The Life of the Mind (34 page)

77. IX, 1–8.

78. Marshall Cohen s unfortunately unpublished manuscript "The Concept of Metaphor," which I was kindly permitted to consult, contains many examples, together with an excellent review of the literature on the subject.

79.
The Odyssey of Homer,
bk. XIX, II. 203–209, trans. Richmond Lattimore, New York, 1967, p. 287.

80. "Das Homerische Gleichnis und der Anfang der Philosophie," in
Die Antike
, vol. XII, 1936.

81. Diels and Kranz, frag. B67.

82.
Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens,
Bern, 1947.

83. Bruno Snell, "From Myth to Logic: The Role of the Comparison," in
The Discovery of the Mind,
Harper Torchbooks, New York, Evanston, 1960, p. 201.

84. Hans Jonas,
The Phenomenon of Life,
New York, 1966, p. 135. His study of "The Nobility of Sight" is of unique help in the clarification of the history of Western thought

85. Diels and Kranz, frag. 101a.

86. Aristotle seems to have thought along diese lines in one of his scientific treatises: "Of these faculties, for the mere necessities of life and in itself, sight is the more important, but for the mind [nous] and indirectly
[kata symbebekos]
hearing is the more important.... [It] makes the largest contribution to wisdom. For discourse, which is the cause of learning, is so because it is audible; but it is audible not in itself but indirectly, because speech is composed of words, and each word is a rational symbol. Consequently, of those who have been deprived of one sense or the other from birth, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf and the dumb." The point of the matter is that he seems never to have remembered this observation when he wrote philosophy. Aristode,
On Sense and Sensible Objects,
437a4–17.

87.
Op. cit.,
p. 152.

88. See Hans Jonas, chap. 3, on Philo of Alexandria, especially pp. 94–97, of
Von der Mythologie zur mystischen Philosophie,
Göttingen, 1954, which is the second part of
Gnosis und spätantiker Geist,
Göttingen, 1934.

89.
The Phenomenon of Life,
pp. 136–147. Cf.
Von der Mythologie,
pp. 138–152.

90. Bonn, 1960, pp. 200 f.

91.
Theaetetus,
155d.

92. 982bl1–22.

93. 983al4–20.

94. See, for instance,
Nicomachean Ethics,
VI, 8, where the
nous
is the mental perception (
aisthēsis
) of the "unchangeable primary or limiting terms" for which "there exists no
logos
" (1142a25–27). Cf. 1143b5.

95.
Seventh Letter,
34lb–343a, paraphrase.

96. On July 2,1885.

97. No. 160.

98.
Nietzsche,
Pfullingen, 1961, vol. II, p. 484.

99.
Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, New York, 1953, nos. 119,19,109.

100.
Phaedrus,
274e–277c.

101.
Physics,
209bl5.

102. 286a, b.

103. 275d-277a.

104.
Phüebus,
38e–39b.

105.
Ibid.,
39b–c.

106.
342.

107.
Ibid.,
344b.

108.
Ibid.,
343b.

109.
Ibid.,
341e.

110.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B33. For: "
Nicht dadurch, dass ich bloss denke, erkenne ich irgend ein Objekt, sondern nur dadurch, dass ich eine gegebene Anschauung ... bestimme, kann ich irgend einen Gegenstand erkennen
" ("I do not know an object merely in that I think, but only insofar as I determine a given intuition, can I know an object") (B406).

111. I am quoting from an early lecture-course of Heidegger's on Plato's
Sophist
(1924–25) according to a literal transcript, pp. 8, and 155, 160. See also Comford's commentary on the
Sophist
in
Plato's Theory of Knowledge,
p. 189 and n. 1, where
noein
is said to stand for the act of "intuition (
noēsis
) which
sees
directly, without ... discursive reasoning."

112. 38 c–e.

113. P. 50 of chap. I of the present volume.

114. Aristotle,
Metaphysics,
1003 a 21.

115.
Ibid.,
984 b 10.

116. Thomas Aquinas,
De Veritate,
qu. I, art. 1.

117.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B82, B83.

118.
Sein und Zeit,
Tübingen, 1949, no. 44 (a), p. 217.

119. See Aristotle,
Posterior Analytics,
100b5–17.

120. An
Introduction to Metaphysics
(1903), trans. T. E. Hulme, Indianapolis, New York, 1955, p. 45.

121.
Ibid.

122.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B84 and B189–B191.

123.
An Introduction to Metaphysics,
p. 45.

124.
Protreptikos,
Düring ed., B87.

125. 1072b27.

126. 1072a21.

127. This mistranslation mars W. D. Ross's
Aristotle,
Meridian Books, New York, 1959, but is mercifully absent from his translation of the
Metaphysics
in Richard McKeon's
The Basic Works of Aristotle.

128.
Philosophy of History,
Introduction, p. 9.

129.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right,
trans. T. M. Knox, London, Oxford, New York, 1967, addition to para. 2, p. 225.

130.
Wegmarken,
p. 19.

131.
Nicomachean Ethics,
1175al2.

132.
Tractatus,
401. It seems to me obvious that Wittgenstein's early language theory is solidly rooted in the old metaphysical axiom of truth as
adequatio rei et intellectus;
the trouble with this definition has always been that such an equation is possible only as intuition, namely, as an internal image that copies the sensorially given visible object. "The logical picture of a fact," which according to Wittgenstein is a "thought" (I am following Bertrand Russell's Introduction to the
Tractatus
in the bilingual edition, London, 1961, p. xii), is a contradiction in terms unless one takes "picture" as a metaphorical expression. There certainly exists a "relation which holds between language and the world," but whatever this relation may be, it is certainly not a "pictorial" one. If it were a pictorial relation, every proposition; unless it renders and repeats an accidental error in sensory perception (something looks like a tree but turns out to be a man on closer inspection), would be true; however, I can make a great many propositions about a "fact" that say something quite meaningful without being necessarily true: "the sun turns about the earth" or "in September 1939 Poland invaded Germany"—the one being an error, the other being a lie. There are, on the other hand, propositions that are inherently unacceptable, as for instance "the triangle laughs," cited in the text, which is neither a true nor a false statement, but a meaningless one. The only internal linguistic criterion for propositions is sense or nonsense.

In view of these rather obvious difficulties and in view of the fact that Wittgenstein himself later rejected his "picture theory of propositions," it is rather interesting to find out how it occurred to him in the first place. There are, I think, two versions of this. He had been "reading a magazine in which there was a schematic picture depicting the possible sequence of events in an automobile accident. The picture there served as a proposition; that is, as a description of a possible state of affairs. It had this function owing to a correspondence between the parts of the picture and things in reality. It now occurred to Wittgenstein that one might reverse the analogy and say that a
proposition
serves as a
picture,
by virtue of a similar correspondence between
its
parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined—the
structure
of the proposition—depicts a possible combination of elements in reality." (See G. H. von Wright's "Biographical Sketch" in Norman Malcolm's
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir,
London, 1958, pp. 7–8.) What seems decisive here is that he did not take off from reality but from a
schematic reconstruction
of some event which itself had already been subjected to a process of thought, that is, he started from an illustration of a thought. In the
Philosophical Investigations
(663), there is an observation that reads like a refutation of this theory: "If I say 'I meant
him,'
very likely a picture comes to my mind ... but the picture is only like an illustration to a story. From it alone it would mostly be impossible to conclude anything at all; only when one knows the story does one know the significance of the picture."

The second version of the origin of the "picture theory of propositions" is to be found in the
Tractatus
itself (4.0311) and sounds even more plausible. Wittgenstein, who replaced his earlier theory with the theory of language-games, seems to have been influenced by another game, frequently played in his time in society, the game of
tableaux vivants:
the rules demanded that somebody had to guess what proposition was expressed by the
tableau vivant
enacted by a number of persons. "One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs"; it actually is supposed to spell out a certain proposition.

I mention these things to indicate Wittgenstein's style of thinking. They may help explain "the puzzling thing about his later philosophy ... that it is so piecemeal" and "has no master plan." (See the excellent presentation of David Pears,
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
New York, 1970, pp. 4 f.) The
Tractatus
also starts from a haphazard observation, from which, however, its author was able to develop a consistent theory that saved him from further haphazard observations and enabled him to write a continuous work. In spite of its frequent abruptness, the
Tractatus
is entirely consistent. The
Philosophical Investigations
shows how this ceaselessly active mind actually functioned, if it was not, almost accidentally, guided by a single assumption, for instance, by the thesis that "there must ... be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact." (Russell,
op. cit.,
p. x, rightly calls this "the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein's theory.") The most conspicuous property of the
Philosophical Investigations
is its breathlessness: it is as though somebody had actualized the
stop-and-think
inherent in thought to the point where it halted the whole thinking process and interrupted every thought-train by recoiling on itself. The English translation somehow mitigates this by rendering the ever-repeated "
Denk dir"
by a variety of words, such as "suppose," "imagine."

133.
Philosophical Investigations,
nos. 466–471.

 

Chapter III

1.
Timaeus,
90c (see n. 35 below).

2. See the very instructive
Theory and Practice,
by Nicholas Lobkowicz, p. 7n.

3.
Symposium,
204a.

4. Pindar,
Nemea,
6;
The Odes of Pindar,
trans. Richmond Lattimore, Chicago, 1947, p. 111.

5. I,131.

6. Sophist,
219b.

7.
Republic,
518c.

8.
The Discourses,
bk. II, Introduction.

9. Bruno Snell, "Pindar's Hymn to Zeus,"
op. cit.,
pp. 77–79.

10.
Nemea,
4,
Isthmia,
4, both Lattimore trans.

11.
Isthmia,
4, Lattimore trans.

12. Thucydides, II, 41.

13.
Protreptikos,
Düring ed., B19 and B110. Cf.
Eudemian Ethics,
1216all.

14.
Protreptikos,
Düring ed., B109.

15.
De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum,
II, 13.

16. Heraclitus, B29.

17.
Symposium,
208c.

18.
Ibid.,
208d.

19. Anaximander seems to have been the first to equate the divine with the
apeiron,
the Non-Limited, whose nature it was to be forever—ageless, immortal, and imperishable.

20. Frag. 8.

21. Charles H. Kahn, in his fascinating study "The Greek Verb 'to be' and the Concept of Being," examines "the pre-philosophical use of this verb which ... serves to express the concept of Being in Greek" (p. 245). In
Foundations of Language,
vol. 2,1966, p. 255.

22. B30.

23. Snell,
op. cit.,
p. 40.

24. Kahn, op. cit, p. 260.

25. Frag. 3.

26.
Protreptikos,
Düring ed., B110.

27.
PhÜebus,
28c.

28.
Symposium,
212a.

29.
Nicomachean Ethics,
1178b3, 1178b22, 1177b33 (the last from Martin Ostwald trans., Indianapolis, New York, 1962).

30.
Timaeus,
90d, a.

31.Quoted from Jeremy Bernstein's "The Secrets of the Old One—II,"
The New Yorker,
March 17,1973.

32. Francis MacDonald Cornford,
Plato and Parmenides,
New York, 1957, Introduction, p. 27.

33.
Protreptikos,
Düring ed., B65.

34. Cornford,
Plato's Theory of Knowledge,
p. 189.

35.
Timaeus,
90c.

36.
Philebus,
59b, c.

37. "Philosophie der Weltgeschichte,"
Hegel Studienausgabe,
vol. I, p. 291.

38.
De Rerum Natura,
bk. II, first lines;
On the Nature of the Universe,
trans. Ronald Latham, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1951, p. 60.

39. I owe the quotations from Herder and Goethe to the interesting study of navigation, shipwreck, and spectator as "existential metaphors" in Hans Blumenberg, "Beobachtungen an Metaphern," in
Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte,
vol. XV, Heft 2, 1971, pp. 171 ff. For Voltaire, see his article "Curiosité" in his
Dictionnaire Philosophique.
For Herder, see also
Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität,
1792,17th Letter; for Goethe,
Goethes Gespräche,
Artemis ed., Zürich, 1949, vol. 22, no. 725, p. 454.