Paradigms for a metaphorology.pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

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Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmatics of Knowledge 29 of man’s common sense.” 53 Are we dealing here, to stick to the metaphor, with a revision of the original verdict, intended to bring another, purer truth to light, or with a pardon, which can ignore the question of truth with recourse to higher motives? To the torture chamber belong the instruments: “In reality, microscopes and telescopes confuse pure human feeling.” 54 But Goethe is not like those philosophers at the university in Padua who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope because their speculations had already taught them all they needed to know; Goethe shuns tools in order that the phenomenon itself may “appear in its entire simplicity, say where it comes from, and point to its conclusion.” 55 Hypotheses and theories get in the way of the self-disclosure of the phenomena; in these operations, the intellect busies itself with its own constructs rather than opening itself to the given: “Theories are usually the rushed conclusions of an impatient mind, which would gladly be done with the phenomena and therefore inserts images, concepts, and often only words in their place.” 56 The Goethean pragmatics of knowledge is determined by the belief that man does not force his way into nature as an intruder but always already enjoys the richest communion with truth from the midst of nature and by virtue of its favor. Mastery and subjugation, cunning and mechanics, infringe upon an almost theological sovereignty: “Nature reserved so much freedom for itself that we generally can neither get the better of it with knowledge and science nor drive it into a corner.” 57 The intervention of technology leads to the point “where the instrument, instead of unfolding the mystery of nature, turns it into an insoluble riddle.” 58 The truth is powerful; only to those who act as if they did not concede it any power does it show this power as resistance. Scarcely no other thinker has thought through and grounded his existence in so universally teleological a fashion. Three hundred years after Copernicus, two hundred years after Galileo, and a century after Newton, the attempt to live a cosmocentric existence was dared once again: “When man’s nature functions soundly as a whole, when he feels that the world of which he is part is a huge, beautiful, admirable and worthy whole, when this harmony gives him pure and uninhibited delight, then the universe, if it were 53. Die Phänomene müssen ein für allemal aus der düstern empirisch-mechanisch-dogmatischen Marterkammer vor die Jury des gemeinen Menschenverstanden gebracht werden. Maximen und Reflexionen, Aus den Heften zur Naturwissenschaft, 430 (Gedenkausgabe, ed. E. Beutler, IX, 551). [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 309.] 54. Mikroskope und Fernrohre verwirren eigentlich den reinen Menschensinn. Maximen und Reflexionen, Aus Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahren, 502 (IX, 564). 55. in seiner ganzen Einfalt erscheinen, sein Herkunft aussprechen und auf die Folgerung hindeuten. Farbenlehre, in Vollst. Ausg. d. theoretischen Schriften (Tübingen 1953), 574. 56. Theorien sind gewöhnlich Übereilungen eines ungeduldigen Verstandes, der die Phänomene gern los sein möchte und an ihrer Stelle deswegen Bilder, Begriffe, ja oft nur Worte einschiebt. Aus den Heften zur Naturwissenschaft, 428 (IX, 551). 57. Die Natur hat sich soviel Freiheit vorbehalten, daß wir mit Wissen und Wissenschaft ihr nicht durchgängig beikommen oder sie in die Enge treiben können. Aus den Heften zur Naturwissenschaft, 439 (IX, 553). 58. wo das Instrument, statt das Geheimnis der Natur zu entwickeln, sie zum unauflöslichen Rätsel macht. Farbenlehre, 576.
30 Paradigms for a Metaphorology capable of emotion, would rejoice at having reached its goal and admire the crowning glory of its own being and becoming. For, what purpose would those countless suns and planets and moons serve, those stars and milky ways, comets and nebulae, those created and evolving worlds, if a happy human being did not ultimately emerge to enjoy existence?” 59 59. Wenn die gesunde Natur des Menschen als ein Ganzes wirkt, wenn er sich in der Welt als in einem großen, schönen, würdigen und werten Ganzen fühlt, wenn das harmonische Behagen ihm ein reines freies Entzücken gewährt, dann würde das Weltall, wenn es sich selbst empfinden könnte, als an sein Ziel gelangt aufjauchzen und den Gipfel des eigenen Werdens und Wesens bewundern. Denn wozu dient alle der Aufwand von Sonnen und Planeten und Monden, von Sternen und Milchstraßen, von Kometen und Nebelflecken, von gewordenen und werdenden Welten, wenn sich nicht zuletzt ein glücklicher Mensch unbewußt seines Daseins erfreut? Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert XIII, 417. [“Winckelmann and His Age,” trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest von Nardroff, in Goethe, Essays in Art and Literature (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986), 101; translation modified.] With regard to the trait that we have been explicating here, Goethe has often been compared to Montaigne. Closer inspection would be able to reveal the differences between their respective historical positions, particularly as far as the coloring of their related metaphors is concerned. What, in Montaigne, amounts to the repudiation of an interpretation of existence that he sees gaining ground around him, is for Goethe at bottom a resigned resistance to what already faces him as a ‘system’ in Newton. What Goethe sees represented in the levers and screws of scientific and technical equipment still assumes, in Montaigne, the form of the old metaphor of life as the conquest of a mountain. Montaigne opposes this metaphor: Le monde . . . ne pense rien utile qui ne soit penible: la facilité luy est suspecte (III 13) [The world . . . thinks that nothing does you good unless it hurts; pleasantness is suspect; Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 1233].
Page 2 and 3: Paradigms for a Metaphorology
Page 4 and 5: Paradigms for a Metaphorology Hans
Page 6: Contents A Note on the Translation
Page 10 and 11: Introduction Let us try for a momen
Page 12 and 13: Introduction 3 speech had been one
Page 14 and 15: Introduction 5 causality.” Immedi
Page 16 and 17: Metaphorics of the ‘Mighty’ Tru
Page 22 and 23: II Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmat
Page 24 and 25: Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmatics
Page 40 and 41: III A Terminological and Metaphorol
Page 42 and 43: A Terminological and Metaphorologic
Page 50 and 51: Metaphorics of the ‘Naked’ Trut
Page 62 and 63: Terra Incognita and ‘Incomplete U
Page 72 and 73: Organic and Mechanical Background M
Page 86 and 87: VII Myth and Metaphorics If we atte
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Myth and Metaphorics 79 ignore the
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VIII Terminologization of a Metapho
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Terminologization of a Metaphor 83
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IX Metaphorized Cosmology The impre
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Metaphorized Cosmology 101 the diss
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Metaphorized Cosmology 103 not only
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Metaphorized Cosmology 105 again in
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Metaphorized Cosmology 107 pernicus
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Metaphorized Cosmology 109 on the o
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Metaphorized Cosmology 111 Galileo
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Metaphorized Cosmology 113 propriat
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X Geometric Symbolism and Metaphori
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Geometric Symbolism and Metaphorics
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Translator’s Afterword Metaphorol
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Translator’s Afterword 135 There
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Translator’s Afterword 137 Rothac
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Translator’s Afterword 139 its in
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Translator’s Afterword 141 in whi
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Translator’s Afterword 143 addres
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Translator’s Afterword 145 art of
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Alberti, 67 Albertus Magnus, 6 Alex
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Nicolaus of Oresme, 72 Nietzsche, 1
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152 Subject Index geometry, 20, 90,
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