Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 5: Miscellaneous Later Essays — John Shaqi
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 5: Miscellaneous Later EssaysMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 5: Miscellaneous Later Essays
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Comparative linguistics; Folklore; Literature -- History and criticism; Mythology; Religions
Here you see how philosophical mythology springs up. The very question
what εἶδος or species or form was, and where these things were kept,
changed those words from predicates into subjects. εἶδος was conceived as
something independent and substantial, something within or above the
individuals participating in it, something unchangeable and eternal. Soon
there arose as many εἴδη or forms or types as there were general concepts.
They were considered the only true realities of which the phenomenal world
is only as a shadow that soon passeth away. Here we have, in fact, the
origin of Plato’s ideas, and of the various systems of idealism which
followed his lead, while the opposite opinion that ideas have no
independent existence, and that the one is nowhere found except in the
many (τὸ ἕν παρὰ τὰ πολλά), was strenuously defended by Aristotle and his
followers.(16)
The same red thread runs through the whole philosophy of the Middle Ages.
Men were cited before councils and condemned as heretics because they
declared that _animal_, _man_, or _woman_ were mere names, and that they
could not bring themselves to believe in an ideal animal, an ideal man, an
ideal woman as the invisible, supernatural, or metaphysical types of the
ordinary animal, the individual man, the single woman. Those philosophers,
called _Nominalists_, in opposition to the _Realists_, declared that all
general terms were _names only_, and that nothing could claim reality but
the individual.
We cannot follow this controversy farther, as it turns up again between
Locke and Leibniz, between Herbart and Hegel. Suffice it to say that the
knot, as it was tied by language, can be untied by the science of language
alone, which teaches us that there is and can be no such thing as “a name
only.” That phrase ought to be banished from all works on philosophy. A
name is and always has been the subjective side of our knowledge, but that
subjective side is as impossible without an objective side as a key is
without a lock. It is useless to ask which of the two is the more real,
for they are real only by being, not two, but one. Realism is as one-sided
as Nominalism. But there is a higher Nominalism, which might better be
called the Science of Language, and which teaches us that, apart from
sensuous perception, all human knowledge is by names and by names only,
and that the object of names is always the general.
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