(circa 1975, excerpt)
Concepts are thought to be a product of reason, if not its triumph, and they most probably are. This does not permit the reverse, however: that reason is only to be found where reality, life, or being—whatever one wants to call the totality—is articulated conceptually, be it successfully or at least with the intent of succeeding.
There is no identity between reason and concepts, although it would of course be nonsense to say that the intention of reason was completely disconnected from the achievement of concepts. It is possible that the achievement of concepts is only a part of the intention of reason, which always seems to have something to do with totality.
Concepts do have something to do with the absence of their object. This can also mean: they have to do with the lack of the completed representation [Vorstellung] of the object. This relationship has been compared to that between different sense organs: seeing only substitutes for the possibility of touch, of feeling, and thus of possession. Optical presence anticipates tactile presence, even when it forgoes the latter. Visibility is the lack of tangibility due to the distance from the object. If one imagines the distance to be further increased—in space or in time—all that is left is the concept, which in turn substitutes for the entire spectrum of what can sensually be accessed.
One could say that reason is the epitome of such achievements at a distance—the integration of that which already lies within a concept as the substitution of presence and hence also of that which cannot at all become present because it does not have the quality of being an object, such as the world, the ego, time, space (ideas—rules as if they were objects).
Schopenhauer was of the opinion that through reason we had a “a complete view of life independent of time. We always have, so to speak, a reduced, colourless, abstract, mathematical sketch of the entire world.”1
Concepts may not be surrogates but they are, to the chagrin of the philosophical expectations invested in it, not the fulfillment of the intentions of reason, but merely the transitional stage in which it takes its bearings.
I try to understand this anthropologically and genetically. Man, the creature that raises itself upright and leaves behind the close range of perception, is the creature of actio per distans [action at a distance]. He acts on things he does not perceive. In the caves, which are his first shelter, he paints on the wall the objects of his desire and of his struggle for existence. Concepts emerge in the life of creatures who are hunters and nomads. Maybe one could best elucidate what concepts achieve by thinking of the fabrication of a trap: it is in all its aspects prepared with the shape and dimensions, the behavior and way of movement of an object in mind that is only expected, not present, and yet to be brought into one’s grasp and possession. This thing again stands in reference to needs that are not immediate, that possess a temporal aspect. An anthropological theory of concepts is an urgent desideratum, for it alone allows for a functional reflection of both the achievements of concepts as well as its falling behind of demands that do not directly arise from a nomadic lifestyle but require the leisure of sedentarism: we are faced with the strange state of affairs that concepts are indeed a product of the hunter and nomad’s form of life but that theory, which appears to be the epitome of concepts’ achievements, presupposes urban sedentarism and the division of labor.
Concepts are not capable of everything that reason demands. Not only is there a hiatus between the highest developmental level of concepts and the claims of reason but it needs to be considered whether the consummation of a concept interferes with or even inhibits the claims of reason. Using the Cartesian characterization of concepts, Lichtenberg expressed this as follows: “To tune down distinct concepts to clear ones.”2 What could this mean? The terms “clear” and “distinct” belong, according to Descartes’s characterization that was so definitive for the modern age, to the initially representational and then conceptual first rule of the Discourse on Method. It is the ideal of complete objectification [Vergegenständlichung], and, on this basis, that of the completion of terminology. Attaining this ideal would mean that the final state of a philosophical language as purely conceptual, in the strict sense, had been reached. Just as there would no longer be a provisional morality, nothing provisional would any longer be possible with such concepts. What these two terms signify is what Edmund Husserl, the last Cartesian, called the “universality of the coincidence between speech and thinking.”3
Concepts developed from the actio per distans, from action across spatial and temporal distance. As concerns temporal distance, it is easy to see the difference between the determinateness that a story about past events can assume (names and the detailed description of occurrences can be sufficient for it) and what kind of intertwining between indeterminacy and the limitation produced by typification is needed to articulate an expectation that refers to approaching and possible events and objects. Concepts must possess enough indeterminacy in order still to grasp these approaching experiences in such a way that expedient attitudes toward them can then be adopted even if—on the level of detailed, full specificity—there are small deviations from past experiences. Concepts require a latitude for all the concrete that is to be subjected to its classification. They admittedly need to have enough distinctness to exclude what is altogether irrelevant, but their exclusivity must not be as narrow as the name needs to be, referring to the individual and its identity, its identifiability. In this respect, concepts are not so much the instruments of a creature that is capable of memory but one that is attuned to preemption [Prävention]: it seeks to cope with what is not yet immediately at hand. Understood anthropologically and genetically, the ideal of concepts’ distinctness refers to the elasticity of the latitude within which a concretely perceived or imagined creature is still supposed to be admitted to everything that is, with regard to attitudes and precautions, typical of action and that is inherent, prepared, or prefigured in experience.
The ideal of clarity has its origin in spatial distance. This is a question not of determining tolerances within which something can still be recognized and acknowledged as something, but of the premises of this act with regard to the obstacles that are posed by the variations of the view brought about through spatial proximity or distance—particularly, too, by those optical obscurations that are the consequences of leading a life depending on a medium, an atmosphere. Life and optics rely on opposite preconditions: the ideal of optics is empty space that does not allow for any obstruction of light; the precondition of life is a certain density of the medium in which breathing is still possible. The ideal of clarity has in its origin something to do with this antinomy of the optical situation.
The preemptive creature is not necessarily a social creature. Anthropologically, it must be assumed that humans stem from a line of primates in which by the prevalent tendency toward flight behavior all the specializations for close combat body-to-body have been lost; instead, it was gaining space that always bestowed benefits in terms of survival. In preemptive behavior, the advantage of gaining space is connected with the pressures resulting from the loss of the specializations for close physical combat. The pivotal situation of this development can only be one in which flight cannot be continued at will, where the flight animal was confronted with the necessity to hold out against its pursuer despite its lack of physiological equipment for body-to-body combat. The compromise consists of the actio per distans, the action of throwing. It is not by accident that human history is dominated by projectiles and throwing devices.
If we imagine preemption not so much as an immediate necessity but as a conception, a project, or a planned order that has at one point been understood in its capacities, then the extension of preemptive behavior leads by necessity to the creation of societies. The flight animal that defends itself across spatial and temporal distances may have not yet become an organic system capable of close combat, but it has become one that itself applies and extends its learned abilities in the hunt for its prey. The trap, too, is an action in the absence of both the prey and, at a temporal remove, the hunter. The trap acts on behalf of the hunter in the moment in which he himself is absent but the prey is present, while constructing the trap displays the inverse relationship. It is expectation turned object. Since one has to return to traps to monitor and enjoy their success, they require a certain degree of sedentarism. The trap also represents the very tolerance between exactness and inexactness of its reference object that can only be created by way of concepts. One need only think of the still current significance of a fishing net’s mesh size, on which depend both the quality of the current prey as well as the protection of their numbers for future forays. But a fishing net is much less specifically designed than the trap of a stone age hunter must have been when one thinks of the fact that even mammoths were caught in traps. The fact that the hunt is the reversal of a flight animal’s primary behavior means that by necessity it becomes socialized [vergesellschaftete] action. It turns the only now linguistically realized concepts into an instrument for organized behavior.
At this point, some might heave a sigh of relief and think that we have now finally arrived at socialization and thus at salvation. But as little as it can be denied that the origin of concepts has something to do with the ways of conduct that impelled to socialization or were made possible through it, as little can it be denied that concepts are just as provisional as socialization, which in the hunting behavior or in the preemption of the struggle for existence is a mere means—a means, of course, that carries one from subjectivity to that objectivity which is inevitable in any intersubjectivity, in any socialization. Objectivity is not yet a goal; it is initially only a means in order to be able to act collectively. Digging pitfalls requires a shared imagination of what they ought to trap. Objectivity is not yet the final state that dissociates humans from animals. Schopenhauer again writes: “Animals bend their heads to the ground because they simply need to see only what affects and concerns them, and they can never arrive at a really objective contemplation of things.”4 I am using an old humanistic formula to make clear that raising gait and gaze, extending the horizon and thus the ability to objectify what is not yet physical proximity, is not the terminal point of this process. The old teleological anthropology of the Greeks and Romans agreed that the upright gait and flexibility of the human head were evidence of nature’s ultimate intention for man to be the beholder of the heavens. This means that the gaze is not fixed on the spatial and temporal horizon in order to expect and act upon that which is approaching; rather, the gaze that had already been raised by ninety degrees horizontally from looking at the earth, is again raised by ninety degrees and directed to the starry sky.
Having done so, this gaze then meets with an object whose quality can be characterized as follows:
For the Greeks, contemplating the sky meant not only contemplating a special and divine object of the highest dignity, but the paradigmatic case of what theory ought to be, what is at stake for it. The ideal of theory is the contemplation of the sky as an object that cannot be handled, that cannot be conceived of as a means. What can no longer be a means is totality itself, which encompasses the means.
Now, this is not a simple and conflict-free ascent of man from earth-boundedness, objectivation, and concept formation, toward totality and ideality. This is an all-too-easy image, developed by traditional metaphysics. In each of these stages, there is the possibility, the danger, and the conflict of neglecting what, with a great philosophical contrast term, has been called “life”—reality, realism, praxis, existence. As regards pure theory, I call to mind the anecdote of Thales: the Miletian protophilosopher and astronomer Thales, contemplating the stars at night in an open field, falls into a cistern; his Thracian maid, having witnessed this, laughs at him loudly and reproaches him for occupying himself with the distant things up there in the sky but overlooking what is in front of his feet. Many fine and witty things have been said about this anecdote for more than two thousand years. Plato turned it into the prototype for his Socrates, whose philosophy made him misjudge the praxis of life and the state in such a way that the conflict came to a deadly ending for him.5
What happens at the heart of this anecdote is a multifaceted conflict. Its anthropological aspect is that pure theory, the claim for the totality of the world, cannot be had without an alienation from the realism of the practical world. The laughter of the Thracian maid certainly had originally been mythical: she believes the subterranean gods of her home, Thrace, to be in the right against the worshippers of the stars, the surface gods, the Olympians who are allied with the light. The laughter is, however, also the constant exhortation to realism, to return to the simple bringing-to-mind of what concerns oneself or may do so, to turn away from that which, with respect to the fate of one’s life, concerns no one but oneself.
One has to understand that the tendency toward this kind of idealized theory is already inherent in the upright gait. Preemption, too, is always a too-much in regard to immediacy, to coping with whatever needs to be done. Instruments for possibilities must be much more extensive and subtle than instruments for a pressing reality.
By his origin, man is bound to the principle of superfluousness and luxury. The upright gait is, from its first appearance, luxuriating: to see what is not yet present, what does not yet have any urgent necessity, to preempt what is only a noncorporeal possibility, potential threat, or temptation—that is always a matter of too much effort and therefore, and not by chance, as much the beginning of as the possibility of the end to all aggressions. To arrive at an astronomy by contemplating celestial phenomena that—as in the legend about Thales of Miletus—allows a solar eclipse to be predicted, is a preemption of such an extreme type that it cannot forestall anything else but the bare fear of the suddenness with which the event of the solar eclipse irrupts. We believe the liberation from fear to be one of the greatest and most arduous efforts of human history. But to a biological-realistic reflection, this must seem like a small return for a great expense.
Two aspects are illustrated here that concern the difference between concepts and reason. An anthropological theory of concept formation will be hard pressed to describe liberation from fear as a result of the rational principle of self-preservation as a true purpose of human history. That this is an idea which rises above the level of the economy of self-preservation, one will be prepared to concede only if one acknowledges the right of pure theory to be realized independently of the complex of self-preservation of life as a form of realizing freedom—namely, the freedom from being bound to the means-structure [Mittelstruktur] of the objects. Freedom from fear and freedom from instrumental objectivation might not be mutually dependent, but are functionally analogous, that is, they are ideas devised by reason for processes that can concern long durations and the whole of history because the minimum of the self-preservation of the species and the individual does not depend on them.
[…]
In his anthropology, Arnold Gehlen has described the emergence of concepts as an achievement of unburdening [Entlastung] under the conditions of sensory overload [Reizüberflutung].6 This allows him to exercise the special type of rationality that is inherent in the concept of economy. Every achievement is here an economizing: the word economizes intuition, intuition economizes touch—one could add: even touch is an economizing of smelling or tasting as the accompanying senses of devouring. The end of isophagy may be reached at the moment when, instead of devouring one another, it is enough only to rub each other’s noses or to hug at the airport.
I have highlighted the aspect of preemption because it corresponds most precisely with the process of raising oneself up as a primal anthropological achievement. But even preemption is an epitome of unburdenings. It relieves future situations from being scattered or suffocated by distracting stimuli. It does so by processing the possible in advance. For Gehlen, the epitome of what is the result of unburdening even in its highest forms of symbolic-abstract structures of achievements is nothing but pure self-preservation, the epitome of responses to the question of how this imperiled organic system can survive at all. Despite the question’s rationality, I tend to see too little in this for a philosophical anthropology.
I believe that the basic concept of preemption gets us further. For in addition to mere unburdening, what we get here is the fact that the having-to-perceive-less is placed in the service of the being-able-to-perceive-more, which is preemption itself; but at the same time, it is also the root of a farther-reaching engagement with what is now made available in this process. For preemption creates the freedom to interpret what it perceives for the benefit of anticipating the possible also as an offer of active choices that tend toward pleasure [Genuss]. As important as the liberation from fear as the purpose of history might be, the creature that is liberated from fear and liberates itself from it does not attain contentment in doing so, because in the actions of neutralization it has become aware of the relation toward the ability to take pleasure. A textbook case seems to me to be myth: in its function, it belongs originally to the nexus of the purpose to liberate from fear; at its end, it is also the inexhaustible reservoir for the basic figures of what can only be enjoyed in obsolete rituals and their aesthetic appeals, in poetry, in tragedy.
If this is the case, then the arsenal of preemption and unburdening is not the pinnacle of human creations. The achievement of concepts, too, would not be something final and valuable in itself.
My thesis: The turn away from intuition is wholly at the service of a return to intuition. This is of course not the recurrence of the same, the return to the starting point, and certainly not anything at all to do with romanticism. Concepts, the instruments of unburdening, of the easy representation [Vergegenwärtigung] of what is absent, are at the same time the instruments of a claim to a new presence, a new intuition—but this time, one that is not coerced but sought. Pleasure requires the return to full sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] under the conditions of the returning agent. The movement of unburdenment from stimuli is reversed in a movement of looking for stimuli, which is only possible from that basic position that before has been unburdened. The success of concepts is at the same time the reversal of their function: it only initiates the process in which a tremendum—something unknown and terrible—that has become an object, returns as an object that now can be enjoyed. Already theoretically the achievement of concepts is only to keep the object potentially available and retrievable.
Metaphor is also an aesthetic medium precisely because it is both native to the original sphere of concepts and because it is continually liable and has to vouch for the deficiency of concepts and the limits of what they can achieve. Metaphorology might not be an aesthetic discipline—it regards the relationship between concepts and metaphors as a genetic and functional one—but it is certainly part of its thematic range to describe and explain how metaphor enters into the aesthetic context, or rather, how the aesthetic in its entirety emerges from the metaphoric and mythical substrate.
In the aesthetic sphere, the functions of the anthropological development recur, but without the connotation of negative qualities such as anxiety and fear, but hence also without being put to use for preemption. What is unexpected now becomes what is surprising. Even the audacity of a metaphor connecting extremely far-flung spheres is made subservient to pleasure. The unexpected now appears as tamed, in dressage, in domestication. Fear has turned into the pleasant shudder in the face of a beast that is dangerous only for its animal tamer (shipwreck and spectator).
Here, however, the reverse confusion also becomes possible for those who want to have metaphor taken at its word, who confound appearance and reality insofar as they believe that in changing the appearance they have already achieved something in reality. Conversely, there is the reproachful spectator who is not satisfied with the merely aesthetical and resents fiction for just wanting to be fiction.
Aesthetic fiction as the atrophied state of a reality that could only be endured and withstood in the exertion of preemption proves to be an irreversible step at least to reclaim reality, perhaps without knowing which reality this would have to be. The relaxed situation of the spectator is not endured or is not supposed to be endured, the confusion of reality and fiction does not become the precondition for its own kind of rhetoric, which demands the end of art because it believes itself able to exchange it eo ipso for reality.
To put an end to illusions, however, does not yet mean to begin with realism—otherwise, centuries of working to reduce prejudices would have to have opened up an unclouded view onto an objectivity without presuppositions.
The quality of surprise that belongs to the aesthetic, therefore, is the unburdened comprehension of the early anthropogenetic situation in which all possibilities had to be anticipated. In art, everything has been tried again and again to restore the primordiality of the unexpected, of that which is at its extreme dissimilar to any reality. Surrealism was one of the aesthetic currents that attempted to exploit the confusion between fiction and reality. Anaïs Nin reports an experience with the founder of the school of surrealism, André Breton, in the fall of 1937.7 Breton had told her a story “which was the opposite of what I had expected.” The surrealists had performed something that we today would call a “happening,” an unplanned action with the intent of bringing about surprises. They had taken a train to an unknown place and waited there for something to happen, hoping that one day one might encounter a real surprise. It was an attempt to make the unexpected expectable. The story Breton tells Anaïs Nin looks at it from the perspective of this aesthetic disposition of the founder of surrealism. It went as follows: a few days ago, Breton had received a letter from a woman, a beautiful letter that spoke of the importance that Breton attached to aesthetic chance, to surprise. The letter writer then suggested such a surprise: she would like to meet Breton at midnight under the Pont Royal, but she did not wish to reveal her identity. The listener of the story waits for the adequate conclusion. But Breton ends with the sentence: “I did not go, of course.” The listener is amazed and asks why this is a matter “of course” to him. Answer: “Because I have many enemies, and it could have been a trap.” Breton notices his listener’s disappointment and adds to his story: “I went the second time, though, after she wrote to me. But I was careful to post two loyal friends on the bridge where I could call out to them in case of danger.” For Breton’s listener, this is the perfect self-exposure of the aesthetic theorist: instead of grasping the possible aesthetic conception of the situation, he once again opts for preemption by not being able to maintain the readiness for surprise as an aesthetic one, but by taking the fiction at its word—as a risky reality to be approached with regard to its ambiguity. The readiness for surprise proves to be, as Anaïs Nin writes, “conscious, premeditated, and an intellectual technique,” a matter for the laboratory. This accusation is naive, psychologically completely unjustified, but it is a consequence of precisely those confusions whose production corresponded to the aesthetic program of surrealism. The listener thus reacted just as she was supposed to if the program had been able to function. She applies the concept of reality that this aesthetic theory presupposes to its founder—which is rightly embarrassing for him but belongs to the unavoidable embarrassments for those who embark on such a theory. The uninvolved spectator to whom this anecdote is offered reacts to it in a completely different way from the two persons involved in it, namely, by laughing. What is ridiculous is the fact that Breton and his listener have different concepts of reality.
[…]
The proof that the theoretical need is not exhausted by the achievement of concepts in judgments and combinations of judgments can only be produced by describing the boundary of concepts and whatever must be achieved beyond this boundary.
In principle, a concept must be definable even if in a given situation no one is capable of fulfilling the demand for a definition. Rationality does not begin with the fulfillment of certain demands, but when they are acknowledged.
What is a definition? Linguistically, it appears as a replacement of one expression by another. Logically, it is described as a relationship of equivalence between the one expression and the other. The definition is the rule according to which an expression can become equivalently replaced by another. […]
“World” is an expression for which the attempt to find rules for replacing the word is constitutively doomed to fail. Some people say that this generally voids the right to speak of the world, because, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”8 (According to the seventh and last main proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—who himself, however, did in no way abide by this proposition but quite unabashedly made the opposite into the epitome of his later philosophy.)
Even if I were inclined to agree that sentences about “the world” should from now on be no longer constructed or used, I would still be very unsure if this ban could ever be successful. Let me confront this last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with another proposition that perhaps explains why an apodictically inclined young philosopher was later not willing to abide by his principle. This sentence is by Paul Valéry, from his work Mon Faust: “What can be written down is mere foolishness. Only the ineffable is of any importance.”9
Perhaps someone might say we can very well dispense with the expression “world.” Such remarks as “The world is bad” or “The world is on the brink of the abyss,” the argument would go, do not actually say anything and are not worth the trouble of uttering them. The difficulty is how far one is willing to go. One who has dispensed with “the world” might hesitate at being expected also to dispense with the expression “freedom” under the same conditions. Particularly for freedom, Kant emphatically assessed this issue: We have no concept of freedom, because we cannot provide any rule according to which the expression “freedom” might be substituted. It can only be deduced “as a necessary presupposition of reason.” Thus, not only its objective reality but also what its concept might contain of that reality cannot be demonstrated. Kant explicitly states that for freedom, even the method to insert analogies and examples for want of concepts fails. Kant reasons that this is the fact “because no example of anything analogous can ever be put under it.”10 That the use of the expression “freedom” is still indispensable results from it having to be approached “as a necessary presupposition of reason.” Exactly this is meant by saying that freedom is not a concept but an idea. Perhaps “world” is a boundary concept; “freedom,” at any rate, is an idea. Nevertheless, I do not want to omit that there is a definition that Goethe expressed toward Chancellor von Müller on June 20, 1827: “Freedom is nothing but the possibility of being able to act reasonably under all circumstances.”11 It corresponds to Kant’s understanding.
Reason awakes the expectations of the understanding and at the same time disappoints them.
To assign concepts to the understanding and ideas to reason is not only a specialty of Kant’s philosophy of dividing up the mind into capacities but also has its cause in circumstances that could be described as achievements or as the limits of achievements.
Now, the suspicion arises easily that every concept that cannot clearly be assigned to a complex of intuitions (for example, the concept of the elephant is assigned to one’s expectations when booking a safari in a travel agency) is nothing but an invention, a fiction, a construct of the human intellect. For lack of any corresponding reality, the concept of freedom would then be nothing but a label for the human illusion of being not merely an element in the nexus of nature and its determinations.
Yet the issue is more complicated. Concepts are not only based on objects but concepts also constitute objects. If a concept is a rule to represent representations in a certain way, that is, a representation of representations [eine Vorstellung der Vorstellungen], then there are concepts that arrive at their objects in no other way than by the rule itself creating the object. Kant held the view that our mathematical concepts are of this type. This was an objection to any kind of Platonism that even claims what is physically not present to be discoverable and given, such as the concepts of ethical norms, the values of goals of action, and so forth.
I am thinking of still another issue, which distinguishes itself from the creation of mathematical concepts in that it opens up access to empirical evidence. Something of this kind is the concept of the unconscious. If one thinks about how this concept came to be and what transformations it underwent historically, one cannot stop marveling at how potent such a conceptual coinage can be. It really appears as if we are initially confronted with a word that simply offers no help at all in conceiving of an object, an issue, or a process. (Something similar is currently happening with the concept of “institution.”) The unconscious is accessed in a comparable way to what Kant had claimed for freedom. A certain content of consciousness supposedly allows no other explanation than that (1) in the past, with a long temporal gap, an event or an experience happened that initiated a certain reaction that led to the disappearance of this very experience as a conscious content; that (2) the disappeared has not dissolved but has disguised and conserved itself according to a principle of preservation; and that (3) this concealed content affects and becomes noticeable in specific correlates within consciousness. […]
In the strict sense, the concept of the unconscious is a procedural rule about how to behave in the face of a specific content of consciousness, or at least of something that can be phenomenally objectivized: one has to search for, ask about, analyze what experience lies at the foundation of the unknown issue whose effects have outlasted the latency phase and that in itself cannot be objectivized. The unconscious is an auxiliary concept for specific technical operations that would certainly be possible but not comprehensible without it. The concept of the unconscious claims a totality of consciousness that is not verifiable in any memory or expectation, that is, in no form of identity’s self-consciousness: the energetic history of the subject, governed by the principle of constancy, is in principle without gaps, and it can only be that way because the discontinuity of consciousness is supported and bridged by the energetic latency of the unconscious.
It is not by accident that the unconscious “works” in a codified language: in symbols (if only they are empirically decodable, that is, through contingent attributions), in metaphors (if they are immanently decodable: while the phallus is a symbol of fertility, if one knows that … yet this does not mean that the snake is a symbol of the phallus but is metaphorically mediated).
For me, the observation was surprising that for the functions demonstrated above the concept of the unconscious is strictly analogous to that of freedom. The unconscious is the thing itself—better still: one of the things themselves. I quoted what Kant said in the 1786 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: that no example can ever be provided for freedom by way of analogy. Yet it is striking that Kant himself infringed against this declaration a year later in his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely, in the important note in which he puts Copernicus and Newton into the same relation in which theoretical and practical reason stand for him. This completely and exclusively refers to the concept of freedom.
This strange preface was written six years after the first publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant had made disappointing experiences with the effects of his work. He had overestimated the possible success of his line of argument. Now, in the preface to the second edition, Kant with great care makes the offer to the reader that, for a start, he may only treat the main thesis of his work as if it were a hypothesis, to test it provisionally and have it prove itself. The most important among the tests that Kant himself had in mind is probably the philosophy of practical reason (1786 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals; 1788 Critique of Practical Reason; 1794 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason). How is it possible that morality can become the confirmation of metaphysics? Kant says that “the experiment providing a checkup on the truth of the result of that first assessment of our rational cognition a priori”12 lies exactly in the fact that it “reaches appearances only, leaving the thing in itself as something actual for itself but uncognized by us.” Of this “thing in itself” no concept exists; it is, in Kant’s wording, a “noumenon in the negative sense,”13 a void left empty, for which seemingly no definiteness can be reached. Every attempt still to find definiteness for this void has to lead to antinomies, paralogisms, and contradictions, as proved by the transcendental dialectic. Now the distinction between appearance and the thing in itself is theoretically no advantage; on the contrary, it is a grave disappointment, because all statements of science can henceforth be only related to appearances, and nothing can be said about the thing itself any longer. The compulsion to concede the decision despite this disappointment was only based on the contradictions that had resulted from the application of our concepts to things in themselves.
But now comes the surprise for Kant’s audience, namely, that the disappointment of theoretical reason emerges after the fact as the only possibility for practical reason, that is, as the only possibility to think freedom despite the absolute determinism of nature and the natural sciences. There is no consciousness of freedom, no experience of freedom, no construction of freedom—and therefore no concept of freedom in the strict sense. But it is the condition of the possibility of our knowing the difference between good and evil, of our ability to be moral beings. Were there the experience of freedom, then there would eo ipso be no possibility for experience anymore—because the validity of the determinism of causality is the condition of the possibility of objects of experience. For practical reason, the existence of freedom becomes itself a postulate as the condition of its own possibility to give an ought in consciousness. One could say, whatever it might be, freedom must exist. And at this point, the “critique of practical reason” uses that space left vacant by theoretical reason to place in the position of the noumenon in the negative sense the very same in the positive sense—one that is only thought and for which no experience could ever provide the intuition. There can be no concept already because what is thought this way must not understand itself as the expectation to be fulfilled by intuition. Kant understands this empty space as if theoretical reason had not only admitted but had downright persuaded practical reason to make use of it. Kant writes, “By such procedures speculative reason has at least made room for such an extension” (i.e., with regard to the existence of freedom), “even if it had to leave it empty; and we remain at liberty, indeed we are called upon by reason to fill it if we can through practical data of reason.”14
The note mentioned earlier now refers to this word, “to fill.” In this note, Kant views the relationship between Copernicus and Newton in the following way: Copernicus had put forward a new hypothesis about the planetary system that made the sun the central body. To him, it was secondary, if not even unknown, that he put the body with the greatest mass into the center of the system. This circumstance was astronomically of no consequence to him. Now Newton comes along and recognizes under the conditions of the Copernican system that it does mean something for the body with the greatest mass to be the central body of the system; that is, it means something under the condition that the bodies attract each other relative to their mass (and in the opposite relation to their distance). The concept of this attraction was inferred in view of this Copernican system, as there is no possible experience of forces that reach beyond the empty space between bodies. But only the theory of gravitation that was deduced from the Copernican system fully confirms the accuracy of the Copernican hypothesis.
Now, the same relation is supposed to exist between theoretical and practical reason—the concept of freedom is supposed to have the same function as the concept of gravitation. Newton’s central laws about the center had proved “the invisible force that binds the universe,” “which would have remained forever undiscovered if Copernicus had not ventured, in a manner contradictory to the senses yet true, to seek for the observed movements not in the objects of the heavens but in their observer.”15 While Newton, then, was afraid that the concept of gravity would introduce a hypothesis into his system that he believed he should not tolerate, Kant exactly reverses this relation: Copernicus is the man of the hypothesis, Newton the one who introduces the confirming reality. This is also how the reader is supposed to see the relation between theoretical and practical reason, between determinism and freedom.
If we now take a step back from this example and try to grasp by it the relation between understanding and reason, between concepts and ideas, then it follows first and foremost that there is no decline at all from the solidity of concepts to the idea’s excessive tension and fictionality. Rather, and conversely, the idea of freedom affirms the procedure, in theoretical reason, of the distinction of appearance and thing in itself even more, and brings it positively to certainty. Although the idea (of freedom), taken on its own, would not have been able to arise and persist without the transcendental discovery of theoretical reason—it would have had neither space nor air to exist—neither can the idea be what is primary, nor can the solid work of conceptuality be omitted and skipped over. Whatever one may think of Kant’s results and systematic classifications, he cannot be easily dispossessed of this accomplishment.
Nor can, at the level of concepts themselves, solidity stand at the beginning. Many readers of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason see little significance in the fact that the main division of the work does not correspond to the grand outlines that become apparent in its effect: not the analytic and the dialectic are the main parts, nor even do the aesthetic and logic make up the great dichotomy; rather, the laconic main division is that between the doctrine of elements and the doctrine of method. Hardly anyone reads all the way up to the doctrine of method, and those who do so have had to muster such enormous efforts of understanding that there are few reserves left for method, and one is inclined to hold it in low esteem. I cannot remember ever having read or heard of a seminar being conducted on the transcendental doctrine of method. But that is exactly what would have to be wished for.
A doctrine of method describes the steps along a path according to a rule. In this respect, it can proceed strictly conceptually. But the notion of the path is related to a totality that can hardly be addressed other than metaphorically: the path leads through a landscape; it bypasses or bridges obstacles, and in the best case it even has a goal, instead of leading back to the starting point. In the metaphorics of the path, much has been said of what has been assumed about the act of cognition and its chances of success but has also been reluctantly expressed with the directness of an assertion. Kant prefers to communicate the totality of his undertaking to the reader through the metaphor of building a house. Much could be said about why Kant preferred this constructive metaphorics, which is detached from the conditions of nature, to that of the path.
Kant writes: “If I regard the sum total of all cognition of pure and speculative reason as an edifice for which we have in ourselves at least the idea, then I can say that in the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements we have made an estimate of the building materials and determined for what sort of edifice, with what height and strength, they would suffice. It turned out, of course, that although we had in mind a tower that would reach the heavens, the supply of materials sufficed only for a dwelling that was just roomy enough for our business on the plane of experience and high enough to survey it; however, that bold undertaking had to fail from lack of material, not to mention the confusion of languages that unavoidably divided the workers over the plan and dispersed them throughout the world, leaving each to build on his own according to his own design.”16
It is immediately discernible that Kant prefers the metaphorics of construction simply because it allows him to draw a relation between the failure of traditional metaphysics and the biblical story of the confusion of languages during the construction of the Babylonian tower. It is telling, however, that Kant does not explicitly invoke arrogance and blasphemic defiance as cause for the builders’ failure; rather, they fail because of technical circumstances, which are not those of the constructive design, but of the deficiency of their materials. This deficiency, however, is constitutive. It apparently cannot be remedied. And that is the reason why the alternative of the dwelling as a refuge sufficient (to experience) for doing business on the “plane” is taken up. The confusion of languages appears as the consequence, rather than the cause, of the failed tower construction. It is the emblem of the confusion, of the isolation of systems.
Through this simile, Kant also wants to depict the relation between the doctrine of method and the doctrine of elements. In the strict sense, it is called the doctrine of elements because it provides the elements, that is, the materials for the edifice. Kant continues: “Now we are concerned not so much with the materials as with the plan, and, having been warned not to venture some arbitrary and blind project that might entirely exceed our entire capacity, yet not being able to abstain from the erection of a sturdy dwelling, we have to aim at an edifice in relation to the supplies given to us that is at the same time suited to our needs.—By the transcendental doctrine of method, therefore, I understand the determination of the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason.”17
By placing the doctrine of method at the end of his magnum opus, Kant took a clear stand against the obsession in German academic philosophy since Christian Wolff, again present in today’s, with not beginning to philosophize before all questions of method have been clarified and all concepts defined. Time and again, the irresistible model of mathematics has not so much corrupted philosophical morals (indeed, nothing would be more urgently desirable than to have clarified all preliminary questions before the main issue is approached), as cut off the air for philosophical thought to breathe.
For Kant, mathematics cannot be the model of concept formation for all types of strict thought because in mathematics, although the concepts may stand at the beginning, they can also be freely formed and constructed by intuition. One can therefore easily agree on such concepts, provided that their noncontradiction can be ascertained (such as the concept of the greatest sphere or the longest route). Mathematical concepts, for Kant, are not analytical; until they are realized in intuition, only very little can be concluded from the constructive rule that they indicate: from the concept of the circle, it cannot be inferred that all points equidistant from a given point have to lie on this circle (or, considered three-dimensionally, have to lie on a sphere). In this respect, the mathematical concept is the exact opposite of the concept of God of traditional metaphysics from which it was possible to deduce everything—not only all attributes, but also existence itself. This paramount achievement of concepts still fascinated Hegel so much that he tried to rescue and restore the ontological proof of God’s existence against Kant’s criticism: it was for him the purest model of all achievements of concepts and of their history.
For Kant, the concept is building material, a tool. One has to see in the course of one’s work how the tool can be modified according to the task and increasingly adapted to it. For this reason, there is no occasion and no possibility to emulate mathematics by providing the definitions of concepts in advance for all matters, unless as a trial and tentatively. “Philosophy is swarming with mistaken definitions, especially those that actually contain elements for definition but are not yet complete. If one would not know what to do with a concept until one had defined it, then all philosophizing would be in a bad way.” In philosophy, approximations to definitions of concepts and those in the process of history must be seen as useful. Kant expresses that with the laconic sentence: “In mathematics definitions belong ad esse [to the being], in philosophy ad melius esse [to the improvement of being]. Attaining them is fine, but often very difficult. Jurists are still searching for a definition of their concept of right.”18
The result is that “in philosophy the definition, as distinctness made precise, must conclude rather than begin the work.”19 But if that is so, one has to ask by which means—if not yet by those of the clarified concept—the path of this clarification can be covered. One can also put it like this: for the benefit of concepts, there has to be a preliminary field of nonconceivability [Unbegreiflichkeit], even if, under the criteria of the possible perfected concept, one were inclined to cross this field disparagingly and let it be altogether forgotten in the state of perfection.
Nonconceptuality in the service of concepts—that would be an option for taking a generous view of addressing this issue as a mere philosophical auxiliary discipline. Yet a more serious situation remains to be confronted, namely, that the work at the preliminary stage of concepts does not arrive at its goal, be it de facto or even out of the necessity of the subject matter. If the latter were the case, then it would be so in connection with the concept’s dependency on intuition and the failure to meet this condition when it comes to the idea.
The desire for linguistic definiteness, for the establishment of ortho-languages will, as a utopia, no more disappear than Esperanto has. It is defined by the urge to put the unambiguous mapping of concepts and linguistic medium at the beginning of every discursive act and every internal or external consideration. This desire is either bound to the ideal of mathematics to cover, with the use of a constructive set of instruments, all noncontradictory possibilities up to the point that the unordered barrage of experience and the factual situation can be faced calmly. Or it is of the phenomenological type, which considers the rigor of a fundamental science to consist in bringing about pure intuitions of states of affairs as they are in themselves, and in then assigning to them a system of concepts (this, then, is not about antecedent definitions so as to be prepared for everything—no defining into the blue, as it were—but it is about intuiting only so as to bring into conceptual form what has or is “essence” [Wesen]). Kant, in any case, must not be associated with the mathematical ideal: “Mathematics is thoroughly grounded on definitions, axioms, and demonstrations. I will content myself with showing that none of these elements, in the sense in which the mathematician takes them, can be achieved or imitated by philosophy.”20
Almost ten years after the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant returned to the problem of the concept’s need for substitution in the Critique of Judgment, whose §59 bears the title “On beauty as a symbol of morality.” Here, as always, Kant proceeds from the assumption that the “reality of our concepts,”21 which for him means the relatedness of concepts to states of affairs, happens in intuition, or more precisely, in Kant’s language: “intuitions are … required.” The simplest case of this realization of concepts is to show it. If I ask someone, What is money? the easiest procedure to answer me is for him to dig into his pocket and to hold in front of me a coin or a banknote.
But one can easily see that this procedure is only a very imprecise reaction to my question. It passes the further work on to me. When a single piece of money is shown to me, I am being reminded that I know more about money than can be conveyed through a single empirical intuition. In a certain respect, this is Socrates’ procedure with the slave boy in Meno, which is performed there as a proof for the recollection of ideas. This procedure can be described as exemplary method. A singular exemplar of a certain class of objects is shown not because it itself allows perception of the concept, but because it evokes or refers to the concept. It would be of no help to someone who has not the slightest idea about the function of money to react to his question what the expression “money” actually referred to by holding a coin or a banknote to his face. To someone, however, who knows what money is and how it works, one would do a sufficient service if one answered his question about the meaning of the Latin expression moneta by showing him a random coin of a random currency. This coin would work like a trigger for a whole complex of familiar knowledge and modes of reaction, and would fully suffice to regulate the use of this expression henceforth. Just think of the situation when someone who has been instructed in such a way is confronted by a man at night in a dark alley with a threatening gesture and the exclamation moneta!—he will know what he has to do if his life or his physical integrity mean something to him.
For this reason, Kant says that the type of intuition that is required for the reality of empirical concepts is called “example.” No empirical object stands in by itself and sufficiently for the intuition on which its concept is based, but it does so to a sufficient degree to help bring about the reality of the concept, the fabrication of its object relation. In this example, it is very much the question whether intuition is in service of the concept or the concept in service of intuition. Does it suffice to refer to one example to be able to use the concept from then on as one pleases, or is adducing an example to clarify the concept only the first step, so as to limit and enrich the sphere of examples from then on in such a way that in this dealing with objects the concept is, as it were, only an auxiliary organ, basically already of no further use because one is occupied with the thing itself and is absorbed in its use or enjoyment. The concept would then relate to the object like possibility to reality. But at the same time, the example also demonstrates that there are no demonstrative definitions in the strict sense: no pointing at something can ever be the sufficient answer to the question of what something is that I am introducing through its concept.
To sustain the correlativity of concepts and intuition in its full rigor, even the pure concepts of the understanding have to possess their kind of intuition, which is necessarily a nonempirical intuition. This is what in the Critique of Pure Reason is called schematizing and schematism. For just as there are pure concepts (i.e., those that are not formed from empirical material), there are also pure intuitions that only make it possible to have mathematical objects and synthetic judgments a priori. Since the forms of outer and inner sense—time and space—are a priori and stand in a foundational relation (which takes the greater generality of the inner sense over the outer to indicate a justificatory relation), the obvious thing to do is to turn the form of time into the very intuition through which all pure concepts of the understanding gain their “reality.”
This whole problem is much more difficult when it comes to concepts that are created by reason and with the help of which it directs its demands at the understanding as the organ of concepts for experience and from experience (i.e., the categories and empirical concepts). These concepts of reason are called ideas in Kant. To demand a verifiable object relation also for them, that is, to verify their “objective reality” in their theoretical function, would, according to Kant, mean to desire something impossible “since no intuition adequate to them can be given at all.”22 It is impossible to offer an intuition for the concept “world,” be it merely that of an example—already because “world” cannot exist in the plural, the hyperbolic use of language notwithstanding, and it is hence impossible to present a world as an example for the intuition signified in the concept of “world.” We are dealing here with concepts whose reality can only be grounded in the process of reason itself, if they can claim such a thing at all.
Expressions that can neither be defined by showing nor by rules of substitution naturally have a broad range of variations when it comes to their definiteness in individual and social contexts. In the minimum of standardized definiteness and the maximum of additional determinability lies their disposition for attracting imaginative and evaluative material, and only then to specify themselves. This is also the reason for the very special historical capacity of symbols, which for themselves and at first mean nothing, but, because of this, are able to assume meaning. This is a trait they share with ideas: they cannot be made exemplarily sensible by any completed or completable experience. While they attract experience and even set the direction in which this happens, this only increases their ambiguity and thereby puts it in opposition to the urge toward definiteness inherent in every concept formation. The epitome of the achievements of concept formation, that is, of all rules for the unity of representations as represented representations, is denoted by the name “understanding”; a system of rules, which for its part is capable of forming rules for representations, becomes distinguishable through the title “reason” as the epitome of rules that are unsurpassable because they in each case imply the totality. For reason, nothing new can and may appear or be added: the plural “worlds” has always been something threatening to reason, and the young Kant had therefore defused this plural by speaking, in his cosmogonic early work, of a “world of worlds,”23 thereby restoring the old singularity. It can be easily shown that since classical atomism and medieval nominalism, this restoration has time and again been the most pressing function of reason in its self-preservation and as an organ of self-preservation. The metaphorics that enters into the indeterminate space of the idea of “world” can produce almost every ambiguity, provided that it does not endanger the unity of that which it thereby denotes. As with the concept of time, we are dealing here with the problem of identity, and nothing is more dangerous—in every sense, right up to that of psychopathology—than to make this identity questionable. On this also rests that the pure concepts of the understanding for Kant can only be schematized by one sensible rendering [Versinnlichung], whose own form is that of absolute identity and unity, and which logically cannot be thought in any other way: namely, time.
What is important here: Just as Kant uses the concept of the schema for the correlative intuitiveness of pure concepts of the understanding, he uses the concept of the symbol for the intuitiveness of the pure concepts of reason, the ideas. Symbolization is constructed in a manner analogous to schematization because one cannot, according to Kant’s premises, analyze the relation between idea and intuition in itself. The representation of a pure concept of reason as rendering sensible is “symbolic, where to a concept which only reason can think, and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate, an intuition is attributed with which the power of judgment proceeds in a way merely analogous to that which it observes in schematization, i.e., it is merely the rule of this procedure, not of the intuition itself, and thus merely the form of the reflection, not the content, which corresponds to the concept.”24 The symbol is not only a sensible sign for a concept, as Kant imputes about the use that “recent logicians”25 had made of the expression “symbolical” and that according to him should be called “mere characterizations”26: words, or signs of an algebraic, even mimetic nature, mere expressions for concepts, that can be inserted instead of their formalisms.
Kant’s example is not the world, but the state: “Thus a monarchical state is represented by a body with a soul if it is ruled in accordance with laws internal to the people, but by a mere machine (like a handmill) if it is ruled by a single absolute will, but in both cases it is represented only symbolically.”27 One can easily see that the expression “symbolic” for Kant means nothing other than “metaphorical,” certainly with an accent in the direction of the absolute metaphor. Kant justifies the procedure for the case of the state in the following way: “For between a despotic state and a handmill there is, of course, no similarity, but there is one between the rule for reflecting on both and their causality.”28 The symbolic procedure, as Kant calls it, then consists in introducing an intuition for a concept, which as such cannot serve as an example, but which permits “applying the mere rule of reflection on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the first is only the symbol.”29
Our language, says Kant, is full of such “indirect presentations, in accordance with an analogy, where the expression does not contain the actual schema for the concept but only a symbol for reflection.”30 The procedure therefore consists in the “transportation” [Übertragung] of a reflection about an object of intuition to another primary concept “to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond.”31 At this point, Kant also says how he would think about the task of a metaphorology, without calling it by such a name: “This business has as yet been little discussed, much as it deserves a deeper investigation; but this is not the place to dwell on it.”32
The idea provides not a determination of objects but of our behavior toward objects. For this reason, Kant says, “all of our cognition of God is merely symbolic,”33 which excludes the hypertrophy of all anthropomorphisms as well as the conceptual speculation of all deisms, both of which do not allow any cognition, not even one with practical intent. Hence, an “object” that cannot quite be determined by its concept is still “represented” as the sum of influences for our practical behavior. Finally, Kant says that the “beautiful” is the symbol of the morally good. What does that mean? The beautiful as that which pleases seems primarily to be governed by mere subjectivity. But the agreement that it receives this way in turn demands the agreement of all others, and the reason for this is that it is not aware of any limited interest—not even the interest in its own pleasure, since aesthetic pleasure in principle is divisible at will without decreasing, but thereby in principle also demands that this be communicated. The naive reaction that has become ready for caricature, namely, to break out in cries of rapture in front of an aesthetic entity, preferably in the interrogative (such as: Isn’t this wonderful?)—this quotidian observation confirms that the judgment of taste is judgment for others not by chance and incidentally, but is so constitutively, because it is looking for intersubjective agreement. This immediate compulsion of the aesthetic object not to be absorbed in sensible reception, Kant now interprets as expression of a deeper root in which the theoretical and practical faculties are “combined … in a mutual and unknown way, to form a unity.”34 The immediacy of the agreement, which the aesthetic object demands without an appeal to self-interest, and the nonarbitrary freedom of the imagination [Einbildungskraft] that it grants, determine the applicability to practical reason that reflection allows to find. Kant concludes this consideration with the sentence: “Taste as it were makes possible the transition from sensible charm to the habitual moral interest without too violent a leap by representing the imagination even in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding and teaching us to find a free satisfaction in the objects of the senses even without any sensible charm.”35
The justification for finding the traditional metaphor in Kant’s symbolical sensible rendering can philologically most easily be found in the fact that at least one of his examples comes from Quintilian’s rhetoric, where it is an example for metaphor: when we find “fields smiling and joyful,” and according to Kant they “contain something analogical to the consciousness of a mental state produced by moral judgments,”36 then we can easily recognize Quintilian’s pratum ridet [the meadow laughs].37 But the laughter of a meadow or a field is something other than the laughter of the world spirit, and it is not even that easy to describe what the difference is. This attempt, however, has to be made if one intends to show that metaphor can achieve more than the paraphrasing of an issue that could be determined equivalent, as is the case with the laughing meadow.
[…]
Perhaps it is no longer perceived that an odium of illegitimacy clings to the very title of a metaphorology. In our tradition, the responsibility for the linguistic institution of the metaphor lies with rhetoric. The relationship of rhetoric to truth—that is, to one of the uncontested values of this tradition—is more than disputed; it is ambiguous, questionable in no good sense of the word. It has never been surprising to find that a philosophical author such as Locke sees the metaphor as one of the basic deceptions of the human mind, whose elimination is among the tasks of philosophy. Rhetoric is the institutionalized antitype of philosophy.
Viewed historically, this is first of all the victory of Plato—and of everything that depends on him, hence also of Socrates—over Sophism. By presenting his enemies accordingly, Plato presented this victory as that of ethics over demagoguery, of logic over aesthetics, and it appeared to the centuries and millennia after him as a great fortune that Sophism had perished through the nonexistence of its literary records, and has only survived as invective, just as Plato allegedly bought the works of Democritus—that is, of atomism, which he had likewise overcome—to burn them and to save posterity from them. But here a more serious problem comes into play than that of historical successes and defeats. Plato gave his work the form of the Socratic dialogue. This form, developed with the authority of Socrates and perhaps indeed by capturing his unmethodical method, is not only supposed to communicate contents of a specific kind (which probably quickly veered far away from Socrates’ self-limitation), but as a form was supposed to bring objections to bear on rhetoric, to bring them to self-evidence. Rhetoric as the art of persuasion appears as the master’s one-sided business toward those who only got involved with him through listening, without measuring up to his studied and trained art. From the beginning, rhetoric appears as the constitutive lack of rational reciprocity as it is represented in dialogue. Persuasion seems to gain ground where the argument is missing or believes that it is unable to hold its ground. Framed this way, metaphor becomes a deception with the aim of gentle temptation, and hence is even more effective when the listener is lacking his or her own conceptual overview and can therefore be offered a surrogate of orientation. Dialogue, in contrast, appears as the institution in which everyone can defend themselves, where play of rational powers is opened up and where the power of truth can assert itself. Everyone looking closely at Plato’s Socratic dialogue and not deceived by its canonical validity and literary appeal quickly recognizes that dialogue, too, has its perils of temptation—that dialogue quickly turns into dialectics, and that its nooses and pitfalls still always catch the other person, who is left with no other option than to surrender, not because he has seen the truth, but because he cannot proceed in his own manner. Still, dialogue became, through early Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and up to Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, a literary form of a certain freedom of thought and its tropes. In fact, in all the authors mentioned we find nothing but an overwhelming prevalence of rhetoric in the guise of dialogue, dialogue as rhetoric. I am giving this brief indication only because it can shed light on what is real about the traditional antithesis of philosophy and rhetoric.
Admittedly, rhetoric does not have a clear tradition. It has come to terms with its Sophistic disreputability and established itself as a more or less open technique [Technik] of persuasion and temptation, as a technique of speech before the law, before the people’s assembly, and finally, before the congregation, which wants to be tempted into its salvation. This tradition culminates in Machiavelli, in the political realism of the attainment, exercise, and maintenance of power, for which the word is but one instrument, albeit the one that implicitly already includes the others. Naturally, there never were many demagogues willing to reveal themselves as such and additionally as teachers of their subject. Voltaire writes about Frederick the Great and his early work Anti-Machiavel that Machiavelli himself could have given his disciple no better advice than to write an Anti-Machiavel.
An easier task in the tradition of rhetoric fell to those who sought again to bring it closer to philosophy, believing they could turn the antithesis into a relation of service. To prevail, truth, too, requires a good presentation, an accommodating form, and even the ornamentation of rhetorical figures. It is clear that one and a half millennia in which the most important trivial literary form was the sermon had to be a support for this tradition of rhetoric, affirming it in spite of all sophistic suspicion. I say all this with regard to metaphor and its assessment and classification within our intellectual history.
Undoubtedly, the divergent conceptions of rhetoric in our tradition also contain fundamentally different, implicit conceptions of language and its function. Rhetoric conceived of as the shaping and decorating of expression takes language primarily to be assertion and communication of contents, particularly of knowledge. Such a conception is today widely regarded as naive and as a factor in many misunderstandings of logic and philosophy. The other conception, which in the meantime has also largely supplanted the expressive conception of language, sees it as a vehicle by which humans influence humans, as a starting point for action and the inducement to actions. It is thus quite consistent to understand language neither primarily as expression nor as communication but as a “speech act” [Sprachhandlung]. Such shifts should always be seen within an anthropological horizon of preferential assessments. The creature that prefers to act is not only distinguished by this fact from others but is also characterized as a creature that cannot afford the stages of rest prior to actions; it is a creature pressed for action and interaction, for whom nothing is more urgent than to establish communications and solidarities, which themselves can always only be preliminary stages of actions. An aficionado of revolution will be inclined to pass off language itself as action; one will soon be the surrogate of the other. If language is action, then its purpose is not at the same time and already its content (as it is the case for the assertion whose linguistic form only serves a single purpose that at the same time is its content). What is important to the speech act is not what it might have to say. The concept of the speech act displays a high degree of affinity to the sophistic concept of rhetoric (or rather, the concept of rhetoric ascribed to sophism).
This remark regarding the speech act shows what it means that the division of rhetoric’s self-conception has preconditions in anthropology. Not by chance was it often the skeptics who had the least confidence in theory and who saw in it no precondition for action, who counted on the indispensability and unpostponability of action as a constitutive aspect of human existence, and who agonized over the question of where, for lack of theoretical orientation, action might find its rules. The lack of truth, from which the skeptic has to proceed for better or for worse, indicates or connotes to him the other shortcomings that compel humans to be acting creatures. But if truth is absent, the whole scale of probabilities has to serve the orientation of action. On this very scale rhetoric resides, if it proceeds from the assumption that persuasion has its place only or especially where rationality is not easily specified, to be found, or practiced. A field opens up to view that is delimited by familiar markings and whose structure is that of a homogeneous anthropological horizon: skepticism, acting creature, probability, persuasion. If science were ever to be completed, there would no longer be any perplexity about what to do and how to do it—that is, there would be a definitive morality that is truly obvious. Then also all rhetoric would be superfluous and ineffective, except maybe as the mere entertainment of demonstrating a skill, just as artistic rhetoric has been all too often when it created the mannerism of postclassical epochs by showing off its means.38 Cartesianism deprives every rhetoric in the strict sense of its object; rhetoric and the possibility of a definitive morality exclude each other. The institution of provisional morality provides a new latitude for rhetoric, however, especially if its epoch proves more extensive than supposed or planned. With regard to the imminence of the end, this latitude can be used with a better conscience and hence with more unscrupulous methods. Not only Cartesians enjoy this license of the provisional interim; all eschatologists possess it and use it. Immediately before finality, it must be permitted, if not required, to tempt humans into their happiness. Rhetoric always has something do with this concept of happiness.
Metaphor—as the significant element of rhetoric—points to an anthropological deficiency and in its function corresponds to the anthropology of the “creature of deficiency” [Mängelwesen]. But it remedies the deficiency from the stock of a surplus and from the digression beyond the horizon of vital necessities, insofar as this horizon separates possibility and reality. The poverty of our relation to reality (amidst the wealth of our relation to the possible) is not only a poverty of cognition, truth, or theory, but already one of language, which emerges within the life-world horizon of nonmodalized givenness, but has to relate its achievements to the unknown and the possible, which are positioned around this immediacy. Metaphor connects the language areas of the primary relation to reality with those of the secondary relation to possibility. Put even more formally: The metaphor is the instrument of an expansive relation to the world, which has long abandoned those regulations and trigger mechanisms of the biological environment [Umwelt] that do not require language, and was only transitionally admitted to the taken-for-granted institutions of the life-world. This centrifugal dynamics is decisive when it comes to a genetic explanation. Cicero compared the genesis of the metaphor to the emergence of human clothing: first and foremost it had been invented for the cold and other weather emergencies, but later it started to also serve as decoration of the body and an indication of dignity—“so the metaphorical employment [translatio instituta] of words was begun because of poverty, but was brought into common use for the sake of entertainment.”39 For us, such a statement is no longer productive enough because it states a mere relationship of succession, but does not help us to understand the transition from the situation of deficiency to that of luxury as something that is grounded in and legitimized by the situation of deficiency as such. Anthropologically, this poverty of language—the egestas verborum that Cicero sensed while attempting to translate the language of Greek philosophers into Latin—signifies only an aspect of inaccuracy with which humans have been embedded into reality, rather than possibly being fitted to it. If it were the logos of the world expressing itself in human language, having merely obtained an organ other than nature, then it would be impossible for anything to exist besides univocal speech in the Aristotelian sense of the kyrion onoma. There would be no need for the courage of metaphor, which always already represents part of the courage to venture conjectures about the nature of reality. Of course, it is a “sad necessity” to require metaphor and to be dependent on its economic effect, but still at the same time this sad necessity reveals to us that we have laid hold of areas of reality that lie beyond our deficiency and neediness, that is, they reflect our freedom to us. In Lambert’s exchange of letters with Holland, we find one passage that refers to paragraph 343 of the “Semiotic” in Lambert’s New Organon: “I wished that you, Sir, had said a few more things about this in the Organon. Since we have been placed into the sad necessity of at least making shifts with words of this kind, it would indeed be very much worth the effort to state extensively the way of using them and to determine most exactly the limits of their legitimacy. I think that we owe a large part of our knowledge, and an even larger part of our errors, to the development of metaphors.”40 Here, everything is said with the fewest possible words: the sad necessity of a makeshift solution leads to the ambiguous excess of a guidance for knowledge on the one hand, and to a relegation of deception on the other.
It is the distrust of language that makes metaphor at the same time indispensable and suspect. To escape this dilemma means to transform the human relation to the world into one that is quintessentially and specifically metaphorical and rhetorical. The philosophy that would result from this could be anticipatorily characterized as a philosophy of rhetoric that in itself becomes rhetorical. Nietzsche comes closest to this type. For him, rhetoric as the epitome of modes of behavior and stylistic means is being formed in a situation of a lack of truth or when scientific knowledge lags behind the great expectation of truth. Plato’s hatred of rhetoric is for Nietzsche the starting point to translate his hatred of Plato and Platonism into a rehabilitation of rhetoric. In the winter of 1872/73,41 Nietzsche gave a lecture course of three hours a week entitled “Description of Ancient Rhetoric.” Initially, one is perplexed at how Nietzsche explains the primacy of rhetoric in ancient as opposed to modern education by arguing that there “the feeling for what is true in itself is much more developed.”42 What is contained in this concept of truth, however, becomes clear in the explanation that Nietzsche directly adds: “[R]hetoric arises among a people who still live in mythic images and who have not yet experienced the unqualified need of historical accuracy: they would rather be persuaded than instructed. In addition, the need of men for forensic eloquence must have given rise to the evolution of the liberal art.”43 Nietzsche is likely the first to give a reason for this relation between myth and rhetoric that goes beyond the obvious observation on which it rests: “The mythical and the rhetorical are employed when the brevity of time allows for no scientific instruction.”44 This is a clue that, anthropologically, also goes beyond a mere state of deficiency because it no longer relies on assessing the initial situation and the basic constitution of humans within the antithetics of cognition and rhetoric—whether, for example, one has to proceed from humans’ richness of creative endowments or from the poverty of their physiological regression. Nietzsche’s clue touches on a constitutive deficiency that puts the availability of time for rational processes in a relation to their gains: lack of time is a radical of the determinedness of human life, and reason may not demand any price of time. For this circumstance, the answer is rhetoric.
There is a precious passage in Kant’s correspondence with Carl Leonhard Reinhold from the year 1789. In the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, Reinhold had refuted Johann August Eberhard’s attacks against Kant, published in his “philosophical magazine.” Kant adds additional remarks about this in two letters. For part of the disciplines that had fallen prey to Kant’s Critique of Theoretical Reason, Eberhard had claimed that further progress of the work would perhaps still bring about successes. He had written, “But even regarding the work of the disputed sciences of cosmology and theology, we do not need to let our hands sink; we can always continue working to further them, we can always seek to enrich them with new truths, without beforehand committing ourselves to the transcendental validity of those truths.”45 Kant provides this text with a short allusion to an anecdote: “Here one might ask, as the foreign scholar did when they showed him the Sorbonne lecture hall, ‘They have been arguing here for three hundred years; what have they found out?’ ”46 At this point, one is tempted to say that rhetoric rests on the fact that one cannot afford to dispute for three hundred years before anything can be agreed upon. But immediately it becomes clear that Kant, in the place of rhetoric, establishes something completely different that nevertheless has the same function of replacing the intolerability of theory’s dilatory procedure with quicker self-evidence—practical reason. Precisely because it is dependent only on the self-limitation of theoretical reason, but not at all on the latter’s progress and completion (as Descartes had wished), it can achieve autonomously what rhetoric believed to be able to achieve only heteronomously. This would be the perfect displacement of rhetoric and its function, were it not for the suspicion that the authority of practical reason had previously been restricted to morality in the strict sense in such a way that too large a scope of human behavior and action would have to remain outside of morality and would be abandoned if the relation of displacement between rhetorical and practical reason were to be seen in Kant’s sense.
I will frame the issues hinted at here in a hard thesis. There is a contradiction between, on the one hand, the infinity implications of reason and its procedures and, on the other, the anthropological conditions of finitude. If this is the case, there not only has to be a critique of pure reason in the sense of a constitutive limitation of its thematic extension, that is, a self-limitation of reason that for Kant could be captured in a spatial, territorial metaphorics. There also has to be a critique of pure rationality that refers to the temporal structure of the processes of reason and that can only be represented in a one-dimensional metaphorics. Not only an infinite being in the theological sense but already a being of infinite access to time would have to accept the demands of pure rationality without objection. It is temporal finitude that compels dissent and insists on shortened processes that cannot suffice for pure rationality, and would compel assumptions about legality and presumptions regarding the burden of proof; these things are often characterized as conservative because they are not prepared to expose what exists to the theoretical postulate of absolute justification. One does not even have to articulate this conjecture as one about the rationality of what exists, but only about the rationality of that which makes proportioned demands of time. Conversely, there is simulated rationality that very much seeks to identify itself through its consumption of time.
Translated by Florian Fuchs and Hannes Bajohr
Excerpted from Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).
1. Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes (New York: Berg, 1988), 1:105.
2. [Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies, vol. 1, Sudelbücher, Fragmente, Fabeln, Verse (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausend-eins, 1994), 270.]
3. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 24.
4. Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, 1:231.
5. [See Hans Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory, trans. Spencer Hawkins (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).]
6. [Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. 1–77. Translation modified.]
7. Anaïs Nin, Diaries, Vol. 2: 1934–1939, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Swallow Press, 1967), 247–248.
8. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2001), 89.]
9. [Paul Valéry, “My Faust,” Plays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 94.]
10. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63.
11. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), 23:481.
12. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112 (B xx).]
13. [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 361 (B 307).]
14. [Kant, 112–113 (B xxi).]
15. [Kant, 113 (B xxii).]
16. Kant, 627 (A 707/B 735).
17. [Kant, 627 (A 707/B 735).]
18. Kant, 639 (A 731/B 759).
19. [Kant, 639 (A 731/B 759).]
20. Kant, 637 (A 726/B 754).
21. [Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 225.]
22. [Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 225.]
23. [Immanuel Kant, “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,” in Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 221.]
24. [Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 225; Blumenberg’s emphases.]
25. [Kant, 226.]
26. [Kant, 226; Blumenberg’s emphasis.]
27. [Kant, 226.]
28. [Kant, 226.]
29. [Kant, 226.]
30. [Kant, 226.]
31. [Kant, 227.]
32. [Kant, 226.]
33. [Kant, 227.]
34. [Kant, 227; Blumenberg’s emphasis.]
35. [Kant, 228.]
36. [Kant, 228.]
37. [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.]
38. On the excess of the ornatus, see Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 273.
39. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 3:122–123.
40. Letter from Georg Jonathan von Holland to Johann Heinrich Lambert, May 8, 1765, in Johann Heinrich Lamberts deutscher gelehrter Briefwechsel, ed. Johann Bernoulli (Berlin: Bernoulli, 1781), 1:39–40.
41. [Blumenberg erroneously dates Nietzsche’s lecture course to summer 1874.]
42. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Description of Ancient Rhetoric,” in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. Sander L. Gilman et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.
43. Nietzsche, “Description of Ancient Rhetoric,” 3.
44. Nietzsche, 7–9.
45. Johann August Eberhard, “Über logische Wahrheit oder die transzendentale Gültigkeit der menschlichen Erkenntnis,” Immanuel Kant, Der Streit mit Johann August Eberhard, ed. Marion Lauschke and Manfred Zahn (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), 16–31; 30.
46. Immanuel Kant to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, May 19, 1789, in Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 304.