10

PROSPECT FOR A THEORY OF NONCONCEPTUALITY

(1979)

A metaphoris autem abstinendum philosopho.

[But the philosopher should abstain from metaphor.]1

—GEORGE BERKELEY, DE MOTU

When Erich Rothacker included my “Paradigms for a Metaphorology” in his Archive for Conceptual History [Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte],2 he had in mind—as did I—a subsidiary methodology for conceptual history, an enterprise that at the time had only just started its work. Since then, nothing has changed in the function of metaphorology, but much about its reference—especially as metaphorics are now understood as merely a narrow special case of nonconceptuality.

Metaphorics is no longer primarily regarded as the guiding sphere for tentative theoretical conceptions, as the preliminary stage of concept formation, or as a makeshift for situations in which technical languages are not yet consolidated. Instead, it is now conceived of as an authentic way of grasping connections, which cannot be limited to the narrow core of the “absolute metaphor.” The absolute metaphor was initially only defined through its indisposition toward being “replaced by literal predicates [Sachprädikate]” on the same linguistic level. Another way of putting it would be to say that the line of sight has been reversed: it is no longer directed primarily toward the constitution of conceptuality but also looks back at the connections with the life-world as the constant motivational support of all theory—even if this support cannot be kept in consciousness at all times. If we have to acknowledge that we cannot expect the truth from science, we would at least like to know why we wanted to know what knowing is now a matter of disappointment. Metaphors are, in this sense, index fossils for an archaic stratum of the process of theoretical curiosity, a curiosity that does not need to be anachronistic simply because there is no way back to its wealth of stimulation and expectations of truth.

The riddle of metaphor cannot be understood simply from the perplexities surrounding concepts. For what is enigmatic is the question of why metaphors are “tolerated” at all. That they appear in rhetoric as “ornaments of speech” may be attributed to their choiceness; that they are tolerated in objectual [gegenständlich] contexts, however, cannot be taken for granted. For in any such context, metaphor is first and foremost a disturbance. If we consider consciousness as it is “affected” by texts—as a structure in which intentionality is achieved, as phenomenology has it—then any metaphor endangers its “normal harmony.”3

In the functional transition from mere intending to fulfilled intuition, metaphor constitutes a heterogeneous element and it refers to a context that is different from the one at hand. Now, discursive (that is, not only temporally isolated) consciousness is perhaps nothing but the “repair” of a disturbance, the overcoming of a dysfunction in the stimulus-response system that has proved so successful organically. In this way, only the synthetic processing of stimulus manifolds into “objects”—as complexes that can be determined not only through signs but through properties—has made object-related behavior possible. To offset its own disharmonies, to find a way back to the harmony of data as those of one experience remains the constitutive achievement of consciousness, by which it reassures itself that it is following reality, not illusions.

Metaphor, however, is at first a “conflict in harmony” [Widerstimmigkeit], to use Husserl’s term.4 This would be fatal for consciousness, which is left to care for its own identity; it has to be the constantly successful organ of self-restitution. From that follows, also and especially for metaphor, the rule that Husserl articulated: “Anomaly, as a break in the originally harmonious unity of appearance, is integrated into a higher normality.”5 The element that is initially destructive only becomes metaphor under the duress of having to repair the imperiled consistency. Metaphor is integrated into intentionality through the device of reinterpretation. To declare the exotic foreign body a “mere metaphor” is an act of self-assertion: the disturbance is qualified as an aid. In experience, this corresponds to the necessity to incorporate even the most surprising appearance bordering on a supposed “miracle” into the total causal system.

To follow Quintilian’s much-belabored example, it is an accident within the smooth processing of information if the intention aimed at a meadow—surprisingly and outside the scope of typical expectations—jumps over to the predicate, so that this meadow now laughs: pratum ridet.6 The text’s ability to achieve something seems all over now until the “excuse” arrives that no possible series of the thing’s literal predicates that were at first expected could ever be able to convey such information about a meadow that is encapsulated in the expression of its laughter. Such an expression would have no place within any descriptive language. Yet it would also be wrong to say that we are here faced with poetry in nuce, no matter how many poets have made meadows laugh.

What does not appear in the properties of a meadow from an objective perspective, but is neither the subjective nor the imaginative addition of a spectator who only for himself could make out the shape of a human face from the meadow’s surface (a mandatory game for visits to limestone caves), is arrested by metaphor. It achieves this feat by assigning the meadow to the inventory of a human life-world in which not only words and signs but the things themselves carry “meanings.” Its anthropogenetic primal type may be the human face with its unequalled situative meaning. Montaigne provided the metaphor for this meaning-content of metaphor: le visage du monde [the face of the world].7

It was one of the most laborious reconstructions of theoretical language to retrace what the expression “landscape” denotes.8 Metaphor reclaims a primordiality in which not only the private and leisurely provinces of our experience are rooted—the worlds of flaneurs or poets—but also the dissecting aspects of the theoretical attitude that are alienated through technical language. For this attitude, Quintilian’s meadow is no laughing matter. And yet, what laughter means for us was not only once “carried over” [übertragen] onto a meadow but as this meaning, “laughing,” it has been enriched and “fulfilled” by being able to return in the life-world. In the life-world, there must always have been relationships of retransferring intuition in order that the stress that metaphor puts on consciousness could be borne.

Hence the validity of Wittgenstein’s 1929 dictum, “A good simile refreshes the intellect.”9 Refreshment is itself a metaphor here, an antithesis to the equally metaphorical exhaustion: the simile reveals more than what is already in that for which it has been chosen. The parallel case is true for hermeneutics, but in the opposite direction: it is not that the full interpretation enriches the text beyond the knowledge the author has brought to bear on it; rather, the foreign reference unpredictably contributes to the productivity of texts. The imprecision of metaphor, of which the rigorous self-exacerbation of theoretical language has become contemptuous, corresponds in another way to the highest level of abstraction of concepts—like “being,” “history,” “world”—that do not cease to impress us. Metaphor, however, conserves the richness of its origins, which abstraction must deny.

The more we remove ourselves from the short distance of intentionality that can be fulfilled and instead refer to total horizons that our experience can no longer traverse or delimit, the more impressive the use of metaphor becomes; the “absolute metaphor” is thus a boundary value. “The hushed, black woods are dreaming”10 is another case of the “laughing meadow,” but in the case of the woods, we are already accustomed, once we have entered into it, not to see it for the trees. Here, then, is a “leap” in our intuition. In this respect, the world is a forest that we never perceive except when standing in it—in hac silva plena [in this forest full of woe],11 Marsilio Ficino says—and that we always miss for the trees. The absolute metaphors that have been found for the world do not dissolve into qualities and determinable properties as this superordinate wood does into trees. And yet it is the wood in which one gets lost, according to Descartes’s simile, and has to decide to follow a morale par provision [provisional morality], precisely because one does not possess a total view of it (for which Descartes’s theoretic program nevertheless allows).

The world may be everything that is the case, thus vindicating its old definition as a series rerum [series of things]; a Cartesian, driven by the demand for clarity and distinctness, could never be satisfied with this. Above all, it would be pretty much what, of all that can be said of the world and as unarguable it may be, is the least interesting—as little to the cosmologist as to the theologian, or even to those who are fed up with interpreting the world and ready to set about changing it. That the world is a book in which one can read or, after some arduous deciphering, will eventually be able to read, is a metaphorical expectation about the type of experience. The life-worldly attitude before any theory and below any theory in our history can hardly be imagined without it, and for this alone one must keep an eye on it, because it reveals the pure use-value of the world that is mediated through the instrument of science as a secondary sense of direction of theoretical conduct. The excitement, with which circumstances are received in which there is once again something to “decipher” in nature, or which even seem to reintroduce the relationship between writing and reader into the process of nature, is atavistic.

The “book of nature” is, after all, not only a collection of references for topos research. It also provides an orientation for inquiring from the factual status of theoretical dealings with the world back toward the life-worldly imbuing with meaning that underlies it. It would be pure romanticism to do this with a view to renewing the position of the reader of the world book. Rather, it is about the pure suspension of the present as obviousness, which to the contemporaries will always seem like the last word to be said on the topic. It is also about the suspension of expectations of meaning that are of a specificity that can only be grasped metaphorically, and whose unsatisfiability, which one does not want to believe, already predetermines disappointment.

One feels that there is something suggestive in all metaphorics, which makes it the preferred element of rhetoric understood as that agreement that is solicited where univocity is not or cannot be reached. Losses are factored into the process of cognition. The definition of time as what is measured with a clock appears sound and is highly pragmatic when it comes to avoiding disputes. But is that what we have deserved since we began to ask what time is?

That time is no discursive concept is part of Kant’s defensive move that allows him to make it, by way of Newton’s absolute time, the a priori form of the inner sense. But when Kant uses the definition of time as an argument in his “Refutation of Idealism” in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,12 it becomes clear that even with him the metaphorics of space are at the bottom of the intuition of time and cannot be eliminated from it. It may be that this has to do with certain facts about the brain in which genetically the achievements of representing space are older than those of representing time.

Then again: Is even the notion of the fluxus temporis, of the stream of time, a necessary metaphorics? Is the commonality of, on the one hand, the absolute metaphor of the stream for consciousness and, on the other, for the constitution of time the guiding thread according to which phenomenology declares time to be the originary structure of consciousness?13 Does the application of the principle of the inertia of substance onto this figuration allow for the extra step made by Otto Liebman, who “imagines” the “I” as “the resting shore or rather the fixed island past which flows the stream of events, the fluxus temporis”?14

Finally, we need the historical reminder that the metaphor of the stream of time took a destructive turn against Francis Bacon’s assurance that truth would be the daughter of time, a belief that allows this stream to transport to our factual standpoint only that which was light enough not to sink into the river—the metaphorical self-evidence for the failure of tradition faced with the burden of truth.

Across the portal of Camille Flammarion’s observatory in Juvisy is written Ad veritatem per scientiam [To truth through science]. Today, one would hardly write this across the portal of a university or a scientific institution. Why not? It seems the saying assumes that the truth at which one wants to arrive is not identical to the science through which one wants to arrive at it. There is a difference with regard to which our expectations must be called extraordinarily vague and imprecise, and, despite all specifications in the scientific world, almost confused. In other words, we no longer know exactly why we undertook the whole enormous enterprise of science in the first place—regardless of all the services it performs for the viability of our world, which make it almost indispensable for it. This truth apparently is something that cannot be and probably never has been expressed in the language of science through which this truth is supposed to be reachable.

Seen from the topic of the life-world, metaphor is, especially in its rhetorically precisely defined short form, something late and derivative. If it does not want to limit itself to the achievements of metaphor for concept formation but become the guideline for regarding the life-world, a metaphorology cannot do without being integrated into the wider horizon of a theory of nonconceptuality. That one can speak of the “laughing meadow” is a poetic suggestion only because its aesthetic evidence lies in the notion that all saw it without having been able to say it. The homelessness of metaphor in a world determined by disciplined experience can be grasped in the discomfort encountered in everything that does not meet the standard of a language approaching objective univocity—unless it qualifies, according to the countertendency, as “aesthetic.” This attribute grants the final, and thus completely uninhibiting, license for ambiguity.

Under the title of nonconceptuality, one has at least to reckon with the expectation that even the class of the unsayable is not empty. Granted, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which begins with the sentence “The world is all that is the case,” does end with a prohibition regarding what is not the case or of which it cannot be said unambiguously that it is the case: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”15 This is, however, the prohibition of confusing the unsayable and the sayable. All that is the case has an unambiguous degree of linguistic availability, the scope of which does not, however, coincide with what can be experienced. Otherwise he would not have written immediately before the final prohibition: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”16 This is the nonchalant statement of a relic, which, since it does not fall under the definition of reality, is, as it were, homeless. It shares this exoticism with the “meaning of the world” that must be situated outside of this world, and even with the definition of the mystical, which is located in that, not how, the world is.

The counterposition has been articulated by Paul Valéry, one of the few modern poets of whom it can be said without exaggeration that they also were significant thinkers, in his play Mon Faust: “Only the ineffable is of any importance.”17 After all, it holds for Wittgenstein as well that even if all possible questions regarding what is the case could be answered, “the problems of life [would] remain completely untouched.”18 Between the life-world and the world of theoretical states of affairs, there could then be no context of justification. The situation after all scientific questions are answered is peculiarly that of the sentence: “Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.”19 The philosopher, Wittgenstein later writes in his Philosophical Investigations, treats a question like an illness.20

The boundary values of sayability and unsayability lie even further apart than those of definitional determinacy and imaginative sketching-out. It is not the existence of correlates of alleged speechlessness that is descriptively at issue, but that of the effort belonging to the history of our consciousness to represent unsayability itself linguistically. I once described this by means of the paradigm of the “explosive metaphorics”21 that occurs in the tradition of the mystical via negationis [way of negation], that is, in those self-portrayals of the elementary perplexity that riddles every theology—having to speak of God incessantly without presuming to dare say anything about him. Nicholas of Cusa made this perplexity a speculative means of representing his coincidentia oppositorum [unity of opposites]. He invented the explosive metaphor of the circle whose radius approaches infinity and thus produces a circumference with an infinitely small curvature so that the circle’s arc coincides with its tangent. Here, the intentionality of intuition is overexpanded in order that its futility be expressed in itself, so that the anticipation [Vorgriff] performs the retraction of the trespass [Übergriff].

It may be surprising still to find modern references for this eminently medieval pattern of expression. Georg Simmel elucidated a particular aspect of the modern consciousness of history in one of his journal fragments by amending Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence of the same into an explosive metaphor: “The world process strikes me as the turning of an enormous wheel, but understood as the premise of the eternal recurrence. But the result, the actual repetition at some point of the identical, is not the same—for the wheel has an infinitely large radius; only once an infinite amount of time has elapsed—that is, never—can it reach the same point again. And yet it is a wheel that turns, which, in its ideal, aims at the exhaustion of qualitative manifoldness without ever exhausting it in reality.”22 Nothing is left of the “sad necessity” of metaphor of which the Enlightenment thinker could speak. Even a desperate effort, something hitherto unspoken and believed to be unspeakable—not a sentence about a state of affairs, but about the totality of all states of affairs—can be an incomparable gain, which the author may have seen under the commandment of silence, although he is no stranger to using paradoxes for the ambiguity of “life” in his published texts. There is a border zone of language in which the act of writing something down would be equal to feeling ashamed before the public, without the claim of having perceived something being withdrawn. Naturally, a philosophy that discovered the theme of “life” had to make the early linguistic experiences of Heraclitus all over again.

The boundary value of the mystical in this context is only a pro memoria item [Erinnerungsposten] of the fact that the nonconceptual is not congruent with intuitiveness. It is not true that myth was the home of intuition before the odyssey of abstraction. The mythical sentence that everything is surrounded and descended from the okeanos is, after all, no more intuitive than the sentence that everything came to be from water. Both sentences have their difficulties in being executed as instructions to our faculty of imagination. Nevertheless, this “translation” of Thales of Miletus is so momentous because a sentence appears here that wants to be taken as a response to a question. This is largely foreign to myth, even if the Enlightenment would have liked to see it as the epitome of naive answers to the same questions that science had attended to in the meantime with incomparable success.

To avoid the pitfalls of myth theories at least in this instance, I shall try to look more closely at one of the most consequential sentences of a mythical quality ever created, that of the Revelation to John: “The devil … knows that his time is short.”23 Since we know how strong an effect this sentence had until very recently among religiously awakened emigrants, as Ernst Benz has shown,24 one is tempted to attribute this out of hand to the intuitiveness of mythical sentences. But this assumption does not withstand closer scrutiny. The apocalyptic-visionary author may have had an image of what the devil looks like; the reader has to take it from elsewhere—for instance, from his experiences with the paintings of more than a millennium later. But what it meant for John’s contemporaries to learn that time was short for this devil completely eludes intuition: time, what time? That of the clock, of the calendar, of history? Short or long in relationship to what? It is astonishing how little material the exegesis of this sentences has yielded for filling the imaginative void. Nevertheless, it is hardly tied to the cultural conditions of its origin; it could be translated into any language using a different name. At the same time, however, it strikes one that this sentence must have transformed the sense of the world [Weltgefühl]. Its warning comes indirectly because it does not tell humans the same old story that their time is short but asserts it of another who can be counted on to summon up the utmost of his abilities to use his time to deprive everybody else of it. It is a one-sentence myth that does not even get our imagination going but is merely a formula for something that could not have been expressed conceptually: the power determined to do harm to mankind is itself under the pressure of time. What comes next was expressed by the evangelist Luke, again in a one-sentence myth, as the vision of the expired reprieve: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”25

In the service of conceptual history, metaphorology has categorized and described the perplexities that arise in the preliminary stage of concept formation, in the vicinity of the hard core of clear and distinct determinateness, and even in complete distance from it. A historical phenomenology, however, must also attend to the degenerate forms that appear after speech has been taken literally as the perplexity in the face of the claim to realism. Theological Christology, in its opposition to docetisms of all kinds, invented stringent types of realism that were previously unknown, or at least could not be articulated rigorously, when dealing with myths and their allegoreses, with epiphanies and metamorphoses whose seriousness was variously indeterminate. The realism of the incarnation turned away indignantly from the Gnostic insistence that God in his historical appearance had only passed through human form as water runs through a pipe. The background of the nonbinding handling of mythologemes forced the dogmatic codification of a rigorism of finality for the salvific union of God and man. But the exegetical arts of multiplying scriptural meaning already softened this realism; metaphor is the form of language that eschews realism’s strict demands.

Anyone who does not want to observe the crisis symptoms of the late Middle Ages in the increasing metaphorization of theological dogmatics can study this avoidance of difficulties in the repeated metaphorization in our own century after the phase of excessive demands made by dialectical theology. Demythologization is for a good part nothing but remetaphorization: the punctual kerygma [proclamation of salvation through Jesus] radiates a corona of linguistic forms that no longer need to be taken at their word. Dogmatic realism had “understood” what resurrection was supposed to mean; as an absolute metaphor for the certainty of salvation, it is something of which one may say that it had better remain nonunderstood.

Reduction to indeterminateness is indeed a peculiarity of sacral texts, which survive by fending off banal literalism because they are credited with something that cannot be examined as to what it may in fact be. To trace church language back to a vernacular delivers every text up to being interrogated defenselessly. In order not to make use of Latin again, I ask what would become of the chorales of Paul Gerhardt if one were to subject them to translation from German into German. It is their art, not their sacral content, that protects them from this.

Metaphor can thus also be late form. In the history of science, a striking example of this is molecularism’s loss of reality in the nineteenth century. For it had, since Laplace, been expected to show that the microstructure of matter would prove to be a repetition of the macrostructure of the universe, and thus a field of application for Newton’s dynamics. Molecularism emerges at a time that admitted no hope for solving the problem of material microstructure empirically; it is an expression of the economic assumption that the solar system represents the simplest building principle of all physical systems. In the other direction, for clarifying the construction of cosmic supersystems of the type of the Milky Way, this hypothesis had already, as the “Copernican Comparative,” proved a successful and empirically justifiable projection.26 Thus, adopting the identical procedure for the underworld of the ultimately invisible seemed to be the application of a unified world principle. Analogy is the realism of metaphor.

What destroyed this realism of molecular solar systems was, at first, positivism and its reduction of all physical questions to those of pure analysis modeled on the rational mechanics of Euler and Lagrange; what continued this destruction was, absurdly, the generosity of Maxwell, in interpreting Faraday’s “lines of force,” to allow understanding to make use of any physical analogy. This was his conclusion from the insight that the positivists’ demand—the demand that a scientific statement contain nothing but differential equations and reality itself be structured mathematically—had come no nearer to reality than the molecularists’ Newtonian systems. These were not antithetical theories but changing occupations of the positions of the “scientific metaphor.”27 Human thought, Maxwell wrote, can move in the sphere of pure positivity only by means of an intermediary; it certainly cannot be satisfied without deploying a metaphor for the symbolism of calculus.

Undoubtedly, this procedure was governed by the principle of insufficient reason.28 Thus, Wittgenstein would later describe philosophy as based on the preference for similes without adequate justification for their choice. Indeed, he writes, a much greater proportion of the opposition between humans is based on the “preference for certain similes” than one would think.29

It seems natural to object that metaphorology and still more a theory of nonconceptuality deals in irrational decisions and reduces man to Buridan’s ass. Even if that were the case, it would not produce but only describe this state of affairs. But when this theory goes back to the genesis of that state of affairs and analyzes it with regard to needs and motivations, something comes to pass that I would like to call the rationalization of deficiency. It consists in supplementing the consideration of how much we ought to achieve [wir … leisten sollen] in fulfilling consciousness’ intentionality with the more anthropological consideration of how much fulfillment we can afford [wir uns … leisten können].

In a fragment first published in 1959 by Helmut Sembdner, Kleist proposed dividing humanity into two classes: “(1) those who are adept at metaphor, and (2) those who are adept at formula.”30 Those who understand both are too few to constitute a class. It looks like there is an exclusive alternative in this typology. But in fact we cannot take recourse to metaphors where formulae are possible. We can afford the abundance of metaphors that our rhetoric produces only because the power of formulae determines our latitude for what goes beyond the bare securing of our existence, and therefore also for what metaphors offer us in going beyond formulae. Above all, formulae ensure that a process’s initial state can be linked to arbitrary final states without presupposing any empirical objectivity for the intermediate field or the totality. Nonconceptuality wants more than the “form” of processes or states, it wants their Gestalt. But it would be premature to see in this the offer to decide between intuitiveness and abstraction, which are, in any case, not identical with metaphor or formula, symbol or concept. They stand in a complex and often contrary relation particularly to intuition.

What unites concepts and symbols is their indifference to the presence of what they enjoin us to imagine. While concepts potentially tend toward intuition and remain dependent on it, symbols, in a reverse motion, detach themselves from what they stand for. It may be that the capacity for making symbols arose from the inability to make an image, as Freud suspects;31 or from magic with its technical desire to dispose of reality as a whole by investigating a splinter of this reality; or from the disposition to the conditional reflex, in which a concomitant circumstance of the real stimulus assumes and retains the stimulus function itself. What matters is that this elementary organ of the relationship to the world makes it possible to turn away from perception and representation as a free disposition over that which is not present. The operability of the symbol is what distinguishes it from imagination [Vorstellung] as well as depiction [Abbildung]: not only does the flag represent the state that has chosen its color sequence, but it can, in contrast to the state, be captured or disgraced, shown in the position of mourning or of sporting victory, misused for some ends and held aloft for others.

For a long time, this capacity for intertwining the heterogeneous inhibited understanding what happens in human cognition and that it is not subject to the obvious but also contradictory evidence of the proverb “like through like.” It may have been the first absolute metaphor of philosophy when Heraclitus described thought as “fire,” not only because to him fire was the divine element but because it has the quality of constantly absorbing the alien and transforming it into itself. Atomism misunderstood this to mean that fire atoms are spherically shaped, and that the sphere contains all other atomic shapes and is therefore the most accurate representation of the soul’s properties of motion and cognition. Only the concept of the symbol—partly prefigured by the concept of the symptom in ancient medicine—allows what happens in perception and cognition to be grasped. The secondary qualities of the senses do not depict what, as such, is not in the thing, just as the external symptoms do not depict the internal diseases; both only achieve what they do because the connection with what they refer to is stable.

Money, by way of its connection with a rare substance, sought to represent value, with the idea of which, however, it needs only to be linked in a reliable manner, for instance by means of the state’s guarantee of its acceptance. But the symbol is powerless to communicate anything about its reference object. It stands for the nonrepresentable without helping to reach it. It maintains this distance to constitute a sphere of nonobjectual correlates of thought—the sphere of what can be symbolically represented—between object and subject. This is the possibility of the effect of mere ideas, of the idea as the epitome of possibilities such as that of value.

Or that of “being.” Do we really understand what Heidegger’s question of fundamental ontology—the question concerning the “meaning of being”—was supposed to mean? We proceed here as with any other question about “meaning” by using a substitution. When, for example, we ask about the meaning of history, we unconsciously replace what we have asked about with something else by attributing a purpose to the course of history, and by locating this purpose in an ultimate state of the historical process that justifies everything prior to it. For the question of the meaning of being, this does not work, because that which is to be established by asking is clearly not subject to change, at least as long as the “history of being” does not yet exist. The device that helps in this situation is the assertion that the question need not be answered with reference to its subject matter at all. Rather, we already have this answer, and in fact are ourselves nothing but the possession of that answer. This would mean a further increase of the Platonic anamnesis [recollection], with the difference that this possession manifests itself not in concepts but in the structure of consciousness itself and the behavior founded on it. The reframing of the question of being by way of concepts avoids the path of the Platonic anamnesis by making the understanding of being into the essence of Dasein without having to say what logical “form” it has. Nonconceptuality here means that we thoroughly experience what the understanding of being is not.

Thus, the answer to the question of being can be seen as the radical of our ways of conduct, as the epitome of its implications and of these implications’ implications. This is why Dasein’s being is care, the implication of care is time, the implication of time is being. Such an answer does not refer to any of the objects we know, or to their totality as a world like the one in which we live. That Dasein is “being-in-the-world” indeed means that the world of this “being-in” does not consist of “objects,” but nor can it be grasped in metaphors.

It only takes a small supplementary theory to make us understand why this possession could be hidden from us for so long and with such disastrous consequences. It is the additional theorem of the inauthenticity of our existence; only later did Heidegger remodel it into a component in his concept of a history of being, which wanted to comprehend what he previously called “inauthentic” as an episode of the concealment of being—or rather, the self-concealment of being. As a historical fatality, its consequences are worse than when it was still unredeemed authenticity. It has ordained that scientific reason should be blind to the origin of its possibility in a world-relation.

Heidegger set up his question of being as an enemy of positive science, an enmity supposedly more profound than that between intuition and concepts, between metaphor and formulae. But what is also true for this relation and what the evaluative inclinations in this field cannot overlook is this: the question of the “meaning of being” is able to concern or preoccupy us only because it neither decides nor even affects the question for the conditions of Dasein.

At first, the artifice of accepting the answer to the question of being as always already given presupposed a link between Dasein and that about which it asks. From this, results a coupling of Da-sein and being that is so constitutively nonobjectual, both lifelong and life-deep, that one could become the symbol for the other, or rather: the foundation of all symbols. What I called “implication” as the schema of the methodological context of the existential analytic and ontology is at the same time a prohibition of metaphorics, including absolute metaphors. Metaphorically, nothing can be “represented” if all elemental behaviors toward the world have their original wholeness in care, whose ontological meaning lies in temporality, and which, in turn, is probably the unfolded horizon of a final radicalism, the designation of which may be arbitrarily interchangeable. For them, a strict prohibition of metaphors once applied; the language of the “history of being” proves that it could not be upheld.

Likewise, what is expressed by the word “freedom” falls under the verdict of being a metaphor. Because it can only be approached “as a necessary presupposition of reason,” Kant says that freedom is an idea. Not only is there no experience of the reality of freedom, but also no possible way of intuiting its idea. For it alone Kant explicitly denies the mere possibility of symbolization—in the sense in which he used the term “symbol” closely to that of absolute metaphor—“because no example of anything analogous can ever be put under it.”32 But the danger of an absolute metaphor for the idea of freedom is perceptible in Kant himself and its serious, necessarily misleading consequences can be discerned in the way he introduces the transcendental concept of action. It suggests understanding as freedom everything that can be represented as a transcendental action of the understanding.

Kant presented the synthesis of the transcendental apperception as a process of the understanding, and the categories as its final regulating instances. Can this, with regard to the concept of action in the theory of practical reason, already or still be called “action”? The theory of practical reason may and must presuppose the identity of a subject that is the condition of all possible responsibility and accountability. The theory of theoretical reason is not capable of doing this; it shows the identity of the subject precisely in statu nascendi [in the state of being born]. The understanding is not the subject that makes use of procedures in its actions; instead, it is nothing but the epitome of this regulated procedure. If we take the linguistic distinction of the understanding from such “actions” at its word, then the whole critique of reason, not only that of practical reason (which as such, of course, is theoretical), becomes practical. If, then, everything is practical and nothing theoretical anymore, this may offer reassurance to all, but leave them none the wiser for it.

Nothing is gained for an understanding of freedom as the conditioning ground of morality if one is told that the synthesis of representations is “already” an action of the understanding. This misunderstanding, however, is older than its later inventors believe. It is already part of Simmel’s much-admired interpretation of Kant and his subsequent attempt, in his philosophy of history, to extract from it something against deterministic historism. Humans would then “make” their history in freedom, or in more freedom, because the synthesis of their representations would be an “action” of their understanding. Yet this is just an absolute metaphor taken at its word, leading us astray.

Translated by Hannes Bajohr

Originally published as “Ausblick auf eine Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit,” Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 75–93; from Hans Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 193–209.

  1. 1.   [George Berkeley, “De Motu,” in De Motu and The Analyst, ed. Douglas M. Jesseph (Dordrecht: Springer, 1992), 74.]

  2. 2.   [Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). The German original, “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie,” appeared first as a special issue of the Archiv für Be-griffsgeschichte 6 (1960): 7–142.]

  3. 3.   [Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 464. This addendum is not part of the English translation of Husserl.]

  4. 4.   [Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendenzale Logik (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 510. This addendum is not part of the English translation.]

  5. 5.   [Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, vol. 3 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 438.]

  6. 6.   [“The meadow laughs.” The example is, in fact, not Quintilian’s; Blumenberg may have found it in Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 128, where it is introduced together with Quintilian as a stand-in for the whole rhetorical tradition.]

  7. 7.   [Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom,” in The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 83.]

  8. 8.   [Blumenberg here likely refers to Joachim Ritter, “Landschaft: Zur Funktion der Ästhetik in der modernen Gesellschaft,” in Subjektivität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974).]

  9. 9.   [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, rev. 2nd ed., ed. Georg Henrik von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3.]

  10. 10.   [Matthias Claudius, “Evening Song,” A Harvest of German Verse, ed. Margarete Münsterberg (New York: Appleton, 1916), 39.]

  11. 11.   [The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, vol. 1 (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975), 181.]

  12. 12.   [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 326–333 (B 274–9).]

  13. 13.   [Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).]

  14. 14.   [Otto Liebmann, “Geist der Transcendentalphilosophie,” in Gedanken und Thatsachen: Philosophische Abhandlungen, Aphorismen und Studien (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1904), 2:15.]

  15. 15.   [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2001), 5; 89.]

  16. 16.   [Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 89.]

  17. 17.   [Paul Valéry, “My Faust,” Plays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 94.]

  18. 18.   [Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 88.]

  19. 19.   [Wittgenstein, 88.]

  20. 20.   [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 98.]

  21. 21.   [Blumenberg, Paradigms, 123.]

  22. 22.   [Georg Simmel, “Aus dem nachgelassenen Tagebuche,” Postume Veröffentlichungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 263.]

  23. 23.   [Revelation 12:12.]

  24. 24.    [Ernst Benz, “Akzeleration der Zeit als geschichtliches und heilsgeschichtliches Problem,” Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur in Mainz. Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 2 (1977): 3–56.]

  25. 25.   [Luke 10:18.]

  26. 26.   [See the fourth part, “The Copernican Comparative,” of Hans Blumenberg’s The Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).]

  27. 27.   [James Clerk Maxwell, “Address to the Mathematical and Physical Sections of the British Association,” The Scientific Papers, vol. 2, ed. W. D. Niven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1965), 227; English in the original.]

  28. 28.   [See Hans Blumenberg, “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric,” in this volume.]

  29. 29.   [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 20e.]

  30. 30.   [Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle (Basel: Stroemfeld, 1999), 555.]

  31. 31.   [Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. David Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), chap. 6.]

  32. 32.   [Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63.]