today, psychology has almost completely renounced this ideal; it no longer believes itself able to understand psychic formations [Gebilden] and totalities [Ganzheiten] by breaking them up into their elements. This negative insight is, how4. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Eine Tragödie, part I, in Werke (Weimar, 1887–1919), 91.]

·124·

338 ·125·

·126·

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F THE WO R LD

ever, still a long way from the positive mastering of the problem of language. For a new methodological difficulty arises here. Humboldt said that the true definition of language could only ever be a genetic one. In order to understand language, we must not remain with its formations [Gebilden] but must investigate the inner law of forming [Bilden]. We are not allowed to view them as something finished and produced but must consider them as a production, as an eternally repetitive work of the spirit. How can this work become tangible for us? How can we reach out from the product of language to the process of language? The known and current methods of psychology seem to fail before this task. Neither experimentation nor introspection gives us a secure approach, for both already move in a linguistically formed world; both already presuppose language, as it were, to observe and describe it in its status nascens [birth state]. It is the bond of language that joins the experimenter with the experimental subject, bringing about understanding between them. And all introspection, all knowledge [Wissen] of our own inner states, is much more conditioned and mediated by language than we are normally aware of. Not only is thought, as Plato said, a “conversation of the soul with itself,”5 this solidarity and insoluble fusion with language goes back just to the layer of perception and intuition, to the depths of feeling. With Hönigswald, modern psychology of thought has declared its “adherence of thought to the word” as its guiding principle.6 How, then, has language itself been psychologically grasped, when it is the medium in which all psychological grasping and understanding move? Here, only an indirect path can lead to the goal; here, only a regressive conclusion can be sought from the formed to the principle of forming, from the forma formata to the forma formans. If it succeeds in exhibiting a province of the psychological, which is linked specifically to language and which is essentially dependent upon it, then perhaps evidence of the becoming and growth of language can be gained from its structure; perhaps one would, in some way, be able to read from its development the laws of formation and configuration to which it is subjected.

5. [Plato, Theaetetus 189 E–190 A; Sophist 264 A.] 6. [Richard Hönigswald, Die Grundlagen der Denkpsychologie. Studien und Analysen (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1925), 28 and 43.]

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

339

3 The thesis that I would like to defend here, which, admittedly, with the limited time available to me I can only set out and not clarify and substantiate, indicates that such a province does, in fact, exist, so long as an essential and necessary interconnection between the basic function of language and the function of objective representing is assumed. “Objective” representing, as I will attempt to formulate, is not the beginning that the process of the formation of language assumes but the goal to which this process leads; it is not its terminus a quo but its terminus ad quem. Language does not enter into a world of finished objective intuition only in order to add to the given and clearly distinguished and delimited individual objects their “names” as pure external and arbitrary signs; rather, it is itself the means of the formation of objects. Indeed, in a certain sense, it is the means, the most important and the most perfect instrument for the production and the construction of a pure “world of objects.” The complete justification of this statement in a philosophy of language would exceed the framework of these considerations.7 I must content myself with explaining by way of a single pregnant example from the problems of psychology. Today, psychology has also clearly grasped and precisely worked out the problematic of representing objects. It no longer sees in it a fact from which psychological investigation can begin as from something given and “self-evident,” but has increasingly recognized it as a task of psychological analysis. Modern developmental psychology has placed beyond doubt that not all conscious life follows the paths of objective apprehension and objective interpretation. In particular, the animal’s world of representation does not know the formation of impressions into “objective” representations and the principle of the constants and identity of objects that is decisive and crucial for our apprehension of reality. In order to characterize this world of representation, following Heinz Werner, we may speak of a way that is “diffuse” with the apprehension of animals.8 7. See my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, “Language,” and vol. III, “Phenomenology of Knowledge” (Berlin, 1923 and 1929) [(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966 and 1957)]. 8. Heinz Werner, Einleitung in die Entwicklungspsychologie (Leipzig: H. Fikentscher, 1926), 73.

·127·

340

·128·

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

We may also describe, with Hans Volkelt, an embodiment of “complex qualities.”9 There always emerges a sharper borderline that separates it from the region of specific human intuition. Difficult as it may be to determine immediately the details of this border, its consistence is still guaranteed by everything we are able to indirectly deduce about the form of animal life. In this respect, it has been the seminal research of Uexküll, above all, that has thrown light onto the opposition between the human and animal worlds of representation. From his research we know that every living creature possesses its own “environment” [Umwelt] and “inner world” [Innenwelt], that it is placed in its own specifically appropriate living space. To be in this space and to effectively act in it, however, is in no way synonymous with the intuition of this space. The animal may live in this space; however, it is not able to place it objectively over against itself, let alone to imagine it as an integrated whole of a certain structure. The animal space remains at the level of a space of action [Aktion] and effect; it does not rise to the space of representation and presentation. The characteristic closedness and confinement of the animal world result from this. Uexküll once said that lower animals in particular rest as secure in their environment as the child in his cradle. “The stimulus of the environment forms . . . a solid partition that encloses the animal like the walls of a self-constructed home, holding back the whole foreign world from it.”10 This protective wall that surrounds the animal is, however, simultaneously the prison in which it remains forever imprisoned. Breaking through the walls and escaping from the prison is achieved only from a level of life in which it no longer remains in the simple sphere of effective action, of “action” and “reaction,” but rather in one in which it turns into the form of presentation and, with this, into the primary form of knowledge [Wissen]. The entire horizon of life now changes in a single blow. The simple space of action [Handlung] becomes the space of the eye; the sphere of action [Aktion] becomes the sphere of vision. And it is precisely in this transition, in this ȝİIJȐȕĮıȚȢİ‫ݧ‬ȢܿȜȜȠȖȑȞȠȢ [transformation into a wholly other genus], that language is essentially involved. There seems to 9. Hans Volkelt, Über die Vorstellungen der Tiere. Arbeiten zur Entwicklungspsychologie, ed. Feliz Krueger, I/2 (Leipzig and Berlin: W. Engelmann, 1914). 10. [ Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: J. Springer 1909), 212.]

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

341

be a phase of development of language in which we can still immediately grasp this breakthrough, grasping it, so to speak, with our hands. All the observers and interpreters of the language of children have insisted on this point; they have emphasized the crucial “revolution in thought” that begins for children at the moment in which the linguistic consciousness of symbols first awakens for them. Stern describes this awakening: “The child not only needs the words as symbols but notices that the words are symbols and is incessantly in search after them. He has made one of the most important discoveries of his whole life, namely, a complex of sounds constantly belongs to every object, which symbolize it and which serve in communication and naming it, i.e., every thing has a name.”11 An almost unquenchable drive to know the names of things awakens in the child, a genuine “hunger for names” that expresses itself in continuous questions. As one researcher has emphasized, it virtually creates in the child a mania for naming. It seems to me, however, that this urge is neither sufficiently nor altogether accurately described psychologically, if we see in it merely a type of intellectual curiosity. The child’s thirst for knowledge is not for names as such but is directed toward the name that he now needs. He needs it for nothing other than the obtaining and fixing of certain objective representations. Some psychologists have indicated, from an intellectual perspective, that the stage of language before which we find ourselves here signifies as enormous a step forward as did learning to walk in the domain of bodily development. For, just as the walking child no longer needs to wait for the things of the external world to come to him, so too does the questioning child possesses an entirely new means to intervene independently in the world, constructing it by himself. If we pursue this analogy further, we can say that name and knowledge [Wissen] play the same role for the child as does the hand or cane that directs or leads those who walk by following it. Names in hand, the child gropes for the representation of objects. For it is not the case that this representation is somehow fixed for the child. It must first be won and secured;12 11. [Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache (Leipzig: Barth, 1928), 190.] 12. Concerning the fact that the representation of the substantial identity of an object is not a simple process but one of the most difficult to acquire in the life of the representation of the child, see, above all, the article by Karl Bühler, Kindheit und Jugend. Genese des Sprechens (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1931), chapters 1, 8, and 9.

·129·

342

·130·

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

and the name is indispensable for this securing. It seems to me characteristic that with children the form of inquiry about a name, as far as I can see, is never such that what is asked is what a thing is “called” but what a thing “is.” The interest of the child is not fixed on the act of designating, which he does not know as an isolated act as such. Typically, even for primitive people, there still exists no real separation for their consciousness between the “word” and the “thing” [Sache]; rather, the word is an objective consistence of the thing, constituting its proper being [Wesen]. The child, thus, asks about the name in order to be able to take possession of the object. A complete “concrescence” between the thing and the name takes place; they grow together and into one another. The psychological process of this concrescence cannot be directly observed; however, we can render it understandable if we keep in mind the goal toward which all objective representation strives and is directed. This goal is nothing other than the spiritual formation of unity. “When we say we know the object,” says Kant, “we have brought about a synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition.”13 Language is essentially involved in this bringing about of the synthetic unity. The skeptical critique of language—from the days of the Greek Sophists to Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language14—has always considered it an essential imperfection of language when it is forced to designate a wealth of different impressions or representations with one name. The immense richness of reality, its radical individuality, its concreteness and vitality are lost with this single name; and in its place there emerges the abstract and empty schema of words. However, what is regarded here as the basic defect of language and what is deplored as its poverty is, rather, when seen more closely, its essential virtue. For only in this way can it achieve a new intellectual “synopsis” of the manifold, that ıȣȞȠȡߢȞİ‫ݧ‬Ȣ‫ݐ‬Ȟ [that all-together-in], which, according to Plato, is the condition for ideas [Ideen] to show themselves.15 A house seen anew from the front, from the back, from the side, an object viewed from different locations and under different lighting are without doubt entirely different intuitional lived-experiences. However, in each of these 13. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 105.] 14. [See Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, vol. 3, 1901.] 15. [See Plato, Phaedrus 265 D; Laws 965 B.]

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

343

lived-experiences lodged within the development of language, in the learning of the “name,” a sign is assigned and attributed to each impression, simultaneously entering into a new bond and relationship with one another. The unity of the name serves as a point of crystallization for the manifold of representations: in which the in-themselves heterogeneous phenomena become homogeneous and similar, in that they relate to a common center. And by virtue of this relation they are for the first time now interpreted as the appearances and “adumbrations” of one and the same “object.” Wherever the force of the “function of naming” weakens as a result of pathological disturbances, the bond of the objective unity immediately appears to loosen itself again. Isolation emerges in this unity; in place of categorical order and closeness there emerges a colorful but nonrelational fullness. Goldstein and Gelb have described a case of amnesia for the names of colors in which this relationship clearly comes to light. The patient, who had lost the use of the general names of colors, such as red, yellow, etc., lived and “saw” the world of colors like any other healthy person. He sharply grasped and distinguished each individual nuance; however, although he did not order all these nuances according to certain basic tones, he understood them as “associated.” In fact, his world of colors was, in a certain sense, a more extensive, concrete, or, as Goldstein and Gelb describe it, a more “colorful” world. This colorfulness, however, was won at the cost of its lack of a uniform grouping and organizing. If I am not mistaken, this individual case contains within it a general theory. Head, too, has emphasized in his work on aphasia that, in certain cases of aphasia in which language is not removed but is in some respect decreased, the world of representation and intuition of the patient shows a characteristic alteration. These patients prefer “pictorial” expressions over general and abstract designations; they “draw” the objects rather than simply “designate” them. In all this, the inner affinity that exists between a determined form and basic direction of linguistic behavior and a certain form of objective apprehension shows itself; the modification of one of the elements infers a modification of the other.16

16. See my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. II, 213.

·131·

344

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

4.1

·132·

With the last consideration, we have already entered into the domain that is, besides biology and developmental psychology, of crucial significance for the empirical clarification and solution of our basic question. I cannot enter further into this domain, into the basic facts of speech pathology, and as these facts will be extensively developed in the course of our conference by leading experts, I have even less need to do so. Thus, only one motive of this sphere of problems will be briefly emphasized. Jackson, a leader in the domain of aphasia research, has already remarked that in order to gain a clear picture into the development of aphasia, it is not enough to describe case by case the vocabulary of the patient. It is not the vocabulary as such but the way in which it is employed that is decisive. Jackson saw the essential nature of aphasia not as the failure of an individual word or class of words but as the inability to use the word as the meaning that receives its original propositional value.17 In the case of aphasia, the loss of language was for him synonymous not with the loss of word formation but with the loss or decrease in the ability to form predicative sentences, that is, essentially those sentences that have as objects a being, a property, or self-relatedness. Once again, we find the relation that exists between the linguistic form of “proposition” and the logical-objective direction of our thinking in the wider sense. Thinking achieves its highest objective determination only with the help of language; only by virtue of language is it able to arrive at the expression of pure circumstances. The predicative, that is, the propositional “sentence,” becomes the vehicle for that manner and mode of objective positing in which a genuinely objective worldview first originates. Where language fails, there too our objective intuition sinks to another level. The immediate use of objects [Objekte] can nevertheless be entirely undamaged or maintained in the wider sense, and yet it no longer succeeds in grasping the objects [Objekte] in their pure “being” [Sein] and determining their “being-a-certain-way” [So-Sein]. They are correctly handled, but they are neither successfully rendered “intelligible” beyond this handling, nor moved into the distance, nor held out as something “opposite” in this distance. However, once again, this emerges most clearly in the represen17. [English translation of Satzwert provided by Cassirer in original.]

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

345

tation of space. There are aphasic patients who are not essentially impaired in their spatial orientation, who can not only find their way around in their surroundings but can also assign any object [Objekt] its particular and accustomed “place,” who, in this situation, even learn to work with something particular that is normally well beyond their ability. And, with closer observation, there also appears in such patients a characteristic change and defect in their intuition of space. For the space of these patients remains a mere space of action [Aktion] and behavior; it does not rise to pure image-space or presentation-space. Here, certainly, one essentially maneuvers correctly “in” space; however, the possibility of making “the” space present in its totality [Gesamtheit] or in the coincidence of its individual parts is lacking. Thus, it is not rare that such patients return from the hospital to their home by way of an often very complex path but lack the ability to describe their route or to indicate it on a map. In the same manner, they are never mistaken in their daily use of objects, or about their correct place, about the way, for example, that the table, the chair, and the bed “stand together” in their room; however, they are not able to indicate or record this togetherness in a simple sketch. From a new perspective, it appears that a change in linguistic capability always contains in itself a definite alteration in the “worldview” as a whole. The objectivity is given, as it were, another “look.” It turns, to use Heidegger’s term for the sake of brevity, from the sphere of the “objectively present” [Vorhandenheit] to the dimension of the merely “at hand” [Zuhandenheit]. This proves, among other things, that the patient no longer names the object according to its “thing-name” but in its place employs designations taken from the use of things; the patient does not find the word “knife” but correctly indicates that the object [Objekt] about whose name he has been asked is intended “to cut.” It seems to me that a uniform problem for psychology is given in all of this. The considerations that I have presented to you do not claim to provide a solution to this problem; they should only sharply posit the question and determine its general direction. I myself am aware that what the solution involves can never be discovered by the philosophy of language alone, even on the basis of pure speculative considerations. More than elsewhere, the philosophy of language needs, at this point, the help and leadership of the empirical sciences of language. Only through the collective work of linguistics, comparative languages, the history of language, biology, psychology, and

·133·

·134·

346

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

psychopathology may we hope to deal progressively with the task that is present before us here. My explanations today do not have the purpose of advocating a certain philosophical thesis about languages. I only wanted to raise one question, recruiting you as representatives of scientific psychology in order to collaborate on this question. 4.2

·135·

This force inherent in language can also be followed in another basic direction, toward reification, toward “objective” determination and detachment. It serves not only the construction of the pure theoretical worldview; it also, practically and ethically, proves itself no less forceful in the configuration of the world of volition. As soon as the feeling and wanting I enters into the magical circle of language, it is transformed. We observe here the same relationship: language not only serves as a secondary function in the expression and communication of feeling and stirrings of the will but is one of the essential functions by virtue of which the life of feeling and the will are configured, and by virtue of which they first rise to a specifically human form. Like the world of “representation,” the world of willing is in no uncertain terms a work [Werk] of language. As with the exchange of thoughts, language not only constitutes the medium in which every exchange of feeling and the will takes place but also actively and constructively participates in the formation of the consciousness of will. This consciousness first obtains its fulfillment and its specific reality through the particular “retuning” [Umstimmung] that begins with the use of language. The first phonetic expressions still stand completely under the sign of affectivity. They are evoked by an effect that the organism undergoes from some external stimulus and they immediately express the turmoil into which they are placed by this stimulus. The affect discharges itself into the scream, into the sound of pain or joy; however, in that it is still externally compelled, it initially remains unaltered in its very nature [Wesen]. The inner excitement, violent and eruptive, breaks a pathway through to the outside, but it finds in this penetrating-to-the-outside only its simple continuation, without experiencing at the same time a transfiguration and transformation. This seems to change, however, just at the moment when language raises them up to their highest spiritual form, when it passes from the stage of simple “mani-

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

347

festation” to the stage of “proposition,” the stage of genuine “presentation.”18 For the affect that is linguistically seized and presented is already no longer that which it was initially; it has experienced in the medium of presentation a metamorphosis and metempsychosis. Wilhelm von Humboldt emphasizes: Subjective activity forms an object in thought. For no configuration of representation of any sort can be treated as a simple receptive looking at an already presently available object. The activity of the senses must synthetically combine with the inner action of the spirit, and from this combination the representation breaks free, it becomes over and against the subjective force an object [Objekt] and perceived as such anew, turning back to its source. Language is, however, indispensable for this. For spiritual striving breaks through making its path through the lips in speech, its product returns to the ear of the subject. The representation is transferred to actual objectivity, without being deprived of subjectivity. This language alone can do. Without this transposition into an objectivity that returns to the subject, a transposition in which language plays a role and which always happens implicitly, the formation of the concept, and, hence, all true thinking, is impossible.19 Humboldt speaks here only of the signification of language for the production and formation of thought, for the theoretical activity of spirit understood in the narrow sense. However, the principle that he sets up here applies in the same sense for practical self-consciousness, for every I that attests and externalizes itself in willing and action. This selfconsciousness is also not something readily present from the beginning but must be spiritually seized and brought to the fore. In this bringing forth, the “transfer into an objectivity returning to the subject,” carried 18. The difference between “communication” in speech and speech “presentation” has been defined with particular clarity in the psychology literature. In particular, see Karl Bühler, “Kritische Musterung der neueren Theorien des Satzes,” in Indogerman. Jahrbuch, vol. VI, 1919. 19. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (Einleitung zum KawiWerk), in Werke, vol. VII, 55.

·136·

348

·137·

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

out by language, is indispensable. The I only becomes a focal point when it succeeds in grasping itself in the mirror of its own utterance. For every utterance of the mere state of being of the I is now accompanied by a new way of hearing [Hören], a certain manner of becoming aware of these utterances and of “listening” [Horchen]. And this mode of hearing [Hören] leads gradually to a form of “obedience” [Gehorsam] that is far removed from the mere subjection to, the unconditional sway of affectivity. To the extent that affectivity learns to express itself and to catch sight of itself in this utterance, it loses that immediately compelling, alldominating, and completely overthrowing force that it exercises over the I. In that it “takes note” [besinnen] of itself through linguistic utterance, even this mindfulness [Besinnung] retroacts on the whole of consciousness. There now arises, not only theoretically but also practically, that turn to “reflection” [Reflexion] that Herder, in his work on the “origins of language,” calls the essential and spiritually decisive moment in every formation of language.20 The linguistic-phonetic configuration of affects resists its premature, pure motor eruption, and the limitless and inhibitionless devotion to it.21 The development of language progressively brings this, its fundamental achievement, to light. All observers of the language of children agree that the first linguistic utterances of children are still far removed from this sort of “objective” presentation. They name no “objects” and they indicate no relation between them, no exis20. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772. 21. I will not venture to say how far, genetically speaking, we can follow and demonstrate this transformation and “change of mood” that emotion undergoes by language. The presentation of the psychology of children known to me contains only sparse statements about this. I would allow myself, therefore, to mention one of my own observations concerning the matter that is important for me here. It concerns a child who tended to be violently frightened at the sight of a strange face. The assurance by adults that he should have “no fear” of a stranger remained almost always without effect. The child burst out crying. This changed when the child, shortly after his second year, began to speak independently. Each time he would see a stranger he would repeat to himself the words “no fear.” And, in this way, he was able to master the situation. The pronunciation of these words clearly functioned as a kind of “consolation” by which the child was able to defend himself from immediate eruption of emotion and to calm himself down after a few moments.

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

349

tence of the thing and no being-a-certain-way of the state of affairs. Rather, they move entirely in the circle of the proper state of being of the I, which they penetrate in some way from the outside through the sound that reveals them. The very gradual progress of the “volitional” to “establishing” can be followed everywhere here. “The triggering element that generally pushes the first words over the threshold of language,” remarks, for example, Stern, “is their demonstrative affectivity. This is connected to the total psychological constitution of the child in which pleasure and displeasure, striving and opposing despotically rule so that there is no place left for an objective comportment of cool ascertaining and naming. The child is in the widest sense egocentric.”22 Affect and immediate need are, therefore, the first and most important impulses for articulation [Lautbildung] per se, and for a long time the development of the latter depends largely on these primary forces. The first differentiation of sound goes hand in hand with the progressive development and differentiation of drives and needs. However, to the extent that “actual” language awakens in children, that the characteristic “symbol consciousness” starts to open up in them, the covering of bare affect begins to fall away. Its absolute despotic rule is now broken. It can no longer prevail in an unlimited way; rather, ever more clearly and consciously, certain antagonistic intellectual forces now appear on the scene. As the philosophy of language has oriented itself increasingly toward thought alone, to the structure of the theoretical world of ideas, it has up to now only partially been able to achieve the clarification of these states of affairs. It is, however, all too familiar to us in another formulation, namely, in the shaping it has experienced in the history of ethics. Since the days of Greek ethics, the subordination of affect under the law and commandment of “logos” has, in diverse twists and with differing rationales, been proclaimed as an essentially philosophical claim, as the true ethical imperative. The first thinkers who defended this demand were clearly aware of the proper signification of the origins of logos and its inner interconnection with the world of language. Against the violent power of the affect as mere ʌȐșȘ [affection], they invoked the activity of “ratio,” 22. Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache, 181. See William Stern, Psychologie der frühen Kindheit (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1923), 111ff., 303ff.

·138·

350

·139·

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F THE WO R LD

which embodied reason in language. This violent power is necessarily limited by the fact that affect is obliged to express itself and to be subordinated to the jurisdiction of language. This necessity of self-expression, of ȜȩȖȠȞįȚįȩȞĮȚ [to justify or give an account], forms outright the fundamental principle that Socrates discovered for ethics and that he communicated to Plato. The process of Socratic “induction” and Socratic “maieutic” (i.e., midwifery) is nothing else than the method by which consciousness is “brought to speak, being assured of this” by the power that resides in its own inviolable spontaneity. Thus, the human being acquires with language not only a new power over things, over objective reality, but also a new power over himself. The initial mastery of things is, for the child, almost completely tied to the force of words and is shown by them. Only by virtue of words is he able to procure the assistance and help upon which he is dependent in almost all of his activities. However, the new function of mediation, of which he becomes aware here and which he learns to use more and more independently, now turns back on him. The medium of mastering things simultaneously becomes the medium of self-mastery and the genuine thought-oriented organ for it. In both cases, consciousness wins true mastery over being in a twofold, genuinely dialectical process. It truly appropriates being for itself—“outer” as well as “inner”—only when it succeeds in removing it from itself, in moving it to the proper “distance” from itself. Language is always essentially involved in the obtainment of this new “perspective.” It can no longer simply grasp and seize objects; it gains power over them only through the act of symbolic designation, which is a pure act of spiritual mediation. To the drive, the desire, the affect that goes directly to things, language always opposes another direction, which is simultaneously provided with the opposite sign. Attraction and repulsion always coexist there, remaining in a sort of ideal equilibrium; the need to attract things directly to the self, simply enclosing them in the sphere of the I, is opposed here by another need, namely, to distance them from the I in order to place them before the I, and in this very act of setting out make them “present” and objective. The force of “attraction” is balanced by the force of “abstraction”: the turn toward the thing that is accomplished in language is also a turning away from them. The interaction and concrete conjugation of these two processes condition and

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

351

render possible this sort of spiritual appropriation of the world, which is the essential and characteristic trait of language.23 5 Alongside the world of “external” objects and the world of one’s own I, however, is the social world, which is first actually opened up by language and progressively conquered by it. The first step that the I takes on its way to objectivity leads it not into a world of objects or mere “things” [Dinge]; rather, earlier than this world of things, than the world of the “it,” there emerges in its field of vision the “you.” The direction of the “you” is primary and original, proving itself to be so strong and overpowering that for a long time all consciousness of mere “things” [Sachen] must be dressed in the form of the “you” in order to achieve appearance or withdrawal as such. This type of life-with [Mit-Lebens] and life-withone-another [Mit-einander-Lebens] is first properly rendered possible and created by language. It is the first dawn of every communal consciousness in general—and this consciousness appears bathed in its light, even in its highest and finest configurations. Wilhelm von Humboldt grasped this relationship with great clarity and depth in his philosophy of language. He writes: In everything that moves the human heart and especially in language, there is not only a strong aspiration toward unity and universality but also an assumption, in fact, a conviction that the human race despite all divisions and all differences, is in its original essence and final determination one and indivisible. . . . Individuality sep23. This meaning of linguistic “abstraction” has been emphasized by Delacroix. See Le langage et la pensée, 76: “Pour avoir vraiment un langage, il faut s’abstraire de ses réactions affective, traiter ses propres états comme des choses et établir entre eux des relations, c’est-à-dire les penser et établir entre eux et certains mouvements un rapport régulier de correspondance.” See also ibid., 102, 280: “To truly have a language, it is necessary to abstract oneself from emotional reactions, treating its authentic states like things and establishing relations between them, that is, thinking about them and establishing between them and certain moments a regular relation of correspondence.”

·140·

352

·141·

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F THE WO R LD

arates, however in such a miraculous way that it awakens by this separation the feeling of unity, even appearing to be a means of establishing this unity in the idea. . . . For in the deep inner struggle for unity and universality the human being wants to overcome the separating barrier of his individuality but must, however, because he is like the giant who possesses his strength only from contact with mother earth, increase his individuality, in which he alone possesses his strength, in this higher struggle. He makes, therefore, further progress in an essentially impossible quest. It is here that language comes to his aid in a truly miraculous way in that it connects at the same time that it isolates and encloses in the cover of individual expression the possibility of universal intelligibility. . . . The same striving that directs the inner life of man toward unity also seeks to connect externally his whole race. . . . Where, when, and how the individual lives is a disconnected fragment of his whole race, and language proves and supports this interconnection that dominates the destiny of the individual and the history of the world.24 In fact, all language acquisition, even the simplest act of “learning” a language is a clear example of this fact. For language is never simply transferred as a finished possession; rather, its actual acquisition must always count on all the forces of the individual. Human language is never acquired through simple “imitation”; rather, in each individual instance it must be obtained anew and configured anew. There is quite simply no “language of children.” Rather, every child speaks his language, which he obstinately and stubbornly hangs onto for a long time. At the same time, however, in this apparent stubbornness [Eigen-Sinn] the meaning of the whole lives and works. The egocentric activity of speaking, as a mere self-utterance, increasingly gives way to the will to communicative understanding, and with this to the will to universality. The more the child progresses in his linguistic development, the more there awakens and strengthens in him the awareness that there is a common general standard, an objectively correct usage. It appears that the consciousness 24. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues (handwritten manuscript), in Werke, vol. VI, 1, 125f.

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

353

of this correctness, which prevails in the norm of language, is, for the awakening of spiritual life, one of the most important and earliest examples of the sense of the norm in general. It is in the linguistic bond, in the devotion to the general meaning of words, that the child experiences perhaps the best and most immediate of the basic character of the social bond, the normative as such. It weaves and works itself constantly into the web of language. Yet, it is not able to spin this web simply out of itself but has to rely on the steady and continuous work of the whole. The work of language arises in this uniform collaboration of all and, at the same time, turns it into the strongest bond between all who collectively create it and acquire it, with and for one another. The ever-strongergrowing tendency of children to ask the names of things illuminates this state of affairs. For the question that needs, demands, and awaits an answer is perhaps the finest form of “social” interconnection, not only a practical but also an intellectual and psychological interconnection. Unlike pure emotional utterances, the urge for physical help is not expressed in such questions; rather, there is an appeal for spiritual help. In the construction of human consciousness there is perhaps no greater and no more important step than the one that moves from the enunciation of a cry or a sound of rage to the enunciation of the question. For, here, the spell of pure physical necessity is broken and the ground for the freedom of spirit is prepared. In the question, for the first time, a desire that is directed not toward the possession of an object but toward the acquisition of an insight is expressed. The question is the beginning of all authentic and pure “desire for knowledge.” With the question of names, the child first enters into this world, and with the why-question, which begins later with such characteristic sharpness and determination, he has already reached one of his intellectual high points. For now, although the content of the knowable is not given to him, its pure form is rendered accessible. In fact, the questions “what is” (IJȓ‫݋‬ıIJȚ) and “why” establish the entire circumference of knowledge in a temporary view and overview. It limits the horizon of what can be known, what is worthy of being questioned, and what can be asked. And it seems to me that a reconfiguration and a specific transformation in form of social consciousness are established in both developments. Question and answer forge another bond between individuals as command and prohibition, consent or prohibition. From the first linguistic sounds that the child brings forth,

·142·

354 ·143·

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

it can be said that they merely serve the announcement of “necessity and desire,” that language is here exclusively “a means of contact for the satisfaction of needs.”25 The new reference of the question, however, simultaneously produces a new reference for community; it forms the first proper spiritual contact in which the members of the community encounter one another. Based on pure psychological observation, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that to the same degree that language gains objective character, all doing inversely becomes animated by social references. “The subjective animation of doing is awoken at the same time as the linguistic conquest of the object world.”26 As profound as this relationship of reciprocity is, there also emerges out of it a communal consciousness, which in its earliest and simplest configurations appears bound to this collaboration of language. Wherever this collaboration breaks down, wherever an individual stands outside the community of language, he also falls outside the social community in general. Whoever speaks a foreign language appears quite simply as the foreigner, the “barbarian” who exists by no inner human moral bond. Even the human being of a higher spiritual culture immediately turns into a “barbarian” as soon as he can no longer make himself clearly understood linguistically within the community. As Ovid expressed it in “Tristia ex Ponto”: “barbarus hic ego sum quia non intelligor ulli” [“Here I am a barbarian since I am not understood by anyone”]. The history of humanity teaches what great effort and what spiritual-moral force was required to grasp the idea [Idee] of a translinguistic community, a humanitas that is not held together and constituted by a particular language. The idea [Idee] of this “humanity” leads beyond language; however, language forms one of the indispensable points of passage for it, a necessary stage on the way to it. 6

·144·

We must still look at one last element in order to completely present the signification of language for the construction of consciousness. It is involved not only in the construction of the world of objects [Objekte], the world of perception and of objective intuition, but is also indispensable 25. See Charlotte Bühler, Kindheit und Jugend, 89. 26. Ibid., 147.

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

355

for the construction of the world of pure fantasy. The performance of both is equally important because all the earlier stages of consciousness are characterized by this, in that the sharp divide between “fantasy” and “reality,” “image” and “thing” [Sache], the “visualized” and the “empirically real,” still has not taken place. All these oppositions still find themselves in a state of indifference; they have not yet carried out the separation and determination between them, as will be the case later in analytic thought, thereby asserting themselves by virtue of this inner determination.27 The world of childlike play also absolutely stands, at least in its beginning, under the sign of this indifference. The interpretation of childlike “games of illusion” is, so far as I can see, still very controversial in current child psychology; a general consensus as to the actual “meaning” of this play does not yet seem to have been reached. It has been asked whether a real illusion dominates this play. Does the child believe in the reality of the events that unfold before him in play or is play a mere drama, the activity of the child being limited essentially to assigning to persons and things in this drama their roles?28 The difficulty of arriving at a clear answer to this problem seems to me to be essentially based on the fact that posing the question suffers from a lacuna. Psychology encounters here one of those problems before which it is all too easily subjected to methodological illusion; it is in danger of committing that self-deception that William James has simply called the “psychologist’s fallacy.”29 “The great snare of the psychologist”—he wrote—“is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ par excellence. . . . Another variety of the psychologist’s fallacy is the assumption that the mental state studied must be conscious of itself as the psychologist is conscious of it.”30 Here, it seems to me, James sharply and poignantly describes the error into which observational and descriptive psychologists fall as soon as they pose the question concerning the child’s playing: to what extent 27. For more details, see my Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. II, 35. 28. Compare on this question the discussion between William Stern, Psychologie der frühen Kindheit, chapter XX, paragraph 3, “Illusion und Illusionseinsicht,” 3rd ed., 217ff., and Karl Bühler, Die geistige Entwicklung des Kindes, 2nd ed., 208f. 29. [English quoted by Cassirer in the original.] 30. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. I (London, 1901), 196f. [Citation given in English by Cassirer.]

·145·

356

·146·

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

does he himself “take it seriously?” How much is really serious for the child in his anthropomorphism, how much is merely play? The phenomenon of play can give no unambiguous answer to this question, because the entire distinction that is introduced, seen from the perspective of psychological analysis, is originally foreign to it. And the reason for this strangeness or foreignness, for this characteristic fusion or “concrescence” between the “image” and the “thing” [Sache], between “reality” and “semblance,” lies equally in linguistic fantasy and in mythical fantasy, in which one repeatedly discovers the source and basis of the anthropomorphism of children. As in all the basic configurations of “primitive” spiritual consciousness, there, too, language and myth work together in harmony; only in their coexistence and constant interaction are they able to raise these configurations into the light.31 The question as to which of these two functions gives, which receives, which is more primitive or derived, can hardly be raised here. Their mutual being interlinked and being together with one another is the sole thing that can, in principle, be established and empirically pursued. If we turn to the structure and genesis of the child’s consciousness, we also discover in it the twofold determination and the two faces of language and myth. For the child has the world as one that is self-identical and intelligible to him only insofar as he is constantly linguistically interconnected to it. All being appears to the child in a certain sense as animated because all being somehow “is in speech,” because all being linguistically opens itself up to him and answers his question. In this communicative exchange conditioned by language, each relationship is linked for the child not only to the specific human world but also to the world of objects. For, in a certain sense, everything that surrounds the child “speaks to” [spricht an] him. Things and events [Ereignisse], as the German language expresses it, “lay claim to” [Anspruch] the child; they form with him a linguistic community that signifies for the child a real life-community. From this perspective, one can wager, paradoxically, that the child does not speak with things because he sees them as living; rather, inversely, he sees them as living 31. For more details, see my study “Sprache und Mythos. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternnamen,” Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 6 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1925). [“Language and Myth: A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of the Gods,” included in this volume.]

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

357

because he speaks with them. They are not initially for him simply objects [Objekte] that exert a purely physical influence on him, but the counterpart, the other, the interlocutor in a sort of dialogue. He expects, he demands an answer from them; and in this answer, the first genuine relationship between things and the I establishes itself. The fundamental difference between the mere relation of things and the genuine psychicintellectual relation, the I-you relation, exists in that only the latter is purely reciprocal and purely reversible. The thing and the I remain essentially foreign to one another in all relations they enter; they can constantly exchange effects, but these effects never move to a point where their substantive separation is sublated. “Subject” and “object” [Objekt], the self and the world, stand opposite one another as “I” and “not-I.” Wherever this pure relationship to things has developed, and wherever it has become dominant in human consciousness, there the world has definitely fallen to the rank of mere material stuff. It can be ruled, it can be increasingly subjected to the human will, being governed by it, but, at the same time, by virtue of this form of subordination, it falls silent for the human being; it no longer speaks to him. For there is true speaking only where there is true mutual “cor-responding” [Sich-Entsprechen], where the interlocutors are not only turned toward each other but in this correlation are also equal. It is characteristic that language, even when it forms the designation for purely objective relations, still retains an inkling of this basic relationship from which these relations are derived. The German expression “sich entsprechen” and the French “se répondre” show how much the pure reference to things is originally interpreted and understood as a reference to speech.32 What seems to me to be characteristic and crucial for the play of children is that we are brought into a world in which these two forms of relation have not yet been untangled but are still deeply and insolubly interwoven. Play and language are internally and essentially dependent upon one another. There is hardly a 32. [In both sich entsprechen and se répondre, Cassirer is suggesting that all correspondence is a co-responding. The French se répondre means something like “to correspond by responding to each other.” In the English correspondence, the reader should hear both an agreement or conformity, as in the case of X corresponds to Y, as well as a communication, for example to correspond through the exchange of letters.]

·147·

358

·148·

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

child’s game that we could describe as a “mute game,” that would not at least be penetrated, animated, and supported by the inner activity of language. A capacity to externalize enunciation, however, also appears to form a real, essential element of play, without which it can neither develop nor become completely itself. The activity of language forms not only a concomitant circumstance but also a perpetually renewing impulse of the activity of play. The desire to play is, for the most part, connected to the “desire to fabulate” and cannot be untangled from it. Thus, the fantasy of the child, like the fantasy of the artist, envelops everything it grasps, imprinting it with its seal “in a radiant garment of the fable.” This fable is an image-fable and word-fable all in one. The word is brought forth by the image and the image by the word, so much so that both live in one another; they are interwoven and exist in one another. All anthropomorphism of the child is solidly anchored in this anthropomorphism that is its very condition; it is constantly anchored in language. It is grounded in the feeling that has not yet been shaken off or negated by skeptics, namely, that there is an immediate becoming aware of things because a means of a “communicative intelligibility” is given to us, because we can, in question and answer, enter into direct relation with them. 7 As soon as we fully make present the signification that language possesses for the construction of the world of representation and the world of fantasy, however, a final and crucial objection against it seems to arise. For when anthropogeny proves itself to be a specific means for “becoming human,” then it also seems to remain forever enclosed and imprisoned within the limits of anthropomorphism. It develops out of itself a world of very rich and finely structured symbols, but with this it spins itself ever more deeply into this self-created world. It is never able to advance to the actual being [Wesen] of things; rather, it must establish in their place mere signs. The skeptical critique of language has repeatedly launched itself from this point. This criticism follows in the direction of this one argument. Language is no organ of knowledge, of the true grasping of being [Wesen]; it is, rather, language that constantly enters between humans and reality, incessantly weaving the veil of Maya and envelop-

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

359

ing us more and more in it. If we do not succeed in trapping language, annihilating the illusion produced and constantly nurtured by it, we can never advance to the truth of being, be it “external” or “inner.” For the latter is not so much discovered by language as it is constantly darkened and covered up by it. Wherever we attempt to voice the content of the inner, of personal existence, to grasp it in some way in words, there the ultimate meaning of this existence is already lost and annihilated. This is the continuous curse under which language seems to stand; all of its disclosures are and must be at the same time a veiling. In its quest to make the nature [Wesen] of things conscious and manifest in their essence, it must reconstruct and contort them. This complaint and accusation runs throughout the entire history of spirit; it has been raised from the side of the critique of knowledge as well as from the side of mysticism, from philosophy as well as from poetry: Why can the living spirit not appear to the spirit? When speaks the soul, alas, the soul already no longer speaks.33 It is, however, precisely poetry that can elevate the complaints and charges that are raised here to their greatest certainty and most just import. For the highest synthesis is reached in the language of authentic poets, which gives the purest mediation and reconciliation of oppositions. Here, the particular merges with the universal, the universal with the particular. Every truly poetic formation of language, in particular, every purely lyrical formation of language, appears like a solution of the mystery of all spiritual existence. More precisely, here we find the secret that the most individual can become the expression of something purely universal, can adequately express and completely open up its content. Insofar as the authentic lyrical genius voices a feeling, he gives it to us as something unique and extraordinary, something that has never existed before. We do not receive it as something known, already given earlier; it is truly a new creation; it is in and by itself an immense enrichment of existence. And yet, this novelty signifies for us nothing coming from the outside, nothing that is foreign; rather, it is as if its character 33. [“Warum kann der lebendige Geist dem Geist nicht erscheinen? / Spricht die Seele, so spricht, ach! Schon die Seele nicht mehr.” (Friedrich Schiller, Votivtafeln, 41: Sprache.)]

·149·

360

·150·

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F THE WO R LD

were familiar to us. Inner being experiences no darkening, feeling experiences no inhibition; it is as if only now they are both freed, and in their pure and original figure raised into the light by language. It is perhaps no accident that this specific direction and characteristic originary power of language, which has been almost overlooked or neglected by theory alone, has experienced its clearest presentation and determination in the reflections of poets. In a terse but comprehensive essay, “On the Gradual Production of Thought by Speech,” Heinrich von Kleist has described in a few pages the problem that is before us with great pregnance. He assumes that the achievement of speech in no way limits itself to communicating already existing thoughts, but it is an indispensable means for the formation of thought, for its internal becoming. Language is not a mere transposition of thought into the form of words; rather, it is essentially involved in its original positing. It not only externally reflects the inner movement of thought but is a fundamental motive, one of the most important impulses and moving forces. The idea [Idee] is not before language; it becomes in language and through language. The French say, “l’appétit vient en mangeant” [the appetite grows by eating], and this law of experience remains true if it parodies it and says, “l’idée vient en parlant” [the idea comes by speaking]. . . . That “thunderbolt” of Mirabeau with which he dispatched the masters of ceremonies, who, after the adjournment [Aufhebung] of the last of the royal sessions on June 23rd in which the King had urged a change of standards, returned into the conference hall in which the standards still lingered and asked if they had heard the command of the King? “Yes” answered Mirabeau, “we have heard the command of the King.” I am certain that by this modest beginning he had not yet thought of the bayonet; he then concluded: “Yes, my dear sir,” he repeated, “we have heard him.” One sees that he still has no idea what he wants. “However, what entitles you,” he continued, when suddenly a source of immense ideas arose in him, “to give us orders? We are the representatives of the nation.” That was it, what he needed! “The nation gives commands, it does not receive them” in order to leap to the heights of presumption. “And so as to make myself clear to you,” and only

LA NGUAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

361

now does he find the expression of complete resistance for which his soul is armed and ready, “go tell your King that we will not change our places except by force of bayonets.” “Language,” Kleist concludes from the recollection of this remarkable process, is for the actual speaker, who does not communicate completed thoughts but for whom thoughts flash and arise in the stream of speech, “no fetter, as, for example, a brake on the wheel of spirit; rather, it is like a second wheel that runs parallel to another wheel on the same axis.”34 In this fortunate comparison, a fundamental relationship between thought and language is described. The dynamics of thought and the dynamics of language go hand in hand. Between the two processes there is a continuous exchange of powers. The entire cycle of psychicintellectual events depends upon this exchange, being always set in motion anew. 8 In the preceding remarks, I have only tried to provide a few hints at a thesis without being able or wanting to exhaust the thesis to which they refer. A real development and solution of the problem that has been considered from all sides here will only be possible if all the disciplines that are involved in language research work together more than they have up to now. However, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, speech pathology, each goes its own way; more than ever are we still hindered in our cooperation by conventional and traditional perspectives, by the consideration of external and technical limits. Everyone poses fundamental questions from his own particular perspectives and interests; everyone must labor and rework anew his own approach and nearly all his methodological concepts. I fail neither to recognize nor to deny the particular nature and unique goals of individual directions of research. It seems to me, however, that the philosophical problem of language can be clarified only by interconnecting and steering itself back toward a unified goal. The fundamental sciences of language themselves still fre34. See Heinrich von Kleist, Werke, Ausgabe Erich Schmidt, vol. IV, 76ff

·151·

362

LA NG UAGE A ND THE CO NSTRUCTIO N O F T HE WO R LD

quently suffer today under their own undoing in that each of them, visà-vis their content and methodology, have and speak their own language. The goal of these concise remarks would be achieved if they were inspiring, if they succeeded here in building a bridge, if they were able to promote mutual self-knowledge through encountering and understanding other sciences.

G LO S S A RY

OF

GERMAN TERMS

German-English Abbild absehen Absicht Affekt Ähnlichkeit Akt Aktualität Allgemeinheit Alltäglich Anschauung Anzeichen Arbeit Aufbau aufbauen Auffassung Aufgabe aufheben Aufhebung Augenblick Ausdruck Auseinanderlegung Auseinandersetzung

copy foresee intention affect resemblance, similarly act actuality (Aktualität) generality, universality everyday intuition indicate, indicative sign labor, work construction construct apprehension, view task sublate sublation instant, moment expression interpretative laying out setting apart, confrontation, encounter 363

364

Aussage außer äußeres Äußerung bedeuten Bedeutsamkeit Bedeutung begreifen Begriff Beobachtung Besinnung besondere Bestand Bestandteil bestehen Bestimmung Betrachtung Bewußtsein Beziehung Bild bilden Bildung Bindung Dämon darstellen Darstellung Dasein Differenzierung Ding dinglich Distanzierung Eigenschaft Einbildungskraft Eindruck Einfluß Einfühlung Einheit

GLO SSARY

proposition external, outside external utterance, externalization signify significance signification conceive concept observation mindfulness particular consistence, consistent existence component subsist (be) determination contemplation, consideration consciousness relation image form, constitute formation bond dæmon present, exhibit presentation existence differentiation thing tangible distanciation property (power of ) imagination impression influence empathy unity

GLO SSARY

Einheitlichkeit Einteilung Element Empfindung Energie Entsprechung Entwicklung Ereignis Erfahrung Erfassung Erinnerung erkennen Erkenntnis Erklärung Erlebnis Erscheinung Erzeugung Faktizität Faktum fassen Fassung Figur Form Formung Fügung Ganze Ganzheit Gebilde Gebrauch Gedanke Gefüge Gefühl Gegensätzlichkeit Gegenstand Gegenwart Gehalt Geist

homogeneity classification, division element (Element) sensation, sentiment energy correspondence development event (Ereignis) experience comprehend, grasp recollect know, recognize knowledge, cognition explanation lived-experience appearance, phenomenon production facticity factum seize, grasp seize, grasp figure (Figur) form forming coincidence whole, entirety, totality (Ganze) whole, totality (Ganzheit) formation (Gebilde) use thought, idea structure feeling antithetical opposition object present content spirit, mind

365

366

geistigen Gemeinschaft Gepräge Gesamtheit Geschehen Gesetz Gestalt gestalten Gestaltung Gewalt gewaltsam Gleichheit Glieder Gliederung Grenze Größe Grund grundHandlung hervorbringen Hervortreten hinstellen Hinweis Idee Inbegriff Inhalt Kausalität Kennen körperlich Körper Kraft Leib Leistung Macht Mannigfaltigkeit Mensch Moment

GLO SSARY

spiritual, intellectual community imprint whole, totality (Gesamtheit) event, occurrence law figure configure configuration violent power violent equal, identity member organization boundary, limit magnitude ground, basis basic, fundamental action bringing forth emergence set out, posit indication idea (Idee) quintessence, embodiment content causality know corporeal body, physical body force, power living body achievement power manifold human being element, moment

GLO SSARY

Nachahmung Nachbild Nachbilden Nachbildung Nacheinandersein Nachleben Nivellierung Objekt Objektivität Offenbarung Ordnung Ort Phänomen Prägnanz Quelle Realität Rede Reflexion Reihe Relation Repräsentant Repräsentation Repräsentative Richtung Sache Satz Schau Schein Schema Seele Sein Seiende Selbsttätigkeit setzen Setzung Sinn Sinnbild

imitation after-image reproducing reproduction succession living legacy leveling down object (Objekt) objectivity revelation order place, location phenomenon pregnance source reality (Realität) speech reflection series relation (Relation) representative representation (Repräsentation) representative direction thing (Sache) sentence vision, showing semblance schema soul, psyche being being, entity autonomous posit, set positing meaning, sense emblem

367

368

Sinngebung Sorge So-Sein Sprache Stimmung Struktur Tätigkeit Technik Totalität Tun Umgestaltung UrUrbild Urform Urphänomen Ursache Urteil Verbindung Verdichtung Vergegenwärtigung Verhältnis Verknüpfung Vernunft Verstand Verständlichkeit Verstehen Vielheit Voraussetzung Vorbild Vorhanden Vorhandenheit Vorstellung Wahrnehmung Wechselbestimmung Welt Weltansicht Weltbild

GLO SSARY

bestowing meaning care being-a-certain-way language mood structure activity technology totality do, doing, activity (Tun) reconfiguration originary archetype originary form originary phenomenon cause judgment combination thickening presentification relationship connection reason understanding intelligibility understand multiplicity precondition model available objectively present representation, idea perception reciprocal determination world view of the world worldview

GLO SSARY

Werden Werk Werkzeug Wesen Wiederholung Wirken Wirklich Wirklichkeit Wirksamkeit Wirkung Wissen Wissenschaft Wollen Zuhandenheit Zuordnung zusammenfassen Zusammenfassung Zusammenhang Zustand

becoming work tool essence, nature (Wesen), being (Wesen) repetition effective action actuality reality effectiveness effect knowledge (Wissen) science will at hand correlation concentrating, grasping together combination (Zusammenfassung) interconnection, coherence state, condition English-German

achievement act action activity activity (Tun) actuality (Aktualität) actuality affect after-image antithetical opposition appearance apprehension archetype at hand available basic

Leistung Akt Handlung Tätigkeit Tun Aktualität Wirklich Affekt Nachbild Gegensätzlichkeit Erscheinung Auffassung Urbild Zuhanden Vorhanden Grund-

369

370

GLO SSARY

becoming being being being (Wesen) being-a-certain-way bestowing meaning body bond boundary bringing forth care causality cause classification cognition coherence coincidence combination combination (Zusammenfassung) community component conceive concept condition configuration configure confrontation connection consciousness consideration consistence consistent existence constitute construct construction contemplation content

Werden Sein Seiende Wesen So-Sein Sinngebung Körper Bindung Grenze Hervorbringen Sorge Kausalität Ursache Einteilung Erkenntnis Zusammenhang Fügung Verbindung Zusammenfassung Gemeinschaft Bestandteil begreifen Begriff Zustand Gestaltung gestalten Auseinandersetzung Verknüpfung Bewußtsein Betrachtung Bestand Bestand bilden aufbauen Aufbau Betrachtung Gehalt

GLO SSARY

content copy corporeal correlation correspondence dæmon determination development differentiation direction distanciation division do, doing effect effective action element element emblem embodiment emergence empathy encounter energy entity equal essence event (Ereignis) event everyday exhibit existence experience explanation expression external external externalization

Inhalt Abbild körperlich Zuordnung Entsprechung Dämon Bestimmung Entwicklung Differenzierung Richtung Distanzierung Einteilung Tun Wirkung wirken Moment Element Sinnbild Inbegriff Hervortreten Einfühlung Auseinandersetzung Energie Seiende Gleichheit Wesen Ereignis Geschehen Alltäglich darstellen Dasein Erfahrung Erklärung Ausdruck äußeres außer Äußerung

371

372

facticity factum feeling figure figure (Figur) force foresee form form formation formation (Gebilde) forming fundamental generality grasp grasp grasping together ground homogeneity human being idea (Idee) image imagination ( power of ) imitation impression imprint indicate indication indicative sign influence instant intellectual intelligibility intention interconnection interpretative laying out intuition

GLO SSARY

Faktizität Faktum Gefühl Gestalt Figur Kraft Absehen Form bilden Bildung Gebilde Formung GrundAllgemeinheit Fassung fassen zusammenfassen Grund Einheitlichkeit Mensch Idee Bild Einbildungskraft Nachahmung Eindruck Gepräge Anzeichen Hinweis Anzeichen Einfluß Augenblick geistigen Verständlichkeit Absicht Zusammenhang Auseinanderlegung Anschauung

GLO SSARY

judgment know know knowledge knowledge (Wissen) labor language law leveling down limit lived-experience living body living legacy location magnitude manifold meaning, sense member mind mindfulness model moment moment mood multiplicity nature (Wesen) object object (Objekt) objectively present objectivity observation occurrence order organization originary originary form originary phenomenon

Urteil erkennen Kennen Erkenntnis Wissen Arbeit Sprache Gesetz Nivellierung Grenze Erlebnis Leib Nachleben Ort Größe Mannigfaltigkeit Sinn Glieder Geist Besinnung Vorbild Moment Augenblick Stimmung Vielheit Wesen Gegenstand Objekt Vorhanden Objektivität Betrachtung Geschehen Ordnung Gliederung UrUrform Urphänomen

373

374

outside particular perception phenomenon physical body place posit positing power power precondition pregnance present present presentation presentification production property proposition psyche quintessence reality reality (Realität) reason reciprocal determination recognize recollect reconfiguration reflection relation relation (Relation) relationship repetition representation representation (Repräsentation) representative (Repräsentant) representative (Repräsentative)

GLO SSARY

außer besondere Wahrnehmung Phänomen Körper Ort Setzen Setzung Kraft Macht Voraussetzung Prägnanz Gegenwart darstellen Darstellung Vergegenwärtigung Erzeugung Eigenschaft Aussage Seele Inbegriff Wirklichkeit Realität Vernunft Wechselbestimmung Erkenntnis Erinnerung Umgestaltung Reflexion Beziehung Relation Verhältnis Wiederholung Vorstellung Repräsentation Repräsentant Repräsentative

GLO SSARY

reproducing reproduction resemblance revelation schema science seize seize semblance sensation sense sentence sentiment series set set out setting apart showing significance signification signify similarly soul source speech spirit spiritual state structure structure sublate sublation subsist (be) succession tangible task technology

Nachbilden Nachbildung Ähnlichkeit Offenbarung Schema Wissenschaft Fassung fassen Schein Empfindung Sinn Satz Empfindung Reihe Setzen hinstellen Auseinandersetzung Schau Bedeutsamkeit Bedeutung bedeuten Ähnlichkeit Seele Quelle Rede Geist geistigen Zustand Gefüge Struktur aufheben Aufhebung bestehen Nacheinandersein dinglich Aufgabe Technik

375

376

thickening thing thing (Sache) thought tool totality totality (Ganze) totality (Ganzheit) understand (Verstehen) understanding unity universality use utterance view view of the world violent violent power vision whole will work work (Arbeit) world worldview

GLO SSARY

Verdichtung Ding Sache Gedanke Werkzeug Totalität Ganze Ganzheit Verstehen Verstand Einheit Allgemeinheit Gebrauch Äußerung Auffassung Weltansicht gewaltsam Gewalt Schau Ganze, Ganzheit, Gesamtheit Wollen Werk Arbeit Welt Weltbild

INDEX Activity [energeia], xxiv, 119, 129, 222 Aeschylus, 181 Aesthetic Elements in Platonic Philosophy ( Justi), 231 Aesthetics: Goethe on, 83; historical development of, 7; Humboldt on, 105; Kant on, 8, 104, 105; and natural truth, 270; and Plato, 217, 218, 231, 234, 241; speculative, 255; symbolic form in, 76, 257, 271; and theoretical space, 317–333; Vischer on, 254 African languages, 14–15, 41, 175n52 African religions, 148, 184 Akkad, 29 Alberti, Leon Battista, 248, 310 Algebra, 86 Algonquin Indians, 184, 190, 190n73 All Souls College at Oxford, xvi American languages, 14–15, 41 Amurru, i.e., Syria and Palestine, 29 Analytic-scientific concept of causality, 93–94, 104, 288 Ancient city of Mexico, 27 Ancient Mexicans’ “Tonalamatl,” 27 Animate, 14, 15–16, 16n16, 19, 24, 184, 185–186 Antiquity, 32, 73, 86, 99, 132, 246–248 Architectonic structure of knowledge, 79, 104, 270, 317 Architecture, 327, 336 Aristotle, 3, 84 Assyria, 32, 199 Astrology and astrological thought: Babylonian, 27–28, 29; causality in,

32–33, 45; classification in, 29–31, 37; concept of form in, 37–38; determinism in, 47–48, 55; geographic signification in, 29; Greek, 29; Kepler on, 52; lawfulness of events in, 34, 42; medieval Christian, 32; sacred numbers of, 50; structure of spatial-consciousness in, 26–27, 29–30, 40; Warburg on, 48–49; worldview of, 36–37 Augustine, 55, 217, 243, 330 Auseinanderlegung, xi, xiii, xxviii–xxix, 21, 289 Australia, native tribes of, 18–20, 23, 56–59, 165, 174, 184 Babylonian astrology, 27–28, 29 Baillie, James, xxx Bantu languages, 12, 12n7, 13–14, 165, 188–190, 191n75 Baumgarten, Alexander, 7, 8 Bedeutung. See Signification Being and Time (Heidegger), xv Bergson, Henri-Louis, xiii, xv, xxiii Berkeley, George, 99, 109–110 Berlin Academy of Sciences, 108 Bernhardi, Theodor Von, 127 Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, xv Biological concepts of form, 8, 9, 37 Boolean logic, 256 Bopps, Franz, 127 Brahman, 17, 196, 333 Brahmanic cult, 53–54 Bringing forth, xxv, 120, 347 Brugmann, Karl, 11 377

378

IND E X

Bruno, Giordano, 243 Bücher, Karl, 303 Budge, Ernest Wallis, 209n105 Calculus, 86 Calvin, John, 55 Cartesian philosophy, 107, 244 The Case of Jacques Rousseau (Cassirer), xv Categories: in Aristotelian logic, 320; grammatical, 190; Kant’s use of, 114, 120; of lawfulness of events, 34; of mythical consciousness, 9–10, 15, 20, 93; of relation, 123; temporal determinations of, 43 Causality: analytic-scientific concept of, 93–94, 104, 288; astrological, 32–33, 45; categorization of, 46, 93; in Cusa’s theory of God, 249; Kantian, 43, 293; magical, 45, 287–288, 293; mathematical concept of, 104; in mythical thought, 42–43, 44, 47; objective, 294; scientific concept of, 93–94, 288 “Cause” [Ursache], 33–34, 287 Characteristica generalis, 107 Cherokee Indians, 182 Christianity, 89–90 Chrysippus, 84 Cicero, 246 Classes of nouns, 14 Classical physics, 320–321 Classification: astrological, 29–31, 37; in Chinese thought, 28; linguistic, 7, 12, 14, 17, 25, 41; logical, 3; methodology of, 17; temporal, 27, 29–30; totemic, xxxi, 18–23, 26, 36, 60–63, 67, 168 Class of the elect, 55 Codrington, Robert Henry, 183–184, 185, 197 Cohen, Hermann, ix, 4 Coincidentia oppositorum, 46 Combination [Zusammenfassen], xxi, 127

Combination [Zusammenfassung], xxi–xxii, 8–9, 97, 142, 151, 187, 191 Comparative mythology, 74 “The Concept of the Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences” (Cassirer), 72–100 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 110, 111 Consistence, xxvii, 21, 91, 110, 262, 294, 340, 342 Copernican Revolution, 136 Copy theory, 84–85 Cora Indians, 140, 182, 209, 211 Cosmogony, 33, 93, 171 Cratylus (Plato), xv, 132, 177 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), xxii, xxvi, 42–43, 101, 104, 105, 107, 113, 117, 129, 335 Culture and Religion of Primitive Man (Danzel), 285 Curtius, Georg, 80 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 24, 25, 59–67, 326 Dæmons, 49, 132, 145, 213, 296 Danzel, Theodor-Wilhelm, 285 de Groot, Johann Jakob Maria, 68–69 Demosthenes, 104 Dempwolff, Otto, 2, 22n22, 166n30 Descartes, Réné, 6, 50–51, 85, 107, 138, 244–245, 265. See also Cartesian philosophy Dessauer, Friedrich, 309n38 Dialectical method, 3, 5, 214, 227, 233, 350 Dialectician, 215, 222–224, 227–229, 231–232, 235, 239–240, 324 Dieterich, Albrecht, 176–177 Differential quotients, 35 Dilthey, Wilhelm, xiii, xxiii Drama, xviii, 66, 330–332, 355 Drawida language, 15 Dunlavey, Wilson, xviii Durkheim, Émile, 18, 26 Dvipas, 28

IND E X

Eiffel, Gustave, 312 Election of grace doctrine, 55 Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim), 18–19 Eloquence, 246 Empathy, 10, 261 Energeia [Activity], xxiv, 119, 129, 222 Enlightenment philosophy, xxv, 110, 111–112, 113, 157, 279 Epicurean, 112 Ereignis [Event], 49, 356 Ergon [Work], xxiv, 119, 129 Essai sur l’origine des langues (Rousseau), 112 An Essay on Man (Cassirer), xvii, xxx “Essay on the Basque Language and Nation” (Humboldt), 115 Ethics: in Kantian philosophy, 102–104, 105, 114; and language, 168, 349–350; in Platonic philosophy, 219, 221–222, 234; and technology, 279, 311, 314 Eudoxus, 29 Event [Ereignis], 49, 356 Ewe language, 80 Eyth, Max, 277–278, 281–282 Fantasy: artistic, 358; and concept of form, 7, 34; and consciousness, 355; linguistic, 137, 186, 201–203, 356; logic of, 8; Plato on, 214, 228, 233; power of, 10–11; and symbolic form, 89, 93; and theoretical space, 324, 327–328 Fate [Geschicks], 32, 47, 50–51, 55, 145, 217, 273 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xxiv, xxv, 5 Ficino, Marsilio, 32, 217, 243 Finite, 44, 109, 115, 197–198, 251, 256 Fison, Lorimer, 18 Forster, Lerke, xviii Foundational figure, 35 Franklin, Benjamin, 283 Frazer, J. G., 287, 293

379

Freedom: in aesthetic space, 328; Bildung essential to, xxv; consciousness of, 296; and ethics, 102–103, 104; and language, 122, 152; of philosophical thought, 280; in servitude, 315; and technology, 305–306, 313 French Enlightenment philosophy, 110 Funeral rites, 23 Gabelentz, Georg van der, 173 Galileo, 34, 36, 217, 248, 307 Gamutch, 19, 23, 58 Gender, 10–13, 12n7, 15–16, 15n13, 167–168 General theory of relativity, 45, 87 Geometry, 86 German Grammar (Grimm), 10 German Society of Psychology, xii Gesamtheit: and aesthetics, 319, 345; defined, xxx; and form of concept, 6, 9, 10, 14–15, 23, 40; and language, 140, 151, 153, 178; and symbolic form, 87, 92, 94, 99–100; and technology, 285, 289, 300 Geschicks. See Fate Gestalt psychology, xxvi Gewalt. See Violent power Giesebrecht, Wilhelm von, 176 Gillen, Francis James, 18 Gnosticism, 32, 32n38 Goethe: concept of form, 38–39 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: on aesthetics, 324, 331; on human nature, 281, 296, 300, 307; and language, 153–155, 200; and Platonic philosophy, 216, 217, 235; on symbolic form, 76, 83, 84, 88, 269 Gola language in Liberia, 15 Gorgias (Plato), 314 Grammaire générale et raisonnée, 7, 107 Grammatical gender, 10–13, 12n7, 15–16, 15n13, 167–168

380

IND E X

Grassman, Hermann, 256 Greek geographers, 28–29 Greeks: ethics of, 349; and form of concept, 28–29; and language and myth, 145, 146, 148, 175, 177, 181. See also specific Greek philosophers Grimm, Jacob, 10–11, 81 Hamann, Johann Georg, 92, 104, 113, 161 Hamburg Psychological Laboratory, 263 Hamitic-Semitic nouns, 12, 12n7 Hardmann, Eduard von, 301 Harmony, 49, 52, 202, 233, 306, 312 The Harmony of the World (Kepler), 52 Harnack, Adolf von, 90, 255 Harris, J. Arthur, 127 Haym, Rudolf, 105–106 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxiii–xxv, xxix, 5, 76, 85, 100, 255, 273 Heidegger, Martin, xi, xiii, xv, xxvii, xxxii, 345 Herder, Johann Gottfried: on aesthetics, 329; and Kantian philosophy, 105, 108, 111–114; and language, 157, 201, 202, 295, 299, 348; on symbolic form, 79 Hertz, Heinrich, 87, 257 Hilbert, David, 256–257 History: and ethics, 102–103; ideographic process of, 5; of language, 80, 133, 143–144, 146, 164, 345; logic of, 6; of mathematics, 86; myth taking form of, 44, 132; philosophy of, 104, 105, 112; of religions, 18, 73, 90, 142, 143–144, 148, 150, 169, 183–184, 194; science of, 4; and symbolic form, 72–73 History of New Linguistic Scientific Literature (Olschki), 248 Hobbes, Thomas, 44, 108 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 92, 213 Howitt, Alfred William, 18, 23, 56–59

Humanism, 246–247, 248, 299 Human sciences, xii, xiv, 4–5, 72–100, 102, 105, 143, 148, 274 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, xxv, 17, 74, 76–77, 79, 96, 99, 101–129, 137, 158, 245, 281, 284, 299, 336, 337–338, 347, 351 Humboldt’s philosophy of language, xiv, 79, 101–129 Husserl, Edmund, 260, 330 Hyle, 260, 330 Hyletic, 330 “Idea: A Concept of Art Theory” (Panofsky), xii Idealism, xxiv, xxx, 52, 73, 85, 105–107, 114, 118, 218, 270, 279 Identity-philosophy, 114 Identity thinking, 47 Ideographic process of history, 5 Idolatry, 89 Imagination: and concept of form, 8, 11, 13, 17–18, 40, 42; and language, 142, 252; and symbolic form, 76, 94, 96 Inanimate, 14, 15–16, 16n16, 19, 24, 184, 185–186 Indian languages, 14, 24, 64, 97, 165, 188 Indo-European language, 11–12, 12n7, 13 Indo-European religions, 141 Inductive reasoning, 39–40 Infinite, 44, 109, 115, 197–198, 251, 256 Inflexive languages, 125 Inner form, 123, 226 Inner form of language, 7, 122, 123, 158 Inner simulacrum, 87 Intellectual synthesis, 42 Introduction to Developmental Psychology (Werner), xii Introduction to the Philosophy of Myth (Schelling), 90 Intuition, 22 Iroquois Indians, 184

IND E X

Jansenius, Cornelius, 55 Judgment: and concept of form, 7–8; in Kantian philosophy, 113, 117, 119; and language, 128, 131, 152; and symbolic form, 94, 97; and technology, 280–281, 280n8, 293, 309, 313 Justi, Karl, 231 Justification, 2 Kabbala, 52 Kant, Immanuel: Cassirer on, x; on causality, 293; and concept of form, 3–4, 8, 43, 44; and Humboldt’s philosophy of language, xiv, 101–129; and language, xx–xxii, 153, 179, 193, 274; on objects, 342; and symbolic form, 85, 260, 308, 315; on theoretical space, 327 Kant and the Problem of Mathematics (Heidegger), xi Kapp, Ernst, 300–301, 302 Kawi-Werk (Humboldt), 17 Kepler, Johannes, 33, 34, 52, 217 Keshvars, 28 Kestner, Johann Christian, 76 Klages, Ludwig, xix, 298 Knowledge [Wissen]: and dialectic, 3, 227; Erkenntnis differentiated from, xxii–xxiii; exactness of, 3; as fiction, 136; and form of concept, 6, 7; Kant on, 101–103, 108, 116; and language, 247, 257, 335, 338, 340; and mathematics, 103; methodology of, 214–215, 216; modes of, xxii–xxiii, 6; objectivity of, 85, 101; Plato on, 219–222, 227; and technology, 273, 282, 300 Köhler, Wolfgang, xi Kroeber, A., 24 Krois, John Michael, ix, xviii Krokitch, 19, 23, 57–59 Kuhn, Adalbert, 202 Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 107 Language and speech: critique of, 99; and formation of concept, 10–18;

381

fundamental ideas of, 73; Humboldt’s philosophy of, 101–129; Indo-European, 11–12, 12n7, 13; linguistic classification, 7, 12, 14, 17, 25, 41; and modern philosophy, 244–253; and myth, 130–213; and objects, 334–362; onomatopoeic origin theory of, 79, 81; of poetry, 91; polysynthetic linguistic practice, 97; structure of, 6; symbolic forms in, 78; translation notes, xviii–xxxiii Language of the people, 248 Langues bien faites, 111 Latin, xxi, 30, 141, 158, 246–248 Lebensphilosophie, xiii, xv, xvi, xxiv, 274 Lectures on the Origin and Development of Religion (Müller), 197 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 3, 44, 50, 85, 86, 107, 110, 256, 265, 309, 321, 326 Leonardo da Vinci, 307, 310 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 271, 329, 330 Lewin, Kurt, xi Life-form, 112, 120 Lingua universalis, 107, 265 Linguistic-aesthetic phantasy, 11 Locke, John, 108–109, 111, 265 Logic: and aesthetics, 7; categorization of, 9–10; and form of concept, 2–4, 6–7, 43, 55; and grammar, 107–108; Hegelian, 5; of history, 6; of human sciences, 5; of inventing, 110; Kantian, 119; and language, 10, 16, 117, 143, 144, 150–151, 206–207; of myth, 8, 46; Platonic, 222, 311; and rhetoric, 247; symbolic, 256–257, 265; and theoretical space, 319–320, 321 The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (Cassirer), xvi Luther, Martin, 55, 90 Lyric poet, 213, 331 Macrocosm and the microcosm, 37, 40, 42, 50

382

IND E X

Magical causality, 45, 287–288, 293 Magical-mythical, 21, 91, 94, 213, 271, 285, 291, 294, 326 Magical rites, 20 Magical sympathy, 327 The Magic Art (Frazer), 287 Magic causality, 45 Malay Sapi, 21 Malebranche, Nicolas, 243 Mallera group, 20, 56–57 Manilius, Marcus, 51 Marind-Anim in Dutch South New Guinea, 20–21, 23n23, 59 Mars, the star of Amurru, 29–30 Marx, Karl, xxiv, 302 Mathematical causality, 104 Mathematical science of nature, 3–4, 6, 50, 52, 102, 252 Mathesis universalis, 51–52, 321 Matthews, R. H., 18 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis, 110 McGee, William John, 187–188 Mechanics of the heavens, 35 Medieval Christian astrology, 32 Medius terminus, 34 Meier, Georg Friedrich, 8 Meinhof, Carl, xi, 2, 12n7, 22n22, 175n52, 189, 191n75 Melanesian languages, 13, 183–184, 197 The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-Lore (Codrington), 183 Metamorphosis, 39, 76, 154, 275, 291, 296, 347 Metaphorical thought, 201, 202 Methodology, 2, 5, 17, 39–40, 44, 153, 214, 362 Mindfulness, 112–113, 157, 273–274, 278, 319, 348 Mithras Liturgy (Dieterich), 176–177 Modern phenomenology, 330 Modern sociology, 26, 64 Modes of life, 26 Monotheism, 89 Morphe, 260, 330 Morphology, 74

Müller, Max, 132, 133–134, 137, 197, 202 Mysticism, 40, 48, 100, 193, 359 Myth of the State (Cassirer), xvi, xvii, xviii, xxx Names of God in the Old Testament (Giesebrecht), 176 Names of the Gods ( Usener), 142 Name taboos, 175, 175n52 Negative theology, 250 Neoplatonic, 32 Newtonian physics, 266 Ngaui, 23, 57–58 Nicholas of Cusa, 3, 248–252; theory of God, 249–250, 251; theory of language, 248–249, 251–252 Noetic, 227, 330 Nominalist theories, 19, 108 Nominative subject, 12 Objective accusative, 12 Objective causality, 294 Objectivity: and aesthetics, 318, 321–322, 328; of being, 103; Kantian, 102, 107, 122, 128, 129; of knowledge, 85, 101; and language, 213; of objects, 335, 345, 347; style as expression of, 83; and symbolic form, 269–270, 271; and theoretical space, 318, 321–322 Olschki, Leonardo, 248, 307 On Dualism (Humboldt), 74 On the Origin of Language (Herder), 201–202 On the Relationship of the Adverbs of Place to the Pronoun in Several Languages (Humboldt), 74, 125 Organization of space, 23, 24 Originary-phenomena, 136, 178, 251 The Origin of Language (Herder), 111, 348 Orphic originary words, 38 Painting, 234, 269, 327, 329, 330, 336 Panofsky, Erwin, xii, 2, 243n42

IND E X

Pars pro toto, 22, 45, 207 Pascal, Blaise, 55 Paul, Hermann, 80 Paul, Jean, 199 Perseus for Amurru, 29 Persians, 28, 54 Perspective as Symbolic Form (Panofsky), xii Petrarch, 246 Phaedo (Plato), 225 Phaedrus (Plato), 130–131 Phenomenology, 1, 5, 148, 330 Philosophie der Technik (Dessauer), 309n38 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer), xiii, xiv–xv, 1 Philosophy of Technology (Kapp), 300 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Cassirer), xv “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (Hardmann), 301 Phonetics, 74, 77, 79 Physics, 4, 45, 86–87, 96, 266–268 Planck, Max, 96 Plato: on beauty and art, xv, 214–243; on form of concept, 2–3; idealism of, 52, 270; on idea vs. appearance, 277, 323, 342; on language and myth, 130–131, 134, 196, 338; on symbolic form, 259; theory of ideas, 2 Platonic Renaissance in England (Cassirer), xv Plejaden for Elam, 29 Ploucquet, Gottfried, 107 Plutarch, 330 “Poetry and Technology” (Eyth), 281–282 Polyonymy, 191 Polysynthetic linguistic practice, 97 Polytheism, 34 Port Royal, 107 Port-Royal Grammar, 10, 107 Positivism, 73, 99 Posterior Analytics (Aristotle), 3 Potentiality, 191, 191n74

383

Powell, John Wesley, 97 Power of the imagination, 17–18, 40, 42, 142 Prägung, 10 Predestination, 55 Prefixes, xxi–xxii, 12–14, 15, 17, 41, 189, 191n75, 321n3 Preuß, Konrad Theodor, 94 Principles of Mechanics (Hertz), 87, 257 Problem of Knowledge (Cassirer), xvi Profane, 90, 184, 186, 191, 204, 255 Prophetic thought, 89 Protestantism, 90 Psychology: and astrology, 32; and causality, 94–95; and form of concept, 46; in Kantian philosophy, 119, 128; and language, 7, 17, 108, 109, 111, 138, 143; and objects, 334, 338, 339; in Platonic dialogues, 237; and symbolic form, 258, 261 Pythagorean, 52, 208, 219 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 210 Radii coelestes, 32 Rathenau, Walther, 313–314 Reduplication, 82 Relation [Relation], 47–48, 94, 123, 321 Religion: and causality, 49; and ethics, 54; and form of concept, 53; history of, 18, 73, 90, 142, 143–144, 148, 150, 169, 183–184, 194; Indo-European, 141; and Kantian philosophy, 104; and language, 130–213, 253; selfconsciousness in, 89; structure of, 6; and symbolic form, 72, 89, 100, 255, 257; and theoretical space, 325; and totemic representation, xxxi, 18–23, 26, 36, 60–63, 67, 168 Renaissance, xxv, 34, 51, 236, 245–248, 307, 310 Repräsentant, 17, 155, 250, 256, 262 Republic (Plato), 223–224, 225, 229, 241 Rhetoric, 131, 209, 238, 246, 247 Riemannian space, 88

384

IND E X

Rita (Indo-Germanic concept), 325 Roehl, Karl, 189 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 279, 313 Russell, Bertrand, 265 Sacred, 50, 52, 54, 169, 182, 184–186, 190–191, 195, 204, 255, 259, 328 Sago-Boan, 21 Samaveda, 54 Sanskrit, 123, 127–128, 133, 158 Sapi-Zé, 21 Saxl, Fritz, xi, 2 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 5, 76, 90, 114–115, 202, 217 Schema, xii, xxxvi, 16, 23, 28, 31, 40, 42–47, 206, 217, 219, 226, 246, 266, 328, 342 Schematism, xxvi, 42, 44, 106, 114 Scherer, Wilhelm, 80 Schiller, Friedrich, xxv, 298–299, 328 Scholasticism, 3 Scientia generalis, 107 Sculpture, 327, 336 Seler, Eduard, 27 Semitic, 12, 12n7, 13 Serialization, 8 Seven against Thebes (Aeschylus), 181 Shakespeare, William, 332 Shambala language, 189 Signification [Bedeutung]: and language, 135; meaning differentiated from, xxxi; and presentation, xiii, xiv, 262; and symbolic form, 262 Signs: artistic, 271, 329, 330; and form of concept, 19, 50; linguistic, 77, 107, 109–112, 247; mathematical, 250, 265; and myth, 135, 208, 212; of numbers, 50; phonetic, 77; and symbolic form, 76–77, 86, 89, 92, 100, 256–257; theory of, 257; and worldviews, 284, 336; of zodiac, 31 Simmel, Georg, xiii, xv, xxiii, 305 Sioux Indians, 184, 187–188 Smith, Norman Kemp, xxii Society for Comparative Mythology, 74

Society for Religious Studies, 1 Sociology, 26, 64 Socratic theory, 3, 216, 236, 350 Söderblom, Nathan, 186 South Andaman, 41 Spencer, Herbert, 132 Spencer, Walter Baldwin, 18 Spieth, Jakob, 148–149 Spinoza, Baruch de, 44, 114, 261, 280 Spranger, Eduard, 106 Steinthal, H., 106–107, 114 Stern, William, xi, xii Stevenson, S., 24 Stoicism, 79, 84 Strife, xvii–xviii, xx, xxviii–xxix, 325 Structural concepts, 37, 40 “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics” (Cassirer), xxvi Style, xix, 68, 83–84, 88, 135, 238, 246, 248, 259, 270–271 Subartu, 29 Subspecies, 38, 155 Substance and Function (Cassirer), x Substantive-class, 13 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 108 Süssmilch, Johann Peter, 110 Su Wen, 28, 68 Symbolic form: in aesthetics, 76, 257, 271; and fantasy, 89, 93; and history, 72–73; in human sciences, 72–100; and language, 78; and objectivity, 269–270, 271; in philosophical system, 254–271; Plato on, 259; and psychology, 258, 261; and religion, 72, 89, 100, 255, 257; and signification, 262; and signs, 76–77, 86, 89, 92, 100, 256–257; and technology, 272–316 Symbolic logic, 256–257, 265 Synthesis: and causality, 293; and concept of form, 8, 42–43; in Kantian philosophy, 102–103, 118, 122; and language, 152; and objects, xxi, 335, 337, 359; in Platonic philosophy, 215; and symbolic form, 96–97

IND E X

Tanck, Joachim, 52 Tao, 28, 68 Technology of myth, xviii Teleology, 112 Temporal classification, 27, 29–30 Tetens, Johannes Nikolaus, 8, 108 Theogony, 33, 93 “Theoretical” space, 317–333 Thing-in-itself, 85, 124 Thinking in figures, 39 Timaeus (Plato), 225, 226–227 Ton-Boan, 21 Totality [Ganzen], 12, 36 Totem, 18, 21, 36, 57–63, 66–67, 208 Totemic, xxxi, 18–23, 26, 36, 60–63, 67, 168 Transcendental method, x, xv, 4, 8, 102, 106, 117, 119, 260, 274, 279 Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von, 44 Tycho Brahe, 33 Uexküll, Johann Jakob von, xi, xiii Uitoto Indians, 169, 182 Understanding, modes of, xxii–xxiii University of Frankfurt, xv University of Göteborg, xvi University of Hamburg, ix, x–xi, xv–xvi, 2 Ural-Altaic group, 41 Urbunna type, 18 Ursache [“Cause”], 33–34, 287 Usener, Hermann, 142–150, 160, 162, 167, 181, 183, 205, 212 Valla, Lorenzo, 246–247 Vedic religion, 53, 132, 195 Verene, Donald Phillip, xviii Verity names, 67 Vico, Giambattista, 4–5, 79 Vieta, François, 50, 86 Violent power [Gewalt]: and aesthetics, 326, 328; defined, xxxii; and form of concept, 22; and language, 172, 176,

385

180, 199, 208; of mythical consciousness, xvi; and objects, 350; and symbolic form, 90–91; and technology, 287 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 76, 254 Visual language, 109 Volgare, 248 von Hildebrand, Adolf, 318, 336 von Nettesheim, Agrippa, 37 Voßler, Karl, 73 Wackelbura, 20 Warburg, Aby, xi, 48–49 Warburg Library, ix–xi, xviii, 2, 72 Warburton, Bishop, 110 Werner, Heinz, xi, xii, 263 Wertheimer, M., xxvi Wesen: and aesthetics, 318, 327; defined, xxxi; and form of concept, 14–15, 19, 21–24, 48–50; and language, 145–149, 161, 163, 169, 176–177, 195, 212, 251; and objects, 358–359; and symbolic form, 94, 263, 268; and technology, 299 Westermann, Dietrich, 15, 80 Whitehead, Alfred North, 322 Wind, Edgar, xi Wirz, Paul, 20–21, 22, 59 Wissen. See Knowledge Wissowa, Georg, 162 Wootaroo, 19 Work and Rhythm (Bücher), 303 Work [Ergon], xxiv, 119, 129 World-egg or world-ash, 33 Yajurveda, 54 Yungaroo, 19 Zarathustra, 54 Zellers, Eduard, 254 Zuñi Indians, 24–27, 36, 59–67, 326 Zusammenfassen [Combination], xxi, 127 Zusammenfassung [Combination], xxi–xxii, 8–9, 97, 142, 151, 187, 191