The Orphic Voice, page 4
After Comte on the one side and Schelling on the other, what happens looks like an uneasy relapse into the original Baconian ambiguity, but in fact it is not. The middle position of such a scholar as Cassirer when looked at closely proves not to be a middle position at all. The claims of logic are too strong now for a thinker to be able to affirm and deny myth at one and the same time. The result is, as can be seen more and more clearly as time goes on, an acceptance of myth as subject matter and a rejection of it as method of thinking. It is an attempt to investigate myth by means of science. It can be seen in Strauss and Renan, in the conscious superiority of tone so noticeable in The Golden Bough, in Max Müller’s concept of myth as a disease of language, in Cassirer’s divided loyalties.
It is seen most clearly of all in Lévy-Bruhl. In his classic Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910) he gives the name “prelogical” to the form of primitive thinking which operates by means of myth, and then begins to wrestle with his own term, saying that prelogical must not be taken to imply necessarily either “earlier in time” or “less in usefulness.” “It is not antilogical,” he says, “neither is it alogical. In calling it prelogical I mean only that it does not have as its main aim, as our thought has, to abstain from contradiction.” But the writer cannot himself abstain from contradiction, and that is what makes him so interesting and valuable, for he sees clearly that one cannot declare for science, in these terms alone, without disastrous consequences. He himself suffers from this split right up to the last paragraph of the book, which speaks of unresolved combat in the mind between these two forms of thinking, “rational” and “irrational.” A little earlier he gives a warning, so clear and important I give it in full. He is talking about logical activity and the fixed concepts necessary for this kind of thought:
But if progress is not to come to a standstill, concepts of beings and objects must remain plastic, must be modified, enlarged, limited, transformed, must separate and unite continually in the light of experience. If they become rigid and turn into a system which claims to be self-sufficient, the mind engaged in such a system will go on working inside it for ever and ever, cut off from any contact with reality which these very concepts are supposed to represent. They become the object of a hollow and useless dialectic and the source of a deathly infatuation.12
L’objet d’une dialectique creuse et vaine, et l’origine d’une infatuation mortelle—it is a noble phrase, and we are still trying to do what it warns us against. More of the same. For though Lévy-Bruhl delivered the warning, he could not act upon it, because he felt, as Cassirer did later, that only the scientific way of thinking could be trusted as a method of scholarly research.
This forces the mind to consider science and scientific thinking as an intellectual activity of a specialized kind, logical above all things, upon which intrude from time to time those flashes of inspiration or unreason which are responsible for discoveries. For everyone knows that discoveries are not made scientifically, in this sense, at all. They are “a seizing upon some happy idea,” “some sort of inspiration,” “bridging a logical gap.”13 This aspect of scientific thinking was first discussed by the mathematician Henri Poincare, and has since under the name of heuristics become a separate subject of study. No scientist could uphold the view that logic and logic alone is necessary for scientific thought; the consistent preferring of the logical over the nonlogical, which would presumably have been Comte’s theoretical ideal, would be completely sterilizing even if it were humanly possible. Even from a less rigorous standpoint, however, if the underlying assumption is that the human mind, individual or collective, moves from prelogical to logical and from mythical to scientific, the intrusion of nonlogical activity at crucial points must remain a slight embarrassment. Discovery, which is avowedly the most exciting and valuable thing in science and is in fact what science is about, must always appear an irrelevance, no matter how helpful, in terms of the prevailing system.
This is an uncomfortable situation. It springs directly from the antitheses we have already seen, and these now can be traced back one step further to two final and more fundamental ones which concern not the instruments of thought, as those earlier ones did, but the nature of the thinker.
Modern thought supposes that human beings are capable of two sorts of thinking, the logical and the imaginative. We are endowed with the faculties of intellect and of imagination—allied, since both are mental, but distinct in their methods and fields of operation. The intellect is the “mind,” properly so-called, and its essential function is abstract and logical thought. The imagination is more closely knit with the body (witness its habit, in myth, of expressing all concepts in terms of bodies, of embodying its ideas, in fact, and the close connection of myth with rite or bodily action),14 and it operates in the more primitive forms of dreams, myth, ritual, and art.
Science and poetry, mathematics and words, intellect and imagination, mind and body: they are old, they are tidy, they are mistaken. If we can dispose of these recurring antitheses which the last 400 years have, with the best of intentions, bequeathed us, we can turn to bequests made on our behalf by other ancestors, for they are there and ready to help. We have given ourselves credit, as human beings, for rather more and rather less than we possess. The human organism, that body which has the gift of thought, does not have the choice of two kinds of thinking. It has only one, in which the organism as a whole is engaged all along the line. There has been no progression in history from one type of thought to another. We are merely learning to use what we have been given, which is all of a piece. This means too that we have to admit and affirm our solidarity with the thinking of the child and the savage. All thinking is of the same kind, and it is this we have to try to understand and to exercise.
If, as we have seen, science cannot absorb myth, we can try the other way around, taking myth as a nearer model of the activity we want to explore and letting it interpret science as no less imaginative, corporeal, figuring, than itself. Discovery, in science and poetry, is a mythological situation15 in which the mind unites with a figure of its own devising as a means toward understanding the world. That figure always takes the form of some kind of language, and that is why we have to go more deeply into language instead of trying to escape from it. Discovery is always under Orpheus’ patronage, so to speak; something that the good poets have always known.
3
Lucian . . . is of the opinion that Orpheus had already prescribed that anybody introduced to the wisdom of the mysteries should be received with dancing
OUR PROGRESS so far may seem no more than a presumptuous rejection of almost everything the present state of learning has to offer, and a preaching of a return to primitive practices. Let us try to put our course in a more positive light. We are to get rid only of that which has shown itself incapable of development, and then to go back over what we possess, looking at it afresh in the belief—for this much of an act of faith is required—that language with its workings and workers is to be trusted. Far from a general course of debunking, we shall find ourselves launched on a reaffirmation of old wisdoms, a kind of passionate conservatism (which may in its turn prove to be one of the characteristics of mythical thinking), letting these antiquities which have in them yet the seeds of newness guide and help us. The Orpheus myth is one of these, and there will be others.
Here a question arises, and it had better be dealt with first. Are we, in doing this, going to imagine into these old methods and writers all sorts of potentialities which were never there? As, for instance, a critic may find himself being blamed for reading more into a poet’s work than the poet can reasonably be supposed to have put into it? The answer probably is “yes,” and such a procedure is entirely justified, if we are to make any progress at all. It is of the nature of mind and language, together, that they form an instrument capable of an indefinite number of developments. It matters very little whether the particular devisers or users of the instrument saw, at the point in time when they flourished, its full implications. Any good poem surpasses its writer’s powers of exegesis, and Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge (1958) has shown that this is also true of scientific hypotheses, and indeed of language in general. We always say more than we know. This is one of the reasons for language’s apparent imprecision. It is no reason for refusing language our confidence.
The aim will then be to draw out certain implications in earlier forms of thinking, using the Orpheus line as a clue. What can be accurately and elegantly used for a particular purpose (that is putting our standards high, but such things have to be striven for at least) may be considered as appropriate to that purpose, whether its designers and earlier users recognized this possible use of it or not. We shall be free, therefore, to draw out from half-forgotten or ill-interpreted authors and from forms of thought fallen into disuse whatever they can offer us, not worrying (beyond the straightforward claims of integrity and logic in these matters) whether we are falsifying them in the process. Tradition is not a handing down of dead fixities, but an invitation to further development:16 Make of it what you can. No further apologies then will be made on this score.
This does not apply solely to writings or poems or to forms of thinking. It applies, very particularly and in the first place, to language itself, as the most misunderstood and underestimated instrument of them all, with almost unlimited possibilities still before it.
The nature of language has been much studied. So has its history. We are after something else: not nature or history but something nearer what we mean by natural history, a dynamic inquiry into process, a natural history of mind and language. Language is to be conceived of not as an entity but as an activity; not in itself, for one must always avoid the metaphor of saying that language is alive, but in conjunction with a mind, with numbers and series of minds in time. Language utterances become events in this kind of thinking. Every poem and recounted myth and scientific hypothesis and theological statement and theory of politics or history and every philosophy become records of happenings at particular times, all of which, if they have any life in them at all, have the capacity to be taken further, in varying degrees, by other minds present and to come. This means giving up the right to abstract language into timeless pattern, and making the effort to grasp it not as a fixed phenomenon but as a moving event, language plus mind, subject to time and process and change—to try to think in biological terms, perhaps.17
We will start with words. Words (or groups of words bearing a unit of sense for the mind—there is no need to be pedantic here) can be thought of as having “natures” for abstract consideration, meanings which are reasonably fixed, both in range and as regards time. Hence they can be defined, and all lexicography and every attempt to define terms and to use them precisely subscribes to this view of words. Connected with this, words have “histories” which can be studied by etymological methods and which in normal nonspecialized use of language contribute to the whole meaning. All of us fall in with these two ways of looking at language every time we use words, although we are neither lexicographers nor etymologists, and that is right and proper.
Between these two lies the shifting field which we might call usage, and which is the proper field of the philologist. It is to this field that we need to direct our attention, but in the terms in which Vico saw it. In his Diritto universale he talks of philology as the study of the first beginnings of the human race (the Greek could carry the meaning of “first principles” as well) and says he hopes to raise philology by his work to the due stature of a science.18 This was to form the basis of his New Science. Words for him are the means by which human beings carry on the specific activity which makes them humans, and poetry and myth are the proper method of inquiry into it.
Every word or group of words is at once a meaning, a history, and the occasion of activity in the mind. A word means the mental activity it conjures up, just as much as it means the object to which it refers and all the past uses to which it has been put. This activity is an essential part of language’s workings, and it is as much physical as mental, the correlation of perception (which is now recognized as an active and not a passive process of body and mind)19 with concept. The active participation of the user of the language is part of the nature of language itself.
Individual words vary in the proportion to which their meaning consists of this third element, of activity. Abstracts in particular have a great deal of it. Their major component is the active response which they call up in the mind. This is what makes the interpretation of them vary so much between one mind and another, since human beings vary widely in the forms of activity of which they are capable. “Honor” and “wisdom” and “science,” even at the merely linguistic level, are things you do (and can only understand by doing). Falstaff saying “What is honour? A word!” means that he is not proposing to give the word his active cooperation. He is withdrawing from participation, and the meaning leaves the word altogether for him, as the rest of the speech shows. The expression, “He is a man for whom the word ‘honour’ has no meaning,” carries the same idea.
The result of looking at language in this way is that the universe of discourse turns out to be a world of action and of individual minds acting in certain concordant or discordant ways. It is always necessarily a world of participation, for it is blessedly obvious that there is no objective and detached doing, no doing without a doer. This activity which upholds all of language as mind cooperates with it20 is what we are to understand henceforward by the word “myth.” Word-language and poetry are at once its highest expression and the best key we yet have to it, but this same kind of activity underlies every other kind of language activity, if we are going to stretch the word beyond word-language for a little while, and is related to all other forms of activity or behavior.
This then is our field, where everything is in action and movement, and you cannot “tell the dancer from the dance.” Now one point at least can be cleared up, for it is in this field that the antitheses we have been talking about belong, all five of them: science / poetry; analysis / synthesis; mathematics / words; intellect / imagination; mind / body. On this dancing ground they are not fixed and opposing marks, but moving and interchanging figures of the dance we call thinking and knowing. They are not to be melted into a hodgepodge of sameness—that was not what was meant by saying they were, as antitheses, useless—for clearly in one sense science is not poetry, mathematics is not words, and so on. They are to be seen as a choice of operations of the dancing mind by which it can learn to understand itself and the world. The image of dancing is a good one here because it prevents us from thinking that this process is an abstract one in which the body is not essentially and passionately involved. The very word “figure” contains within itself the possibility of such a setting to partners. There are figures of speech, the instruments of poetry; but figures are also the relations of change and movement, stylized yet free, of a dance, and it is the human figure which has to lend itself to each of these modes of operation before they can come into being at all. “For he who recollects or remembers, thinks; he who imagines, thinks; he who reasons, thinks; and in a word the spirit of man, whether prompted by sense or left to itself, whether in the functions of the intellect, or of the will and affections, dances to the tune of the thoughts.” That is Bacon (one of Orpheus’ men) in The Advancement of Learning. But before coming to him and what he has to say about this activity of mind and word we shall have to go back a little beyond him, for in that earlier period lies what we need, a kind of manual of language and mind as a dance of relations, moving and not static, which may help us forward.
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And those who have this art, I have hitherto been in the habit of calling dialecticians; but God knows whether the name is right or not. But now I should like to know. . . . whether this may not be that famous art of rhetoric?
TO LOOK AT LANGUAGE as a field of activity or a form of behavior is a way of looking at the universe, and is going to widen our concept of language out beyond word-language for the present. For this field of activity or myth, where mind-bodies work and unite with figures in order to learn and to discover, is far wider than words, and wider than consciousness. It is the field of all behavior which is not wholly mechanical, in any living thing. What this means is that all ordered purposive selective behavior is potentially a language situation, which develops at the human level into the invention and use of language as we know it but which implies such a development from the beginning. If this is so, then language, once arrived at, may incorporate in itself all the unexpressed elements in simpler types of behavior, offering a special insight into living behavior in a wide context. The connection between word-language or poetry and natural history may be closer than we think. Let us consider this for a moment.
The stuff of which the world is made follows, as far as we can tell, particular patterns toward particular conjunctions. In so-called inanimate matter—the division between this and the animate seems to be going or gone— the patterns are fixed. With the appearance of living things and the individual forms of bodies which characterize organisms, the formalizing tendency continues, but it is peculiar to a body and its mind together to become its own instrument for formal operation (growth and development), and its own instrument for formal behavior (function). The organism is at one and the same time medium and instrument of its own formalizing tendencies. The intervention of self-consciousness does not check this process or falsify it. It means that the body-mind recognizes itself as part of this process. It cannot withdraw from it. But in addition to these formal operations still carried on directly upon and with itself, the mind extends the process and invents systems of forms which it can use as hitherto the body used itself—that being the only material given it—systems which will serve as media in which formal operations can be carried on, and as instruments for formal behavior, including new kinds of behavior, discovery and exploration, which a new instrument makes possible. This is the point of the invention of language, which then becomes not a huge gap but the making explicit of something implicit in life from the beginning. All striving and learning is mythologizing; and language is the mythology of thought and action, a system of working figures made manifest.
