THE
by Beezone
“The article ‘the,’ so small yet grand,
Can turn mere words into a new land.
From concrete to abstract, it takes us far,
Shaping the ‘I,’ the ‘world,’ our guiding star.
In its simplicity, a paradox lies,
A key to worlds seen through different eyes.
With ‘the’ we mark the known, the clear,
Distinguishing thoughts, making ideas appear.
It anchors concepts, gives them form,
In the storm of words, it stands the norm.
Without ‘the,’ our thoughts would blur,
Lost in ambiguity, unsure.
Yet with this word, we find our way,
To abstract realms where ideas play.
But in this clarity, a trick of the mind,
For ‘I’ is a shadow, an illusion we find.
As ‘the’ can also obscure and delude,
Masking the truth in a linguistic shroud.
So we tread lightly, aware of the game,
Knowing ‘the’ can both enlighten and maim.
In its power, we see the duality,
Of shaping reality and obscuring clarity.
So beware of your language and your thought,
For you may fall victim to your smart.”
CHAPTER IO
THE ORIGIN OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
Editors note: Greek words have been replaced with (greek word) due to font limitations.
The linguist who concerns himself with the rise of scientific thinking will have little or no interest in the usefulness of language toward the achievement of scientific insight, or in the objective value and success of scientific terms. More likely he would like to find out what were the elements in ordinary speech which promoted the development of a scientific mentality, and where, in pre-scientific speech, the seeds of that development might be found. He is eager to learn which forms of speech are passed over and eliminated, and what others need to be available so that scientific terms may be forged from them. The linguist, therefore, does not really look at what we might call the objective aspect of his problem, the concrete meaning and the validity of the terms and concepts: that is a field of inquiry which he leaves to the historian of science. For himself, he is interested in language as a vehicle of the human mind, as a tool of the understanding.
Greek is the only language which allows us to trace the true relation between speech and the rise of science; for in no other tongue did the concepts of science grow straight from the body of the language. In Greece, and only in Greece, did theoretic thought emerge without outside influence, and nowhere else was there an autochthonous formation of scientific terms. All other languages are derivative; they have borrowed or translated or got their terms by some other devious route from the Greeks. And it was only with the help of the unique achievement of the Greeks that the other societies were able to progress beyond their own pace of conceptual development.
In Greece, the verbal—and that is to say : the intellectual —seeds of scientific language are of a very ancient date. To take one example: we could scarcely imagine the existence of Greek science or Greek philosophy if there had been no definite article. For how could scientific thought get along without such phrases as to (greek word) (water), to (greek word) (the cold), to (greek word) (thought)? If the definite article had not permitted
the forming of these ‘abstractions’ as we call them, it would have been impossible to develop an abstract concept from an adjective or a verb, or to formulate the universal as a particular. As far as the use of the definite article is concerned, Homer’s speech is already more advanced than the classical Latin of Cicero. Cicero finds it ven difficult to reproduce the simplest philosophical concepts, for no other reason than the lack of an article. To express ideas which to a Greek come easily and naturally, he has to fall back upon circumlocutions: his translation of to (greek word) (the good) is: (greek word) (re vera) bonum est. Before he can attempt to phrase a philosophical concept without the article, he must borrow the content of the thought. His language, that is, becomes the receptacle of an element of meaning whose expression is more than its own unaided capacities will permit. But, conversely, the language itself must contain within it the rudiments of a future evolution towards a higher stage; and that is what we mean by the ‘seeds’ inherent in a language.
The definite article is such a seed for the growth of scientific concepts. Its evolution from the demonstrative pronoun, via the specific article, into the generic article was slow and halting.1 The horse, in Homer, is never the concept of a horse, but always a particular horse. This demonstrative use of the article enables Homer to promote an adjective to the status of a noun, as in the case of the superlative: rdv dpujTov Axcutiv, ‘the best of the Achaeans’. In the same way Homer is free to say: rd r dovra rd t’ €(j(j6pL€va irpd t’ dovra, ‘the present, the future, and the past’. The plural number shows that Homer does not yet ‘abstract’ permanent being, but merely draws together the sum total of all that is now, and distinguishes it from all that will be. Such contrasts occasionally create the impression that Homer had already learnt the generic use of the article: II. 9.320 (greek words), ‘Both the active and the inactive met their doom,’ or Od. 17.218 ^ (greek words), ‘as God always conducts the like to the like.’ But these proverbial idioms still refer strictly to an individual, the d points to a single person, even though it is no longer a finger that does the pointing.
Hesiod also lacks the article characteristic of the later scientific concept. Where we would, with Plato, speak of ‘the just’ (i.c. justice), he says, without the article: (greek word), ‘a just act’ (Works 226); or, if he adds the article, he uses the plural (greek word), ‘the scries of individual just acts’ (Works 217 and 280). In subsequent poetic works the generic article emerges very slowly.2 Tragedy has it from the outset, especially before an adjective used to denote a virtue or a vice; but even Aeschylus does not yet employ it with abstractions.3
While poetry thus maintained a rather reserved stand towards the generic article, in literary prose the generic use of the article was a solidly entrenched fixture from the very beginning. In the day of Aeschylus, Heraclitus speaks of the act of thinking (112; 113), the universal (2; 114) and the logos (50). If we compare him with Plato his use of the article is still somewhat sparing.4 His philosophical thought is, however, entirely dependent upon the generic function of the article; the waxing power of the article is a prerequisite of his abstractions. The article is capable of making a substantive out of an adjective or a verb; and these substantivations, in the field of philosophy and science, serve as the stable objects of our thinking. But the substantives formed in this way do not refer to the same order of things as ordinary concrete nouns; ordinary material things are not the same as the objects of thought created by these substantivations. Neither our term ‘substantive’ nor the Latin label, originally taken from the Greek, nomen, ‘name’, describes their true nature. Apparently there are three different types of substantive: the proper noun, the concrete noun, and the abstract noun. The proper noun describes only one individual item, and it is, therefore, a closed unit. The concrete noun is quite another matter; it contains within itself a principle of order and arrangement, and this is where we must look for the seed of scientific subsumption and classification. The designation by a concrete noun is the first step on the road to knowledge. The proper noun never produces knowledge, since its object is always one and the same thing which can never be known or understood but only recognized, once it has been seen. To say: ‘This is a table’ and: ‘This is Socrates’ is to make two entirely different types of statement. The proper noun is merely a signpost calling attention to an isolated point; its function is to enable us to affirm something about an individual, e.g.: ‘Socrates has protruding eyes.’ The concrete noun, by way of contrast, has a generic significance; if I want to refer to a single item, I need to emphasize this by means of a pronoun, by the specific article, or some similar device.5
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Editors Note: Snell’is pointing out that language itself shaped the Greek capacity for philosophy.
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The article was not just grammar—it was a cognitive tool.
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By allowing abstract substantives to exist, it provided the “furniture” for philosophical thought.
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Plato’s world of Forms would have been impossible without this linguistic development.
Greek philosophy was born out of a grammatical innovation—the ability of the article (“the”) to transform qualities and actions into “things.” This shift allowed thinkers to treat abstract ideas (justice, beauty, thought) as if they were stable objects, paving the way for science and philosophy.
In primitive speech many things were regarded as persons and given a proper name, as for instance the famous sword which was called Excalibur. But it would be incorrect to conclude that the proper noun was the earliest type of substantive. We should rather say that the proper noun and the concrete noun are both forms belonging to the rudimentary stratum of speech, to designate the physical phenomena of the world surrounding man. But the competence of substantives extends beyond the realm of the physical. Abstractions, such as ‘the universal’, ‘the act of thinking’, are neither proper nouns, for they do not refer to a unique or personal object, nor do they, like the concrete noun, comprise a number of concrete objects. The abstract noun is as independent a form of the substantive as the concrete or the proper noun, but it is not as old or indeed as basic as the other two, for it owes its origin to the development of thought, and only reaches completion with the generic definite article.
There are, of course, even in the earliest layers of speech some seeds of abstractions, nouns which differ somewhat from concrete nouns or names. Many words which were later regarded as abstracts began their career as mythical names. In Homer, e.g., fear appears as a demon, as the Frightener, the Phobos.6 The extent to which these words were understood as names, even after their mythic connotation had long worn off, is evident from the use of the article. Aeschylus, for one, does not use the article in combination with substantives of the type which Ammann calls mono- semantica, i.e. those nouns which, like proper nouns, describe something existing only once, as (greek word), (greek word): earth, sun, heaven, and moon ; or which refer to objects of which the speaker knows only one example: (greek words) : house, city, father, mother.7 Nor does Aeschylus attach the article to abstract nouns. Lessing once observed that in the language of the German 17th century poet Logau the abstract nouns were, by the omission of the article, given the status of persons. He thought that this was a poetic artifice; in reality the presentation of abstracts as proper nouns had once been the general practice. Another seed from which the abstract noun developed was the reference to parts of the body where their activities or functions were intended. The statement: He has a good head on his shoulders’ does not apply to the head as a thing, but to its capacity. In rational speech we would employ an abstract noun: ‘He has a good intellect’, instead of the functional ‘metaphor’ (cf. above, ch. 1).
Editors note:
Snell’s showing how abstract nouns were born in myth and metaphor:
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Mythic names (Fear as a demon, Justice as a goddess, etc.).
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Body part functions (head → intellect, heart → courage, etc.).
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Only later did language develop the tools (especially the article) to treat these as general, abstract concepts.
This explains why Aeschylus (still close to mythic language) didn’t use the article with abstracts—because for him, they weren’t “concepts” yet, but more like names.
Abstract nouns like “fear” or “intellect” didn’t begin as neutral concepts. In early Greek (and many languages), they were treated as names of beings (Phobos = the demon of fear) or as bodily functions (“a good head” = intelligence). Only gradually, with the help of grammar (like the article), did these turn into proper abstract concepts usable in philosophy and science.
These two ancestors of the abstract noun, the mythical name, and the figurative use of a concrete noun, have as their special area of reference the non-physical—alive, animate, intellectual, dynamic—which ordinarily is not within the reach of the proper or the concrete noun. Both the metaphor and the personification necessarily put an anthropomorphic, or physiognomic, interpretation on the non-physical, i.e. they present it as a product, or an embodiment, of animate reality. Natural science is, however, possible only where the physical is unequivocally distinguished from the nonphysical, where a rigid line is drawn between the moved and the mover, between matter and force, thing and property. These distinctions cannot be effected until a reliable and unmistakable method of describing non-physical facts is discovered; and for this, the substantivation of the verb or the adjective is the sine qua non. Thus the abstractions of Heraclitus are the prerequisites of scientific thought; that Heraclitus himself did not steer his course toward the sciences, that, on the contrary, he desired to grasp that broader and more vital area which includes both the physical and the non-physical universe, does not upset our argument.
In these substantivations the definite article discharges three functions. First, it delimits and defines the nonconcrete. Second, it promotes it to the status of a universal. And third, it re-defines and individualizes this universal so that we may make statements about it. Without exaggerating we might, therefore, say that the generic definite article endows the substantive all at once with the qualities of an abstract, a concrete, and a proper noun. This will become even clearer when we come to examine the way in which the article helped the concrete noun to attain the character of a universal concept. (editors emphasis)
The demonstrative pronoun from which the article originated confines the concrete noun to the area proper to a name; hie or ille leo is an individual lion. In a language which has no article, as in Latin, the concrete noun by itself has either a specific or a general force; either: (greek words), ‘the (or: a) lion attacked him’, or: (greek word), ‘this is a lion’. The formation of the article becomes necessary when the general idea implicit in the concrete noun begins to get the upper hand, and it is felt that the description of a specific individual would require the addition of a specifying agent. As the concrete noun reveals its general character, it becomes more and more apparent that, as the description of a class, it is actually a predicate: (greek words), ‘this is (a) lion’. This is particularly evident in Greek, because the predicate noun never carries the article. The single lion, to which I refer by adding the article, is the object of a statement: ‘The lion is old’. Like a name, the concrete noun preceded by the definite article specifies a particular object which is lion. Now the generic article has this function that it makes this original statement the object of a new statement. The lion, as a scientific concept, comprises the sum total of everything that is lion. Thus a new object is posited. ‘ The lion’ differs from ‘the lions’ or simply ‘lions’ in that its existence extends beyond the empirical concrete race of lions, and that, in spite of the singular, it comprehends all known or knowable lions. Thus if Cicero translates ‘the good’ as: (greek words), his procedure, though awkward and circuitous, merely reproduces the more direct function of the Greek generic article; the predicate (. .. bonum est) is so transformed (greek word . . .) that new predications of it are made possible. Only Cicero has to see to it, by adding re vera or some similar adjunct, that we do not take his good for an individual good. The universal character of the concept is, therefore, already latent in the concrete noun; that is proved by the fact that the latter may be used as a predicate noun. But this does not yet make it an abstraction. In the statement: hie leo est the word leo could hardly be said to have an abstract significance. The abstraction is brought about by re-defining the universal through the medium of the article and its demonstrive force, by giving it the quality of a name (‘this animal is called lion’), and thus making it into an object of thought. The general concept, we may conclude, absorbs characteristic features of all three types of noun—proper, concrete, and abstract—; we may go so far as to say that rational thought, or logic, is the product of a combination of all three; that is why its nature is so hard to define.
The abstract nouns which owe their existence to the substantivation of adjectives and verbs manifest this transformation of a statement into the object of a statement in just the same way as the more original substantives. That the good is that which is good we may learn from Cicero’s translation; the verb, of course, as always has its proper place in the predicate. Actually the seeds of these substantivations are already apparent in primitive speech, even before the generic article is added to complete the process of abstraction. Prior to recognizing an object as such, I perceive only its property; I say: ‘There is blue’ or: ‘There is something blue’. This is to say, if the fact that I am dealing with a concrete thing is not yet clear to me, I may use the term for a property as a substitute for the noun denoting the object. This substantivation of an adjective is a simple matter because the adjective, at least originally in the Indo-European languages, is inflected like a noun. In fact, the dividing line between noun and adjective is very tenuous.
The germ of the substantivation of the verb is to be looked for in the so-called nominal forms of the verb, the infinitive and the participles. They set the limits for verbal substantivation. It I say: ‘He catches (greift)’ and then ask: ‘What is the meaning of “catching (greifen)”? the answer might be: ‘ “Catching (das Greiferi)” is an operation of the hands? Thus the first step toward the formation of an abstraction is made by using the infinitive (in English, the gerund) in the position of predicate noun, to denote a universal. The next step is to add the definite article to the infinitive which is, in turn, transformed into the object of a statement; and this allows for an even more general term, ‘operation’, to be used as the predicate, which may then be further defined by reference to a specific differentia, ‘hands’. The scheme of definition by species and genus with which we are acquainted from the animal kingdom evidently has its place in this context too.
The active participle furnishes a succinct designation of an organ or its function. The hand as the organ of grasping is ‘the grasping one {die Greifendef, the foot of the lamp is ‘the standing one (das Stehendef, the soul is ‘the thinking one (das Denkendef or ‘the moving one (das Bewegende}’. The passive participle describes the result of an action, and its importance for the formation of abstract nouns lies chiefly in the province of the intellect, where the result, i.e. the thought, has no existence outside of the action, i.e. separate from the thinking (cf. above, Introduction).
Apart from the infinitive and the participles, which are part of the conjugational system, there are other nominal derivations from the verb, the derivative nouns, whose significance is, however, practically coextensive with that of the verb forms proper. The so-called nomina agentis, such as ‘grasper’, ‘thinker’ etc. have the same meaning as the active participles; the nomina acti such as (greek word),a ‘speech’, and (greek word) that which is learned’ may be reproduced by passive participles; and the nomina actionis: (greek word) ‘action’, and (greek word) ‘moderation’ are equivalent to the active infinitives.
In the area of thought and knowledge, action and result are at times linked in a peculiar combination. Those nouns which arc derived from verbs occasionally denote, at one and the same time, an organ, its function, and its effect. Nous is the image-making mind, but it is also the act of image-making, and finally it is the individual image, the thought (cf. above, ch. i). Gnome is the understanding mind, it is the act of understanding, and the particular result of the understanding, i.e. the knowledge gained.9 True, as speech became developed philosophically it made for finer distinctions, and finally abstracts, such as noesis and gnosis, were formed to label these mental activities more precisely. Beginning in the fifth century, verbal nouns ending in -sis emerge into prominence, to furnish a more accurate concept of an action. In the course of that century, the immense delight taken in these distinct formulations propagated a multitude of abstracts ending in -sis. It became the vogue to paraphrase original verbs by means of the substantives; in Thucydides, for instance, we find (greek word) instead of the simpler (greek word). This is the same kind of development which has made the expression: ‘To issue a proclamation’ more popular than the briefer: ‘To proclaim’. The pregnant vitality of the verb is given up in favour of conceptual clarity, and thus a trend whose seeds had existed in primitive speech comes to its full conclusion. The evolution was slow and complex; in the course of it, the verb and the noun were blended into one, and the three basic forms of the noun—name, concrete, and abstract noun—were themselves, as we have shown, poured into the same mould. The new product which the crucible gave forth was the rational, the concept. It needs only to be added that, as regards the history of language, the noun conquered more and more territory, as Herder and Humboldt have already shown.10
A similar combination of elements went into the making of the abstract conception of the human mind or spirit, as it was prepared by the lyrists and brought to fruition by Heraclitus. The latter regards it as the crucial trait of the mind that it is a ‘common’ thing, that it ‘passes through everything’, and that it ‘increases itself’ (cf. above, ch. 1). This means that the mind, which was at first looked upon as an organ, i.e. as a concrete object, was now fitted out with attributes which belong to the domain of the adjective or the verb. For it is obviously true of a property that it may be shared by various objects and that it may ‘pass’ through a variety of things, while spontaneity and self-increase are notions which must be associated with the verb. Tragedy, in the end, acquaints us with a notion of the soul as ‘the acting’ or ‘the moving’ thing: the very formulation gives away the origin of the idea, namely the verb. Evidently, therefore, even the nature of the soul cannot be understood except within the framework of the linguistic categories we have been discussing.
It would be an error to suppose that the rational, i.e. the logical expression of thought, is a foreign intruder who pressured his way into language; for it has no home outside language either. We may say, however, that all ways of specifically describing the rational in speech were only gradually explored and opened up. The rational potential contained in the predicate function of the concrete noun had to be brought to the surface by the article whose function it is to particularize a universal; precisely in the same way all other manifestations of the rational had to be revealed to the consciousness by some discovery. At first the rational is merely understood, it has no linguistic categories of its own, and is never witnessed in isolation. By taking up the challenge of further understanding that which is already, i.e. tacitly, understood, the intellect acquires the surprising capacity of retracing its track to itself: the discovery of the mind is at the same time the re-discovery of the mind by itself. In the phrase: ‘This is a lion’ the rational nexus is implied by the word is-, the copula ‘to be’ answers to the logical problem of how the particular and the universal are to be connected. Going back even further, hie leo, o&ros Aecov, is understood even without the addition of an is. But in this case we encounter a development of linguistic seeds occurring at the Indo-European level; for already in pre-Greek times a verb which signified ‘to be available’, ‘to exist’, was also used as a copula. Thus, something that was understood without being expressed came to be regarded under the aspect of existence. This made possible the Parmenidean identification of that which is with that which is thought, an identification which depends on our interpreting the is in ‘this is a lion’ as exists. And this, in its turn, raised the difficult question what kind of existence may be ascribed to that which is thought, to the universal.
Just as the logical connexion between subject and predicate was at first not specifically set forth, so also the causal connexion between the different parts of speech found, to begin with, no explicit expression. The causal prepositions —8td, per, through—originated from terms which designated relations of time and space. These terms contained a causal connotation, but it was at first not brought out as such. Similarly, the causal conjunctions—on, quod, because—are either based on temporal or local notions, or they start out from the purely pronominal associations of two thoughts, i.e. from a mere grammatical co-ordination, whose logical component was only slowly disentangled.
These modes of connecting parts of speech—the copula linking subject and predicate noun, prepositions linking parts of sentences, and conjunctions linking sentences—are the prerequisites of all logical thought. All of them are the product of that strange threefold development which we have already discussed. At first the logical element is merely understood from the context; as a second step, certain words which had at first had a different function came to represent the latent logic; and finally this logic, now overtly expressed, becomes an object of reflexion. But within our thought processes, inevitably tied as they are to the spoken language, the logical relations always remain somewhat mysterious and, in the last analysis, inconceivable. For the simple process of connecting two units with each other is no more at home within the materials of speech than it is to be found beyond its confines; the earliest significant words always refer to something specific, to a particular semantic unit.
Since this logic is a matter of connecting and relating, it is a basic requirement for all rational thought and speech, for the whole of philosophy and all branches of science, regardless of their particular subjects. All thought draws its contents from nouns, verbs, and adjectives; but the mode of the thought, or the type of a science, is determined by the grammatical categories which are employed in the manipulation of the words.
This is especially true in the strict natural sciences, or science par excellence. It is, first of all, concerned with the material things whose nature it wants to explain. Thales says: the origin and nature of things is water. With this he follows up a suggestion of Homer who had declared that Ocean is the origin of the gods (II. 14.201). Only Thales uses a concrete noun in the place of a mythical name. Once before, by Hesiod, an attempt had been made to bring order into the phenomena of the world by including all gods and demons in a genealogical system. But even that attempt to see the world as a systematically arranged pattern had been confined to the use of mythical names. Now Thales transcends beyond the pale of individual things by postulating a common substance in them all. These references to a substance, so very important in early thought, continue to exert their influence in all subsequent speculations of Greek natural philosophy. Earth, water, air and fire are given the position of ‘elements’. But soon they begin to lose their concrete character, for they are equated with specific qualities, with the dry and the moist, the cold and the warm. We need only point to medicine to demonstrate the authority with which this doctrine of the elements asserted itself; but it cannot be claimed that it alone sufficed to produce the sciences proper. Anaximenes’ statements concerning the rarefication and densification of matter bring us much closer to the threshold of scientific thought; the changing degrees of density, i.e. the variability of any one property, serves to distinguish one substance from another; the difference between things is explained by the differences within a quality. But it is not until we come to Democritus that we find a satisfactory exposition of scientific thought, how it deals with the adjectival properties, and how it arrives at its special perspective and terminology.
That which goes, by and large, under the name of property, i.e. the aspect which an object presents to our attention, which affects our sensations as colour or sound, as temperature or taste, and whose impact derives from a polarity within it: this property is too vital a thing, too Heraclitean, as it were, to provide the material for precise scientific judgments. Its impression upon us is fluid and flexible, depending, as Democritus himself says (B 9), upon the condition in which our bodies happen to be. Colour, sweetness, and bitterness exist only as functions of the nomos; objectively speaking, there are only atoms and the void (B 125). Thus he ‘throws the qualities overboard ’ (Diog. Laert. 9.72), or rather reduces them to the forms of atoms, in order to leave dim perception behind and advance to true knowledge (B n). To Democritus, therefore, what appear to be properties are in reality nothing but a variety of ideai, of forms, as he sometimes calls his atoms, arranged in different geometrical positions (B 141; cf. Aristotle Metaph. 1.4.985 b 14 ff. = 67 A 6 Diels). The only properties which may be said to exist in actuality are those which can be expressed in terms of space or numbers: large, round, small, parallel, many, few and so forth.
This principle which Democritus was the first to pronounce is well known to us from the modern sciences; sensory perception is eliminated in favour of mathematical measurement. The shadings of a sensation are reduced to the quantitative units of a property, and the variations within a property are brought into relation to a graded system of measurement: thermometer, musical scale, spectrum. Beyond the measuring of distances, of weights and of time the Greeks cannot well be said to have progressed. Only in one direction did they probe further. The Pythagoreans equated the level of musical pitch with the length of a chord. But the Greeks were not interested in observing the infinite transitions within chord and pitch; they were content to record the constant relations responsible for the harmonies, and to use figures—and this is true of all their measurements —as integer numbers. And so this is not very far removed from the axiom of Democritus, that all variations within a quality are based upon the difference between concrete unchangeable shapes. Without entering upon the intricate problem of the ancient concept of number11 we may safely say that the Greeks had a predilection for explaining qualities in terms of spatial shapes because the latter seemed to them especially suited to represent objective reality. Basically this is the same scientific approach as we find in the modern sciences: the reduction of sense impressions to a mathematically intelligible form. The unscientific metaphysics of Heraclitus, when confronted with the contradictions of sensation, had taken the opposite stand and actually asserted their validity as an integral part of man’s experience.12
But we have not yet exhausted the categories of the adjective. Apart from the adjectives of sensation, and those of form, quantity and size, there is a third group consisting of the adjectives of evaluation. The former two groups form the point of departure for the scientific thought of Democritus and the philosophy of Heraclitus; adjectives such as ‘fair’, ‘good’, ‘just’ lead us to the problems of Socrates and Plato. The peculiarity of these adjectives is this that they imply a teleological movement toward a single objective. The property which they denote does not lie somewhere between two opposite poles, nor is it to be located along the scale of a progressive comparison. In this case, plurality appears as a gradual defection from the one, the true being. Even in ordinary language the contrast between ‘fair’ and ‘ugly’ is not parallel to that between ‘warm’ and ‘cold’; one of the two opposites, namely ‘fair’, has the distinction of serving as the norm, whereas ‘ugly’ merely answers to everything that fails to satisfy the test of ‘fairness’. These teleological adjectives are no more accommodating to the system of scientific concepts than the ‘vital’ adjectives, for teleological principles are ever at war with the exact sciences. Science eliminates them from the phenomenal world, just as it dismisses the moral element from its consideration of man. Any consistent materialist should have to set down the measurable good, i.e. profit, as his goal of action. But Democritus did not choose this road; he turned off into another domain, that of psychology, wThich was related neither to the sciences nor to ethics proper. He equates the good with pleasure. Plato also regarded the achievement of the good as attended by happiness, but there is no doubt whatever that in his case happiness stands under the control of ethical ideas. Democritus, conversely, bases the good upon that which is pleasant to the senses, or, according to our subdivision, upon an adjectival factor in the realm of sensation. While Plato’s good is a goal which always lies just beyond the present horizon of possibilities, the view of Democritus is the opposite (B 191): ‘Direct your mind to what is possible, and find satisfaction in the present.’ Nor does he content himself with mere sensation. Whereas Heraclitus identified life as the tension between two strong poles of contrast, Democritus says—and we need not doubt that this is pointed against Heraclitus (B 191): ‘Men attain good cheer through moderation in pleasure and a life well measured. Want and excess cause a metastasis and produce great disturbances in the soul. The soul which moves between distant points is neither stable nor cheerful.’ Thus he seeks happiness through a levelling of the polar tension; he describes the processes of the soul as motions or fluctuations, and emphasizes their measuring. His model for the life of the soul is obviously taken from the realm of physical nature, and in this he differs immensely from Heraclitus and Plato, even though they too speak of the motions of the soul, and the measure of life.
Democritus initiated the view that pleasure is amenable to a calculus, that it is based upon mechanical motion, or the lack of such. In this manner he arrives at a purely psychological conception of the sensations, and of ethics. His famous ethical tenets deal with matters of moral psychology, a field in which he has much to say that is new and good: concerning the relation between virtue and the will (62; 89; 79; 257), concerning the conscience (297), modesty (84; 244; 264), repentance (43) and duty (256). But on no occasion does he make an effort, as Socrates and Plato did, to define the good as a goal, or to interpret justice metaphysically as the norm of life, in the manner of Heraclitus. As a psychologist, he trains his sights upon the positive or negative moral sensations, and thus transfers the complex of ethics into a sphere more acceptable to scientific thinking.
Plato is interested chiefly in action, Heraclitus in the soul which is neither active nor in a state of physical motion but alive and ‘changing’ by virtue of the opposites. Democritus seizes upon the fact of motion, not only in the province of psychology, but even in his contemplation of nature. For according to scientific thought the concrete world whose description relies on the use of verbs is in motion.
This means, first of all, that Democritus understands the verb-aspect of the world as passive rather than active. For, in the view of Democritus, motion is not an act of moving, but the being moved. Since the first whirl of diverse forms was separated from the whole (B 167), all motion has proceeded in accord with necessity: the atoms are ‘flung about’ in the void (A 58). To conceive all motion passively is tantamount to placing causality at the top of the system: every motion must have its cause. True, in the living organism Democritus postulates soul atoms which actively produce a movement; but that exception is evidently a vestige of mythology and figurative speech. Aristotle draws the logical conclusion of this by distinguishing the intellect from the body as the mover from the moved. The result is that in natural science neither the acting I nor the intelligible youy but only the concrete it has its proper place. In ordinary speech the verb may appear in one of several voices, and in various persons; Democritus knows only one voice of the verb, the passive, and only one person, the third.
It would be possible to show further that natural science allows only one tense. For it is obvious that we can know empirically only what has happened, i.e. past facts, even if those known facts are then transposed into the philosophical present of the nunc et semper. But the Greek language has its special rules; in Greek, as is well known, the verb is divided not so much into tenses as rather into aspects of action. This is to say, the actions are, on the basis of the sense impressions they create, partitioned into modes which bear no resemblance to the tenses of our conjugation. In Greek an action is described either as a static condition—the present expresses this aspect—or as an event—the aorist has this function— or as a result—which is put into the perfect. Thus an action is either a durative state: ‘He walks’ then equals: ‘He is walking ’, a statement in which the activity or the actual motion finds only a minimum of expression. Or an action is a punctive event: ‘He steps’; here the activity is prominently expressed, but concentrated in one point. Or again it is nothing but the prior condition of a result: ‘He has arrived’. Thus the Greek verb lacks the dynamic obscurity which distinguishes our own usage when we say: ‘He walks’; for to our minds the latter expression conveys both a duration and a perpetual renewal of the event. The Greek verb, much better than its English equivalent, succeeds in presenting a clear, transparent picture of the action as it impinges upon the senses.
What effects, we are now ready to ask, did these modes of action exercise upon the role of motion in the natural sciences? Democritus considers motion the result of a motion which once occurred; thus his aspect is that of the perfect. This view, however, fails to grasp motion as such. On the other hand, Heraclitus comprehends motion through the symbol of tension and wave, thus reducing it to the order of phenomena which even in our modern science represent the ne plus ultra. But these fail to resolve the physical problem of motion; for tension is of the present: a body held in tension is no less at rest than the arrow in Zeno’s paradox. As for the image of the wave, Heraclitus picked it to express the fact of a never-ending supply of fresh impulses. But this merely breaks an action up into a series of individual events, like the running of Achilles which, in that other paradox of Zeno’s, falls apart into separate units of action.
Even Aristotle does not yet understand motion in its dynamic nature. In classifying it, he first distinguishes genesis and destruction; but he adds that these are not really motion, since they originate from not-being and again end up in not-being. We agree that this concept would clash with the principles of science,13 even though the idea of becoming and passing away is very much a part of life and sensation; that is why Heraclitus makes so much of it.
When he comes to his examination of motion proper^ Aristotle distinguishes three types: quantitative increase and decrease, qualitative change, and finally phora, locomotion (Phys. 8. 7). Of these, quantitative and qualitative change do not lend themselves to an exact definition. But we need not enter upon a thorough study of the vexed problems involved in this theory of motion, to realize that Aristotle is here erecting a system of physics which deals only with ‘magnitudes and motion and time’. Aristotle has an extraordinarily clear understanding of the nature and limitations of the natural sciences (cf., e.g., Phys. 3.4). But he deviates from the modern concept of motion when he sets up his definition: he defines it as a permutation from one being into another being (Phys. 5.1). In this formulation the stages prior to and after the motion are fixed as finite magnitudes; motion is merely that which occurs between these two points. This does not, however, tell us anything about that intermediate occurrence. To bridge the distance between the two points, Aristotle introduces the concept of entelechy: motion is the actualization of a possibility. Thus the movable becomes a prerequisite for motion. To explain this, Aristotle refers back to the province of teleological objects, from which Plato also had drawn his paradigms for all things: the process of building is the buildable and the energeia of the buildable qua buildable (Phys. 3.1.201 a 30 ff. and 201 b 7 ff.). We would prefer to define the buildable in terms of the act of building, rather than vice versa. But Aristotle’s formulation enables him to reduce motion to a being at rest; the consequence is, of course, that he does not really penetrate to the dynamic process, the actual course of the motion. His interpretation takes its cue from human action. A man finds himself faced with a variety of possibilities, only one of which can in the end attain realization. The real action is involved in the man’s concentration upon that one possibility, in his choice —this, incidentally, would correspond to the aorist aspect of the verb; after that, the change itself is regarded as nothing more than a state of being.
The Greeks, then, failed to recognize the irrationality of motion. Only Zeno came close to it, but he deduced from the irrationality of what he had found that there could be no motion. We must conclude that they lacked a genuine concept of motion. And thus it need not surprise us that they proposed no laws of motion, except perhaps in terms of simple periods.
Of all the subjects which to-day are comprised under the heading of physics, only mechanics and optics achieved a measure of importance in Greek science ;14 at most we might add the field of acoustics which was the special preserve of the Pythagoreans. In these spheres of inquiry, the objective was to trace only the constant, static relations. In acoustics the Greek scientists discovered the correspondence between the pitch of a note and the length of the chord. They did not, on the other hand, progress to a calculation of pitch on the basis of vibrations, even though an attempt was made to connect sounds with underlying motions.16 In the field of optics the Greeks did not pass beyond a geometry of light rays; and their scientific mechanics did not develop beyond statics.
What we have seen to be true for the substantive and the adjective, has now been shown to hold for the verb as well. The formulation of scientific concepts and technical terms is restricted to the limits set by speech, and this means that it was geared to the level of development which the Greek language had reached. It also means that the choice of terms and concepts was determined by the amount of forms available in the language. All this is, of course, intelligible only if the forms available in a language are already stamped from the very first with particular meanings, i.e. if on the strength of their latent content they channel the beginnings of scientific thought in a particular direction. Thus the formation of a body of scientific concepts does not emerge ex nihilo. Not that they were already contained in pre-scientific speech, or that no labour was required to draw them forth. The real achievement, one that was great and difficult, consisted in the isolation and the furthering of these seeds, as we have called them, and this was impossible without a hard struggle against the other, the unscientific potentialities of early speech. Even the limitations of the Greek tongue, such as are evident in the Greek concept of number or in the aspects of the verb, prove that all forms of speech are meaningful in their own way; they contain a semantic potential which points the way for the hammering out of concepts, but which needs the struggling assistance of thought to emerge into the pure air of knowledge. Speech harbours the seeds of the structure of the human intellect; the growth of human language, and finally the effort of philosophical thinking are necessary to allow that structure to unfold itself fully. The whole edifice of grammar, at least of Indo-European grammar, is organically divided into three parts, and it is this division which conditions the ways of philosophy. For it is responsible for the three genres of poetry: epic, lyric, and drama, which may justly be considered the foundations upon which the three basic categories of philosophy were erected.18
The thought of natural science represents only one of the categories with which our speech operates. But its development in human thought has been so purposeful that no other body of concepts, no other terminology has removed itself equally far from the expressions of ordinary language. The Greek tongue is, probably, the only medium in which it can be shown how those concepts grew forth from the soil of speech, and how a good many roots still keep them anchored in that soil. For the Greeks were the first, in the province of natural science, to release the logos from language. The same is, however, also true of the other two categories of thinking. Perhaps, therefore, the Greek language will some day enable us to find an answer to the question how philosophy may combine the three separate forms of thinking, and thus regain that ancient unity which naive speech, with its indiscriminate manipulation of the various categories, has never ceased to possess.
CHAPTER 10
THE ORIGIN OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
1. Cf. Kuehner-Gerth, Grammatik der griechischen Sprache vol 1, pp. 575 ff. where
a wealth of material is collected. Also Arnold Svensson, in Eranos 44 (1946) 249-65.
2. E. Lobel, AAKAIOY MEAH LXXIV ff. suggested that the generic use of the ©
article was already known to the Lesbian poets; H. Fraenkel, Goett. Gel. Anz. 1928,
276.1 has shown that this is not true of the article before the noun, but it is equally
untrue of the article preceding an adjective used as a noun. There also the article
specifies a particular thing.
3. For the role of the mythical name-as representing an abstraction, cf. below.
4. In fr. 126, for instance, t& yuypc Sépetor, eoudv wHyeta still betrays a ‘Hesiodic” ©
outlook: ‘All cold things become warm, warm (matter) cools off.’
5. A more detailed discussion of this follows below.
6. For the whole problem, cf. H. Usener, Goetternamen, esp. pp. 364 ff. Since oéfos
is akin to 9é6fn, the former was probably, as E. Kapp has suggested, at first the ‘hair
standing-on-end’, or, as a demon, the ‘hair-raiser’.
4. Cf. the data collected in Dindorf’s Lexicon Aeschyleum 235 A. which are, however,
neither complete nor systematic.
8. (In the following two paragraphs, I have attempted to convey the purport of the
argument by adding, in brackets, the original German terms, wherever it seemed
necessary. The chief difficulty which made it impossible to arrive at a straightforward
translation is the fact that both Greek and German have the nominal use of the infinitive,
whereas in English its place is taken by the gerund, without the article. Since the
argument hinges on the presence of the article with the infinitive used as a noun, a
construction which does not exist in English, I could do little more than indicate the
stages of the argument by means of cross references between my translation and the
original.—Tr.)
9. Philol. Unters., 29.32 ff.
10. For the Greek language, this has been shown especially by Diels; cf. Philol.
Unters. 29.19; also O. Weinreich, Die Distichen Catulls 41.
11. Cf. J. Stenzel, Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon und Aristoteles 23 ff.
12. Cf. Hermes 61.353 ff.
13. Cf. Empedocles B 8, Anaxagoras B 17, Democritus A 37.
14. Cf. J. L. Heiberg, Geschichte der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften im
Altertum (Munich 1925), p. 66.
15. Cf.,e.g., Aristotle & tot 1. éxovotév 800 a 1 ff., especially 803 b 34 ff.: (greek words), Sic SE (greek words),
—i.e. the vibration is again divided into individual impulses. In Problemata 1 A. 898
b 26 ff. high pitch is explained as fast, low pitch as slow movement; but there Aristotle
is concerned with single disconnected observations. He does not formulate a general
exact law, nor does he associate a particular pitch with a particular speed of movement.
16. We have tried to show that of our three categories, one is significant for Democritus,
another for Heraclitus, and the third for Plato. The relationship between the
three, and the three ‘types’ of Dilthey should be obvious. Concerning this division
of speech into three categories, Fr. Mauthner has said many instructive things, though
with a somewhat different point of view: Die drei Bilder der Welt, ein sprachkritischer
Versuch (1925).
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