9 OBSERVATIONS DRAWN FROM METAPHORS

(1971)

Locating the Observer

Since the publication of the first volume of the Historical Dictionary of Philosophy¹ [Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie], the situation for doing research in the history of concepts has changed. Joachim Ritter’s preface analyzes not so much the changes that this new dictionary might bring about as the changes that occurred since the last edition of the Eisler dictionary appeared, on which the conception of the much larger undertaking just embarked upon is based. In an editor, this reservation is understandable. For the interested audience, however, it is more exciting to ask what standards are being established by this work. Hopefully, the journal Archive for the History of Concepts [Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte] can collect and present part of the discussions that will be sparked by the abundance of material, by the conception and the method, by the successes and possible failures, and by what is presented and what is omitted.

I feel personally addressed by the explicit declaration of what the Historical Dictionary of Philosophy does not include. Ritter says that the editors decided not to include metaphors and metaphorical phrases in the nomenclature of the dictionary. I would like to state from the outset that the reason for this omission makes sense to me and that there is no point in criticizing it. It is correct that the current state of research would have condemned any attempt in that direction to be an “insufficient improvisation,”² as Ritter himself put it.

It is at least revealing that this omission was “not taken lightly.”³ This fact can definitively be related to where Ritter situates the project in his preface and through which he distinguishes his endeavor from the situation in which Rudolf Eisler first conceived of his Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts [Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe] in 1899. Eisler’s regarding the stage of development of philosophy that his dictionary was meant to represent was determined by Auguste Comte’s law of three stages, from which Eisler derived the assumption that “all methods, concepts, and questions that do not and cannot merge into science are destined to fall back into the past of merely historical existence.”⁴ Thus, for Eisler, the systematic definitions that introduced each article were that achievement which could be justified by the remaining material only insofar as its character as a result standing at the end of an overarching development was beyond doubt. History had its product, and it was simply a matter of identifying it with regard to its status as ultima ratio.

Ritter is right not simply to leave behind the Cartesian ideal of a definitive terminology as an outdated moment in some greater schema of stages but rather to voice only such doubts about its ubiquitous possibility in the overall area of the formation of philosophical languages and concepts that, since Eisler’s final product in the nineteenth century, had been exaggerated as much as they had been justified. The new work is supposed to withstand the very tension that has arisen between the two poles of, on the one hand, a Cartesianism transformed into a philosophy of science and a new logic and, on the other, “a philosophy that conceives of itself historically.”⁵ Without this tension, we could understand neither the research into the history of concepts nor any of the expectations held of it. Besides being orientated toward the history of concepts, those expressions are treated whose “function is constituted by their being detached from history.”⁶ A historical presentation is chosen “where it is necessary or desired in order to understand the concept.”⁷ Where such necessity or desire is to be found, however, can only be determined through the “experiment” of the historical presentation itself and through the understanding it yields about the matter constituted in the concept. One may call this a pragmatic procedure—which is supposed to sound improper today—but it is, after all, the only procedure that remains possible in the tense field of philosophical positions and at the same time promises conducive results.

But these results carry an unevenly distributed burden of proof, which seems to be unfavorable to the historical aspect. Historical terminology does not have sovereignty over the constructive formation of concepts; its “things” are always already made and the achievements embedded in them can only be deduced. The counterposition to the Cartesian ideal of clear and distinct concept formation will undoubtedly be represented impressively by the Historical Dictionary, but will still be put to a tough comparative test by the thetically constructive conceptuality of its articles. This juxtaposition is found not only among the attractions but also among the thought-provoking aspects that elevate this project above the function of a mere reference instrument.⁸

Precisely because the burden of proof is so unfavorable for historical terminology, it will need to go beyond its own factual representation in this work and necessitate reference to that which, it was proclaimed, had to be omitted. Only with difficulty was the history of concepts able to free itself from the permanent complication stemming from the fact that most of its historical sources and proofs did not attain the form of clear and distinct determination. In other words, it can barely free itself from the unacknowledged preference for the Cartesian ideal and its successors.

This is the reason expanding research in the history of concepts toward metaphorology can be seen not just as the addition of a specific chapter, whose omission would mean a relief from an additional risky task. Metaphorology renders conceptual history the service of helping it approach a genetic structure of concept formation that, while it may not meet the requirement of univocity, nonetheless permits the univocity of the end result, which indicates an impoverishment of the imaginative background and the threads leading back to the life-world. In the methodical confrontation between Cartesianism and historicism (given that such keywords are even sufficiently differentiated), the dualism of the world model and the life-world, as it has become pressing in our reality, is reflected. Regarding its subject matter, metaphorology must not simply be considered a preliminary stage or substructure of concept formation; instead, and in the reverse direction, metaphorology opens up the possibility of tracing back the constructive instruments to the constitution of the life-world, from which they do not actually stem, but back to which they often refer. The life-world not only provides the material that is to be processed but also possesses a complex structure of resistance to such processing, as well as to an acknowledgement of what it has achieved.

Without developing the field of metaphorics in the broadest sense, it is impossible to reach the results in which philosophical or prephilosophical language has resisted being dissolved into conceptuality and in which metaphor can take on that absolute function that makes apparent that it can be neither translated into “literal” speech nor reoccupied by it. Certainly, even absolute metaphors are still lacking this functional determination, which would state that, at any particular time, only one given imaginative element could take its position. When Lessing says that metaphorics is a “means to elevate … arbitrary signs to the value of natural signs,” so that they obtain “the power of natural signs,”⁹ then “naturalness” in this context means obvious validity under conditions of unquestioned contingency.

When I first presented the draft for what was to become Paradigms for a Metaphorology in Jugenheim in May 1958, during a meeting of the German Research Foundation’s senate commission for historico-conceptual research, Bruno Snell inquired about a possible system of absolute metaphors. He who raised the question at that time is under no suspicion of having pedantic systematic needs. But it is immediately clear that there is a very specific heuristic trait to his question, namely, that it aims at starting from the linguistic phenomena of metaphorics to reach the very findings that separate and distinguish themselves by the untranslatability of their metaphorical representatives. Since such a system can claim no intrinsic value, there is no need to rush into drafting it. But it may be seen that here typological work has to lead the way.

We currently tend to undervalue typological procedures. To many, they appear—as, for example, Dilthey’s typologization of worldviews—to be some kind of display of wares to choose from, that is, as the preliminary stage to a decisionist act. But that is not the primary function of typology. Its primary function is the virtual opposite: it neutralizes decisionist processes that have already occurred by trying to present the complete field of possibilities, that is, confronting prejudice with the judgments that would have been possible in the first place, and by retroactively supplying it with what still is. The decisionist character of preconceived “opinions” becomes transparent with regard to what has not at all been consulted in the life-world and therefore could also not at all have been eliminated. Of course, typology can never be an end product of theory, but it is an essential step of rationalization with its own immanent question: What are the negations implied in a position?

Thus, it is easy to see that every anthropology stands in a metaphoric horizon of an opulence or poverty of the being thematized by it, and that already its point of origin is determined by the makeup of this horizon. Typology seeks to lock in place what historically actualizes itself as a constant search for the latitude of the possible, as a part of those “processes of extension” in which Kant’s “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” saw the “tempting” function of reason.¹⁰ Every present wants to reassure itself that it is not the embodiment of necessity but that, and how, it lies within the latitude of the possible. Typology is above all discredited by the role it played in biologism. But it must be grasped more precisely of what this offensiveness consists. Above all, it is caused by the boundary case of physiognomics and race theory, that is, by substituting the external for the internal, the factual for the essential. The resistance to typology—in our tradition perhaps represented most brilliantly by Lichtenberg’s great objection to Lavater’s physiognomics—consists in the fact that humans cannot and must not accept that they are what they appear to be. If the villains in a work of art also look evil, we are bothered not only by the lack of realism but also by the physiognomic presumption of categorizing humans on the grounds of the very thing for which they are not responsible.

This remark seems to me to be necessary to replace the denigration of typological procedures with an insight into their functional limitations.

In looking for clues on how to structure the realm of absolute metaphors, one stumbles upon the historical diagnosis that certain concepts have always been under suspicion of not fulfilling the requirements necessary for their status as concepts and possibly never even being able to fulfill them. I would like to call to mind the dispute over whether there ever could be a concept of time in the strict sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, for one, says: “Time is no discursive … concept.”¹¹ What this means we need only discuss here with regard to how this deficiency of the concept of time in all its attempted determinations apparently finds its expression in the fact that it contains a metaphorics of space that cannot be eliminated. It may be the case that this is connected to circumstances having to do with the brain’s development, in which the achievements of spatial representation are genetically older than those of temporal representation.¹² One may dismiss the traditional question of what time is, given the great possibilities to measure it without having to determine it by anything other than the parameters of this measurement—unless I am much mistaken, this old and perhaps all too great question will continue to rear its head, at least as a disruptive factor in measuring time.

It is similar with the concept of “world.” World may be everything that is the case, but in no way could a Cartesian be satisfied with this pseudo-definition. Kant discovered that world is an idea and thus a reference to something that cannot fulfill the intuition demanded by concepts and that nevertheless contains the claims that intuitions should be interconnected, and that the stock of intuitions reached should always be exceeded. Especially as an embodiment of postulations, an idea does not reach the dignity of a concept—not because it is content with less, but rather because necessity demands more. It is similar with the totalities that we have grown accustomed to calling “life” or “history.”

In the wake of Cartesianism, it was perhaps believed that the concept of the subject that lies in the “I think” would represent the purest fulfillment of the demands for determinateness raised by concept formation. The most accurate presence that the subject possesses for itself has to allow for the boundary case of clear conceptuality. Leibniz still thought it evident, in accord with all of tradition, that the spirit [Geist] as the self-aware subject might be problematic in its theoretical approach to anything else, that is, to the world of physical material objects, but that it possessed immediate knowledge in relation to itself and thus remained entirely unproblematic. Only Kant’s curious Dreams of a Spirit-Seer from 1766 broke with this traditional evidence in a way that at first remained unclear. “We” do not know what the spirit thinks and how it immediately thinks about itself, what it may be doing when we are physically deeply asleep (not dreaming!, since the dream will be discovered only much later as a substitution for this hidden self). The wakeful subject has a system of ideas of itself transposed [übertragen] by “symbols.” Here, the mechanism of the metaphor itself becomes a metaphor for the mechanism by which spirits experience themselves: “For these influences can enter the personal consciousness of man, not, it is true, directly, but, nonetheless, in such a fashion that they, in accordance with the law of association of ideas, excite those images which are related to them, and awaken representations which bear an analogy with our senses. They are not, it is true, the spirit-concept itself, but they are symbols of it.”¹³ Kant comprehends the possibility of such symbolism according to the procedure of metaphorics; its possibility becomes distinct according to “the way in which the higher concepts of reason, which are fairly close to the spirit-concepts, normally assume, so to speak, a corporeal cloak in order to present themselves in a clear light.”¹⁴ In addition to the moral characteristics of the divinity and the allegorical personifications, Kant mentions the example of the representation of time as a line, “although space and time only agree in their relations; they thus, presumably, only agree with each other analogically, never qualitatively.”¹⁵ The emergence of spirit-sensations in consciousness thus receives the character of a transition through the excitement of the imagination, and the appearances of spirits are finally nothing but hypertrophic metaphors in which the mere images of the imagination take on the semblance of real sensations. Here, the available technology of the metaphor turns into an intangible psycho-physical limit case of a sensorium that is symbolic in nature. We need take this matter no further, yet in its “magnification,” the boundary case shows the constitution of the absolute metaphor.

Metaphors draw us into imaginative contexts. This is explicitly how the simile arises from a metaphor. If such explicitness is not reached, this orientation can remain in the background. If humans play roles in their human environment, who is their observer? Does a self-conception as being involved in role playing also imply a claim for specific observers, so that the role fails if it misses its addressee? Does the pathology of the failed role consist in providing the failed actor with proof of his observers and to finally therapeutically make such proof available to him, thereby at least hinting at it by offers of reception? What is the function of the therapist in this imaginational nexus? The secret, covert, or even suppressed role—can it finally be played, because the observer has been found, because someone tentatively assumes the function of the addressee, because an infinitely attentive, infinitely curious observer occupies the position that had previously been vacant—one as a placeholder for many or for specific others about whom he will never learn? The sequence of these questions is not supposed to constitute the development of a theory but only to hint at a possible theory. The almost associative character of this sequence demonstrates how much support a background metaphorics, once found, can provide for a field in which one can work only with heterogeneous material.

We know what a narrated story is. But we do not know what it means that we can call the totality of all possibly stories “history” [Geschichten … die Geschichte], according to a principle of selection that is difficult to define. No reminder is necessary that this collective singular is not old at all.¹⁶ Nor need attention be drawn to the fact that the transferability of this metaphor originally simply consisted in narratability. Here there was no sign of its disposition becoming the great philosophical standard problem, which seems to be following as a matter of necessity from the hypostasizing achievement of the singular. The singular of “history” is itself an absolute metaphor, one of the great words from the world of those nouns that create the great problems for us as well as the metaphysics corresponding to these problems. No critique of language seems equal to the task of avoiding them. There was the philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie]; perhaps it will return under another title, for questions such as “What is life?” are ineradicable, despite the fact that the toughest answers may already have been given—like Nietzsche’s: “What is life? … Constantly being a murderer?”¹⁷

The totalities for which only examples are given here seem to form an ordered structure of entanglement with each other, to which the functions of absolute metaphorics might correspond. “Life” as the totality of individual existence; “the self” as this totality’s bearer, unknown to itself; “history” [die Geschichte] as the overall unity of such totalities of life; and finally, “the world,” itself the comprehensive totality of all realities that have an effect on history, or rather of the realities that are characterized as indifferent to history, such as nature or the indifference of the stars—even those stars whose light could not yet have reached us. At least one other totality is conceived of beyond the world, which Jaspers, for instance, has called “the encompassing” [das Umgreifende], namely, everything that by way of myth has become differentiated into supraworld and underworld, into the antemundane and eschatology.¹⁸ Projection is the means by which the extraworldly spaces of the imagination are populated, transcendence the form in which its boundaries are transgressed. The metaphors and myths of beginnings may be demiurgic or organic, those of the end juridical, catastrophic, or theatrical.

The great conceptions of the whole and of its phrasings conceal their metaphoric orientation. In a sense, Freud’s death drive is a metaphor to the same degree that Ernst Haeckel’s “biogenetic law” derives its plausibility from the transfer structure: ontogenesis is the metaphor of phylogenesis. Freud basically thought this matter one decisive step further into a total perspective. If one takes the expression “phylogenesis” in a broader sense still, it comes to comprise not only the development of organic life itself but even the step from the anorganic to the organic. Haeckel’s basic law can be interpreted as perpetual return of nature to its points of origin, to the beginnings, to the repetition of a constant ritual. In that case, however, the ritual is incomplete; it repeats only part of its history—only the organic episode—and excludes the physical, chemical prehistory. Now one might say that only the conception of the death drive radicalized this repetition, integrated the organic episode into the more encompassing principle of inertia, and finally provided the second law of thermodynamics with its psychoanalytic correlate. The individual is a metaphor of the total history of nature and not merely of the history of organic nature. It seems that Lou Andreas-Salomé was the first to characterize Ferenczi’s idea of the “death tendency” and Freud’s idea of the “death drive” correctly: “I cannot escape the idea that the tendency to death and rest—which Freud attributes to every living being as its essential being, inborn, and from which it is reluctant to be disturbed—is itself a rather neurotic estimation of life.”¹⁹

Gottfried Benn spoke of the “boastfulness” [Aufschneiderei] of the metaphorical.²⁰ Indeed, not only poetical but also philosophical metaphorics always have some kind of this having-promised-too-much that evades all demands of redemption. We have “no relationship to the totality of existence,”²¹ but we turn “the world” into the subject of statements, just as we do with “history.” It may be that metaphorics rhetorically overextends the anticipatory or overarching aspect [Vorgriff und Übergriff] of promising-too-much; yet it does not create the structure of anticipation and overarching but rather enters into it. If the life-world did not have the intentionality of anticipating and overarching extensions, which, according to Husserl’s description, unanimously persist, but can also experience “cancelings-out,”²² then negation could not exist. Anyone able truly and insistently to live only in a receptive-immediate manner would not possess this instrument. Even neopositivist falsificationism still makes this very clear: we do not live by confirmations but by the absence of denials, that is, by those very “cancelings-out.” The life-world is a world, as it were, on probation. The metaphor offers an exemplary manifestation of this unsurpassable state of affairs, in which this undefined expectation horizon first articulates itself. The constitutive anticipatory aspect easily becomes overarching, potentially even lapsing into Benn’s “boastfulness.” Realists are always reducing metaphorics, which certainly is fair enough—but is reality what then remains?²³

If one keeps this in mind, significance accrues to a very specific form of metaphorics that I have described as “explosive metaphorics,”²⁴ because its own futility is always simultaneously expressed in its intentional expansion, the anticipatory aspect is expressed at the same time as the retraction of the overarching aspect. The invention of this configuration of metaphors stands in the tradition of negative theology, the mystical via negationis [way of negation], that is, the very self-representation of every theology’s elemental conundrum: to be supposed to keep talking about God while not being afforded the confidence to say anything about Him. For his coincidentia oppositorum [coincidence of opposites], Nicholas of Cusa devised the explosive metaphorics of the circle whose radius becomes infinite, thereby causing its peripety to have an infinitely small curvature, ultimately coinciding with a straight line. One might not suppose such an eminently medieval pattern of expression could still be useful to illustrate a specific aspect of historical consciousness of the modern age. In one of his journal fragments, Georg Simmel decisively amended Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence of the same with the help of this explosive metaphor: “The world process strikes me as the turning of an enormous wheel, as, however, it is 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, that, in its ideal, aims at the exhaustion of the qualitative manifoldness without ever exhausting it in reality.”²⁵

The space of metaphor is the space of concept formation that is impossible, has failed, or is not yet consolidated. The norm of conceptuality is based on anticipatory orientations, which in turn and by necessity lie outside the normative and its systematicity, yet do not form its mere genetic preliminary stage that consumes itself in the process.

The Sources

The critique of rhetoric and especially that of the use of metaphors tends to give rise to the expectation that “literal” speech [“eigentliche” Rede] in the traditional sense would also be univocal. This expectation is not confirmed. Scientific language does indeed tend toward the univocal use of its means, but at the cost of being restricted to a mere technical language, which is then again prone to metaphorical “misuse” outside its realm. The aesthetic use of language is opposed to the process that tends toward univocity; the ambiguity of linguistic means is either being restored or fabricated anew by being bound to contexts hitherto unacceptable. The task of seeking out metaphorics even in the internal language of science does not aim for its possible aesthetic revaluation, that is, at maintaining or awakening equivocity, but rather for a factor of consistency conserved in metaphorics. For a metaphor is orientated a certain way when it homogenizes a context, and it prepares the context’s understanding with regard to this orientation. It makes more explicit how things that at first appear different could have come together and how they are related. The function of a metaphorology can therefore be to secure univocity for a hermeneutical conception or to support attempts to correct such a conception that has not yet been secured. Hence, metaphorology has no aesthetical aspect, because, far from tolerating ambiguity, it accepts the tendency toward univocity within scientific language.

In a technical language such as that of philologists and historians, there exists a metaphor, barely perceived as such anymore, of the type of “the sources.” When such a metaphor is suddenly “taken at its word,” a kind of life-worldly self-evidence is shattered for those who have been using the technical language. Such a moment happened when in August 1957, during a conference at the Fondation Hardt on the Sources de Plotin, Richard Harder, shortly before his death, picked up on the use philologists make of the expression “source” and pointed out that they were dealing with a metaphor—a fact that of course everybody who was present knew, but had not been made aware of as long as anyone can remember.²⁶ “Were classical studies ever to begin,” said Harder, “to think about their own concepts, such metaphors would surely be in need of examination, the biological ones, like family tree and development, as much as the physical ones, like cause and effect.”²⁷ Harder acknowledges reservations against the concept of the source and that such metaphors are not helpful for understanding the issue. What does he do who draws from a source? He draws, but what comes of it will later be an “influence,” in the language of the historian. And what has happened to the source from which he drew? “The water from the source is pure; who draws from it, muddies it.”²⁸

Harder’s remarks on the topic of “Source or Tradition?” were originally merely the introduction to his presentation, which has not survived, on “The Whole Before and in Plotinus.” But the discussion about this introduction, recorded in the proceedings, still reveals how irritating, if not unsettling, this unexpected metaphorological redirection of attention toward a background that is no longer perceived can become. It suddenly emerges that a single metaphor belongs to and indicates a system of orientations, but that at the same time the latency of the background is also secured and shielded by the supposed self-evidence of the metaphor. In the discussions, this disruption met with defensiveness. The editor of Plotinus, Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer, whose merits are beyond dispute, indeed acknowledges that “source” is a mythological expression, but remarks that this does not make it an impermissible concept: “one has only to agree on what one means by it.”²⁹ Yet there lies the rub: the plausibility of the metaphor, its pictorial self-evidence, skips the need for agreement and suggests that everyone already knows what is meant by it. “At times,” Schwyzer writes, Harder gives the reader the feeling that “he was seeing ghosts from the deep.”³⁰ Does one really know what that is supposed to mean? The metaphor carries a potential for implications and connotations that cannot be exchanged at will, that permanently may offer themselves up, but that can also remain untapped until someone needs them. Above all, let us not forget about the “purity” of sources—as the sources of streams that later become muddied, which does not only imply the methodical postulate of recuperation and development, but which, in the call “to the sources,” also becomes a criterion for quality and dignity. There is an aversion to the implications offered by metaphor, such as when Willy Theiler says the following in the discussion at Vandœuvres: “I myself have no recourse to the word source … because following through with that image causes linguistic difficulties.” Theiler continues that which of the “mythological modes of expression” one happens to be using may be relatively insignificant: “The key point is to work together on the issue.” But what is the issue here without the imaginative system of orientation through which its contexts are registered?³¹

We are dealing here with an imagination from the philosophy of history that anticipates how events (in the widest sense) can relate to one another. Johann Gottfried Herder has made use of this system of imagination to differentiate his, one feels almost compelled to say, subterranean, concept of historical progress against skepticism on the one hand and against the rationalist idea of progress on the other: “Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? Do you see this river current swimming along—how it sprang forth from a little source, grows, breaks off there, begins here, ever meanders, and bores further and deeper—but always remains water!, river current!, drop always only drop, until it plunges into the ocean—what if it were like that with the human species?”³² Does one arrive at the sources if one traces this schema in the philosophy of history in the opposite direction? Goethe has accused the “philosophers of the intellect” of being unclear because they are too in love with clarity, causing them to end up like the man “who follows a river from its mouth upward, thus always coming across inflowing brooks and creeks, which again divert, so that finally he will completely lose his way and come to rest in deverticulis [up a byway].”³³

Sources are something that one stumbles upon. This is true of the historian’s sources because they have entered the stream of history without drowning in it. Against the overrating of tradition, Bacon coined the malicious image of time as a torrent in which the very thing that has the least weight is carried along and endures. What becomes a “source”? Is it a process of canonization when things are conserved, collected, copied, merged in documentations, critically secured, and finally diplomatically edited? Some things only become a source once there exists the respective historical discipline or subdiscipline which expands the original canon, such as the history of economy, the history of science, folklore studies, name studies, the history of concepts. What was a mere relict before now becomes an authentic source. It is in the nature of an epoch shaped by historical consciousness that it begins to archive almost everything as worthy of being passed on. But will it be what future historians will want to know about this epoch? Will their concept of “life-world” and its totality not be more encompassing than what can be fulfilled by some kind of archiving canon as it is currently defined? And above all: Will this legacy still be called “source”? Metaphorology also poses the question of how far a metaphor’s coverage extends. At any rate, we are leaving potential future historians other and different materials than those that were left for us. They no longer have in common with “sources” that they are stumbled upon. Transmission has rather taken the form of an aqueduct, whose bed is cemented against loss. It carries along all that has been not so much purposely left behind as accidentally left lying around, and all that has by law been destined for preservation. The metaphor of the source only comes to be revealing if one sees through it onto the possible, no longer “source-shaped” modality of materials that were saved only because there no longer were any criteria for distinguishing that which is not worthy of being passed on.

From this perspective, the source stops being the original and the final—and thus also that which is pure and to be kept pure, and entrusted to the philologies as such. By interrogating it, it is possible to go beyond the source, toward either the will that left it behind, or the conditions for its appearance. Within the metaphorical guiding system of the “source,” Johann Gustav Droysen has illustrated the possibility of inquiring about what feeds the source in his Outline of the Principles of History. To begin with, Droysen has a final conception of sources: “Under sources belong past events as human understanding has apprehended them, shaped them to itself and passed them over to the service of memory.”³⁴ Throughout large parts of the text, the metaphorics of the “source” have been so far extended and forgotten in the terminology of the historian that the following mixing of metaphors becomes possible: “Even the very best [sources] give him [the scholar], so to speak, only polarized light.”³⁵

Independent of the will that leaves the source as such behind, for Droysen the very historical fact to which the source attests is already “a complex of acts of will, often many, helping and hindering acts of will.”³⁶ Source criticism has to determine how the materials relate to those past acts of will. The source therefore is a product that for us precedes the historical circumstances, it is the emergence of a hitherto shapeless supply system. It is to the very bottom of this wellspring that Droysen now refers in a sentence in which he surprisingly and curiously reveals and enacts the metaphorical reference to the term “source”: “The primitive ‘source’ does not consist in the dreary maze of contemporary opinions, accounts, reports. This is only the daily repeated atmospheric process of ascending and self-precipitating vapors from which the true Sources or springs are replenished.”³⁷

It is indicative of the function of metaphor that the terminological use of an expression is pivoted to its imaginative horizon in the very moment in which a discipline transgresses, with regard to its foundations, the area of its fixed and methodically defined object. The historian no longer has anything to do with such a drainage basin that feeds his sources beyond their methodical conceivability. The everyday business of opinions and narratives, of news and rumors, of ascending and precipitating vapors is not his topic, but the metaphorical extrapolation at least records what, as a process of objectification, forms the basis of a discipline’s achievements, and what in that process was left outside of the horizon of objectivization.

Finally, here are two examples of how the imaginative system of “source” might be resorted to in a polemical manner. In his 1670 introduction to the work of Marius Nizolius, Leibniz said against the pseudo-philosophers that the objects of philosophy were in principle none other than those of common thought, and that its language could be that of the quotidian if one were ready to accept a greater effort than that which scholastic terminology demands. Philosophers only feel what others feel, too, but they attentively perceive what others overlook. Yet even if one acknowledges that, Leibniz writes that those who resort to Aristotle and the classical thinkers, and defy the scholastic mudding of those sources, are not to be despised: “qui ex Aristotelis et veterum fontibus potius quam lacunis scholasticorum sua hauserunt” [those who draw from the sources of Aristotle and the ancients rather than from the cisterns of the Scholastics].³⁸

The second reference is as historically lighthearted as it is now apt to evoke wistfulness. Christian August Vulpius, Goethe’s brother-in-law, published a Glossary for the Eighteenth Century in 1788, in the alphabetical order of which only this short formula is to be found under the rubric of “university”: “the most pleasant place to suffer thirst at the source.”³⁹

Paradigm, Grammatically

In his widely discussed book on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn introduced the concept of paradigm into the theory of the history of science.⁴⁰ In the preface, he states how he came to use this concept. He spent the year 1958/59 as a natural scientist at the “Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences” at Stanford, in a research group that largely consisted of social scientists. To the natural scientist, it was surprising how many different opinions on the social sciences’ methods and problems existed and how extensively they were debated. Kuhn then did not content himself with assuming that the exact sciences enjoyed greater security and solidity with regard to fundamental questions, but arrived at the assumption that other historical and social structures of scientific practice had favored the solidification of specific premises to eliminate controversies. Kuhn writes: “Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as ‘paradigms,’ a term that relates closely to ‘normal science.’ By choosing it, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actual scientific practice … provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.”⁴¹ It is, then, the very validity of the paradigm that finally leads it into a crisis, namely, when at a certain point of theoretical development the refinement and precision of procedures to determine anomalies leads to the expectations that are active and persistent in the paradigm being disturbed. In a certain way, the concept of the paradigm thus represents a moment of discontinuity within the schema of the history of science. “Violations of expectations” are possible and consequential only when a consolidated stock may be endangered. The paradigm is a latent complex of premises which, as implications of scientific practice, need not even be expressly formulated but already have entered into the methods and into the framing of problems. “Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms.”⁴² Scientific progress must thus not be conceived of as an additive process; rather, the spontaneity that occurs in it resembles a “technique for producing surprises.”⁴³

One reads this text without perceiving the term “paradigm” to mean anything other than “example.” However, it is telling that already Georg Christoph Lichtenberg used the expression “paradigm” as a metaphor with reference to the history of science. In the last volume of the Göttingen edition of Lichtenberg’s writings from 1800 to 1806, the following may be found among the texts entitled “Unpublished Fragments”: “I believe that among all our heuristic pulleys none is more effective than what I have called ‘paradigmata.’ ”⁴⁴ Lichtenberg continues that he believes that “by means of a paradigma chosen from physics … one could have discovered Kantian philosophy.”⁴⁵ The text does not reveal what might have prompted Lichtenberg to use the term paradigm in this context. On this, Gottlieb Gamauf’s recollections of Lichtenberg’s lectures offer some insight. Here we find the following text by Lichtenberg, which sounds quite authentic: “The finest example of the great usefulness of hypotheses is given by astronomy. Now the Copernican system is almost completely beyond any doubt. It is, as it were, the paradigm according to which all other discoveries are supposed to be declined [dekliniert]. Here human understanding has penetrated the furthest and deepest.”⁴⁶

The expression “paradigm” is used metaphorically in this text, as the phrase “as it were” makes amply clear. The function of astronomical theory of Copernican rank is that of an example from a grammar textbook, by means of which students learn the declension of all other nouns of the same stem type. Lichtenberg himself demonstrated again and again in what sense the Copernican system is such a paradigm by which other discoveries can be “declined.” Out of his affinity for this astronomical paradigm, Lichtenberg finally also composed the most beautiful biography of Copernicus that exists in German.⁴⁷

Another significant example in this context that I would like to adduce can be found in Lichtenberg’s Geological-Metereological Fantasies in which he uses the expression “paradigm” in the distinct metaphorical meaning of the textbook example. In this passage, Lichtenberg discusses the problems of the possibility of periodical fluctuations of solar radiation and how climate variations might depend on them. The Göttingen astronomer Mayer had made proposals for setting up radiation meters on mountains, as suggested by William Herschel’s work. On that topic, Lichtenberg writes the following in the Göttingisches Taschenbuch, of which he is also the editor:

The editor of these pages is boundlessly delighted to see here once more what the astronomical mind or, it is tempting to say, astronomical sensitivity is capable of when it comes to arranging research plans in the sciences. As he has said repeatedly, not all parts of the sciences will do well until the procedure used by astronomers to extend their science is recognized as the paradigm to decline all other parts of sciences accordingly and the history of astronomy in a nutshell is nailed as a chart to walls of the physical and chemical laboratories. Now might also be the time to advise the eager antiphilologists to take to heart the history of the invention of the true world system. Lavoisier has undoubtedly become the Copernicus of chemistry.⁴⁸

Lichtenberg likes to think of the state of the sciences of his time as pre-Copernican. Part of the reason for this is the confusion that had resulted from the hypertrophy of auxiliary constructions and newly discovered elements. Foremost and repeatedly this applies to chemistry, where in Lichtenberg’s view far too many “new earths” had been discovered. This indicated to him that a radically simplified approach based on the paradigm of astronomical reform was due in this science. In a note published posthumously, Lichtenberg writes:

I truly cannot say that I like those discoveries of new earths. These accumulations of new bodies remind me of the epicycles in astronomy. What would those astronomers have done with their epicycles if they had known the aberration of the fixed stars? Much geometrical acuity could have been demonstrated, like Copernicus did, for example, in his errors. But what is that? What I actually meant to say is: If chemistry does not soon receive its Kepler, it will be crushed by the number of epicycles; nobody will study it anymore, and languor will at the end know how to simplify it, which an active intellect could have done better. There need and must be a point of view from which everything looks simpler. As soon as one deems a perceived irregularity in the leaves of a tree to be significant enough to remark on it as a great event in the history of the tree, it is no longer possible to think about discovering the nature of the tree.⁴⁹

The scientific paradigm of the Copernican type is preceded by the paradigm that language provides for all thought. Lichtenberg is captivated by this idea, and he did say that the whole of our philosophy is the correction of our use of language and thus also the correction of the most common, always already existing philosophy. This, in turn, is expressed in a grammatical metaphor: “Our false philosophy is incorporated into language in its entirety; we cannot reason, so to speak, without reasoning falsely. One fails to consider that any speech, regardless of its topic, is a philosophy.… But only this common philosophy has the advantage of possessing declensions and conjugations. Thus, true philosophy is always taught in the language of false philosophy. Explaining words does not help, for in such explanations we do not yet alter the pronouns and their declensions.”⁵⁰

If one considers how frequently the metaphorics of words, syllables, and letters, and that of an open and enciphered semantics occur in the metaphoric complex of the “book of nature,” then only Lichtenberg’s metaphorics helps us to see—from the vantage point of the end of that tradition—that no metaphors of syntax and morphology had existed for this “book of nature.” The perception of that which does not exist is the most difficult.

Critical Masses

It is no rarity to observe that metaphorics are “taken at their word.” In the process, the metaphor is seized from the limited intention of its author, made independent, and extended in a direction that often changes the clarification into an explanation. The metaphor of the wax tablet, which was intended to illustrate specific epistemological expressions, for Diderot becomes an explanation of the function of memory. For some of his students, the energetic metaphorics of Freud’s psychoanalysis take on the form of hypostatization, most clearly in Wilhelm Reich’s “Orgon” mysticism. The traditional theater metaphorics of “life” and “world” have gradually led to “realistically” formulated anthropological, psychological, and sociological theorems of “role behavior” and “primal scenes” [Urszenen], with sceneries, props, masks, and other inventory. The simile not only extends the metaphor but also condenses it, and thus takes away the degree of nonbindingness and of rescindability that it originally possesses and that is demonstrated in retaining the possibility of “coexisting” with other metaphors.

Given this premise, the question arises whether the reverse can also be proved, whereby that which is “to be taken at its word” is, in the end, not taken, but instead localized in another language. This type of unlawful “transfer” [Übertragung] is most likely to occur when the technical language that someone speaks is not recognized or understood, that is, it is taken to be a “metaphorics of technical language” inadequate to the speaker’s intention.

I would like to offer one revealing example that is relevant for a number of reasons. September 1970 saw the first visit of a West German minister of science to the Soviet Union. The journalist Claus Grossner, who was well known at the time for a recent series of newspaper articles entitled Philosophie in Deutschland, accompanied the German delegation and reported very critically about the composition of the West German representatives and their preparation for and attitudes about negotiation.⁵¹ In the report it appears almost naive that the delegation should try to downplay the political dimension of scientific interests when in contact with their Soviet partners. The “theoretical positivism” of the German “experts” does indeed have “dangerous effects when put into practice.” As a contemporary, one can discern what language is being spoken. But can we simply assume that the other side also speaks this language? The reporter tries particularly to distinguish the opposite type across the negotiation table to delineate the lost chances that are supposed to rest on the existence of some kind of “Scientists’ Internationale.” Mikhail Lavrentyev, the president of the Sibirian Academy of Sciences in the scientific metropolis of Akademgorodok, invokes his three thousand-kilometer distance to Moscow and says, “We have here gathered around us a critical mass of scholars.” To which the reporter adds by way of interpretation: “—which are of course also a political power.” The expression “critical mass” has seized the reporter’s choice of language. He continues, “This attitude, which openly articulates what many of the young elite scientists are thinking in this Siberian super-academic city, demonstrates that the plans for a German-Soviet scientific agreement are not merely concerned with a ‘superstructure’ treaty [“Überbau”-Vertrag].” Through what attitude is what being demonstrated?

The Siberian president of the academy has been speaking to people who know what a “critical mass” is and who can easily grasp its metaphorical application in relation to the effectivity of scientific institutions. In the sphere of nuclear reactions, the expectation that a “mass” becomes “critical” when it reaches a level that triggers self-perpetuating activity has long been fulfilled, albeit not in a manner apt to afford us much comfort. In an unintended sense, the reporter is right: within the technical languages, there is today a greater possibility for an understanding beyond national borders than there is, within a national language, between the worlds of technical languages.

***Sensus Communis*, Metaphorically**

Since the Copernican turn, modern science has been governed by the self-perception that its results were essentially radical disappointments and corrections of the everyday image that humans create of the world and of the language that draws on this everyday image. Positivism has expressed this idea of science most starkly by designating the discovery of scientific research as the solemn refutation of good judgment: “La scienza positiva si stabilisce con una scoperta. E la scoperta è una smentita solenne del senso commune” [Positive science establishes itself with a discovery. And the discovery is a solemn denial of common sense].⁵² This formulation looks like the counterpoint to a dictum by Goethe, addressed to Riemer on July 24, 1807, in which the metaphorics of the senses and of common sense, as the central organ of sensibility that is traditionally used to unify and harmonize the achievements of the other senses, are being used to represent the relation that all sciences among themselves and as a whole have toward philosophy: “Single sciences are just, as it were, the senses with which we stand face to face to things; the philosophy or science of sciences is the sensus communis.”⁵³

Even when Goethe used this metaphor, it had, in a way, already become anachronistic. This is the case at least since the emergence of a thought that forcefully obtrudes upon the human relation to the world, namely, that human sensibility might only be a random selection of the possibilities for accessing reality. This thought occupied Montaigne, Voltaire, and Lessing; Goethe is not bothered by it. The scientific representation of the world dissects reality into measurable properties and it is characteristic for this dissection in particular that it tries to free itself from the randomness of the data accessible to the sense organs, beginning with the difference between primary and secondary sense qualities. Fritz Mauthner coined the metaphor that with regard to the world, our senses open only “accidental breaches,” and furthermore refuses to account for why it remains unknown to us just “what cannot be seen through these breaches.”⁵⁴

That the expression sensus communis should appear in both quotes ought not to blind us to the fact that it means something different in each case. For this expression has degenerated from the very specific meaning of a mediating and attributing central organ of sensibility to that of a common sensibility as that average of perceptions that may be assumed to apply to all humans, or at least to those we may assume to form a community of understanding. What Goethe has in mind for philosophy’s relation to the sciences, however, is not this role of representing the common as an average common to all; rather, he has in mind the role of enabling communication among the sciences through agreement within a functionally higher organ. This organ’s role could be, for example, according to Molyneux’s much debated problem, to ascertain the identity between an object only given through sense of touch with an entity that is optically presented only thereafter.

The Background Metaphorics of Cultural Critique

Metaphor falls under the remit of rhetoric. In our tradition, this attribution is deemed as carrying a low status. It lies in the function of metaphor that it has an anticipatory quality, something that goes beyond the area of what has been theoretically vouchsafed and that it connects this orienting, detecting, roving anticipatory quality with the suggestion of safeguards that it cannot obtain. What is merely a matter of configuration appears as an explanation. From this duality of risk and security, it is possible to understand the function of metaphor. Metaphor uses the suggestion of intuitiveness and is therefore not only the preliminary stage or the basis of concept formation, but at the same time prevents it or misleads it in the direction of its suggestion.

This function can be concealed when the metaphor accompanies a highly indeterminate concept (in the sense of a “vague legal concept” [unbestimmter Rechtsbegriff]) in an explanatory way. In Hans Freyer’s Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters [Theory of the Present Age],⁵⁵ the concept of the “secondary system” plays a central role. It is striking how the necessary correlate to a “secondary system”—the “primary system”—does not appear in the text with any terminological explicitness, yet is always presupposed in the imaginatively created complementary notions.

Here the numerous additional metaphors come into play that center around the difference of fertility and sterility as the foundational conditions of the two systems. There is no “primary system” to begin with, because what presents itself in the metaphors as the primary cannot have the quality—or more accurately, the disquality—of “system” belonging to the secondary. Between both realities there is therefore a relation of irreversibility. This comes with its own metaphorics of reduction and exhaustion, of the unsound management of capital, of borrowing, of the depletion of reserves. All this explicates the schema of the two systems, makes it comprehensible, but at the same time also provides it with some kind of superficial self-evidence: the organic, solid management, the primary, the stratigraphically foundational has suggestive advantages for argumentation, which are well known and concentrated in the formula of the terra inviolata [unplowed earth].

All of this would not be that interesting had the author not warned explicitly against the dangers of this imagery and shown himself to be intimately familiar with them. He claims to be aware of the fact that “sociology has to proceed with extreme caution when using images taken from organic life. Specifically, it is highly dangerous to identify matters of fact concerning historicity and the continuing influence of tradition with the help of such images. This leads one to think of temporalities as spatialities, of processes as organic structures.”⁵⁶ Cultures and civilizations had not developed through growth, but through achievement, and in history there were incipient decisions that had no full parallel in the area of organic life.

Despite expressing this awareness of the dangers of metaphorics, Freyer falls back into his imaginative system of orientation only a few lines later. The present age has turned the possibility of the secondary system into a reality and has reached the point of no return. This modern system must be characterized as a whole and complete world, or at least such a world in the making. “The attempt of laying a concrete foundation to build a construction in the ‘suspended’ style has now really been undertaken, and as far as it has succeeded, one supposes that the roots have been cut and the capillaries blocked as well.”⁵⁷ The ground as something that has grown is being consumed by deforestation, karstification, and desertification, and the old metaphor of “groundlessness” [Bodenlosigkeit]—as artistic unconcern—returns not only in the senses of mismanagement and desertification but also as the intention to uncover the surrogates of the soil. In this way, it is said of language as a “secondary system” that it is “completely groundless; to supply it with a ground would be in contradiction to its principle of formation.”⁵⁸ And the dilemma of modern humans to restore the balance of natural powers they have disturbed is described in the following way: “After they have overcultivated the ground in the proper sense of the word, they try to put a new ground underneath their rational cultivation.”⁵⁹ But here indeed the talk of the ground is supposed to illustrate that what has grown cannot as such be made: “Where we are dealing with the balances of nature, with ‘ground’ in the proper sense of the word, nature has the last word, and its answer can very much arrive via detours and from a completely different corner than expected.”⁶⁰

This brief paradigm serves as a clue for the necessity of a metaphorology of cultural critique [Kulturkritik], which, though it may not have its own jargon, at least has its own imaginative background.

Translated by Florian Fuchs

Originally published as “Beobachtungen an Metaphern,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 15, no. 2 (1971): 161–214. Sections 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 9 are translated here.