The breath is seated by the shining one in the bushel of the part it takes in what is altogether loosed

I amused a few people with my Barth-on-Descartes’-physics post over at CT. In a similar vein, I offer tonight some selections from Anatole France’s “Aristos and Polyphilos on the Language of Metaphysics”, in The Garden of Epicurus. [It's out of print and I can't even find it in the Amazon catalog, but you can get it from Alibris. It's a wonderful book. Well worth getting your hands on.]

Aristos: Good day, Polyphilos. What is your book? You seem plunged over head and ears in its pages.

Polyphilos: It is a Manual of Philosophy, dear Aristos, one of those little works that bring the wisdom of the ages within reach of your hand. It reviews all systems, one by one, from the old Eleatics down to the latest Eclectics, and it ends up with M. Lachelier. First I read the table of contents; then, opening the book in the middle or thereabouts, I lighted on this sentence: The Spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute.

Aristos: Everything indicates that this thought forms part of a serious argument. There would be no sense in considering it as it stands by itself.

Polyphilos: For that reason I paid no attention to what it might mean. I made no attempt to discover how much truth it contained. I devoted myself solely to the verbal form, which is in no wise singular, I doubt not, or out of the common, and which offers to an expert like yourself, I should say, nothing specially precious or rare. All one can say is that it is a metaphysical proposition. And that is what I was thinking and when you came.

Aristos: May I share the reflexions I have unfortunately interrupted?

Polyphilos: I was merely thinking, - thinking how the Metaphysicians, when they make a language for themselves, are like knife-grinders, who, instead of knives and scissors, should put medals and coins to the grindstone, to efface the lettering, date and type. When they have worked away till nothing is visible in their crown-pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: “These pieces have nothing either English, German or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their circulation is extended infinitely.” They are right in speaking thus. By this needy knife-grinder’s activity words are changed from a physical to a metaphysical acceptation. It is obvious what they lose in the process; what they gain by it is not so immediately apparent.

With Montaignean wit, Polyphilos expounds a philosophy of language that is a mixture of empiricist positivism and Nietzschean genealogy.

Polyphilos: Grant me one thing, Aristos, to begin with, viz. That all the words of human speech were in the first instance struck with a material type and that they all represented in their original freshness some sensible image. There is no term which was not primitively the sign of an object belonging to the common stock of shapes and colours, sounds and scents, and all the illusive phenomena whereby our senses are mercilessly cajoled. It was by speaking of the straight road and the tortuous path that our ancestors expressed the first moral ideas. The vocabulary of mankind was framed from sensuous images, and this sensuousness is so bound up with its constitution that it is still to be found even in those words to which common consent has assigned subsequently a vague, spiritual connotation, and even in the technical terms specially concocted by Metaphysicians to express the abstract at its highest possible power of abstraction. Even these cannot escape the fatal Materialism inherent in the vocabulary; they still cling by some rootlet or fibre to the world-old imagery of human speech.

A. J. Ayer says the same in the opening paragraphs of Language, Truth and Logic:

One way of attacking a metaphysician who claimed to have knowledge of a reality which transcended the phenomenal world would be to enquire from what premises his propositions were deduced. Must he not begin, as other men do, with the evidence of his senses? And if so, what valid process of reasoning can possibly lead him to the conception of a transcendent reality? Surely from empirical premises nothing whatsoever concerning the properties, or even the existence, of anything supra-empirical can legitimately be inferred.

Polyphilos puts it less precisely but more pointedly and Frenchly: “The concrete, filed down and extenuated, is still the concrete. We must not commit the blunder some women fall into, who because they are thin, pose as pure, immaterial spirits.” (Ah, what a cutting objection-by-analogy to Descartes’ proposal of pineal humours as a solution to the mind-body interaction problem.)

Eventually Polyphilos returns to the case in point of his ponderously Hegelian sentence, which – as he explains - he will treat with the philological equivalent of the chemical reagents scholars use to decipher palimpsests:

Spirit, God, measure, possess, participate, can all be referred to their Aryan signification; absolute can be broken up into its Latin elements. Now restoring to these words their early and undefaced visage, this (barring errors) is what we get: -

The breath is seated by the shining one in the bushel of the part it takes in what is altogether loosed.

Aristos: Do you suppose, Polyphilos, that any conclusions of importance are to be drawn from this rigamarole?

Polyphilos: There is one at any rate, to wit, that the Metaphysicians construct their systems with the fragments, now all but unrecognizable, of the signs whereby savages once expressed their joys and wants and fears.

Further reflections ensue. I’ll quote the dialogue’s conclusion, which returns us a third time to the sentence in question:

Polyphilos: “The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute.”

What is this if not a collection of little symbols, much worn and defaced, I admit, symbols which have lost their original brilliance and picturesqueness, but which still, by the nature of things, remain symbols? The image is reduced to the schema; but the schema is still the image. And I have been able, without sacrificing fidelity, to substitute one for the other. In this way I have arrived at the following: -

“The breath is seated by the shining one in the bushel of the part it takes in what is altogether loosed (or subtle),” whence we easily get as a next step: “He whose breath is a sign of life, man that is, will find a place (no doubt, after the breath has been exhaled) in the divine fire, source and home of life, and this place will be meted out to him according to the virtue that has been given him (by the demons, I imagine) of sending abroad this warm breath, this little invisible soul, across the free expanse (the blue of the sky, most likely.)”

And now observe, the phrase has acquired quite the ring of some fragment of a Vedic hymn, and smacks of ancient Oriental mythology. I cannot answer for having restored this primitive myth in full accordance with the strict laws governing language. But no matter for that. Enough if we are seen to have found symbols and a myth in a sentence that was essentially symbolical and mythical, inasmuch as it was metaphysical.

I think I have at least made you realize one thing, Aristos, - that any expression of an abstract idea can only be an allegory. By an odd fate, the very metaphysicians who think to escape the world of appearances, are constrained to live perpetually in allegory. A sorry sort of poets, they dim the colours of the ancient fables, and are themselves but gatherers of fables. Their output is mythology, an anaemic mythology without body or blood.

Aristos: Good-bye, dear Polyphilos. I leave you unconvinced. If only you had reasoned by the rules, I could have rebutted your arguments quite easily.

Indeed, Aristos would seem to be quite correct. Continuing the Ayer passage quoted above:

But this objection [that nothing non-empirical can be inferred from anything empirical] would be met by a denial on the part of the metaphysician that his assertions were ultimately based on the evidence of his senses. He would say that he was endowed with a faculty of intellectual intuition which enabled him to know facts that could not be known through sense-experience. And even if it could be shown that he was relying on empirical premises, and that his venture into a non-empirical world was therefore logically unjustified, it would not follow that the assertions which he made concerning this non-empirical world could not be true. For the fact that a conclusion does not follow from its putative premise is not sufficient to show that it is false. Consequently one cannot overthrow a system of transcendent metaphysics merely by criticizing the way in which it comes into being. What is required is rather a criticism of the nature of the actual statements which comprise it.

This is what Polyphilos’ semantic genealogy of the Hegelian sentence is supposed to be: a criticism of its nature rather than a judgment on its truth. (Very like Carnap’s indictment of Heidegger’s “Nothing nothing’s itself.”) But, as with Ayer’s logically positive denunciations of metaphysics, a certain amount of question-begging mars Polyphilos' prosecution.

But there is certainly something very charming (I find) about this diagnosis of abstract ideas as ‘allegory’.

And you should read France's Penguin Island, if you never have.

I think the only well-known philosopher to discuss France's dialogue at length is Derrida, in "The White Mythology" - the title of which is taken from France's figure of an 'aenemic mythology' (I'm not sure what the French is there.) It's easy to see why Derrida, with his Heideggerian and Hegelian fixations, finds this dialogue interesting. But his discussion is, I find, tedious and unrewarding.

The edition of book I have appears to be ©1926. Does that mean it's public domain? I guess I'd need to figure out when the translator died. If it's public domain I might seriously consider typing out the whole dialogue and putting it on the web. Given Derrida's extensive discussion of it, I'm surprised no one has republished it. It deserves to be made available. I'll take France over Ayer any day of the week, and France over Nietzsche once a fortnight.

Comments

[bob mcmanus]

Available in French at Gutenberg

[Des von Bladet]

It's still in print in the Frenchy-French.

[Des von Bladet]

It's still in print in the Frenchy-French.

[Carlos]

Well, *I* thought it was a neat dialogue, although I have been a fan of Anatole France since I found a copy of Spider Robinson's translation of "Our Lady of the Jugglers" in the Brown County Public Library when I was eleven or so. Screw the copyright! unless that would mean the non-empirical being derived from the empirical, of course.