MEANING AND MYTH
[1]
In his contrast between radical and poetical metaphor, Max Müller distinguished those ‘figurative’ expressions with which early languages abound from the similitudes deliberately invented by modern poets. This was an important step. Nevertheless, when we come to examine his definition of ‘radical’ metaphor and to inspect his examples, we can scarcely help being afflicted with grave misgivings. For we find that that definition is based on the old philologist’s hypothesis of ‘roots of speech’—the theory that every language started with a group of monosyllabic sounds, each of which expressed a simple, general notion. These general notions, it is supposed, were then applied to particular phenomena, among which they were subdivided by the addition of other words; and these latter words finally became the prefixes, suffixes, inflexions, etc., familiar to all students of the Aryan group of languages. Thus, to the root hab were added various little words implying the notion of particular number and person; but in course of time these coalesced, and the result was an inflected form such as the Latin habuerunt. Finally, by a process commonly alluded to as ‘decay’, these inflexions were lost and language returned once more to the use of separate words, as in the English they have had.
Now, from the grammatical point of view, it is hardly too much to say that this theory has been hopelessly discredited. Professor Jespersen, for example, in his Progress in Language, has put an overwhelmingly strong case for the opposite view, according to which the flexional (hab-u-erunt) form of language is the earlier, while the isolating or root (they have had) languages (of which Chinese is commonly taken as the most striking example) represent final—not first—stages of a long speech-evolution where-in English is already far advanced. ‘The evolution of language’—so Professor Jespersen sums it up—‘shows a progressive tendency from inseparable irregular conglomerations to freely and regularly combinable short elements.’
Again, if we approach the theory of roots from the semantic point of view, we shall find that here also it falls heavily to the ground. For it owes exactly the same defect as does that theory of metaphor and of a ‘metaphorical period’ which was elaborated in the last chapter. Moreover, the defect arises from the same cause, namely, that instead of starting from the present and working steadily backwards, the theorist insists on starting, as it were, from both ends at once. He has his idea, or prejudice, concerning the nature of primitive minds—an idea derived from sources quite outside his own study—and somehow or other he is determined to make his history of language coincide with that.
Consequently, just as, in considering metaphor, the fact the he found language growing more and more figurative with every step into the past, did not prevent him from postulating an earliest period in which there were no ‘figures’ at all; so, the fact that he finds words growing longer and longer and meanings more and more individualized with every step into the past does not prevent him from depicting speech as beginning from monosyllables with general meanings (‘roots’). Here it is necessary to point out that a meaning may be ‘perceptual’ (that is to say, the word’s whole reference may be to some sensible object or process) and at the same time ‘general’ or ‘abstract’. Anatole France’s antithesis is, in fact, erroneous. It is just those meanings which attempt to be most exclusively material (‘sensuel’), which are also the most generalized and abstract—i.e. remote from reality. Let us take the simple English word cut. Its reference is perfectly material; yet its meaning is at the same time more general and less particular, more abstract and less concrete, than some single word which should comprise in itself—let us say—all that we have to express to-day by the sentence: ‘I cut this flesh with joy in order to sacrifice’. If it is impossible to cut a pound of flesh without spilling blood, it is even more impossible ‘to cut’.1Now it is an indisputable fact that, the further we look back into the history of the meanings of common words, the more closely we find them approximating to this latter, concrete type. Thus, even as recently as the date of the composition of the Fourth Gospel (John, ch. 3, v and viii) we can hear in the Greek πνεῦμα an echo of just such an old, concrete, undivided meaning. This meaning (and therefore, in this case, practically the whole sense of the passage) is lost in the inevitably double English rendering of spirit (v) and wind (viii). There are any number of other examples. Here I shall be content to point to our seemingly arbitrary, and now purely verbal allotment of emotion to divers parts of the body, such as the liver, the bowels, the heart, where, in our own day, an old single meaning survives as two separate references of the same word—a physical and a psychic.1
According to Max Müller, it will be remembered, ‘spiritus’—which is of course the Latin equivalent of πνεῦμα, acquired its apparently double meaning, because, at a certain early age, when it still meant simply breath or wind, it was deliberately employed as a metaphor to express ‘the principle of life within man or animal’. All that can be replied to this is, that such an hypothesis is contrary to every indication presented by the study of the history of meaning; which assures us definitely that such a purely material content as ‘wind’, on the one hand, and on the other, such a purely abstract content as ‘the principle of life within man or animal’ are both late arrivals in human consciousness. Their abstractness and their simplicity are alike evidence of long ages of intellectual evolution. So far from the psychic meaning of‘spiritus’ having arisen because someone had the abstract idea, ‘principle of life …’ and wanted a word for it, the abstract idea ‘principle of life’ is itself a product of the old concrete meaning ‘spiritus’, which contained within itself the germs of both later significations. We must, therefore, imagine a time when ‘spiritus’ or πνεῦμα, or older words from which these had descended, meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply had their own old peculiar meaning, which has since, in the course of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified—and no doubt into others also, for which separate words had already been found by Greek and Roman times.
To sum up, if we assume, as it seems only reasonable to assume, that in the ages of speech preceding anything that can be touched by modern etymology the main stream of language, whose course is afterwards to become plainly visible to us, was already flowing in the same direction (i.e. from homogeneity towards dissociation and multiplicity) and not in an opposite one, what is the result? Both ‘root’ hypothesis and ‘metaphor’ hypothesis fall to the ground together. Müller’s so-called radical metaphor, instead of being primitive, is seen to be one of the latest achievements of conscious linguistic development. A better name for it would be synthetic metaphor; and a better example, say, gramophone. ‘Roots’, far from being the germs of speech, are the product of ages of intellectual abstraction carried on, first, instinctively by ordinary speakers, and afterwards deliberately by the grammarians and philologists. The service rendered by these latter both to speech and to thought is of the utmost importance; their error merely lay in supposing that life actually created language after the manner in which their logic reconstructed it. They mistook elements for seeds—and called them roots.
[2]
Used with due caution, the mental progress of the individual from infancy to maturity is likely to provide some evidence of the mental history of the race; for the peculiar relation between phylogenesis and ontogenesis, which is summed up in the word ‘recapitulation’, quite evidently applies, within broad limits, to mind as well as body. Consequently, a consideration of the development of ‘meaning’ in the life-history of the individual would be pertinent to the matter in hand. There is clearly no room here to go into such a question in detail, but one may refer to the American psychologist, J. Μ. Baldwin,1 who has pointed out how the adult observer constantly misreads his own logical processes into the child’s mind. He shows how a child’s apparent ‘generalizations’ are in reality single meanings, which it has not yet learnt to split up into two or more.2 ‘All psychic dualisms and distinctions’, he points out, ‘are meanings in the sense that they are differentiations from earlier and more simple [sic] apprehensions.’Finally, while it is a tiresome and stupid error to suppose that the childhood of races whose blood was afterwards to blossom into a Plato or a Shakespeare can be safely deduced from the present condition of peoples inhabiting Tasmania or the islands of the Pacific, nevertheless there are cases in which the one may conveniently be illustrated by the other. It is interesting, therefore, to find anthropologists telling us of the ‘holophrase’, or long, rambling conglomeration of sound and meaning, which" is found among primitive and otherwise almost wordless peoples. Moreover, we hear again and again of primitive languages in which there are words for ‘gum-tree’, ‘wattle-tree’, etc., but none for ‘tree’; and R. R. Marett, in his little book, Anthropology, remarks that in some crude tongues, although you can express twenty different kinds of cutting, you cannot say ‘cut’. One could take many other examples from the chapter on Language in this book, to illustrate the distinction drawn above between concrete meanings and abstract meanings, a distinction which I have endeavoured to discuss a little more fully in an Appendix (IV).
[3]
We are now in a position to survey once more the apparent contradiction remarked above (III, 4–5) between aesthetic and philological judgements. On the one hand, the poet and the critic find language growing more and more poetic as they trace it back into the past. On the other, the Locke-Müller-France way of thinking sees the beginnings of language in a series of monosyllabic ‘roots’ with simple, perceptual references. What is the solution of this paradox? Hitherto, as far as I am aware, the only one worthy of the name has been that which is fairly common as vague idea, but which is found explicitly in Max Müller—that of the ‘metaphorical period’, a wonderful age when a race of anonymous and mighty poets took hold of a bald inventory and saturated it with poetic values. It is important to recollect that, as we saw in III, 4, these values are not merely poetic in the sense of causing pleasure, but also in the true, creative sense, as causing wisdom.
Recognition of this last fact should keep us from a certain tangle of loose thinking into which many evidently slip, to whom the existence of poetry is not an actual fact of phenomenal experience, nor its presence one of their measures of reality. For it is not infrequently suggested that the mere fact of direct connection with sensuous experience is enough to render language poetical. Thus, we find Macaulay1 asserting that half-civilized nations are poetic simply because they perceive without abstracting, and absolutely regardless of what they perceive. And a similar view2 is taken by Jespersen, who is otherwise content to dismiss the whole question of poetic values with the somewhat superficial reflection that after all ‘we cannot all be poets’.3 Maybe; but that very circumstance might surely have prompted him to investigate a little more closely the consequences of his own conclusion that once upon a time we all were poets!
Of these two theories, I have endeavoured to show my reasons for regarding the first as absurd and untenable. The second is, of course, not a solution at all. It merely shifts the locus of the problem; for we are still left asking why this direct perception should in itself have value as cause of wisdom. Indeed, the superficiality of such a view is so palpable that we can only suppose it to be the outcome of a consciousness to which the expression ‘poetry as cause of wisdom’ corresponds with no concrete experience, but is rather a contradiction in terms. There is, however, a third solution, and I suggest that it is one to which we are necessarily led by all that has gone before. It is this: that these poetic, and apparently ‘metaphorical’ values were latent in meaning from the beginning. In other words, you may imply, if you choose, with Dr. Blair, that the earliest words in use were ‘the names of sensible, material objects’ and nothing more—only, in that case, you must suppose the ‘sensible objects’ themselves to have been something more; you must suppose that they were not, as they appear to be at present, isolated, or detached, from thinking and feeling.1 Afterwards, in the development of language and thought, these single meanings split up into contrasted pairs—the abstract and the concrete, particular and general, objective and subjective. And the poesy felt by us to reside in ancient language consists just in this, that, out of our later, analytic, ‘subjective’ consciousness, a consciousness which has been brought about along with, and partly because of, this splitting up of meaning, we are led back to experience the original unity.
Thus, the sunstruck or ‘meaningless’ man, into whose consciousness we endeavoured to enter in II, 5, is in no sense whatever (as Anatole France, for instance, assumed) an analagon of primitive man. To make him that, we should have to conceive of him—so far from being meaningless—as literally resounding with all manner of meaning, and moreover, with meaning such that, if he could but communicate it to us, we should be listening to poetry.
Then what is a true metaphor? In the same essay of Shelley’s, from which I have already quoted, he cites a fine passage from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning:‘Neither are these only similitudes, as men of narrow observation may conceive them to be, but the same footsteps of nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.’1
This is the answer. It is these ‘footsteps of nature’ whose noise we hear alike in primitive language and in the finest metaphors of poets. Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal. These relations exist independently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker. And according to whether the footsteps are echoed in primitive language or, later on, in the made metaphors of poets, we hear them after a different fashion and for different reasons. The language of primitive men reports them as direct perceptual experience. The speaker has observed a unity, and is not therefore himself conscious of relation. But we, in the development of consciousness, have lost the power to see this one as one. Our sophistication, like Odin’s, has cost us an eye; and now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception. Thus, the ‘before-unapprehended’ relationships of which Shelley spoke, are in a sense ‘forgotten’ relationships. For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen. And imagination can see them again.
In the whole development of consciousness, therefore, we can trace the operation of two opposing principles, or forces. Firstly, there is the force by which, as we saw, single meanings tend to split up into a number of separate and often isolated concepts. This is the τόλογίζειν1 of Shelley’s Essay. We can, if we choose, characterize it as non-poetic—even as anti-poetic, so long as we remember that for the appreciation of language as poetry, this principle is every whit as necessary as the other. The second principle is one which we find given us, to start with, as the nature of language itself at its birth. It is the principle of living unity. Considered subjectively, it observes the resemblances between things, whereas the first principle marks the differences,2 is interested in knowing what things are,whereas the first discerns what they are not. Accordingly, at a later stage in the evolution of consciousness, we find it operative in individual poets, enabling them (τὸ ποιεῖν)to intuit relationships which their fellows have forgotten—relationships which they must now express as metaphor. Reality, once self-evident, and therefore not conceptually experienced, but which can now only be reached by an effort of the individual mind—this is what is contained in a true poetic metaphor; and every metaphor is ‘true’1 only in so far as it contains such a reality, or hints at it. The world, like Dionysus, is tom to pieces by pure intellect; but the poet is Zeus; he has swallowed the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it as a living body.
It is really not at all surprising that philologists should have had such a vivid hallucination of metaphor bending over the cradle of meaning. For the distinction is a distinction of agent rather than of function, and the principle is indeed one. Nevertheless it is better to keep the definition of the label metaphor within bounds and thus to deny it to these early meanings, which appear in the world without individualized poetic effort. Figure and figurative, on the other hand—as long as we disentangle them carefully in our minds from the modern expression ‘figure of speech’, may justly be applied, owing to the perceptual or aesthetic, the pictorial, form in which these unitary meanings first manifest in consciousness. Not an empty ‘root meaning to shine’, but the same definite spiritual reality which was beheld on the one hand in what has since become pure human thinking; and on the other hand, in what has since become physical light; not an abstract conception, but the echoing footsteps of the goddess Natura—not a metaphor but a living Figure.
[4]
Perhaps nothing could be more damning to the ‘root’ conception of language than the ubiquitous phenomenon of the Myth. Now myth, at any rate for the Aryan peoples, is intimately bound up with the early history of meaning. It is the same with innumerable words; if one traces them back far enough, one reaches a period at which their meanings had a mythical content. To take such English words as panic, hero, fortune, fury, earth, North, South, is merely to lay hands on the most obvious examples. A glance at the Vedas will make much clearer the enormously wide scope of this historical phenomenon. Yet the ‘root’ theory of language and its affiliated conceptions either have nothing to say on this head, or they suggest the most sterile trivialities. The reason of this is fairly plain. Upon such a view the myths must be the product of that same mysterious ‘metaphorical period’ when the inventive ingenuity of humanity is said to have burgeoned and sprouted as never before or since. Thus Max Müller, who perceived very clearly the intimate bond connecting myth with metaphor and meaning, was actually obliged to characterize the myth as a kind of disease of language.1 Such a point of view is barely worth discussing, or rather, to the genuine critic, it is not worth discussing. For, for him, the poetic wisdom-values which he finds over and over again in myth would themselves be an immediate and sufficient answer. The word ‘disease’ is meaningless in such a connection.
On the other hand, the more widely accepted ‘naturalistic’ theory of myths is very little more satisfactory. For it is obliged to lean just as heavily on the same wonderful metaphorical period. The only difference is this, that for an extinct race of mighty poets it substitutes an extinct race of mighty philosophers. In either case, we must admit that the posthumous obscurity of these intellectual giants is ill-deserved, considering that the world owes to them (to take only one example) practically the entire contents of Lemprière’sClassical Dictionary. The remoter ancestors of Homer, we are given to understand, observing that it was darker in winter than in summer, immediately decided that there must be some ‘cause’ for this ‘phenomenon’, and had no difficulty in tossing off the ‘theory’ of, say, Demeter and Persephone, to account for it. A good name for this kind of banality—the fruit, as it is, of projecting post-logical thoughts back into a pre-logical age—would perhaps be ‘Logomorphism’. Whatever we call it, there is no denying that it is at present extraordinarily widespread, being indeed taken for granted in all the most reputable circles. Imagination, history, bare common sense—these, it seems, are as nothing beside the paramount necessity that the great Mumbo Jumbo, the patent, double-million magnifying Inductive Method, should be allowed to continue contemplating its own ideal reflection—a golden age in which every man was his own Newton, in a world dropping with apples. Only when poesy, who is herself alive, looks backward, does she see at a glance how much younger is the Tree of Knowledge than the Tree of Life.1[5]
For to the poetic understanding myth presents an altogether different face. These fables are like corpses which, fortunately for us, remain visible after their living content has departed out of them. In the Classical Dictionary, the student of poetic diction finds delicately mummified for his inspection any number of just those old single meanings, which the differentiating, analytic process already referred to has desiccated and dissected. Goethe gave symbolical expression to this striking fact at the end of Act III, Part II, of his Faust. Here, however, a single example must suffice. We find poet after poet expressing in metaphor and simile the analogy between death and sleep and winter, and again between birth and waking and summer, and these, once more, are constantly made the types of a spiritual experience—of the death in the individual soul of its accidental part and the putting on of incorruption. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground, and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’
Now by our definition of a ‘true metaphor’, there should be some older, undivided ‘meaning’ from which all these logically disconnected, but poetically connected ideas have sprung. And in the beautiful myth of Demeter and Persephone we find precisely such a meaning. In the myth of Demeter the ideas of waking and sleeping, of summer and winter, of life and death, of mortality and immortality are all lost in one pervasive meaning. This is why so many theories are brought forward to account for the myths. The naturalist is right when he connects the myth with the phenomena of nature, but wrong if he deduces it solely from these. The psycho-analyst is right when he connects the myth with ‘inner’ (as we now call them) experiences, but wrong if he deduces it solely from these. Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities. As such the poet strives, by his own efforts, to see them, and to make others see them, again.
In a work with the present title, one need have no hesitation in making such round assertions; for either they are true, or poetry itself is a dream and a disease. ‘It is easily seen’, wrote Emerson, referring especially to the kind of metaphor or analogy which relates the ‘inner’ experience to the ‘outer’:
‘that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life….
‘Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.’11 See also Appendix II.
1 In stomach we may very possibly have an example of the transition stage—the actual moment of division. For in the twentieth century the expression ‘I have no stomach to the business’ is still by no means purely psychic in its content. It describes a very real physical sensation, or rather one which cannot be classified as either physical or psychic. Yet, on the analogy of the other words mentioned above, it is reasonable to suppose that, when a sufficient number of years has elapsed, the meaning of this word also may have been split by the evolution of our consciousness into two; and the physico-psychic experience in question will have become as incomprehensible to our posterity, as it is incomprehensible to most of us today that anyone should literally feel his ‘bowels moved’ by compassion.
1 See Appendix IV.
2 For example, while every man is papa, this does not mean that the child uses the word papa to express a general idea, ‘man’. He has no such general idea. He has one single meaning, ‘papa’, but it is a meaning which contains within itself the capacity to split up, or unfold or evolve into two separate ideas, ‘Father’ and ‘man’, of which one is more particular, and the other more general than the original ‘portmanteau’ meaning.
1Essay on Milton, p. 3. ‘Nations, like individuals, first perceive and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical’. It is clear that Macaulay is here using the word ‘perceive’ in the ordinary, wider sense—the sense in which I use ‘observe’ (sec II, 5, note).
2Progress in Language, § 273.
3Ibid., § 79.
1 See also Appendix IV.
1Advancement of Learning, II v. 3.
1A Defence of Poetry, p. I. I keep his term, though Liddell and Scott give λογίζεσθαι only.
2 Cf. Bacon; Novum Organum, i. 55.
Maximum et velutradicalediscrimeningeniorum, quoadphilosophiam et scientias, illudest: quod alia ingeniasintfortiora et aptioraadnotandas rerum differentias: alia, ad notandas rerum similitudines. Ingeniaenim constantia et acutafigerecontemplationes, et morari, et haerere in omnesubtilitatedifferentiarumpossunt; ingeniaautemsublimia et discursivaetiamtenuissimas et catholicas rerum similitudines et agnoscunt at componunt: utrumqueautemingenium facile labitur in excessum, prensandoautgradus rerum, autumbras.
1 See also Appendix III.
1The Science of Language, II, 454 ff.•
1 See also Appendix IV.
1 Emerson; Nature, Ch. IV on ‘Language’.
**
[1]
It may very well be objected that certain words, as abstract, concrete, subjective, etc., have been used in this book, either in a question-begging manner, or at least without a sufficiently clear indication of what is meant by them. Therefore, while I believe that their significance ought to have emerged gradually from the text itself—provided that it be allowed to stand as a whole—I should like, in the remaining Appendices, to try and state in a somewhat more condensed manner what I intended to convey by these ambiguous symbols.
In explanation of the form of this particular Appendix (II), I might perhaps add that, in the case of abstract and concrete, it seemed to me that the best way to set their meaning in a clear light was to try and relate what I have said here on the nature of consciousness with some well-known intellectual system. With this end, I took Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and endeavoured to locate their precise point of departure from my own premises and conclusions. I chose Locke, partly because he paid such particular attention to language, partly because he is English, and partly because it seems to me that historically the Essay does really mark a very important initial step in the development of those intellectual premises (they are premises now) which make it so difficult for Western thought to grasp the true nature of inspiration. So far I have only hinted at these premises under cover of such words as abstraction (as used in the loose sense) or ‘logomorphism’.
Kant, on the other hand, I selected because, with all his contempt of Locke, it seems to me that the Critique of Pure Reason was one of the most effective intellectual factors in finally clenching these premises upon the minds of almost the whole Western world. It is not merely a matter of acknowledged supremacy, though he is indeed revered by many as the Aristotle of post-Christian thought; I follow Steiner (to whose Philosophie der Freiheit1 and Wahrheit und Wissenschaft1 I am here very much indebted) in detecting an unacknowledged influence far wider still. How many children, I wonder, are nowadays informed at an early age by some elder brother or some guide, philosopher, and friend, that what they see and hear and smell is not ‘nature’ but the activity of their own nerves? And though this is not Kant’s doctrine, it is a crude physiological reflection of it. Thus, it does not require a very active fancy to see the Königsberg ghost hovering above, and intertwining itself with the ideas of minds that never even knew Kant’s name; and this indirect influence may be just as strong over others which are also directly acquainted with his books—and perhaps even despise them. In Croce’s honest words, Kantian doctrine is ‘(so to say) immanent in all modern thought’.
[2]
The word abstract, as applied to thoughts or to the meanings of words, should not be very hard to define; for there is nothing abhorrent in it from the nature of definition itself. Indeed, it is fairly correct to say that the meaning of a word is abstract, just in so far as it is definable. The definition of a word, which we find in a Dictionary—inasmuch as it is not conveyed by synonym and metaphor, or illustrated by quotation—is its most abstract meaning. And if, when using the word in thought or speech, we are prepared, as Pascal suggested in his Esprit Géométrique, to substitute for the word itself its definition, ‘denuding it of all additional meaning’, then we are thinking or speaking abstractly. Thus, in thinking of gold, if we can at any point in our thought substitute ‘a precious, yellow, non-rusting, malleable, ductile metal of high specific gravity’, then our thought of gold is relatively abstract. A purely abstract term—which, with the possible exception of numbers,1 can nowhere exist—is a mark representing, not a thing or being, but the fact that identical sensations have been experienced on two or more occasions. It is in fact a classification of sense-perceptions. Purely abstract thinking, carried to its logical conclusions, is thus—counting;1 as was realized by Hobbes, who described all thinking as addition and subtraction, and by Leibnitz who, regarding perception itself as a kind of imperfect thought, described it as ‘unconscious numeration’.
Now the meaning of nearly every word, as was pointed out in III, 2, can apparently be interpreted, on an etymological analysis, in terms of pure sense-perceptions. Let us say, then, that every word, in so far as it is interpreted to ‘mean’ the percept itself, is material; in so far as it is interpreted to mean the fact of the repetition of percepts, is abstract; in so far as it is interpreted to mean the percepts plus the real but imperceptible link between them, is concrete. It could be shown without much difficulty that the first interpretation is simply the fruit of confused thinking, while the second is possible, but is equivalent to numeration.
Where the denotation of the word seems at first sight to be wholly remote from the physical world, as in the case of virtue, we shall still find that, in so far as we consider it to be susceptible of scientific ‘definition’—in so far, that is, as its meaning is abstract to us—it is ultimately reducible to terms of sensation plus numeration. Thus, even if we call virtue an ‘impulse’ to perform certain actions, we are left with the obligation to define impulse; nor will it be long before we are talking about ‘pushing’. But what can a push be but a ‘force’, i.e. a something, an x, an abstraction definable only by its observed numerical effects? And even if we give up this attempt at pure definition (= pure abstraction) and, taking just a little help from metaphor, affirm the existence of a ‘moral world’ imperceptible to the senses, we are still quite incapable of defining virtue, except by its observed effects. A far bolder activity of the imagination is necessary before the concept ‘virtue’, in its radiant and practical reality, can be lit up in one mind by suggestion from another. And the same is true of gold.
An excellent example of language at an advanced stage of abstraction is the English language, as Locke sought to interpet it. His definitions of words are perfect models of abstract thought, and he proceeded to attribute this defining activity of his own to primitive man, as the process by which language actually came into being.
‘One of Adam’s children [he wrote], roving in the mountains, lights on a glittering substance which pleases his eye. Home he carries it to Adam, who, upon consideration of it, finds it to be hard, to have a bright yellow colour, and an exceeding great weight. There, perhaps, at first, are all the qualities he takes notice of in it; and abstracting this complex idea, consisting of a substance having that peculiar bright yellowness, and a weight very great in proportion to its bulk, he gives the name zahab, to denominate and mark all substances that have these sensible qualities in them.’1
This is the kind of thing I mean by ‘logomorphism’ as an historical delusion. It can also, as will be seen later, be a psychological delusion.
[3]
Just as a concrete definition is an impossibility, so it is much harder to give even an approximate definition of the word concrete itself—not, of course, of the simple, physical meaning commonly attached to it in Logic primers, but in the sense in which it has been used in this book. It is difficult, because one is brought face to face, on the very threshold, with the whole mystery of creation—and even incarnation; with the mystery, in fact, of Meaning itself and of the qualitative reality which definition automatically excludes. If I were to bring the reader into my presence and point to an actual lump of gold, without even opening my mouth and uttering the wordgold—then, this much at least could be said, that he would have had from me nothing that was not concrete. But that does not take us very far. For it does not follow that he would possess anything but the most paltry and inchoate knowledge of the whole reality—‘gold’. The depth of such knowledge would depend entirely on how many he might by his own activity have intuited of the innumerable concepts, which are as much a part of the reality as the percepts or sense-data,1 and some of which he must already have made his own before he could even observe what I am pointing to as an ‘object’ at all (cf. II, 5). Other concepts—already partially abstracted when I name them—such as the gleaming, the hardness to the touch, the resemblance to the light of the sun, its part in human history, as well as those contained in the dictionary definition—all these may well comprise a little, but still only a very little, more of the whole meaning.
Both in the text and here, therefore, it has not been possible to do much more than hint at the nature of concrete meaning and the knowledge of it. Nor am I unaware of the unsatisfactory nature of the particular hint which I attempted to give in IV, I, of some conceivably more concrete inflexion of the verb ‘to cut’. For apart from the word ‘I’, the phrase ‘I cut this flesh with joy’ represents, as it stands, merely an addition to the abstract ‘cut’ of other more or less abstract ideas. It must, however, be remembered that it is just a part of the point at issue that reality is not susceptible of direct expression in modem language. Thus, the meaning of the whole passage is accessible only to the active imagination of the reader himself, if he has good will enough to try and reconstruct for himself, on the basis of what is given, the consciousness of the hypothetical individual who heard or uttered the hypothetical word.
[4]
Following from the above, we shall find it particularly important to realize that the operation in the poet of the unitary principle which I characterized as ‘poetic’ by no means coincides with the ‘synthesis’ of modern philosophy and psychology. The latter word is generally used, whether deliberately or no, in the sense of a synthesis of ideas already abstract. The former, on the other hand, is always a direct conceptual linking of percept to percept, or image to image, from the bottom of the scale upwards (II, 5), and is therefore justly labelled aesthetic. Though pictorial images in the memory may be substituted for the actual sense-data, it is a peculiar mark of this poetic cognition (inspiration) that it commonly has a counter-effect (recognition) on the very observation through which it has been generated in the first instance. This is much less likely to be the case with opinions or judgements that owe their origin in part to ‘synthesis’ in the sense in which that word is commonly used. Thus, my experience in observation of apple-blossom is not much affected by my judgement that the tree before me is of the genus pyrus malus, which is of the order Rosaceae. All this judgement can do for me is to direct me to look out for a possible real resemblance between apple-blossom, pear-blossom, and roses, which, as it is intuited in actual observation, becomes poetic knowledge (inspiration), and will then react, as wisdom, on my further experience in observation (recognition), so that I shall truly see or ‘read’ the flowers with different eyes.1
Now this judgement, even in its present logistic form, could never have been produced by analysis only. Thus, synthesis, as well as analysis, is not a poetic, but a discursive function, operating within the sphere of the rational principle. And, for example, Locke’s distinction between Wit and Judgement, which might appear at first to be a representation of the two principles traced in this book, is in reality very different.2 Locke, who started out with ‘simple ideas’, never discriminated between percept and idea; he did not sec that the idea must already contain a conceptual element. Hence his synthetic faculty of Wit is synthetic only in the discursive or logistic sense of divining the general in the particular. It conducts a synthesis of ideas. Now this is precisely what I understand by the word definition. The whole philosophy of Locke might indeed be described as a Philosophy of Definition; hence, no doubt, the amount of space which he devoted to language.
All this is ‘synthesis’ in exactly the sense in which Aristotle uses the word in the De Anima,1 distinguishing it from knowledge proper and pointing out that it is the beginning of error. It is the beginning of error because it is only the ‘putting together’ of subjective ‘ideas’. And this putting together can only come after, and by means of, a certain discrimination of actual phenomena—a seeing of them as separate sensible objects—without which the ideas themselves (general notions) could never have existed. The poetic principle, on the contrary, was already operative before such discrimination took place, and, when it continues to operate afterwards in inspiration, it operates in spite of that discrimination and seeks to undo its work. The poetic conducts an immediate conceptual synthesis of percepts. Brought into contact with these by its partial attachment to some individual human brain and body, it meets—through the senses—the disjecta membra of a real world, and weaves them again into the one real whole; whence it was called—not perhaps very happily—by Coleridge esemplastic (εἰϛἓν πλάττειν).
[5]
The same—to take one more example—may be said of Kant’s two principles—the Faculty of Distinction and the Faculty of Wit.1 Both, as he describes them, are discursive. It is true that he postulates an aesthetic ‘synthesis’ or ‘conjunction’ as necessarily preceding that analytical function of the understanding which makes abstraction possible. But this he calls ‘the mere operation of the imagination—a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom even conscious….’ This is, of course, the ‘primary’ imagination with which Coleridge was so much concerned; but the time of psychology was not yet, and Kant was not interested in it. ‘The first thing [he continues] which must be given us in order to the a priori cognition of all objects, is the diversity of the pure intuition; the synthesis of this diversity by means of the imagination is the second; but this gives, as yet, no cognition.’2Thus, it is really our necessary unconsciousness of self during the actual moment at which this true, aesthetic synthesis, or act of primary imagination, takes place which makes Kant deny to it the name of ‘cognition’. He goes on to point out that ‘the conceptions which give unity to this pure synthesis, and which consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetical unity, furnish the third requisite for the cognition of an object, and these conceptions are given by the understanding’.2
What are these conceptions, ‘which consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetical unity’?
Now Kant, in his theory of knowledge, implicitly accepts, as given, the subjectivity of the individual.1 And it is just this fallacy2 which is at the bottom of what I have called ‘Logomorphism’. Kant’s thought is thus extremely ‘logomorphic’, though in a slightly different sense from that in which I first used the word. For he is logomorphic, not historically, but psychologically. He starts his theory of knowledge, not from thinking, but from Kant thinks. This Kant thinks—the ‘synthetical unity of apperception’—is to him ‘the highest point with which we must connect every operation of the understanding, even the whole of logic and after it our transcendental philosophy: indeed, this faculty is the understanding itself’.
He thus identifies thinking with Kant thinks and Kant thinks with the understanding—which is ‘the faculty of judging’. In other words, thinking = judging: ‘The same function which gives unity to the different representations in a judgement, gives also unity to the mere synthesis of representations in an intuition.’3
The result is the same as that which arose in Locke’s case through the confusion of percept with idea. All cognition is conceived of as being logical in form: and is of the definable only. Kant’s answer to the question asked at the end of the last paragraph is, therefore: ‘the Categories’. Consequently the ‘unity’ to which he refers is really the unity produced out of a logistic process of comparison, that is to say, it is a unity based on the synthesis and analysis of ideas—which do indeed posit a remembering, comparing, judging subject.1 In other words, it is the unity of the general notion, the ‘nominal essence’ of Locke, the ‘abstract universal’ of V, I; and it has really very little to do with the concrete unity of any complex of percepts which we may have learnt actually to recognize as an ‘object’. The only relation it can have to this real unity is the relation of a shadow to a body, whose outer shape the shadow will resemble more or less according to circumstances.2
[6]
In his Essence of Aesthetic (p. 26) Croce shows that it is because he accepts Kant’s theory of cognition that he is obliged to divorce art from knowledge altogether. Criticizing the doctrine of an ‘esemplastic’ imagination, he remarks that ‘in any case, the concept or idea always unites the intelligible to the sensible, and not only in art, for the new concept of the concept, first stated by Kant and (so to say) immanent in all modern thought, heals the breach between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, conceives the concept as judgement, and the judgement as synthesis a priori, and the synthesis a priori as the word becoming flesh, as history. Thus that definition of art leads imagination back to logic and art to philosophy, contrary to intention.’
Croce thus follows Kant in just this all-important point of identifying thinking with judging. Therefore he dislikes the notion that imagination is ‘esemplastic’, is related in any way to thinking and knowing.
For we see from the first few words quoted that, just as Locke identified percept with idea, so the Kantian identifies idea with concept. Whereas the idea is, in truth—as Steiner has so well pointed out—a result which the concept brings about in uniting itself to the percept. It stands between percept and concept, and is the beginning of subjectivity. If the idea is thought, the concept is thinking.
I pause here for emphasis. The distinction is absolutely crucial. If thinking is really identical with judging, instead of merely including it—then Croce’s aesthetic may be quite sound—but I must be talking nonsense.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that ‘Realism’, in the sense of an hypostatization of such ideas, must be merely one step further into the realm of unreality. For it is a step into the realm of shadows of shadows. Such hypostatization is today commonly attributed to, e.g., Plato, and that not only by amateurs in philosophy, but even by those who have made it their principal task to interpret him to others, and who, following Kant, regard it as a matter of course that they know what the author of Timaeusmeant better than he did himself. Thus, it may be remarked, in conclusion, that logomorphism is always to be suspected in the writing of modern commentators, etc., upon ancient philosophy or literature. It is precisely when such a writer starts complaining that his author uses the same word in two different senses that the discerning reader will prick up the ears of his imagination in the hope of acquiring some real knowledge. ‘Equivocation’, or ‘amphibology’, as they sometimes call it, should never be imputed, until we have thoroughly satisfied ourselves that the two ideas, which the author in question is accused of confusing, had a separate existence in his time comparable to that which they have in our own. So ubiquitous is the Königsberg ghost that it is, in my opinion, wise to assume every modern writer on every subject to be guilty of logo-morphism, until he has actually produced some evidence of his innocence.
1 Translated into English, and published in one volume under the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
1 The Arabic system of numeration, of which practically the entire meaning resides in the order in which the figures are arranged, furnishes an interesting commentary on the parallel progress of language towards increased fixity of word-order and abstraction of content. V, 3, etc.
1Essay on the Human Understanding, III, vi, 46.
1 Really very much so, since the perceptual part of his experience is conditioned by his own physical organization, his position in space in relation to the object, etc., etc. Thus, in so far as it is perceptual only, his experience, though always concrete, is subjectively determined: and his knowledge of the reality will vary directly as the extent to which he can disentangle these determinations from it, by knowing them too.
1 It is not denied that this judgement itself may have been mediated originally by the poetic principle operating in language and in the minds of botanists and others. The question to be considered is degree of remoteness from the concrete unity. Were plants classified solely—as they have been classified by Linnaeus—by the number of their stamens, my judgements derived from the study of botany would probably be altogether useless except for the purpose of logical classification. That is to say, they would be useless, not only aesthetically, but in a most practical way, in that I should not have, c.g., the faintest idea how to produce certain plants from certain soils—just as we have already lost most of our knowledge of the healing properties of herbs.
2Essay on the Human Understanding, II, xi, 2.
1 Bk. III, ch. 6. It is remarkable that the Greeks seem to have had an instinctive horror of the very logic which it was obviously their mission to develop: for Æschylus uses συνθετοὶλόγοι in the sense of mere ‘fiction’, which are, he says, ‘of all things most hateful to the gods’.
1Critique of Pure Reason. Meiklejohn, p. 401.
2Ibid., pp. 62–63.
1 It is, however, exceedingly difficult to follow his argument through the tangle of unstable terminology, and at least one passage, wherein he speaks of ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ and ‘objective unity of self-consciousness’, seems to admit of an interpretation quite contrary to the main thread of the Critique.
2 See Appendix IV.
3 It must be remembered that Kant uses intuition in a different sense from that in which it is used in this book. For him it corresponds more with percept than with intuition, as I use the word.
1 ‘All general conceptions—as such—depend for their existence on the analytical unity of consciousness.’ (Ibid., p. 82, note.)
2 There is a curious, somewhat equivocal, passage in the Critique, in which Kant himself seems to suggest that the one kind of unity at any rate ‘presupposes’ the other:
‘If the diversity existing in phenomena—a diversity not of form (for in this they may be similar) but of content—were so great that the subtlest human reason could never by comparison discover in them the least similarity (which is not impossible), in this case the logical law of genera would be without foundation, the conception of genus, nay all general conceptions would be impossible, and the faculty of the understanding, the exercise of which is restricted to the world of conceptions, could not exist. The logical principle of genera, accordingly, if it is to be applied to nature (by which I mean objects presented to our senses), presupposes a transcendental principle. In accordance with this principle, homogeneity is necessarily presupposed in the variety of phenomena (although we are unable to determine a priori the degree of this homogeneity), because without it no empirical conceptions, and consequently no experience, would be possible.’ (Ibid., p. 401).
From: Poetic Diction
A Study in Meaning
Owen Barfield
