The Life of the Mind (18 page)

 

In the
Thaedrus
¹⁰³
Plato contrasts the written word with the spoken word as used in "the art of talking things through"
(technē dialektikē),
the "living speech, the original, of which the written discourse may fairly be called a kind of image." The art of living speech is praised because it knows how to select its listeners; it is not barren (
akarpoi
) but contains a semen whence different
logoi,
words and arguments, grow up in different listeners so that the seed may become immortal. But if in thinking we carry out this dialogue with ourselves, it is as though we were "writing words in our souls"; at such times, "our soul is like a book," but a book that no longer contains words.
¹⁰⁴
Following the writer, a second craftsman intervenes as we are thinking and he is a "painter," who paints in our soul those images that correspond to the written words. "This happens when we have drawn these opinions and spoken assertions away from sight or any other perception, so that we now somehow
see
the images of what we first opined and spoke about."
¹⁰⁵

In the
Seventh Letter
Plato tells us briefly how this twofold transformation may possibly come about, how it is that our sense perception can be
talked about
and how this talking about
(dialegesthai)
is next transformed into an image visible only to the soul. We have names for what we see, for instance, the name "circle" for something round; this name can be explained in speech
(logos)
in sentences "composed of nouns and verbs," and we say the circle is a "thing which has everywhere equal distances between its extremities and its center." These sentences can lead to the making of circles, of images
(eidōlon)
that can be "drawn and erased, turned out and destroyed," processes of course that do not affect
the
circle as such, which is different from all these circles. Knowledge and mind
(nous)
grasp the essential circle, that is, what all circles have in common, something that "lies neither in the sounds [of speech] nor in the shapes of bodies but in the soul," and this circle is clearly "different from the real circle," perceived first in nature by the eyes of the body, and different, too, from circles drawn according to verbal explanation. This circle in the soul is perceived by the mind
(nous),
which "is closest to it in affinity and likeness." And this inner intuition alone can be called truth.
¹⁰⁶

Truth of the evidential kind, construed on the principle of things perceived by our bodily vision, can be arrived at through the guidance
(diagōgē)
of words in the
dialegesthai,
the discursive train of thought that can be silent or spoken between teacher and disciple, "moving up and down," inquiring into "what is true and what is fake." But the result, since it is supposed to be an intuition and not a conclusion, will follow suddenly after a long period of questions and answers: "when a flash of insight (
phronēsis
) about everything blazes up, and the mind ... is flooded with light."
¹⁰⁷
This truth itself is beyond words; names from which the thinking process starts are unreliable—'"nothing prevents the things that are now called round from being called straight and the straight round"
¹⁰⁸
—and words, the reasoned discourse of speech that seeks to explain, are "weak"; they offer no more than "a little guidance" to "kindle the light in the soul as from a leaping spark which, once generated, becomes self-sustaining."
¹⁰⁹

I have cited these few pages from the
Seventh Letter
at some length because they offer an otherwise unavailable insight into a possible incompatibility between intuition—the guiding metaphor for philosophical truth—and speech—the medium in which thinking manifests itself: the former always presents us with a co-temporaneous manifold, whereas the latter necessarily discloses itself in a sequence of words and sentences. That the latter was a mere instrument for the former was axiomatic even for Plato and remained axiomatic throughout the history of philosophy. Thus Kant still says: "
worauf alles Denken als Mittel abzweckt,
[ist]
die Anschauung,
" "all thinking is a means of reaching intuition."
¹¹⁰
And here is Heidegger: "The
dialegesthai
has in itself a tendency towards a
noein,
a seeing.... It lacks the proper means of
theōrein
itself.... This is the basic meaning of Plato's dialectic, that it tends towards a vision, a disclosure, that it prepares the original intuition through the discourses.... The
logos
remains tied to vision; if speech separates itself from the evidence given in intuition, it degenerates into idle talk which prevents seeing.
Legein
is rooted in seeing,
horan."
¹¹¹

Heidegger's interpretation is borne out by a passage in Plato's
Philebus
¹¹²
where the inward dialogue of me with myself is once more mentioned but now on its most elementary level: A man sees an object in the distance and, since
he happens to be alone,
he asks
himself:
What is it that appears there? He answers his own question: It is a man. If "he had someone with him he would put what he said to himself into actual speech, addressed to his companion, audibly uttering the same thoughts.... Whereas if he is alone he continues thinking the same thing by himself." The truth here is the seen evidence, and speaking, as well as thinking, is authentic to the extent that it follows the seen evidence, appropriates it by translating it into words; the moment this speech becomes separated from the seen evidence, for instance, when other people's opinions or thoughts are repeated, it acquires the same inauthenticity that for Plato characterizes the image as compared to the original.

Among the outstanding peculiarities of our senses is the fact that they cannot be translated into each other—no sound can be seen, no image can be heard, and so on—though they are bound together by common sense, which for this reason alone is the greatest of them all. I have quoted Aquinas on the theme: "the one faculty [that] extends to all objects of the five senses."
¹¹³
Language, corresponding to or following common sense, gives an object its common name; this commonness is not only the decisive factor for intersubjective communication—the same object being perceived by different persons and common to them—but it also serves to identify a datum that appears altogether differently to each of the five senses: hard or soft when I touch it, sweet or bitter when I taste it, bright or dark when I see it, sounding in different tones when I hear it. None of these sensations can be adequately described in words. Our cognitive senses, seeing and hearing, have little more affinity with words than the lower senses of smell, taste, and touch. Something smells
like
a rose, tastes
like
pea soup, feels
like
velvet, that is as far as we can go. "A rose is a rose is a rose."

All this, of course, is only another way of saying that truth, in the metaphysical tradition understood in terms of the sight metaphor, is ineffable by definition. We know from the Hebrew tradition what happens to truth if the guiding metaphor is not vision but hearing (in many respects more akin than sight to thinking because of its ability to follow sequences). The Hebrew God can be heard but not seen, and truth therefore becomes invisible: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath."
The invisibility of truth in the Hebrew religion is as axiomatic as its ineffability in Greek philosophy
, from which all later philosophy derived its axiomatic assumptions. And while truth, if understood in terms of hearing, demands obedience, truth understood in terms of vision relies on the same powerful self-evidence that forces us to admit the identity of an object the moment it is before our eyes. Metaphysics, the "awesome science" that "beholds what is insofar as it is" (
epistēmē hē theōrei to on he
on),
¹¹⁴
could discover a truth which "forced men by the force of necessity" (
hyp' antēs tēs alētheias anagkazomenoi
)
¹¹⁵
because it relied on the same imperviousness to contradiction we know so well from sight experiences. For no discourse, whether dialectical in the Socratic-Platonio sense, or logical, using established rules to draw conclusions from accepted premises, or rhetorical-persuasive, can ever match the simple, unquestioned and unquestionable certainty of visible evidence. "What is it that appears there? It is a man." This is the perfect
adequatio rei et intellectus,
¹¹⁶
"the agreement of knowledge with its object," which even for Kant was still the definite definition of truth. Kant, however, was aware that for this truth "no general criterion can be demanded. [It] would ... be self-contradictory":
¹¹⁷
Truth as self-evidence does not need any criterion; it
is
the criterion, the final arbiter, of everything that then may follow. Thus Heidegger, discussing the traditional truth concept in
Sein und Zeit,
illustrates it as follows: "Let us suppose that someone with his back turned to the wall makes the true assumption that 'the picture on the wall is hanging askew.' The assertion is confirmed when the man who makes it turns around and perceives the picture hanging askew on the wall."
¹¹⁸

The difficulties to which the "awesome science" of metaphysics has given rise since its inception could possibly all be summed up in the natural tension between
theōria
and
logos,
between seeing and reasoning with words—whether in the form of "dialectics"
(dia-legesthai)
or, on the contrary, of the "syllogism"
(syl-logizesthai),
i.e., whether it takes things, especially opinions, apart by means of words or brings them together in a discourse depending for its truth content on a primary premise perceived by intuition, by the
nous,
which is not subject to error because it is not
meta logon,
sequential to words.
¹¹⁹
If philosophy is the mother of the sciences, it is itself the science of the beginnings and principles of science, of the
archai;
and these
archai,
which then become die topic of Aristotelian metaphysics, can no longer be derived; they are given to the mind in self-evident intuition.

What recommended sight to be the guiding metaphor in philosophy—and, along with sight, intuition as the ideal of truth—was not just the "nobility" of this most cognitive of our senses, but the very early notion that the philosopher's quest for meaning was identical with the scientist's quest for knowledge. Here it is worth recalling the strange turn that Aristode, in the first chapter of the
Metaphysics,
gave to Plato's proposition that
thaumazein,
wonder, is the beginning of all philosophy. But the identification of truth with meaning was made, of course, even earlier. For knowledge comes through searching for what we are accustomed to call truth, and the highest, ultimate form of cognitive truth is indeed intuition. All knowledge starts from investigating the appearances as they are given to our senses, and if the scientist then wants to go on and find out the causes of the visible effects, his ultimate aim is to make appear whatever may be hidden behind mere surfaces. This is true even of the most complicated mechanical instruments, which are designed to catch what is hidden from the naked eye. In the last analysis, confirmation of any scientist's theory comes about through sense evidence—just as in the simplistic model I took out of Heidegger. The tension I alluded to between vision and speech does not enter here; on this level, as in the example quoted, speech quite adequately translates vision (it would be different if the content of the painting and not just its position on the wall had to be expressed in words). The very fact that mathematical symbols can be substituted for actual words and be even more expressive of the underlying phenomena that are forced by instruments to appear, as it were, against their own bent demonstrates the superior efficacy of sight metaphors to make manifest whatever does not need speech as a conveyor.

Thinking, however, in contrast to cognitive activities that may use thinking as one of their instruments, needs speech not only to sound out and become manifest; it needs it to be activated at all. And since speech is enacted in sequences of sentences, the end of thinking can never be an intuition; nor can it be confirmed by some piece of self-evidence beheld in speechless contemplation. If thinking, guided by the old sight metaphor and misunderstanding itself and its function, expects "truth" from its activity, this truth is not only ineffable by definition. "Like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them"—Bergson, the last philosopher to believe firmly in "intuition," described very accurately what really happened to thinkers of that school.
¹²⁰
And the reason for the "failure" is simply that nothing expressed in words can ever attain to the immobility of an object of mere contemplation. Compared to an object of contemplation, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to
see
and
grasp
it, it "slips away."
¹²¹

Since Bergson, the use of the sight metaphor in philosophy has kept dwindling, not unsurprisingly, as emphasis and interest have shifted entirely from contemplation to speech, from nous to
logos.
With this shift, the criterion for truth has shifted from the agreement of knowledge with its object—the
adequatio rei et intellectus,
understood as analogous to the agreement of vision with the seen object—to the mere
form
of thinking, whose basic rule is the axiom of non-contradiction, of consistency with itself, that is, to what Kant still understood as the merely "negative touchstone of truth." "Beyond the sphere of analytic knowledge it has, as a
sufficient
criterion of truth, no authority and no field of application."
¹²²
In the few modern philosophers who still cling, however tenuously and doubtfully, to the traditional assumptions of metaphysics, in Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, the old sight metaphor has not altogether disappeared but has shrunk, as it were: in Benjamin truth "slips by" (
huscht vorüber
); in Heidegger the moment of illumination is understood as "lightning"
(Blitz),
and finally replaced by an altogether different metaphor,
das Gelaut der Stille,
"the ringing sound of silence." In terms of the tradition, the latter metaphor is the closest approximation to the illumination arrived at in speechless contemplation. For though the metaphor for the end and culmination of the thinking process is now drawn from the sense of hearing, it does not in the least correspond to listening to an articulated sequence of sounds, as when we hear a melody, but again to an immobile mental state of sheer receptivity. And since thinking, the silent dialogue of me with myself, is sheer activity of the mind combined with complete immobility of the body—"never am I more active than when I do nothing" (Cato)—the difficulties created by metaphors drawn from the sense of hearing would be as great as the difficulties created by the metaphor of vision. (Bergson, still so firmly attached to the metaphor of intuition for the ideal of truth, speaks of the "essentially active, I might almost say violent, character of metaphysical intuition" without being aware of the contradiction between the quiet of contemplation and any activity, let alone a violent one.
¹²³
) And Aristotle speaks of "philosophical
energeia,
activity" as the "perfect and unhindered activity which [for this very reason] harbors within itself the sweetest of all delights
("Alia mēn hē ge teleia energeia kai akōlytos en heautē echei to chairein, hōste an eiē hē theōrētikē energeia pasōn hēdistē")
.
¹²⁴