The Life of the Mind (16 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience. Moreover, in the thinking process itself they serve as models to give us our bearings lest we stagger blindly among experiences that our bodily senses with their relative certainty of knowledge cannot guide us through. The simple fact that our mind is able to find -such analogies, that the world of appearances reminds us of things non-apparent, may be seen as a kind of "proof' that mind and body, thinking and sense experience, the invisible and the visible, belong together, are "made" for each other, as it were. In other words, if the rock in the sea "which endures the swift courses of whistling winds and the swelling breakers that burst against it" can become a metaphor for endurance in battle, then "it is not ... correct to say that the rock is viewed anthropomorphically, unless we add that our understanding of the rock is anthropomorphic for the same reason that we are able to look at ourselves petromorphically."
⁸³
There is, finally, the fact of the irreversibility of the relationship expressed in metaphor; it indicates in its own manner the absolute primacy of the world of appearances and thus provides additional evidence of the extraordinary quality of thinking, of its being always out of order.

This last point is of special importance. If the language of thinking is essentially metaphorical, it follows that the world of appearances inserts itself into thought quite apart from the needs of our body and the claims of our fellow-men, which will draw us back into it in any case. No matter how close we are while thinking to what is far away and how absent we are from what is close at hand, the thinking ego obviously never leaves the world of appearances altogether. The two-world theory, as I have said, is a metaphysical delusion although by no means an arbitrary or accidental one; it is the most plausible delusion with which the experience of thought is plagued. Language, by lending itself to metaphorical usage, enables us to think, that is, to have traffic with non-sensory matters, because it permits a carrying-over,
metapherein,
of our sense experiences. There are not two worlds because metaphor unites them.