The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul

Chapter 35

Symbolic vs. Conceptual Thinking

This chapter represents Klages' attempt to recover the legitimacy of what he calls "symbolic" or "life-dependent" thinking against the intellectual arrogance that dismisses it as primitive confusion or superstition. What emerges is a devastating critique of modern rationality and a vision of an older, more truthful relationship to reality that has been systematically destroyed by the advance of abstract thought.

Klages begins with a striking proposition: whoever considers original meaning units to be derived from elemental similarities has elevated similarity to an active power—analogous to how gravity determines the grouping of things in the physical world.

This stands in extraordinary contrast to the principles of comprehension we've become accustomed to. Modern thought, always relying on things, seems to have abolished similarity connections by replacing them with cause-and-effect relations.

Klages' counter-claim is absolute: Just as there is no connection by similarities in the realm of things, there would be no connection by cause and effect in the reality of life—but exclusively by elemental similarities.

This is not metaphor. Klages means that living reality is organized by a completely different principle than mechanical causation—the principle of essential kinship, manifesting through experienced similarity and opposition.

Jean Paul famously called language a "dictionary of faded metaphors." For Klages, this means: word meanings testify to the effect of elemental similarities and fade to mere metaphors only for intellectual thinking, which is compelled to insert a merely objective and therefore comprehensible unity under every living and thus only experienceable unity.

But since judgment cannot express itself except by using the great dictionary of language, the efficacy of life-dependent creative drives must be demonstrable even in strictly factual thinking through its relationship to means of communication.

Consider the fundamental question: what came first, the noun or the verb? Klages' answer: the question is meaningless, because every original meaning content was an essence—a living power whose reality could not be grasped without understanding its effect, and whose effect could not be grasped without understanding its reality.

The Latin serpens (snake) comes from serpere (to creep), just as German Schlange was formed from schlingen (to wind). But for understanding the emergence of meaning, it would be fundamentally the same whether we apply the sense of sneaking to the entity called "snake" or derive the meaning of the process word from the snake's perception.

They are co-original—two aspects of the same essential reality.

Linguistics teaches the threefold possibility of noun-verb relationships:

  1. Common descent from the same root (fall/to fall, song/to sing)
  2. Verb from noun (to smoke from smoke, to murder from murder)
  3. Noun from verb (amount from to amount, success from to succeed)

This confirms the equal suitability for generalization of both forms. In the nascent state of differentiation, noun and verb must not present any difference in the extent of their meaning contents.

Klages offers fascinating examples of semantic transformation:

But every linguist knows that few proper names are not themselves derived from generic names, originally meaningful.

The crucial point: there is no original object name that does not offer the characteristic of what it names. Every name is a node in the web of similarities, carrying within itself the seed for reflection on countless comparabilities.

As something sneaky, the snake is a form of representation of an entity that appears in thousands of situations—sometimes object-like, sometimes property-like, sometimes state-like—and can be linked by some kinship trait with the human (consider "sneak" and the "sneakiness" serving it!).

When Thales supposedly replied to the question "what came first, night or day?" with "The night by one day," we shouldn't merely see reification. More importantly: reification originally only succeeded because initially all object-meaning names were essence-meaning names.

Instead of meaning that night is an object-like thing, Thales could have meant that all things are essences like the night—which better fits the magnificent vivifications of the entire phenomenal world in Ionian "hylotheistic" philosophy.

Linguistically, night has remained what it was originally conceived to be. We still speak of night as an acting entity when we say it "breaks in" or "escapes," substantivizing the statement word in phrases like "the breaking in of the night."

Etymological dictionaries repeatedly note that a name initially had such and such an "actual" and "physical" meaning and was subsequently "transferred" to states of soul, mental achievements, human behaviors.

But Klages argues this assumes what needs proving—that object-related thinking precedes essential thinking. Consider the complete cycle of supposed transfers traceable through recent examples:

In today's "sunbeam" (Sonnenblick) the second component seems figurative. But Blick comes from Old High German blic meaning "lightning," echoed in mining terms Goldblick and Silberblick.

The "transference" had already occurred once in the opposite direction—when the sudden radiance of lightning or gleaming metal was thought rediscovered in the "ray" of the human eye! The sun can "glance" today because long before, the eye was capable of "flashing."

If one counters that even here the "physical" ray forms the starting point, Klages responds: the physical ray would hardly have been determined in the glance of the eye, and certainly not in "radiant" beauty, "radiant" smile, "radiant" joy, had one not already grasped the essence of radiance as later verifiable through retransference of the human "glance" onto the now objectified sun with "Sonnenblick"!

The assumption of higher originality of object-related thinking rests on falsification of our objectivity into the processes of language formation, whose developed contents never name things alone but always also phenomena—which means essences.

Every discovery of essence is based on shared similarities of images. In all the languages of the world, there is no abstract name that has not at some point branched off from another name with a visual meaning content.

Because we're accustomed to every perceptual content being immediately associated with things and their properties, it becomes easy to atomize even the oldest meanings of words.

But just as physical atomism fails with organic living beings, linguistic atomism fails with the demonstrably visual original content of all words and phrases for the mental and intellectual.

Even genuine transfers—table leg, weather vane, meadow foam, nightshade, blossom snow, flower sea, land tongue, gulf, seal, cabbage head, valley basin, forest edge—could only occur because even factual or poetically comparative view had secretly undergone the pull of convergence of soul-related images.

One would resist such insights less if not for the erroneous doctrine—victorious since conceptual thinking triumphed over symbolic thinking—asserting that essence discovery is based on imaginative projection, on "empathy," "animism."

Max MĂźller decisively rejected this intellectually arrogant nonsense that souls must coincide with personified souls: "Because one called the moon the cutter, the dawn the awakener, the thunder the roarer, the rain the rainmaker, the fire the runner, we must not assume that these things were considered human beings with arms and legs."

It is by no means a choice between "figurative" and "literal" speech, but rather whether a roaring person or even just a roaring ox must be meant by the essence of roaring, which the listening soul encountered among other things in the thunder.

The essence of night echoes even in the impersonal pronoun when we say "it's getting dark"—rescued into grammatical form after the world was far advanced in desouling.

Even the most conscious factual thinking cannot do without the connecting and separating train of hidden meaning units from the workshop of essence-meaning thinking. But how does it differ?

The "heavy heart" establishes no connection for objective thinking between body weight and human mood. Talk of "warm" colors establishes no connection between optical and thermal properties. The distinction between "high" and "low" tones establishes no connection of sound with spatial extensions.

The self-same "something"—"human mind" or "tone" or "color"—was gained at the price of detachment from experienced contexts, such that we believe we're renouncing thinking itself if we give up the factual and property-related units whose concepts those words designate.

But here lay the decisive trait of symbolic thinking: it was far from seeing metaphors in such linguistic signs, but took the designated contents as realities independent of consciousness.

While in conceptual thinking, things are the reality (or skeletal framework of reality) and beings are merely fantastic fabrications, in symbolic thinking, beings are the reality, while things are either unconsidered and used merely in service of life phenomena or as abodes of beings ("idols").

Given that even the highly enlightened late period of Greek culture allows us to hear from Aristotle that myths are "fragments of ancient, long-lost wisdom," Klages considers both mentalities not as developmental stages but as differences in kind:

Intellectual thinking:

Soulful thinking:

Both form series and types—but if one follows properties of things and the other characters of images, the series must not only diverge completely but have logically opposite meanings.

The experienced and symbolically captured similarity between the upper part of space and the height of a sound quality is not a factual relation. But the factual relation between air vibrations and sound is not an experiential similarity.

Thinking proves life-dependent insofar as it derives its units from essential kinship of perceived images, which then immediately polarize. Both series, always formable according to opposites, form the still vital core of linguistic meanings, without whose continuing appeal factual comparisons and distinctions would not occur at all.

In relation to linguistic symbols, factual comparison is always the result of an act of decomposition—completely indifferent whether it proceeds by connecting or separating.

How does factual thinking detach from living meanings? Through overemphasis on the present—according to which events of images run the risk of being swallowed by their omnipresent form.

Because the height of space perceived in pitch is not sensibly present in sound quality, the warmth perceived in purple is not sensibly present in color quality—accentuation of the present prepares each pair to fall apart. The mental act assigns tones to tones, space properties to space properties, colors to colors, warmths to warmths—thus discovering general concepts of tone, vertical extension, color, temperature.

Consider "warm purple." If the symbolic meaning units preceded the factual ones, then finding factual concepts would be entirely the result of decomposition, not synthesis.

The redness from which warmth is expressed is not factual redness but an essential phenomenon. This essential phenomenon is broken down to find both factual redness and factual warmth.

The color concept thus arising would be nothing new regarding mode of appearance, but entirely new concerning the now insurmountable boundaries running between the contents.

As image side, specific redness is realized from effectiveness of an essence which also realizes itself in another redness and then also in warmth. As thing side, it is isolated and requires external causation.

The spatiotemporal warmth of purple has a native place in the spatiotemporal universe of purple's appearances. But what it binds to the image is unrelated to the existence of the thing.

Klages puts it beautifully: "The likeness cools, which was previously a spatiotemporal phenomenon of a thoroughly living being: the warmth of the purple."

There are terms whose subject has lost all relation to the world of perception and completely to the world of images—what Klages calls "meaningless" concepts.

Particularly the essential concepts themselves no longer have a place in the objectified universe and therefore can never be understood in original visual meanings, often easily read from names.

Precisely these serve as the irresistible lever of profound ontological research that uproots entire mechanistic thinking. Only from the primordial reality of the living universe can a mechanized universe be understood—but not from the being of the mechanized universe, even measured in thousands of light-years, can the tiniest living creature be explained!

This justifies why Klages attributes the ability to gain metaphysical insights only to life-dependent symbolic thinking, not at all to life-detached factual thinking.

Now to thing-like symbols, which more than others reinforced conviction of the supposedly fallacious nature of life-bound thinking. There is no doubt there can be no talk of parables with thing-like symbols!

Because the snake coils into a ring, it was for the Pelasgian symbolist the cycle of life, whose sensual presence brought blessing to the house, healing to the sick.

Because the bird silently flees into farthest spaces, it was a "swarming" soul and fate-announcing soul messenger.

Because the Meta Sudans rises steeply and is moistened from above, it was phallic witness power, indeed constantly life-renewing sacred marriage!

What was nineteenth-century ethnology's opinion of such facts? That primitive man had his conception of things confused with things themselves.

Today's accepted opinion? The same nonsense, though altered by interpretation method—that primitive man, as a kind of neurotic, confused images of his wishes with facts.

Klages invokes J.J. Bachofen, who had the key to the early world of soul but made no other use than to unlock that early world.

When Greeks put a roof stone on trial for having killed a man, or prosecuted an axe for murder—must we believe they couldn't distinguish stone or axe from a living person?

When Aztecs paid funeral honors to wooden images of the drowned—should we believe they forgot they themselves made those images from wood?

When Chinese gave the dead paper replicas of favorite possessions—are we foolish enough to imagine paper oranges were considered the same as those grown on trees?

And what if a devout Lutheran drinks communion wine with faithful words in heart "the wine is blood"? Or if the Catholic swears to believe the priest's gesture transforms wine into blood—are these any less simple-minded than those Greeks, Chinese, Aztecs?

One will forever rack one's brains over such questions as long as one doesn't have the key: there are two types of sameness—conceptual or factual identity and symbolic or essence identity!

Taking the simplest case of similarity between model and replica: if consciousness becomes aware of the sameness of a soul appearing in both from their similarity, perception of this is no more hindered by knowledge of the duality of objects than the difference between a steel-hard rod and glowing melt hinders our perception of identical iron in both!

Consider what objects and circumstances we don't hesitate to consider identical even with remotest possibility of comparing them visually. This amazement gave rise to evolutionary theories—biologists claiming the tree was already hidden in the tiny seed, the animal in the fertilized egg.

A summer cloud, white powdery snow, and solid ice are visually as different as possible. Consider what sum of hypotheses was and is necessary to reasonably believe the three are nonetheless materially the same—water!

And a multitude more if it's to be conceivable that transparent liquid water is materially the same as invisible gases hydrogen and oxygen, or that organic life essentially consists of four "elements"—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen—none resembling any animal or plant!

Should it not seem more natural if symbolic thinking based on similarities assumes the identical? And should we not consider whether there's a direction of thought allowing such identicals to be found just as well—probably more easily—than finding the hydrogen atom in countless incomparable facts?

We become conceptually aware from case to case of what we want to consider identical, generally having in mind the thing or atom conceived as thing. The bearer of symbolic thinking could not equally provide information that it is always the uniformity of an essence found again in similar images.

This demonstrates the possibility of symbolic truths and simultaneously the impossibility of defeating them with objections from factual thinking.

The plastic image, materially a piece of wood, can be the appearance of the prototype's soul. The material wine can be the appearance of blood's soul—if indeed they are images in which and through which alone souls express themselves!

The person behaving according to such thinking has not judged but experienced and practiced the profound truth that the images of the world are manifestations of the souls of the world. And they are thereby a hundred times right against our entire factual science, as often as it, misunderstanding itself, pretends to explain even a single fact of life!

From the so-called external case of representation, contemplation of similarity in image thinking can ascend to higher generalities of essence and dare all-pervading connections of essence—just as from contemplation of causes, factual thinking can ascend to ever less significant thinking objects.

Because the quarter moon has the shape of a boat, it becomes the appearance of the ship's soul. The ship, containing all living things within itself, becomes the appearance once of the mother's womb, then also of the grave's darkness that demands everything back.

These few similarities, with which dozens of kindred natures intersect—sickle, grain swing, cradle—suffice to make us understand why for Egyptians the crescent moon was Isis's gondola, for Greeks the moon was generally Persephone's region and the 'element of souls,' which according to Plutarch 'dissolve into it as the bodies of the dead into the earth.'

This didn't exclude that the same Greeks philosophized about the moon's size, distance, and materiality. They couldn't distinguish and protect from mutual disturbance the service of images and service of facts—both fight each other to this day and had to do so since the service of facts presumed to accuse the service of images of either devilry or foolishness!

Now, as for the first time its life-looseness and unreality is exposed by us, it is—too late.

The earth drips with the heart's blood of shattered and mutilated images, and the severed souls wither.

Over the fundamentally existing possibility that elemental similarity of images also becomes visually apparent and can be confirmed by factual comparison, we must not forget their origin from inherently invisible kinship of essence.

Not the sequential arrangement of tone qualities, but first and foremost the kinship relationship of tone characters allows comparison of their differences with the 'steps' of a 'ladder.'

If many 'natural peoples' derive return of the questioned ancestral soul from resemblance of child to deceased person, or testify to greatest reluctance to portray because the image holder gains power over the model's soul—such examples reveal with the principle of illustrative similarity the basis of its ability to create meaning.

We thus had no reason to be surprised that in ancient China as well as India, name similarity was considered an impediment to marriage. For if it is the soul that forms a person's features and reappears in similar person's features, then it may also be what is expressed in the person's name and reappears in identical and similar names.

The essential kinship of twins from visual similarity need not be greater than the entirely non-visual one of a thing with its name!

Right next to symbolic truth lies symbolic error—but also right next to logical truth the logical error.

There is plenty of genuine "superstition," but it fades away like light mist beside the knotted tough fantasies from the history of understanding!

The wisdom of image cult turns into delusion of ghost belief as soon as it degrades its realities into things. But the acumen of serving facts turns into soul-denying dullness whenever it raises its units of calculation to realities!

One might ask what is rule and what exception, and one will know from which side the greater horrors threaten.

Klages' argument culminates in a vision of profound historical tragedy. Two modes of cognition—symbolic and conceptual, life-bound and life-detached—have existed in uneasy tension throughout human history.

Symbolic thinking organized reality through essential kinship, experienced similarity and opposition. It recognized that snakes, sickles, boats, crescents, cradles, and graves participate in the same essence—not through arbitrary association but through lived connection in the web of images.

This was not confusion or projection. The wine is blood, the wooden image is the drowned person's soul—not factually identical but essentially the same. Two types of identity for two types of reality.

Conceptual thinking arose through decomposition of these living unities. The warmth of purple split into factual warmth and factual color. The height of pitch split into factual sound and factual spatial extension. Properties isolated from essences required external causation. The mechanized universe of things replaced the living universe of beings.

And now—too late—we recognize the life-looseness and unreality of this factual thinking that presumed to be the only truth. The earth drips with the heart's blood of shattered images. The severed souls wither.

Symbolic thinking alone could grasp metaphysical truth because only it remained connected to the primordial reality of the living universe. From that living universe, a mechanized universe can be understood. But from the mechanized universe—even measured in thousands of light-years—the tiniest living creature cannot be explained.

The greater horrors come not from superstition but from the knotted tough fantasies of understanding that raised its units of calculation to realities while denying the soul.