There are moments when, deep within my provincial soul, almost without cause, a murky mixture of suspicion and jealousy, shame and pride begins to bubble. I see a man walking to his car with steps all too brisk; I hear someone who, with complete certainty and in a language that knows no faltering, makes general pronouncements; I experience things that I find endlessly astonishing being taken completely for granted. Especially the latter; there appear to be people who, with disconcerting ease, settle into any vacant space and adopt every word that comes into fashion. Then I feel it very clearly once again: here we are standing before a fellow human being who is open minded, who acts without hesitation, and who effortlessly realizes the universality.
What could that be, I wonder, ‘open minded’? Aside from being enviable, good, and strictly prescribed, upon closer inspection, I know relatively little about it. It is, of course, the opposite of narrow and constricted thinking, but this designation is also rather mysterious. It must have something to do, I think, with open spaces, the entire world, and so on. But what form of thinking is precisely this very open mindedness, which so easily spans the continents? What is its theme, and how is it formulated other than by the assertion that it is so open and world-embracing? In my suspicion—which is equally untrustworthy—I sometimes think that it is not thinking at all, but merely the negation of every concrete and therefore limited starting point. Nothing is needed for that; it is a completely empty trick. It only needs to be announced to be considered demonstrated; no one can verify it. If someone claims to have an open mind, they may not be thinking at all, but skip the thought process to immediately want something great and immeasurable.
He who is at home everywhere is at home nowhere, as Martial, a Roman provincial of the first century, already knew. Space without a starting point and without a grid is a destruction of every house and every place; it makes any form of presence impossible. Being there, being present, being extant, is bound to place and time; it is determined by mutual distances within a coordinate system. What is not present in a grid is absent, lost in an immeasurable open space. Being open minded, I sometimes suspect, is nothing but a terrifying attempt to ignore all presence and all connection to any grid, thereby skipping elementary data, the final stage of a smoothed-out and painless nihilism.
Everything that is, is somewhere, and ‘somewhere’ is determinable. There is a coordinate system by which it can be precisely located. People do not live and take root in the entire, spacious world, but precisely ‘here’ or exactly ‘there,’ and not everywhere at once. What they conquer in space is measured from here or from there, and without that measurement, the new space does not exist; it is not a given that lies open, but the experience of a distance from a certain point. Real thinking can only arise as the overcoming of a limitation in time and space that is given as a concrete and unignorable starting point. It operates from presence: when it tries to bypass that, it evaporates in an empty space into an energetic but meaningless verbalism, a language without roots. This talking in space is a language that denies its origins in a native language or dialect. It seems to presuppose a self-evident, unbroken continuity between the starting point in limitation and the furthest attainable boundary, a world without differences.
My own experience, as far as I can recall, is the opposite. Every expansion of horizons was a laborious and sometimes painful process, in which a form of betrayal of one’s origins had to be weighed against a gain in intelligibility and wider credit. With every step, my provincial skin shrank to goosebumps. Every difference was registered, every denial of it aroused suspicion; often wrongly, but the correction of that mistake is also part of the process and cannot be skipped.
The more I become convinced of the impossibility of ignoring one’s origins, the less I can believe in the existence of people who don’t carry a coordinate system in their souls. It is unacceptable to have such a great difference within the same species. But there is a difference in types of provincialism. There is a provincialism that endlessly scruples about its own limitations, and there is a provincialism that perseveres without scruples and considers its own limitations as the model of humanity. Where this form of provincialism prevails, differences are forbidden, and any other dialect is dismissed as gibberish and any other fashion as old-fashioned. The prevailing provincialism identifies its own place with the entire space and its own limitations with cosmopolitanism. This is the provincialism of the capital, which imposes its norms on the region with self-evident authority, thereby defining its own advantage without giving it any substance. Its dialect is the language of the entire world. This dialect is not discussed here: it is more about an oppressed than a dominant variant.
As a starting point and as an awareness of its own limitations, the so-called provincialism of the region is more opposed to narrow-mindedness than it would coincide with it. Nowhere is the world less identified with its own place on the axis system than in the provincial soul. Insight into its own limitations is its most characteristic feature. Its language rustles with humility and self-mockery. But that small world, or the remnant of it, offers the most stubborn resistance to any attempt to ignore or skip it. The place demands its share. The strictness of its structures is an indispensable training for the senses: it trains the eye to see differences, which someone who a priori wants to be open minded doesn’t have access to.
Such a structure, for example, is dialect, the variant of the mother tongue in which most people grow up, and which they later more or less ‘overcome’ for the sake of a language that is widely accepted. I believe I have acquired two certainties about this, which may be somewhat at odds with often-proclaimed beliefs. The first is that dialect is neither less complicated nor more primitive than common language. In some cases—not mine—it is somewhat poorer in words, but then this poverty is amply compensated for by a rich metaphoricity in which existing words are given greater prominence and a broader meaning. And what is primitive in it turns out, upon closer inspection, to be more complicated rather than simpler compared to common language. The more common a language becomes, the more it must be simplified. The transition from dialect to generally accepted is therefore a transition from greater to lesser strictness, from demanding complexity to relative simplicity. A great many distinctions disappear, and less is said with more words. When dialect is considered a linguistic poverty, a backwardness, or an easily imitated folklore—and this seems to be the prevailing view—it is a pretentious neglect of factual data and a typically provincial mistake.
The second certainty is that the strictness of a structure, even apart from its content and what it actually regulates, in all its regional contingency, is an indispensable foundation for a learning process that can ultimately lead to broad and global thinking. Sensitivity to detail can only be awakened through rigorous training in the use of rigid rather than broad or flexible structures. Without the axis system of a fixed and provisionally self-evident structure, reality cannot be approached or named. “Open minded” as a slogan can only be a starting point for vague and undifferentiated thinking, for non-thinking and inflated self-assurance. Space is the vagueness to which people flee who cannot meet detailed demands.
In that space, identity, a product of the structure, explodes and evaporates. Identity is the most extreme form of limitation, the almost to zero-reduced result of an endless reduction process in which difference is cultivated and “the other” acquires its full weight elsewhere in the structure. Identity is a fixed point on an endless grid. Whatever space is conquered only has reality and concreteness insofar as it is measured from this point and bound to it. And as this point approaches zero and becomes more modest in its pretensions, it also acquires a more absolute certainty regarding its right to exist.
Concreteness cannot be global. It always has a regional character. Thus, the language we learn from living people is determined by the demands of their concreteness. The language that, for me personally, has been the starting point for learning everything related to spoken language—writing is a completely different matter—is a Central Brabant dialect. That language belonged to an agricultural world and rounded out an agricultural worldview with the strictness of an all-encompassing structure. The absolute certainty that there was more to be had in the wider world than in our remote corner of it went hand in hand with the firm confidence that even that remote corner offered clues for naming all that. And the resolve to remain silent about certain things led to a considerable mastery in hinting at them. The world of language owed its roundness to an extremely refined sense of metaphor, one not very accessible to outsiders. But within it, a great strictness and a demanding conformism prevailed.
Speakers of a dialect are exceptionally sensitive to differences. Any deviation from the usual language or its pronunciation is a step outside the shared world, which was threatened by negation or negligence from the outside. People with a different dialect and those who spoke in a generally civilized manner were accepted without much difficulty, and in fact, a mixture of neighboring dialects could be heard in almost every family. My mother brought with her a different accent than my father. She pronounced some words slightly differently and also used different words for certain things. For example, she called “sobbing” “schröwen,” and that sounded much softer and more understanding to us than the harsh and dismissive “kwèken” (quack), which we were used to, also of animals. Yet we didn’t adopt it; to us, it remained a sweet, but foreign word. Moreover, we ourselves used a language that was much less archaic than the dialect of a previous generation and evolved more towards common civility. We would have felt we were being pretentious by using certain words that sounded perfectly normal in the mouths of our father and other elders. All these subtle variations were tolerated, although they sometimes gave rise to some ridicule. Difficulties arose when someone abandoned or violated their own dialect too readily and without reason, and when someone imitated our accent with the superior ease of an outsider, unaware of the mistakes they were making and, of course, without caring about them—after all, anyone can imitate a dialect. This seemed to cause a rift in the world and thus caused irritation.
Whether this was done correctly is of little relevance now. It is mentioned here only to demonstrate how strict the structure was and how sensitive that strictness made people to small differences. A consequence of that sensitivity is probably that I now think that sensitivity to one difference also leads to sensitivity to another, and that strictness is therefore a good teacher of the subtleties of feeling. It has always amazed me, to give one example, that so many students, and also peers from other regions, had difficulty with the distinction between masculine and feminine words—later abolished by arbitrary decree—or between the so-called short ei and the long ij. We knew this automatically because we had learned to use the indefinite article ‘unne’ or ‘unnen’ with masculine words, and because we pronounced ‘ei’ very differently from ‘ij’. Deviation from these rules was seen as pretentious, and the coercive conformism taught us, without me ever recalling it being difficult and without us ever being presented with a general rule—rules weren’t formulated, but applied—to flawlessly remember the gender of hundreds of words. This “feeling” wasn’t an innate, mysterious characteristic, but the effect of a culture.
It seems as if this strict requirement—at the time also important for writing standard Dutch, especially in connection with the inflectional “n”—elicited the talent to meet it. If someone says that such strictness was unnecessary in this particular case and that the energy invested in adhering to unformulated, but rigid and immaterial rules could have been better spent, I can hardly argue. But I would like to know what happened to the associated talent after the rule was dropped, and whether it was perhaps put to a better use. I fear it evaporated into empty open-mindedness, in which differences are irrelevant and on which no demands are made.
The example is rather arbitrary, but every structure is arbitrary and can be replaced by any other. It is more important that there is a structure, a grid against space, than what structure there is. Understanding the arbitrariness of a structure does not make it redundant, but it is necessary as a condition for escaping its tyranny and avoiding the intolerant narrow-mindedness inherent in a dominant provincialism. Structures, after all, reveal differences and, through them, cultivate a sensitivity for every difference, thus of the rich variety of reality.
The beginning of my exposition may not seem to matter much, for is not the beginning doomed to be swept aside by the sequel and that which ultimately matters? If there is a core of the matter in the area I am now about to enter, and if it occupies a central place, there must also be many ways and approaches to reach it, much as all roads are said to lead to Rome. And if that core does not exist or if it is too insignificant, too broad or too vague to indicate, then the long loop of the detour around the area in which it is located, the detour that we must take in life and thought in order to return to the self-evidence from which we started and which we tried to replace with a reflexive certainty, has nevertheless been, despite its futility, an inevitable Odyssey to the place where we already were when we began that detour. The question of the usefulness of something that turns out to be necessary is superfluous and reaches beyond our capacity. No one can know how much unrest is needed and even how much must be deliberately mobilized in order to ever come to rest and be satisfied with the little that we have at our disposal from the outset.
From the beginning, which I want to tie in with these considerations, I do not even know whether it is merely an expression of amazement at existence or a question about the purpose and meaning of everything. It stems from a childish train of thought that already assumes the linguistic form of a question, but perhaps wants to share that question with the person to whom it is put rather than expecting a definitive answer.
One evening, when I was putting my son, then six years old, to bed, he suddenly asked: “How can I know that I am not dreaming everything?” The question sounded innocent and did not give the impression that it was the product of a long mental struggle with questions that were too big and too premature and probably not only for him. I even thought, in an attack of maturity, such as children can provoke, that it was more appropriate for his age than for mine. For adults are supposed not to raise the questions to which they have no answer.
His day, as far as I could tell, had been more saturated with pleasure than with the possibility of rapid forgetting or writing off. He wanted to hold on to the day and what had happened rather than see it refuted as a mistake. And he was apparently experimenting at that moment with a possibility that adults are more likely to be ashamed of, namely, to believe in an existence that he shared with no one, that existed only in his own imagination and from which the outside world had been imagined away or into which that outside world had been imagined. Meanwhile, nothing, least of all his drowsy sleepiness, showed that the dream he had conceived would be for him an oppressive nightmare from which he would want to wake up at the very moment he was going to sleep. Rather, he belonged to the rituals that were supposed to ensure that he could sleep without worrying about the continuity of his world. He did not have to be the lonely watchman in a sleeping universe.
2
Now, on closer inspection, is this really a question to which a serious answer is expected, an answer that is more than a reassuring incantation? And can anyone ever give a sufficiently businesslike answer to it? We can probably dismiss it as childish, but that would only really say something of significance if it were also clear that everything childish, as the initial phase of human life, has the status of provisionality and is doomed to disappear without a trace from a life and a way of thinking that claim to be truly valid and to have reached a definitive stage. Then our entire childhood would be superfluous and every memory of it meaningless. I am more inclined to regard that time and the memory of it as normative and decisive. Then this decisive beginning would indeed be arbitrary and could be crossed out against the sequel.
In the meantime, I did not know the answer and so I merely said that, if it were a dream, we had probably both dreamed the same thing. We went through a few details and soon came to the conclusion that it must be so. We also dreamed the same father, the same son, the same house at the same address, the same room and the same bed. And we had to assume that others who saw us there, for example his mother and his little sister, would also come to the same conclusion at the same time as we did.
If that were the case, there would at least be a familiar circle around him who dreamed exactly the same thing as he did in completely different minds. Within that circle there was a common world. If we were to assume that the world was limited to that circle, then he could already feel fairly safe within it and talk about everything that concerned him. But he could also discover outside of it, on the street and at school, that apparently everyone sees the same things, hears the same sounds and moves aside for the same cars of the same make.
The simplest way to explain why we have the impression that we are all experiencing the same thing is to assume that all those things are real and are not dreamed by everyone at the same time and in the same way. For then the differences in all those dreams would have to be so great that people could not speak to each other in the same language. And those things are not only there when we are awake; they also remain there while we are asleep, and they do not change, no matter what we dream.
3
That’s how he could know, I explained, that he was not dreaming. He seemed quite satisfied with that and went to sleep peacefully. But I had to think for a moment about the word ‘how’ in his question. For that does not only mean ‘in what way’, so that the answer can be ‘like that’, but also ‘to what extent’, so that degrees of probability and certainty can be indicated.
In what way and how certainly can I know then that I am not dreaming and that the things outside me and that I worry about really exist? For a shared experience of a jointly perceived world can also be dreamed. There are no possibilities, however unlikely, conceivable whose realization cannot be dreamed. The dreamer does not have to account for the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the things he dreams. He only sees them before him, and what we only see before us without understanding it and without actively relating to it, we can also start to think that we dream it.
Once that possibility has been discovered, there seem to be no limits, neither to dreaming nor to the doubts to which the suspicion that we dream can give rise. His dream did that too. It was a dreamed up, thought up dream, a dream without images and without certainties, a reflected dream between brackets and in a loop, in which the whole world and the mutual coordination of all things and thoughts were immediately included.
His question could also have been: ‘does anything exist, apart from myself?’ ‘Dream’ would then have been another word for a way of thinking, in which we realize that thinking is a precarious affair and that we only think and do not know for sure. Then I might have had to tell the story of ‘I think, therefore I am’ and the fantasies of René Descartes (1596-1650) about a possible evil genius, who shows us an entire world, including our thoughts about it.
The question did indeed start from that ‘I’ and the certainty that can be achieved from this point, but its existence was not at issue, but everything else was. For a six-year-old child, its own existence itself seemed sufficiently embedded in a ‘we’ that could guarantee a jointly inhabited world that can be considered the real world, if only because it is shared with others.
4
At this point I want to leave this beginning, both of human thought and of these expositions, to its own defenselessness and make no attempt to make a solid foundation of it. Nor do I see any possibility of doing so; and I do not know how we can justify our existence other than by accepting it in its contingency as a given or a gift, preferably without the teeth-gnashing heroism with which some existentialist philosophers in my younger years took existence on their shoulders as a design of their own. Not only is it perilous to detach such an ‘I’ from a ‘we’ in which it is embedded and secured against blowing away, in order to then oppose it to a whole world, but it also seems to me impossible to prove the mere existence of anything, starting from certainties that would be even greater, in any other way than by being consciously confronted with it and moved to think. If the existence of a God and his infallibility must first be proven in order to then conclude that the world really exists and is not my dream or merely my thought, I risk making both the world and my own existence into a construction and solving an earthly problem via the detour of heaven, which is not necessarily a pious undertaking. That necessity may eventually arise, but as a first step it does not seem reliable.
That construction itself is namely woven from the same fragile material as the dream, because it too is a thought, produced by a lonely ‘I’. The reasoning it forms can make clear that I cannot think in any other way than in a particular way, but not that reality outside of me also behaves as I think it should think. The cosmos is stubborn and has not obliged itself to cooperate with my concoctions as if I were its creator. My dream does not become less of a dream if I make it clear in that dream that I cannot dream in any other way than in this way. It thereby becomes a dream that threatens to prevent me from living in the reality outside.
We rather expect reality to refute our dream. The reality of which we dream that we dream is, even in that dream, something other than the dream itself, that which we cannot dream and think and from which we even wake up. And what we cannot think, we can never become certain in the way of thinking that it really exists and exists independently of our own thinking. But that is precisely what we demand of reality, even when we have understood that we ultimately have nothing to demand.
So if the certainty that the world exists is the first and most fundamental certainty, even after critical reflection, then it is not so thanks to something that we can call ‘thinking’. A name such as ‘experience’ or even ‘dream’ would then be more appropriate. The first thing we think is independent of thinking as dreaming and goes against it. It comes down to waking up from the dream and discovering that reality exists and exists regardless of what we think about it and regardless of the question of how it is and why it is the way it is.
If I show myself open to the idea that I am only dreaming and constructing reality and its existence through thought, I am not thereby making any attempt to come up with a more solid construction whose evidentiary value will definitively complete the circle of thought, but on the contrary I am beginning a new way of thinking that is directed against dream and construction from the outset. How old I am at the moment I do this should make no difference to someone who wants to think seriously about this. The qualification ‘childish’ in itself says nothing at all and is, philosophically speaking, just as invalid as an attempt to explain and expound away the entire conception of an external world, including its existence, in psychological terms, without paying any attention to the content of the thought.
5
That situation, although it led to a question, is not itself a question, but something that can be processed into a question, that with which, according to Plato, philosophy begins and which becomes something other than just thinking, but a thinking about thinking and what it pretends to be able to do. If that is a childish affair and if the question, whether we perhaps only dream that there is something, has a childish character, then something of the childish nature is also inevitably and essentially part of the dowry of philosophy and it is perhaps learned, but unphilosophical to deny it or to mask it under a layer of values and all kinds of erudition.
That beginning is namely the defenseless wonder, the awakening from the dream that things are as we think them, made from the same piece and self-evident. Through wonder as an event that happens to people, a break is caused with all previous thinking and with every self-evidence to which this led. This new thinking or even the beginning of it, as it were, puts the old between quotation marks before it can itself make any claim to its own validity.
In wonder we discover that things are as they are, independent of what we think, different from what we think and resistant to the way in which we think about them. The role that thinking plays in wonder is not that it withdraws from things, but that it confronts them permanently as a receptivity to their surprising character. It is at least a provisional break between thinking and being, a postponement of all judgment about the identity of things and a suspension of all certainties.
The ‘I’ that asks itself by way of experiment whether it is not dreaming and considers the possibility that it is only thinking everything up, is the same agency that in wonder makes itself as small as possible and reduces itself to no more than a point at which the existence of reality is established and its ‘other’ is registered. The I makes itself small and light in order to create space for the size and weight of the things themselves. The question that surprised me must concern the idea that things are as we tend to think and that the worlds of thought and being run more or less smoothly and definitively parallel. The surprise is the shock in which it is registered that this is not the case. Whoever considers it childish seems to assume that it is not precisely the beginning of an attempt to overcome childishness. After all, taking everything for granted cannot be the ideal form of adulthood.
6
At this point I must explicitly mention a few themes that have already been discussed in the preceding, but which are worth discussing more than in passing. These are mainly the couple dream and sleep, the ‘I’ as the bearer of awareness and the real existence of the outside world. These themes come together in the question ‘how do I know that I am not dreaming?’.
In ancient philosophy, the awareness of an ‘I’ that thinks and therefore sets itself against other people and against the world, was most emphatically expressed by Heraclitus of Ephesus (± 500). And he connects far-reaching and very pretentious consequences to this. This already happens in the first fragment of the collection of fragments that have survived from his work. It is generally not regarded as a coincidence, but as the first and most decisive sentence of the entire book. I do not quote it as proof or authority, but solely as a starting point for my own reflections on the question that I am currently studying.
“For this train of thought, although it is always valid, people always prove to be full of incomprehension, both before they have heard of it and when they first hear of it. For even though everything proceeds according to this train of thought, they still seem to be inexperienced, even though they have experience with such words and real things as I explain them here, whereby I analyze each thing according to its nature and indicate how it is. But it escapes other people what they all do when they are awake, just as they also forget everything they do in their sleep”.
The idea that emerges from this is not only that of an omniscient I, but above all that of an I that gives relief to its individual existence and distinguishes and separates itself from all other people by its wakefulness alone. Thinking is presented as a meritorious wakefulness in itself or an openness to the world, not thinking or continuing to live in an ancient and uncritically tested self-evidence as a form of sleeping or dreaming. At the same time, this awake openness appears to be rewarded, as it were, with a coherent train of thought and with the willingness of an entire world to take up residence in that awake brain or to walk in the wake of its train of thought. And not only are the parts of that train of thought interrelated, but there is also an attunement of that train of thought to the world to which it refers. In this way, a new and astonishing form of self-evidence even seems to arise.
In the dream, things are presented to us that are not real or of which we are not certain that any reality corresponds. Someone who wonders whether he is perhaps dreaming does not claim that he is awake and therefore distinguishes himself as a thinking self from all others who do not ask themselves that question, but he nevertheless leaves open with a certain modesty the possibility that he is completely and fundamentally mistaken in his view of the world or underestimates the multiplicity of meanings of the world.
Heraclitus’ pretension is to be the sole awake one among a mass of sleepers. He does not ask them questions to check his own wakefulness, but tries to wake them up and make them receptive to his answers. In the contrast he sets up between his own awake self and the sleeping masses, the weight of the world to which he wants to point people seems to be replaced, at least temporarily, by the importance he attaches to the wakefulness of his own self. This must give the impression of misplaced arrogance, namely a transfer of the weight of things to the thinker.
This pretense of solitary wakefulness or of isolation as election is characteristic of many philosophers and prophets of antiquity. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates presents himself with arrogant modesty as a tiny fly who attacks the noble but somewhat lazy horse of Athenian society with his venomous stings and prevents it from falling asleep. Sleep and dream are the great enemies of thought and responsibility. And in the ancient symbolism of sleep and dream the pretension seems to go so far that being awake is not only a condition for a good way of thinking, but that it also determines its content in itself. That Heraclitus makes the size and the wakefulness of his ego coincide with the whole world, must also mean that in that world he was especially fascinated by the restless fire, the permanent flow, the coincidence of opposites and the continuous changing of one into the other.
7
That Socrates imagines himself as a fly, a small and vulnerable creature that can be crushed and eliminated by the horse with one blow, or even by the sting with which the fly stings, no more than a point, already presupposes a process of reduction in which the ego tries to withdraw its constructions and projections from the world and no longer wants to identify with it. And as the ego makes itself smaller and reduces itself more to a disappearing dot, the world seems to become larger and more wondrous.
In this respect, there is a decisive difference between the omniscient vigilance of Heraclitus and the unknowing, contentless vigilance of Socrates who withdraws to that one point and concentrates on a minimal certainty to which he nevertheless attributes a maximum effect. They seem to represent two opposing types of philosophical vigilance, one of which regards vigilance as a certainty and an end and the other as wonder and beginning. Is the size of the ego perhaps proportional to that of the pretended knowledge? Does Socrates make his ego, despite the formidable effect he attributes to it, so small and vulnerable, because he is aware of the limitation of his knowledge and actually only knows that he knows nothing and attributes the pretended knowledge to others, in order to then make it the object of criticism? In this assumption, his alertness comprises no more than the sharp awareness of the atomic fact that he is there, not the knowledge of the how and the why of it, including everything else, as Heraclitus seems to imagine. The certainty that he was not dreaming had no other content and it taught him nothing about the world other than that it was there and inspired him.
Perhaps this is saying too much and portraying Socrates too much as a scholar, too little as a philosopher who reflects on thinking and on the point at which it concerns reality, the ego and their relationship. For it seems that the question he seems to have asked first, and which in the tradition is ‘what is?’, did not primarily concern observable things such as houses and people, but subjects of weighty conversation, such as justice and bravery. And about this, people who have the reputation of knowing something of some importance can be asked, as knowers, whether they really exist and are something. For of something that does not exist or that on closer inspection is nothing but a weighty word, the assumption must be, we can also know nothing. Only when it becomes clear that they are something and not a figment that has been proclaimed to be self-evident, can the question be asked, what it is and to what core their existence can be reduced.
That question and the question of why must therefore have been preceded by a whole history, in which a certainty arises about the fact that it is there and that it is something and not a dream about which it is not possible to exchange ideas fruitfully. That it is there is the minimum in an exchange of ideas and the minimum certainty from which it can proceed. A parallel certainty that has also been reduced to a point is that this observation is formulated by an I that can be reduced, but not thought away.
In this exchange, the shared conviction that not only the observable world exists, but that also unobservable things such as justice are more than a figment of the imagination, can be a useful starting point as a form of shared alertness. And even then it is not certain that the outcome will yield more than the shared conviction that it is ‘something’ and not nothing. The question of what it is, and which must result in a definition, is at that point not yet at issue.
8
If there is a question that is connected to the wonder about the fact that there is something and that there is even an impressive, incomprehensible quantity of things, then it must be the question about the why of all that rather than the how or what of something in particular. That question is namely more global and childish than the question about the essence of an individual thing. It has been posed and repeated with apparently minimal variations and gradations of plaintiveness since Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in the form “why is there something and not rather nothing?” and considered more or less unanswerable, as long as the answer did not involve the will of a divine creator.
In the meantime, Leibniz, one of the very greats in the history of philosophy, also puts forward with some emphasis the proposition that nothing is or happens without sufficient ground or cause. That proposition can be regarded as a somewhat vague and general answer to the question why there is something. It proclaims a priori and apart from a comprehensive experience a principle or a certainty, without therefore being able to make it true or fill it in for every concrete case. We can confidently and even with a minimum of emotional and intellectual involvement claim that everything that occurs will have a cause, without even suspecting what that cause may be. It takes quite a bit of decisiveness, not the most philosophical virtue, to declare the principle applicable to all individual situations and to be satisfied with it.
The proposition was already formulated by Aurelius Augustine (354-430) and in fact also by the ancient philosophers who said that nothing just happens and that nothing can come from nothing. And that happened even before Socrates, according to tradition, made the question of essence the theme of his conversations. The beginning of a reassuring answer to the question of the why of nothing less than everything had therefore already been expressed in general terms and was considered self-evident. To ask further questions would seem like childish and spoiled whining, while it was considered the task of thinking, which was equated with science, to investigate the how, the what and the why of different things in more detail.
That Augustine reformulates the old principle again and detaches it from a natural-philosophical background, can possibly also be explained by religious motives. Incidentally, these are not entirely absent from the ancient formulations. In his treatise ‘On Heaven’ Aristotle literally says: “God and nature do nothing without reason”. That everything has a cause must also mean for Augustine that there is only one cause for everything that exists, and as that one cause he considers the creator God. Even if the entire creation, everything that exists, were a dream of that God, ‘in whom we live, move and have our being’, then in Augustine’s eyes it would still have the validity of what really exists. For God, the one from whom the word has creative power, is the only ‘I’ for whom dream and reality coincide.
9
As far as I know, Leibniz was the first to formulate the question of the why of everything in this way. And he did so in the religious-philosophical context of his treatise on ‘the principles of nature and grace based on reason’ from 1714. Despite a clear childishness in the question, if only because as a question it seems to expect and be satisfied with an all-encompassing and paternally reassuring answer, it has become the fundamental question of philosophy in its relatively short career. At least that is what Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) calls it.
Perhaps Leibniz only dared to pose it because he believed he could give an answer to it in his astutely articulated thoughts about possibilities that want to become reality (‘everything that is possible asks to exist’) and about a divine creator with an all-encompassing plan in which everything that can exist simultaneously and does not exclude each other must also really exist and is attuned to each other from the outset. It is a mystery in itself why this question was formulated so late in history. Part of the answer must be sought in the brilliant originality of Leibniz, who succeeded throughout his life in staying close to elementary matters or returning to them.
The way in which he formulates the question may have something childish, like my son’s question had at the time, but it shows no trace of the struggling despair that it seems to acquire a century later, detached from its religious background, in Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854), and of which the heavy traces can still be found in the addition ‘überhaupt’ in him and in Heidegger, which almost sounds like ‘in God’s name’. In the light of the answer that Leibniz already has in reserve and that, so to speak, provokes the corresponding question, it even sounds joyful and a little triumphant in him. Just as Heidegger, not entirely rightly, wondered why the ‘principle of the base’ that he first thought he had encountered in Leibniz, turned out to require such a long incubation period, so too this question ‘why there is something rather than nothing’ might give rise to some surprise at the late date at which it was posed. It seems as if, with this question as an expression of the wonder at the fact that things exist, philosophy is finally returning to the childhood it should never have left.
Perhaps its attempts to appear mature and scientific or even to pass for the mother and queen of all sciences were somewhat too pretentious or too heroic and prolonged and collapsed under the weight of real science when it began to develop. This development was greatly accelerated when, for example, the microscope in the seventeenth century sharpened the eye for a different view of dimensions, for the infinite richness of reality and of the previously unthinkable possibilities that are realized in it. At such a moment, a retrospective look at a distant past that is considered outdated or childish can present itself as a necessity. And that retrospective then teaches us at the same time that no question is too big to be asked, but also that a perilous loss of self-evidence and wonder are necessary conditions for this.
10
If we now consider with some justification the defenceless wonder about the pure and apparently irreducible existence of things and all the questions that are derived from it, which concern the proof thereof, the essence of things and the why of nothing less than everything, as childish elements in a thinking that reflects on itself and its pretensions, we can perhaps understand a little more of this. Questions always reach further than knowledge; after all, they begin where knowledge as a provisionally acquired self-evidence ends and a new unrest begins.
Socrates asked without embarrassment about the essence of bravery and justice. What is striking in his ironic attitude is that he did not ask this question of himself and of his own self as a kind of authority, but of experts or people who had the reputation of being experts in a certain field. And the first thing he asked was whether that which he asked about really existed and was really something.
In Plato, the whole of philosophy stems from wonder. Aristotle seems to follow him in this, but he leaves open the possibility, and actually expects it, that from the research to which the wonder leads, knowledge, certainty and a new form of self-evidence will emerge within a foreseeable time. From that knowledge, the expert thinker will then wonder about the fact that he once wondered how things are with, for example, the phases of the moon or the mutual indivisibility of the straight sides and the longest side of the triangle.
In his eyes, we apparently grow out of wonder, like we do with childishness and the associated ignorance. He therefore speaks in terms of childishness about the predecessors of Socrates, and calls their expressions ‘stammering’. Once grown up, people will at most recognize themselves in that childish behavior with a pitying smile and perhaps have a certain nostalgia for it, but will not feel inspired by it. That Socrates asked his questions to experts and stubbornly considered himself ignorant also means, above all, that he accepted it and even assumed that he was a layman in every area in which he asked his difficult questions to experts. He even gave the impression that he was not only fully aware of this ignorance, but also wanted to maintain it. For him, translated into terms of later developments, there must have been a profound distinction between science as knowledge or intellectual achievement on the one hand and philosophy as reflection or intellectual attitude on the other. In contrast to the practitioner of science, the one who strives for a new form of self-evidence in a demarcated area, the philosopher continues to maintain and cultivate the status of an unbiased layman with a certain stubbornness.
In a century of exuberant development of science, its methods and its perspectives such as the one in which Leibniz lived, this was bound to lead to the philosopher venturing with his questions outside the increasingly extensive area that was claimed for itself by science that was becoming independent. This independence also meant that science demarcated the boundaries of its method, its domain and its expertise with ever greater precision.
As a result, philosophy threatened to end up outside the prestigious domain of science. And the question of why all things are, the question of why there is something and not nothing, is therefore the question of a layman. A philosopher and universal scholar, expert in many areas, as Leibniz was, could afford to ask a childish question and to formulate the beginnings of an answer to it. Perhaps that is why he was the first to ask it. A person may consider himself lucky if he is condemned to this childishness for life.
(Translator’s note: one word in particular was tricky to deal with, and I left it in Dutch. Should you wish to have a go at translating this essay yourself, or read the original Dutch version, I’ve added it at the end of this translation)
Nothing listens more closely the word
That clinks together what belongs together.
1
He who says goodbye, or more precisely: he who is said goodbye to, may say whatever he wants on that occasion. That is, in addition to the pension rights and all the other benefits with which such a person is showered, one of his ritual privileges. The content of his words will probably be judged as mildly afterwards as the nutritional value of a gallows meal.
He may therefore also tell the truth with impunity, in case he knows it and possibly also believes that it will hit hard. Because I do not know it and therefore have no reason to believe that it would hit like a hard strike, I will not make use of that privilege. So do not expect any painful revelations at the last minute or secret settlements. I have no reason to do so, on the contrary: the work I have to say goodbye to and the environment in which I was allowed to do that work were extremely dear to me. By announcing that I am now going to take some liberty, I mean something quite different and something very simple. I would like to say goodbye without any weightiness to a function to which I attach greater weight than I have ever been able to bear. So I will say goodbye at the same time to the function, to its weight and to the obligation that results from it to speak to fellow human beings in a learned and instructive manner. I therefore propose for this hour some frivolity, but above all some freedom from the academic erudition that seems to belong to this function.
I may now also admit without impunity that I have never felt completely at home in it – I do not mean the function, but the erudition – and that I have often felt a bit of nostalgia for the time when I still lived in the wild, without the compulsion of the program and of the only correct method. In short: I want to sniff around like a dilettante for another hour, following my own nose, according to a method for which a critic has used the witty and undoubtedly deadly qualification ‘associative gibberish’.
2
Let me start with a point that is at least clear, so that anyone who wants to can follow my quest. I propose to concentrate this hour on such an almost-nothing that can become an almost-everything in a moment of attention and intellectual excitement, the extremely dilettante theme of ‘the sound of truth’.
By this I certainly do not mean the loud voice with which something is sometimes proclaimed that must be considered a hard truth or the only correct method. I do not want to proclaim anything at all and certainly not loudly. Nor will I talk about an articulate voice, but about a sound that we could locate in the metaphorics surrounding truth and the sensation of suddenly discovering a truth. Metaphors are very telling, but they speak very softly and they rustle with scepticism. They cannot tolerate being proclaimed.
Traditionally, when we think of ‘truth’ we think of two seemingly very opposing views: on the one hand, truth is understood as an agreement or correspondence between what we produce while thinking and what appears to be the case outside, in the reality that we cannot conceive, the fitting of what we think with what is, or, expressed more weightily, but still in acoustic terms: the resounding of thinking and being.
That is a very strange, striking phenomenon: we can think very abstractly for a long time and as it were under water or behind the backs of things and then suddenly it turns out that it makes sense or that it is correct and then, for example, people land on the moon. With a soft thud, two worlds come together. What seemed like a dream, the inner affair of a subject, changes substance and becomes part of reality.
On the other hand, we also think of truth as the inner coherence of a story or argument, the fitting of one part of it with the other. A coherent whole, free of contradictions and harmoniously constructed, gives a sensation of truth as well as the agreement of assumption and verifiable fact. We can hardly imagine that nothing would correspond to a well-constructed and coherent whole of thoughts outside of it. Rationality creates its own reality. What we think must also exist and we cannot create that existence, not even through mutual unanimity: consensus is ultimately only a poor consolation, a support that we seek from each other in an incomprehensible world. In both the one and the other representation of truth, existence must ultimately be encountered as a hard fact.
3
There is, then, in my last learned words, a theory of truth as correspondence and one of truth as coherence or as consistency. My intention is not to say the last word on this now, but to pay some attention to certain aspects of the imagery in which these theories are expressed and in which fitting appears to play a role.
These aspects do not concern the voice of things, of being or of truth itself as a speaking instance, but, so to speak, the inevitable audibility factor in the experience that we are dealing with truth, the experience that something ‘accords’, lets the same voice be heard, that it ‘fits’, ‘clicks’, ‘hits’ or ‘rhymes’ or at least is not too discordant. My assumption is that at the moment of such experiences an exclamation of surprise on our part coincides with the click with which things and thoughts fit together and can be combined.
To begin with, I would like to note that the very opposition between these two conceptions of truth probably owes a great deal of its persuasive force to the fact that it is expressed in rhyming, clicking, and partly coinciding words in which, so to speak, their clash and their agreement become audible at the same time: correspondence-consistency. We apparently like to express oppositions in rhyming words and to condense them into the smallest possible, almost atomically small, but persistent, difference which then hides itself in an often strangely emphasized and increasingly stubborn syllable, a hasty tap on the table: évolution-révolution, náture-cúlture, ídealism-réalism, quántity-quálity, or, to keep it modest: cane sugar-beet sugar.
A keen ear for the sound of truth and its echoes is required for the right choice. The smaller the difference and therefore the greater the dispute, the sharper the ear must prick itself to hear it. Truth is a delicate matter; the fight is preferably about one letter or about the tone that makes the music.
4
A great many classical images in connection with truth and with the experience of having found it originate from the sphere of visual perception. Words such as ‘insight’ and ‘evidence’, ‘vision’, ‘theory’ and ‘contemplation’, but also, albeit to a lesser extent, ‘clarity’, emphasise visual qualities, a sharp eye in the observer and a great accessibility for that in things. The eye has always had the reputation of being the most intellectual sense, because, says Aristotle, it brings many differences of light. (Metaphysica. 980 a 27). The clarity of the difference is a criterion of great importance.
In particular, one’s own visual perception as an organ of control is preferred over hearing, which is then sometimes given the meaning of: knowing by hearsay, to others, the earlier and the superiors, listening and obeying instead of investigating oneself. Hearing, with one’s own ears, as a form of attention to things and to agreement, is in intellectual terms a neglected matter. But I do not want to talk about this grateful subject now either. It is too general. The voice of being itself, the whisper of things and the call of the wise world will not sound here.
My subject is therefore not, to describe it a little more negatively, the visibility of difference, but the audibility of agreement, the sound of truth as a surprising discovery, landing on the moon, hitting something hard, the metaphorical click that we think we hear, when a combination takes place between what we think inside here, logically and theoretically, and what turns out to be the case outside there, practically and factually, between what others think and what we think or between what we think in one area and what we think in another area.
That whole story does not take place in long reasoning or in considerations about the right method, but in the rather everyday metaphor of truth or evidence that suddenly, as it were with one snap, thus with a certain degree of audibility, presents itself, so to speak as an acoustic side-effect to the flash that makes everything visible, the clap of thunder that comes to keep the lightning company. The sound of truth comes as a surprise, as an agreement where rattling or shrill contradiction could also be expected.
Truth as agreement between what we assert and what is the case is in any way presented as a sound, a tone, a voice that joins another voice and harmoniously agrees with it; truth as inner coherence is, listened to as a metaphor, a harmony or mutual consonance of parts that are attuned to each other and fall into place. That attunement produces a little click and we then hear that.
5
Once our attention is focused on this experience, we hear this imagery in ancient philosophical texts as well. In the school of Pythagoras, the word ‘harmonia’, which in Homer still referred to something as simple as a connection in carpentry, was charged with a cosmic meaning. They spoke of ‘the harmony of the spheres’, the attunement of the heavenly paths and of the heavenly bodies that rush through space. This harmony did not only consist in the fact that the movements fit together and could be performed simultaneously without causing collisions; but according to the followers of Pythagoras, it was also audible in principle in a pleasant murmur of chords.
The problem of the Pythagoreans was only that people have become so accustomed to that harmonious sound in the background that they no longer hear it, just as a blacksmith eventually doesn’t hear the sound he makes on his anvil, just as people who live near a railway line are no longer bothered by the speeding trains, and perhaps also just as the wise lessons of parents go in one ear and out the other for children.
The argument has its comical aspects, especially when it is not so much a matter of ‘no longer hearing’ as of ‘never having heard’, but it is not much more comical than any other argumentum ex silentio. We also claim with a serious face that people are driven by motives that continue to elude their own perception and their consciousness and that are precisely therefore so strong.
What we do not hear is not therefore inaudible; what is hidden from the naked eye is not therefore invisible; to the microscope as a second eye, to the ear or to the contrivance via a sound amplifier it can reveal itself. It is difficult to make general and definitive statements about observability.
The relative inaudibility of cosmic sounds, mentioned with such cunning emphasis, may in this perspective have a function: it invites a focused attention that goes beyond the obvious and familiar that has become mute in every respect. It is precisely in this attention that it is usually less about looking than about listening. Attention is primarily focused on hearing sounds. It listens alertly to what is unspoken or unspeakable, what is untranslatable, the rustling in the trees, the hissing of false air in overly powerful statements and the sound with which connections and breaks are created. “When the soul listens, it already speaks a language that lives”.
‘Harmonia’ is, as I said, the word Homer uses for the connection of parts of a ship, something like a dovetail. It is not the connection itself or the connectedness, but the means by which it is brought about by a skilled carpenter. The parts are separate and heterogeneous data in a multitude, the ‘harmonia’ artfully joins them together, so that they fit together or correspond with each other like ploughed planks and suddenly form a new whole in which the memory of the multitude is lost.
There seems to be nothing acoustic about it, except a cautious affirmative tap with the hammer, the short click at the moment when the parts come together or a satisfied groan from the workman who sees his attempt succeed. Completely without any sound it is difficult to explain why the word ‘harmonia’, besides the indication of a connection and of a closed chord on a small or large scale, has also become pre-eminently that of a consonance.
6
This is already the case with Heraclitus, when he uses the word in connection with bow and lyre, where strings and wood are made into one whole (fr. 51). It is unclear whether in his case the most beautiful harmony, which according to his words arises from the contumacious combinations (fr. 8), offers a visual spectacle or perhaps is audible. Very interesting for my argument is fragment 54, in which Heraclitus says that an invisible or at least not at first sight visible ‘harmonia’ is better or stronger than a visible one. If this word were about something purely audible, the use of qualifications such as ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ would be somewhat difficult to explain. Because the dark philosopher likes to play with words and to evoke profound suggestions by means of sober indications, I will try once more here that dovetail as a translation of ‘harmonia’ and that produces a very striking result: ‘A dovetail that you cannot see gives a stronger connection than one that you clearly see’. I think that such an explanation is linguistically quite correct and, what is more, that every carpenter will agree with it, especially when the implication is that such a connection is less beautiful when it is protruding heavily than when it is completely sunk in.
A minimum of presence, bordering on the appearance of absence, gives it the greatest strength and rewards attention the most. There can be no more than a trace or a residue of processing: the crafting must not impose itself as artificial; it must resemble organic growth as much as possible and as little as possible like violence. And it has always been part of art to conceal art itself and its interventions.
Apparently Heraclitus and other philosophers of his time found ‘harmonia’ a beautiful and apt word, because they gave this metaphor a great career. The word shares this, but that only makes the story more wonderful, with another gigantic term like ‘cosmos’. From the meaning of ‘ornate creation’ or ‘order’, that word has expanded in a century to that of ‘universe’, not just as everything that exists, but as an ‘ordered whole’, ‘world order’, thus the product of a successful intervention that nevertheless does justice to the nature of things. Apparently, art can only imitate nature when nature and its processes have first been presented in the image of successful craft work and completion.
The artisanal making of the potter, the blacksmith and the carpenter therefore seems to underlie images and metaphors of a reasonably ordered, joined or made world. The world is a ‘machina’, a gigantic construction, in the seventeenth century a clock with many interlocking cogs, made by the great engineer and builder of the universe, who according to Leibniz thought of everything and tuned it to each other in a ‘predetermined harmony’. In this view, the world only exists when it succeeds; its being is perfection. On closer inspection, each part falls into place in the whole where it ticks along like a hidden cog. Understanding the world is having an eye and ear for this harmony.
The image itself represents a view of the world; it is a constructed parallel between what we think of and what we place next to it for comparison as data that we encounter, two strips that fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Without an element of construction, there is nothing to compare, to fit and to measure. This comparison, if it is successful and brings parallels to light, can give a sensation of truth, an Aha-erlebnis, although for the time being we will leave it open where the sound comes from: from the coming together of the parts into a whole or from our astonished mouth.
7
After these now too broadly rambling explanations I want to slow down a bit and descend from the cosmic spheres to earth. And there too I am not concerned with the voice of being – because it is not the being that speaks, but the happening – but ultimately with the short, beautifully mechanical and as it were satisfied click of the dovetail under the last, careful and almost ritual knock of the carpenter who at that moment sees that everything is good and fitting. The knock confirms the success. It is a round of applause for the maker.
So let us first listen to everyday words such as ‘click’, ‘clink’ and ‘knock’. We can do that without immediately becoming hoarse with respect or melting away with awe. We are actively involved and that can be wonderous enough. All these words are said to be ‘onomatopoeic’, but it is not clear which sound is imitated by ‘clicking’, ‘clinking’, ‘clapping’ or ‘knocking’. It seems to be more about a dynamic participation in events located in the throat and tongue, such as the joining together of various things, than about the reproduction of a sound heard outside of it. But I will not delve too deeply into the onomatopoeia, also in order not to make myself unnecessarily vulnerable.
A key ‘clicks’ in the lock. That remnant of a collision is an audible sign that lock and key, inside and invisibly, fit together very closely. That is how they are constructed. The click is the proof of the pudding, the sound of success, an acoustic bonus to the harmony. The sound is short and reassuring. We hardly hear it and pay no attention to it, because we count on the fact that lock and key are made for each other and that we do not take the wrong key.
In the meantime, few words are so strongly charged with a philosophical metaphor as ‘lock’ and ‘key’. The entire symbolism of fitting and belonging together, searching and finding, problematizing and solving, coding and deciphering, secret and method, can be allowed to culminate in that brief click in which the harmonious but invisible belonging together also literally becomes audible. Even the soft and whooshing closing of a car door gives connoisseurs a satisfying sensation that, we metaphysicians would be inclined to think, belongs in higher regions.
Probably under the influence of the English word ‘to click’, many people say that it ‘clicks’ when a contact is easily established or when something takes hold and is successful. We are successful when success follows our attempt, while it still seems to come from another world. Perhaps the metaphor of truth includes the idea that what belongs together must also sound together. The sound is the completion and confirmation of the harmony; the agreement must be accompanied by a perceptible sound as the audible ratification of the accord.
A decision is ritually and magically, but with a certain inevitability, sealed, confirmed, by a blow of the hammer, as if two things had to be riveted together. Glasses are raised and knocked against each other. There is a whole ceremonial around the agreement and the conclusion and ratification of treaties, in which the final confirmation must be an acoustic phenomenon and even owes its validity to it. Like ‘harmony’ and ‘agreement’, ‘clinking’ (in Dutch) has two meanings. It is ‘making a sound’ and it is ‘establishing a connection’. The door handle (clink in Dutch) is part of the lock.
8
A beautiful and popular word for the sound of truth in Dutch is ‘kloppen’ (to knock, to beat, or to match) in both meanings that we give to the word ‘truth’. The calculation matches the control and then there is a correspondence. The fracture surfaces of the two parts or strips fit together like a key and a lock or the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Or the calculation or the argument is internally consistent and then we also say that everything matches. If that is not the case, we think we hear that something is rattling. That is the shrill sound of absurdity, an inharmonious noise that we cannot place acoustically and cannot process intellectually. And by ‘we’ I of course do not mean us, the scholars, because it is a popular word used by people who do not follow a scientific method.
According to the Dictionary of the Dutch Language, the word ‘kloppen’ in this meaning only came into our language around 1880. Initially, its use was accompanied by muttering something as an excuse for this break with tradition. In a letter from Geertruida Bosboom Toussaint from 1886, for example, we can read: “Yesterday I literally could do nothing, and today I force myself to at least write a letter to you, who I hope will not take it so seriously if there are any gaps, or if everything does not ‘klop’, as is the accepted term these days.”
Apparently, gaps in the letter prevent the whole from ‘kloppen’, the parts from connecting. There can hardly be any doubt about the meaning of the word ‘kloppen’ in the context of this letter. A letter that ‘klops’ is a letter that forms a coherent whole and in which no gaps, strips of emptiness, prevent the parts from touching each other. Because the whole does not exist by itself: it is a construction of merged and as invisibly as possible dovetailed parts.
What can also be safely stated is that this ‘kloppen’ must be the explicit and reinforcing indication of a sound that is related to the representation of truth as a gathering of heterogeneous elements. Whoever, following Nietzsche’s example, auscultates with a hammer, will not hear a hollow sound. But furthermore, the transition from ‘beating on wood’ to ‘beating something’ is not clearly demonstrable in this language usage and cannot be thought of off the top of one’s head. Fitting keys and closing boxes are close, but it is not impossible that ‘kloppen’ here is inherently something like ‘striking’ or ‘surprising’. Whether or not it is one’s own creation, in ‘kloppen’ there is also an impersonal aspect of success and achievement, in which the maker himself becomes an astonished spectator. In success and achievement we end up in a different order than that of the attempt that precedes it. Who or what that subject is remains unclear. I will have to come back to this obscure statement, but I cannot promise great clarity.
9
‘Kloppen’ is essentially a ritual form of repeated hitting. Whatever its origin, the ritual gesture of hitting must also express the awareness that the agreement is not self-evident, and that it does not come about without a will and a decision. It does not simply confirm that it is so, but it also indicates that it must be so and, if I may say so – and I may say so today – it hammers that awareness home. It therefore occurs when in the experience of truth and in the sensation that it is so, the factor ‘must’ or ‘want’ comes into play. That is not a must in the ethical sense, but in the sense that as soon as we think coherently and want to compare an intellectual construction with reality in order to calibrate it to it, we cannot possibly think otherwise. In order to succeed, our making must turn into finding, encountering what is already there.
Ultimately, we cannot think that what we think makes no sense and just hangs in the air before us. We want to establish it powerfully on a solid foundation. We must therefore decide on what we cannot leave undone and express this with a tap, a remainder of strong-willed involvement and, as it were, violence kept available that makes the reasoning conclusive with striking arguments.
So in this ritual of confirmation there is not only an acoustic but also a dynamic element that expresses involvement in a completely different way than a purely contemplative one and that precisely as a ritual is also something other than a technical activity.
The tapping and knocking is more a confirmation of the fitting and agreement than that it would bring this about, more an applause for what, in any case. already is and what we encounter, than the arbitrary production of it. It is an expression of our agreement with what we find appropriate and an almost magical or lyrical attempt to connect our will with it afterwards or to extend our involvement in it. It is like shaking after use. Or also: it is a remainder of activity in a contemplative attitude and it marks the transition from one attitude to another.
No different from ‘harmony’, ‘knocking’ and ‘clinking’, the sound of striking is part of the presence that presents itself. The clock strikes and my words, I hope, hit their mark and are not solipsistic muttering: they relate to something that lies beyond and that I would like to bring up.
10
Now, after the two forms of the sensation of truth, which have been discussed with the accompanying sounds such as correspondence and consistency, a third, very elementary form presents itself, and this too has to do with the sound of hitting, knocking and bumping. It is the sensation that, while thinking and searching, we come across a reality that is harder or at least has a completely different state of aggregation than anything we can think, and which, through its own recalcitrance, forces our thinking to bend back on itself and to reflect on its own status of ‘merely thinking’. In this way, reality presents itself, even before there can be any question of agreement or consent, as that which puts a stop to the autonomy of thoughts and reminds thinking of what inspired it before it lost itself in its own laws and methods.
Aristotle, despite his aversion to metaphorical language in philosophy, occasionally uses words like ‘haptesthai’ and ‘tunchanein’ to indicate that an investigator is close to the truth or even to the only correct method. He touches the matter, so to speak, or strikes at something, a bottom or a ground. But untrained investigators, he says, are like poorly trained boxers: they jump around furiously and sometimes deliver ‘nice blows’, but these are accidental hits (Metaphysics. 985 a 15).
The striking here is a metaphor for a directed movement that must hit a target or remove an obstacle. The silent blows in the air and the dynamic jumping around only represent the rituals of readiness, the deliberations about the method, the sharpening of knives and the preparations we make. They can be elevated to an art in themselves in which, raised to an academic level, a great and admirable mastery can be achieved; but only the blow that hits arrives counts.
That ‘arrival’ is the moment when the movement encounters a reality of a different nature than the method. That reality is not far away or high; it is within reach. And it is hard in two senses: it does not deviate and it makes itself heard. In that sense we may also speak of a ‘hard’ truth: it is stubborn and indigestible. What we only think, on the other hand, is not the hard factuality, but our own fabric, soft and silent.
11
Stripped of its aggressive context and placed back in the symbolism of thought, the image of the boxer illustrates the irreducibility of reality and points to the chances of thought missing it and becoming entangled in its own movements, methods and importance. When we close in on reality, thoughts and easy words come to a standstill in the target they hit. The shock that is then felt, the blow that is heard, represents a sensation of truth that the softness of words alone and the security of a consensus cannot provide.
In intellectual parlance, the image of a core or a hard bottom, which we are said to come up against when thinking or searching, and which has a special meaning, is common. The image refers to the decisive point at which thought encounters reality and touches hard facts. The image derives its meaning from three interrelated assumptions.
The first is that outside that hard core, there is an abundance of softness that is irrelevant and which we must pass over. The second is that the element in which the movement proceeds with some naturalness and rectilinearity, like a ship in the sea, is of a different nature or substance from the element it encounters and by which it is suddenly slowed down. The third assumption is that the arrival at the other, hard element is conceived rather as the attainment of a goal and a foundation or as the making of a discovery than as the encounter of an obstacle to be overcome. Its meaning is felt and heard before it can be intellectually processed and transformed into agreement. The continuation of the train of thought, instead of being a success, may be given the task of refuting the preceding as unfounded, bottomless, and merely imagined.
Words like ‘hit’, ‘touch’ and ‘stumble on…’, combined with the image of a hard bottom, indicate in this context not only that the reality on which thinking is directed and on which it, if it is lucky, encounters, is of a different and harder material than human thoughts, but that this distinction is firstly recognizable, secondly also rewarding and thirdly not to be reclaimed within the uniqueness of a thinking subject, a system or a method.
Thinking exists by the grace of the fact that it is not automatically of one piece with that on which it is directed and that it could consume. Ultimately it cannot ground itself without deifying itself: the bottom or hard truth is the other in relation to thinking. And in that hardness it is superior, just as being awake is in relation to dreaming.
So this is not about a hunter hitting or striking a prey who then takes possession of it, a metaphor often used by Plato and Aristotle, but rather about being stranded on the coast of a strange area that must be carefully explored. What we encounter, find, discover, is always and essentially something different from what we think or make from our soft inner self. It affects us, it also puzzles us, it strikes us with amazement and dumbness. There is a clash between what we already know and what may not fit in with it at first glance and which is nevertheless decisive. That sensation of truth leaps away from the grasp of every method. It is surprising precisely because it cannot be methodically organized. Truth is ultimately not invented and produced, but discovered.
12
Finally, to conclude my frivolous reflections, with my hand already on the doorknob, I would like to take a look at the academic room I am about to leave. It has not escaped my notice that there, in philosophy, a gigantomachy is still raging around the essence, a titanic struggle over the question of whether philosophy, for centuries in its twilight, can still be about anything other than philosophy, whether it is therefore about anything other than its own products and their problematic status. Does it, woven into an academic methodology and ruthlessly stripped of any naive enthusiasm, still refer to a world, or, in terms of the preceding: does it make sense, does anything of the noisy world still penetrate its circuit, if only the fact that this world exists and could itself be the object of reflection? Sometimes I get the impression that the easy triumph of postmodernism in academic circles consists in having done away with every reference to the outside world as a primitive belief. Philosophy pays for its autonomy the price of its content, even when it replaces naive belief with the hope of a soggy consensus and settles for what may be a shared illusion.
When in the preceding years and also in the last hour I have professed my faith in philosophy and especially in metaphysics, I meant first of all to profess my faith in the power of the irreducible and indigestible reality that we cannot invent. Metaphysics as inspiration and as a minimum sparks off against it; as a system and as a maximum it breaks down against it and as a radicalization of wonder it cannot go further than a detour and can last no longer than a delusion.
On October 19th, 1956, Cornelis Verhoeven promoted on his thesis ‘Symbolism of the foot’. In his autobiography he wrote the following about that day:
“I myself had decided not to talk to anyone about my subject, not to ask for advice and to go my own way, like a stubborn autodidact. My very knowledgeable and experienced supervisor, Karel Bellon, encouraged me rather than put on the brakes in a learned, methodical and thoughtful way. After each chapter I sent in, I received a friendly and stimulating letter with an occasional suggestion. On his initiative, a small committee of professors quietly arranged for a subsidy that covered all the costs of the publication.
It was therefore a fine promotion in the autumn of 1956, despite the thousand fears I endured – and against which I had armed myself with a hearty meal and a few glasses of wine -, despite the rather angry objections I heard from Stefan Strasser and which I had to answer somewhat laconically in order not to burst into tears or anger, and the excessively long deliberation of three quarters of an hour that turned out to be necessary after the defence. I stood there, in front of a half-admiring, half-curious audience, biting my tongue a little. I saw my father – to whom I had dedicated my book with a Latin sentence in which I offered him the first fruits of my mind at the age of seventy – shrinking with fear and basking in his proud smile and in the triumphant grin of the president of the seminary who, to my delight, was also there, when finally the promoter, the well-fed Flemish Canon cheeks still red from the learned quarrelling in the senate chamber, beamingly announced that the promotion had been granted cum laude and praised me lavishly for my original work. I had to tell him at some point how I had come up with the idea; what I had suggested at the beginning of my defence about a painful gap in the professional literature on the history of religion, he naturally took with a grain of salt. Later he told me that the argument in the Senate chamber was mainly about the audacity with which I had dared to describe a word derivation from Thomas Aquinas as a ‘helter-skelter etymologic’.”
For those of you interested in the original Dutch manuscript, a PDF version of it is here:
When my little girl said ‘dead’ for the first time, on July 19 1975, she’d only been alive for two years and ten days. She knew roughly what she was talking about. It wasn’t one of those words she’d just repeat to please her verbally geared parents, like ‘cherished pledge’ and ‘utterly nutritious’. She laid still on the floor and declared: ‘Now I am dead’. Even though the seriousness of the declaration was tempered drastically by the circumstance that it was the subject herself who notified us of her premature passing, I was still a little shocked by the use of this particular word. She could have also said ‘Now i’m asleep’.
I thought about the poem by Anton van Duinkerken with the title ‘My little girl said: dead’. That starts with the following stanza:
‘The word that I find hardest to bear,
Double unwelcome from a child’s lips,
Aches my memory as an open wound rips,
Bare for the wind, naked in a gust of rain.’
To the question, where the child has learnt ‘this most bitter notion’, the poet answers that death itself has had to have taught its own name to the stammering child, for her father and her mother have always avoided ‘the dark sound’.
‘She looked at me. Her eyes grew wide
Of a shock that she read somewhere.
And I, who was silently playing with her.
Now know forever: my own child will die.’
The situation and the poem are serious enough to become subject of some deeper attention. The circumstance that the poem wasn’t written by a hen of a mother, who will take any opportunity to brag about her chick, and the fact that 1979 is the year of the child, makes it a bit less difficult for me to overcome the diffidence that the subject evokes, and to forget for a moment the toughness that our masculine culture imposes on fathers.
In the poem something remains unclear that in my daughter’s proclamation is unambiguous. Van Duinkerken doesn’t cite the words of his child, so we don’t know in which sense she used the most bitter notion. I suspect that for her, as was the case for my kids at the time, only the adjective ‘dead’ existed. ‘Death’, as a noun and as a independent operating demon, they don’t know. It remains a dark force in the background, that darkens the life of the father. Instead of ‘to die’, my kids, probably like most kids their age, have said ‘become dead’ for a long time. In as far as I can understand childlike thoughts, ‘death’ must be in the line of ‘sick’ and ‘old’. It is its superlative. Old people are already almost dead and it is a matter of fact for our kids that dad will become dead before mum, and Neeltje before Daniel. That is the simple consequence of a rule of nature that everything that has started sooner, will also end sooner.
In the poem it is Death as a Demon -with a capital- that whispers his name to the child. Therefore the reader gets the impression that the poet’s daughter used the noun. She ‘formed this word herself/ and tightened her childlike forehead’. In the face of so much seriousness the question of noun or adjective is a bit frivolous. So i’ll let it be and concentrate on the last line. My little girl declared ‘now I am dead’ and therefore was already talking about her own death the first time she used the word. Van Duinkerken makes himself into the mediator of this realisation: ‘My own child will die.’ This makes the seriousness much greater and colours it with much more melancholy. In my daughter’s case, and probably also in the case of the Asselbergs’ girl, there was hardly any seriousness involved. Concepts like beginning and end or mortality are at most an interesting background to the motionless laying still that they were practising here. I just hope that toddlers know nothing of death as a force.
Or am I mistaken in that and are we always mistaken when it concerns small children? I can hardly imagine that kids wrestle with issues like death, but on the other side: where do those dark tones come from, and why do we, well balanced adults, become so groundlessly melancholic and overflow with empathy when we see kids engaged in their serious games?I am no longer so sure that ‘becoming dead’ for them is necessarily and always something that happens to others, the ill and the old, and that ‘dead’ is no more than an adjective. Sometimes it seems as though they’ve stared the demon straight in the eyes, and as though this encounter throws a veil of melancholy over their games.
For years i’ve had the habit to write down my kids’ pronunciations when they affect me. In the last few months the word ‘dead’ is quite frequent in their conversations. Grandma has passed, a little friend of two has had an accident, a neighbour has died, two funerals of popes were televised, in short: deaths and funerals have been the order of the day. The mortality of all that lives has become thoroughly apparent. Daniel (22-12-1974) is the most radical in his conclusion. Seeing a photo of the newest pope he mumbles with something like resolute cheerfulness: ‘That is the new pope. That is pope John Paul. This pope now becomes dead: all popes become dead.’ (2-11-’78) No trace of emotion or dismay.Apparently the choice of pope to him was searching for a candidate for death. That is how the powers and the grown ups must arrange things.
The sudden death of grandma affected them more, for grandma was sweet, and then the observation alone won’t do. Still it is wondrous how quickly they get used to a definitive missing. Neeltje (9-7-1973) made a funny drawing for grandpa: ‘well gosh, I just wanted to console him’. And at the quiet graveyard the day after the funeral they are as much at home as they are in the playground. Daniel walks up to cracked old gravestones and calls: ‘Booo, is anybody there?’ and Neeltje wonders if grandma isn’t cold there in the ground. . The share of seriousness in the questions of kids is hard to judge. The protest against death is can almost not be untangled from the playful fantasies about everything that is possible and imaginable.
When little two year old Alberik died, our little girl seemed hurt in her sense of justice. She fantasised about how it would be if she had all the power, and for reasons not entirely clear she called that power ‘church’. ‘I wish I was the boss of the church. Then I would say, that nobody can be buried, but they should just be laid in a casket in someone’s home. I think it’s so sad that Alberik is buried and dead’. (27-1-’79)
She continuously toys with the thought that one of her parents will die. Sometimes that game is fairly ambiguous, especially after a day that wasn’t entirely peaceful and harmonious. ‘When mama is dead, we are allowed to stay up late, because we have suuuch sorrow’. (16-1-79) Another time she was loudly singing:
‘I have a poisoned hat,
and then I ask the thieves,
if they will wear it,
and they immediately drop dead’. (18-2-79)
Fate dictates that sick and old people die, kids want bad people to be handled in the same radical way, and that sweet people live forever. ‘You are sweet, papa, you have to stay alive’, Daniel says in a whispering tone, as though he detected suicidal thoughts in me.
The words that touched me most in this context, also by the tone which with they were spoken more tearful the less lugubrious the content became, I noted from the moth of my little daughter on March the 13th 1979. For me it is a text of some importance, and if it wasn’t so conceited and pedantic, I would dedicate six pages to it.
‘Papa, I think you are so sweet;
when you die, I want to lay with you.
I’ll certainly come to the funeral,
when they bury you, oh certainly.
But I can’t bare the thought of you dying;
it makes me want to sit down and cry.’
To be sure, just this: in three stages she distances herself from my and her own death. From fellow corpse she becomes an important visitor of my funeral and only after that she resolutely discards any thought of death. Only after the great sorrow is behind us, can we think about sitting down and crying. The tone becomes more sentimental the less near death is. On moments like that i’m not so sure how kids differ from adults.
When you look out of the window of your home or monade, you won’t see words there, but things. Those would also be there, we assume, when you’re not looking, or if you weren’t there at all. Perhaps the things can’t miss us, from a certain point of view, but that one person more or less won’t make much of a difference to them. So what we can ask ourselves is: what would that lone watcher see, if he didn’t have words to name the things he sees, and could merely watch speechless without providing them with the fitting label? Can we, talkative as we are, see without labelling? Can we distinguish things without making that distinction explicit in a difference of words? Do we look at the world with a haze of texts, words and names in front of our eyes? The omni-present imagination has a hard time shifting into this situation of merely looking without reading.
Still we have to assume that the majority of our fellow inhabitants of earth watch things this way, without words, or with the background of totally different words, and that they in their own way see the same things. And every human has experienced a time in which this must have been familiar: watching things and experiencing all kinds, without having words for those things and those experiences that inevitably pop up, and without even knowing there are words that are connected to them. At most the voices around them raised the suspicion that one belonged to the other, and that they in turn belonged to the one who spoke these words.
From the moment that we have words available to us ourselves, that early situation seems to be irretrievably erased from our memories, and has become inaccessible to our imagination. For that too is inhabited by words. There is, strangely enough, not a trace remaining of a genesis or the learning process in the self-evident way in which we handle language. That’s why we can’t think it away, or in our imagination leap away from it. Language seems to have always been there, and be omni-present.
Words seem not to tolerate any competitors: where they appear, they displace the original occupants of the soul, amongst whom amazement and wordless perception, so that it will permanently start murmuring with words that slowly take on the density of the things themselves and their representation. What is up there, becomes something that flies, what flies becomes a bird, the bird becomes a finch or a falcon, that one particular finch gets a name, just like that one particular human gets a name. We then see and recognise no longer something that flies or is human, but that particular bird or that particular person: we see their name. The more specific the name is, the more the things coincides with its name and the more its existence becomes self-evident.
Without words the things seem to get orphaned or lose their identity, and even their existence can be doubted: things seem to be what they are called to be, a tree, a bird. And mostly: as words they are not there, in a world outside of us, but here, inside us. What is there, has a name and what doesn’t have a name and doesn’t fit in that schematics of our categories and our verbalisation, is supposed not to be there. Or its existence is seen as not relevant, as long as we haven’t turned it into a concept. In the words we conquer an autonomy that makes the world superfluous, precisely because of its verbal manageability. Language threatens to make the things superfluous.
2
There is an old and stubborn quarrel, whether people can think without language, so not merely silent and without explicitly expressing what they might as well say, but without their heads being full of a verbal murmuring that wants to become words and complete sentences, and prepares to spread itself over the things like a verbal veil behind which the things get magicked away.
In all likelihood we would do well not to think too much of such a wordless thinking, if only because it can’t be the basis of any form of communication. For sure we can’t make of such a thinking the demands we usually make of accurately articulated thoughts in which reality has been trapped as in a network of words, and is involved in the mutual communication. For that articulation is in language and destined to be communal and communicated. And just like nobody has a language of their own, so too nobody has a world of their own. The real world, whatever it may be, is a shared world. And words, maybe only them, make the world shareable and into a communal property.
That is why that articulation is so exposed to verbalism and royally creates the possibility for words without thoughts and without any reference to any reality, therefore words that are pushed along by the dynamics of their own self-evidence and their own order. Within that order and without a support point outside of it, it often turns out you can communicate excellently and reach a consensus. Nobody can point at something that isn’t there, but verbal communication turns out to offer possibilities for which the real existence of the things is not a stipulation.
Whoever starts the discussion about wordless thought can’t lose sight of those possibilities. If indeed words take their meaning from that which they mention, from the things that are present, in the space around us or in the network between us, then there is a reason, for as long as possible, at least as an experiment, to grant priority to the existence of things over words, over thought, and even over the consensus.
Those things we can localise and point out, pinpoint them in the space we all communally see before us, before we can name them. We can only call that pointing ‘language’ if we fully intend to call everything that has to do with communication ‘language’. Then we have to conclude that animals too have a language, and the question of thought outside language shifts to the thoughts of animals and to the way they understand each other in a shared world that isn’t one of words, but for example of shared hearing or watching.
3
There is, even when we’ve long since installed ourselves into language, a situation in which the things demand priority or the last word emphatically, and in which the machine of encompassing and totalising speech turns quiet for a moment. That situation can be guilelessly indicated as ‘wonder’, but it can also manifest itself as bewilderment or annoyance. And once we assume that animals communicate and have a language, there can also be no objection to ascribe to them a sense of wonder.
In that wonder we not only stand still, but we also become speechless and language loses its grip on things. We can then once again say that words fail us and that we are faced with the inexpressible riddle, at the borderline of language; but usually we see people getting very expressive just there. The inexpressible itself has become the source of indomitable eloquence, a zone in which verbalism grows rampant, not hindered by any earthly gravity.
The question is if wonder is pre- or rather extralingual. To answer that question, or even to ask it the right way, we first have to get rid of a persistent habit, forced upon us by the omnipresence of language. Namely that we’ve gotten used, especially in philosophy, to wonder immediately expressing itself in the shape of a question of the how and the why of things. In that question a start is made to repair reality as fast as possible by the verbality of an answer. When we radicalise wonder and truly make it the first principle of philosophy, then perhaps we should distance ourselves from that and keep in mind that wonder in the first place concerns the ‘pure existence’ of things, outside of us and outside of language.
So usually we don’t immediately ask ourselves a question, when we wonder about something. Perhaps formulating a question, on closer inspection, is exceptional and is wonder a situation that can last your whole life. For example, we’re watching a movie about life in the deep sea and turn off the sound, because it doesn’t fit the silence of this world. And it is probably precisely that silence within the scene that robs us of our words and makes us waive them.
The silence of the universe bewildered Pascal and made him speechless: it itself, in its impressive massiveness, was the superior language of reality as a significant given, beyond all arbitrary verbalism. In such a situation of perplexed contemplation there is no need for explanation or some other verbal supplement, because it can only be very meagre in comparison to the spectacle itself, on which it illegitimately parasitises. There is no relationship between the words of an insignificant being on a dust speck in space and the silent endlessness of the universe.
4
That’s only part of the question. It is not sufficient to pose human speech against the fathomless silence of the cosmos and cross it out all too simply in the face of that. We do it more justice by evaluating the worth of the word within the context in which it rings. And this goes specifically about the word in which an explaining thought is expressing itself about the world.
It’s not the how of the world that is the mystery, said Wittgenstein, but the that of the world. That, in all its unimaginability, we can ascertain wordlessly, without torturing ourselves with questions, and it’s likely that many animals can do that too. Their curiosity seems to have the disinterestedness of amazed witnesses and doesn’t always seems to be geared towards acquiring food of the continuation of the species. They too don’t have a full time job with that. Perhaps it is so that we view them as having that job because of our own, learnt allergy for affairs that aren’t self-evident.
With the question why we enter a domain that is much more articulated and specific than the wordless wonder that precedes every language and perhaps remains its backdrop permanently. It is more a rule than an exception ever since Aristotle, that whoever directly identifies speechless wonder and verbal questions and doesn’t allow for any respite between one and the other, whoever too expects an immediate answer after a question, or only allows for questions when the answer is already in sight and the jump across the silence can be dared, they are busy wheeling in the world, diligently verbalising it and gobble it up verbally. At this moment they ought to remember the silence of which Pascal speaks.
5
One thing is for sure: the world outside and up there is wordless, and what speaks volumes about it, it will speak in a language other than ours, a language we don’t immediately understand. There is no continuity between word and world. Animals live in there without problem and are capable of establishing communities that can provide an example to ours in many ways. With our words we involve the things into our world and our intentions in a way that possibly doesn’t do those things justice.
Alongside with our verbality there seems to be the conception that the word is of a higher order, or at least that in the end everything is word or wants to become word. In the word the being of things would evaporate, but on the contrary culminate and reach their final destination. Humans have to be mediators in that process. Everything is about their decisive word. So if the beginning wasn’t a word already, then the last will be a word, the final confirmation of being, from the position of the speaker who has appointed himself to the centre and creator of the world.
There is such a last word for the final ‘yes’ and the definitive confirmation; and something notable is going on with it. It is ‘amen’ and that is Hebrew for ‘certain’ or ‘it is so’. What is notable about it in the first place is that it mostly gets used in a religious context. The word is situated at the border of the human world, at the edge of silence. With this word we not only hand over the things, but also the unilateral naming of them. The question is if this also implies that past that border a form of existence starts that can only be indicated with the term ‘religious’. Not only has the religious apparently still become a terrain of of almost unlimited loquacity, but also does it seem quite premature to for example correlate the silence of the deep sea directly with the higher powers.
In the second place this word renounces every explanatory pretension and every form of verbal appropriation. If you only confirm that the things are there and that they are as they are, you distance yourself from every claim of ownership or influence of them. ‘Amen’ is the final word of an otherwise silent consent, a remaining realisation.
In the third place there is the question if, for the people who pronounce the ‘amen’, that word has any meaning other than that it it comes at the end of words. In its incomprehensibility this word is no longer part of a sequence of words that can be continued undisturbed, but it sooner represents the frayed edge of an area where words still matter. What’s outside of that area, is of a different order; the continuity with the verbal order gets broken, but it would be a mistake to think that reality itself ends there too, or changes character under the influence of our wordlessness.
6
Perhaps what comes after that is of the same order as what was in us before and what is always there outside of us. Possibly all of this verbal activity is just an overconfident and fascinating but destined to fail episode between an original silence and the quiet that comes after a storm of words, which might barely recollect any of it.
The ‘inner conversation’ that people surrender to as a preparation of communicative use of language or as a late, waning echo of it, that too doesn’t self-evidently stand closer to the silent world than to loud and perky speech. Or rather: the inner talk as a preparation and as a dying echo do belong to language in its whole scope, but it doesn’t necessarily reach as far and as wide as the wordless realisation of an enigmatic reality.
“Reality’ in the end is the irreducible and therefore unexplainable fact that the things are there. The realisation of that, the most fundamental and most serious form of thinking, is wordless. Language, including its mumbling practise period or its run-up, and its muttering aftereffects, might just be an island in an ocean of silence. Therefore it seems to me that it’s a depressing mistake to equate language and thought, to let language reach as far as life and to regard the silence as the domain of death and what comes after that.
1. It is a mistake to think that everything that happens is the result of a decision.
2. Insights are to be taken seriously insofar as they are not chosen, but received.
3. The dilemma is a way of thinking that is chosen.
4. It is unique to only children and tyrants to pose dilemmas.
5. The dilemma is the form of thought of violence.
6. Polarization as a mode of thinking that poses dilemmas is tyrannical and violent.
7. Polarization owes its attractiveness to the fact that it organizes a multitude in a way that promises a decisive battle between opposites. In violent thinking, nothing is more attractive than a struggle to the death.
8. Polarization is only possible based on the mythical idea that existence is filled with a battle between two powers, one of which will prevail.
9. The illusion that a final victory is in sight, and that the meaning of life lies in witnessing it, inspires polarization.
10. The task of the mythical element in polarization is to give the artificially formed contradictions completely their own life and thereby increase the credibility of the chosen way of thinking.
11. Polarization can only be presented as a state of extreme emergency, which will be lifted after a final victory.
12. In polarization, what’s really important is not taken into account; the essential cannot become a point of struggle and is therefore not interesting, neither for the combatants nor for the spectators.
13. Polarization tries to bring something into the activity that cannot be conquered with action.
14. The motives for polarization cannot be refuted or combated, but only demythified and demoralized.
15. The participants in the decisive historical competition ushered in by polarization do not know the stakes.
16. The spectators at the match are prepared to honor any victor, regardless of their initial choice.
17. The popularity of football matches promotes the illusion that the match is of fundamental importance in public life.
18. Watching a match reconciles the spectator with his powerlessness and passivity by involving him in the action in a harmless way.
19. Polarization in politics is an effect of the passivity of voters, which reduces them to spectators, while at the same time the opposing parties acquire mythical proportions.
20. Polarization is as popular as it is anti-democratic. It is the ideal preparation for the dictatorship.
21. Politicians tend to play to an audience that just wants to watch a game and has no interest in the stakes.
22. In polarized politics, the terms “left” and “right” refer exclusively to a competitive situation and are therefore meaningless.
23. What is called “clarity in politics” or “showing your colors” or even “consistency of principle” is nothing more than a way to determine competitive positions, promote polarization and make the contest exciting. This propagated clarity contributes to the simplification required for polarization.
24. Spectators at a match want to see blood. Color television was invented to meet this desire.
25. Polarization makes life exciting and thought worthless.
There are probably few people who would be 100% happy to be called ‘good’. Because we often call someone a good person because there is little else to say about him. And strangely enough, this goodness, the absence of all evil, doesn’t have a very favourable meaning. It is pretty much regarded as simpleness. The word ‘simple’ also used to mean: good and innocent and now only means: stupid and unworldly. The world to which the simpleton is alien does not seem to take pure goodness seriously and therefore prefers to give its names an unfavourable meaning. What is not good and bad at the same time, or rather: what, in addition to being good, is not at the same time useful, pleasant, fascinating or admirable, is pushed into a corner by the bad world. Only the ambiguous mixture of good and evil or good and whatever can endure. The pure is not welcome. In the game of the world everything must also contain its own opposite, because each player must take into account all the movements of his opponent. Otherwise he won’t play along and becomes unworldly or silly.
This now also seems to be happening to nonviolence. In everyday language, this name seems to suggest an attitude that ignores the existence of violence. And there is violence, so that attitude is simple, albeit noble and good. Nonviolence is then the noble but unreal attempt to create, in the midst of a world full of violence, an island that is characterized by the absence of the most worldly and is therefore very unworldly.
Now one can of course say that it is not so bad to be unworldly; one can continue to preach noble nonviolence in the face of ridicule. There is something beautiful in that.
But besides the fact that it is difficult to prove that unworldliness is not a bad thing, there is the danger that one will make a virtue out of enduring that ridicule and thus harm the ‘world’ in a stupid way. That does not benefit the world and the purpose of a virtue is precisely that it does benefit the world.
Those who advocate nonviolence should take a different path. They must begin to remove its ‘image’ from the sphere of sterile simplicity. Nonviolence is not at all the same as pure nobility. It is not a denial of violence, but only a refusal to cultivate violence by adopting the rules of the game. It does not coincide with pure goodness.
Nor is violence the only evil in the world. And nonviolence should not be seen as a lack of resources. This is often done based on the belief that violence is a super means. But violence as a means is actually very dubious and nonviolence can be very superior from the point of view of the use of means. There are forms of nonviolence that are far smarter, infinitely more evil, and even incomparably more worldly than the primitive and brutal violence they are opposed to. Nonviolence is the human tool par excellence.
And it is not at all true that violence can only be met with violence. Whoever can answer it more effectively is not simpler than the other who uses violence, but on the contrary much smarter. Nonviolence is always superior to violence. Violence is powerlessness; nonviolence can be power. But nonviolence is not superior – this must be especially emphasized – because it contains a heavier element of ethical nobility, patience and gentleness. I emphasize this not to belittle these virtues and push them away into the corner of simpleness, but to highlight the inherent character of nonviolence by removing from it what a hostile and simple world has wrongly placed on it. Nonviolence is characterized not so much by a noble aversion to violence as by the presence of other and more superior means or, failing that, the refusal to do anything, no matter what. The principle of nonviolence means that we do nothing when we have no means; the principle of violence is that the absence of means is never recognized.
The negative name therefore does not indicate a perhaps noble and very difficult attitude towards violence, but an attitude towards a difficult matter. Seen in this way, nonviolence is a ‘technical’ rather than an ethical matter and in any case it does not owe its ethical superiority to its simpleness, but to the fact that it knows how to use means in a situation where others, in the absence of all means, see reason to engage in violence. Nonviolence is the possession of means or, in their absence, expertly practiced passivity, while violence is the simultaneity of an urge to act and a lack of means. Nonviolence can only come from the ability to analyse a situation, while violence is the unwillingness itself to analyse. It will be clear that the first attitude is far superior. Ultimately, this consideration is not enough to make the better attitude prevail on all fronts, but my intention was only to show that nonviolence has nothing to do with stupidity, and on the other hand, violence has everything.
Conflicts are an attempt that is being made or continued after its failure.
The conflict, as a collision of two worlds that aren’t aware of their incompleteness, is an endless detour to an enforced peace.
Conflicts exist in the perspective of a possible peace. There is no conflict possible between two parties where there is no peace possible.
Conflicts arise and persist on the grounds of their superfluidity; they serve no purpose whatsoever.
The distinction between “cause” and “reason” in explaining the emergence of a conflict only emphasizes its inexplicability; it builds into the explanation a delay that is tantamount to a postponement of the explanation.
Conflicts arise from ignorance of their cause; they not only are there before the warring parties know about it; they also come because the parties don’t know about it.
The moment when a conflict arises cannot be predicted any more than the moment when an accident happens. Predictable conflicts do not arise.
Conflicts are prolonged indefinitely by the illusion that they will be short-lived.
The duration of a conflict is determined by the extent to which the motivation is unclear and can be shifted to other conflict material.
Conflicts are only motivated once they get going; they do not arise from that motivation.
The motivation of a conflict is subordinate to its continuation.
A conflict is a clash between two logical systems; it is about being right; reasoning is an essential component of a conflict.
At each subsequent stage of a conflict, the illusion arises that the conflict only took on realistic forms at a previous stage.
Conflicts are self-perpetuating and find motives in their own history to continue.
The relationship between the severity of a conflict and the size of the conflict material is only established during the conflict.
The motivation for continuing a conflict can also be used to end it.
Each conflict itself provides the material for a later resumption; new material is not necessary.
The escalation of a conflict does not arise from the conflict material, but from the conflict itself, which creates the illusion that the severity is proportional to its shortness.
When a conflict is at its most intense, the cause is forgotten, it no longer is about anything and peace is the most logical solution.
Conflict as a continuation of dialogue, but with other and inferior means, affects the effect and credibility of the better means.
Conflicts don’t solve problems, but force to pose them.
A relationship is more primitive and precarious, the more conflict it takes to become aware of the problems within it.
What the conflict is about, being right, is never made clear by its outcome.
Achieving victory in a conflict means: to force your own being right and to create your own truth.
Peace is the postponement of one’s own being right; peacefulness means being willing to engage in a dialogue without end.
According to the well known Greek saga, Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus and famed around the world for her beauty, was kidnapped by Paris, who had gained the permission and courage for this by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The elopement then became the cause for the Trojan war. For Menelaus and his brother Agememnon gathered a large number of Greek heroes and sailed across the sea to Troy to avenge the injustice. Only after a ten years siege did they manage to take the city by means of a ruse, the well known wooden horse that, filled with soldiers, was brought into the city.
That is a saga, something that’s being told and something to talk about. A large chunk of Greek literature finds it starting point in this saga. But it can also be discussed differently than from a literary point of view, for example critically. Herodotus, a Greek historian from the fifth century before Christ, does this. In his work we find a different reading of the Trojan saga, recorded from the mouths of Egyptian priests. When Paris had kidnapped Helen and wanted to sail away from Greece, an unfavourable wind was blowing which made him end up in Egypt. And the Egyptian king took Helen under his guard, along with the possessions Paris had robbed, so that Aphrodite’s favoured had to sail back to Troy alone. When the Greeks landed there and demanded Helen, the Trojans could rightfully say that she wasn’t there. Of course nobody put any faith in their words and only after the city was conquered did it turn out they had spoken the truth, and that the whole ten year war had been a senseless undertaking. Herodotus, who takes this saga rather seriously, says that this reading strikes him as the most believable. For, as his reasoning goes, if the Troyans really had Helen in their midst, they wouldn’t have been so insane to endure a long and bloody war just to give frivolous Paris the chance to have an adulterous love life. They would have handed over Helen.
This argument does sound convincing. It’s just that, if you are busy anyway looking at this saga critically and trying to learn from it, then you also have to say this: if Helen truly was in Egypt and not in Troy, then the fight was even more senseless. For then, there wouldn’t have been any stakes, not even the protection of the adulterer Paris. We then reach the conclusion that the Trojan war, the most sang about war in history, the first conflict between East and West, either had as its stakes something as frivolous as the love life of cowardly Paris, or nothing at all; with the footnote that, the longer we look at the affair critically, the probability increases that it was about nothing at all, at most that nothing that we can call a ‘miscommunication’.
Ernst Bloch wrote extensively about this allegorical meaning of Helen in Egypt in his colossal work “Das Prinzip Hoffnung”. “There were you are not is where happiness is” says Bloch. Dreams invite to distant journeys and long detours. In every conception there’s an element of hope, that in its own way and despite reality stubbornly remains. Even though Helen is in Egypt she has to be in Troy, for there is where the battle rages. And vice versa: if there’s fighting in Troy, Helen is in Egypt. The dreamt version of Helen beats the real version. I believe that our surprise about this situation gives us all kinds of connections to current events. Helen is once again in Egypt. The stakes of a heroic and what’s even called idealistic battle withdraw themselves again from the possibilities that can be realised by war. In war it always turns out to be about ‘something else’ and in that, war isn’t different from a domestic fight. The effect is in no way related to what the war was meant to achieve. Helen is in Egypt, while they’re fighting about her in Troy.
Only after the war does it turn out to be the same Helen. But when we deduct from the dream vision what the intoxication has added to it, than that same remaining reality has only become more problematic. The problem of why the war started, has become twice as big, and lays the foundation for yet another more violent war which in turns increases the problems. For example: one of the causes of the war in the near East was the large number of Palestinian refugees. That number hasn’t decreased; on the contrary it has increased with thousands of Jordanian refugees. The animosity which brought forth this war has also not gotten smaller: it has, historically speaking, been prolonged by at least one generation. The chance of a new war has only gotten bigger.
To draw from this the conclusion that nothing can be achieved with war, seems to me especially weak and untrue. Some things can indeed be achieved by it. It is an iron law, that war achieves the opposite of what it intended to do. War is an extraordinarily efficient, even an infallible means to, at the costs of unimaginable sacrifices, achieve what we would like to avoid at all costs; it is the only truly efficient way to turn difficult problems into unsolvable problems.
Cornelis Verhoeven 
