Exercises in the Elements: Essays, Speeches, Notes

By Josef Pieper

This title, which at first sight seems curious, shows Pieper’s philosophical work as rooted in the basics. He takes his inspiration from Plato – and his Socrates – and Thomas Aquinas. With them, he is interested in philosophy as pure theory, the theoretical being precisely the non-practical. The philosophizer wants to know what all existence is fundamentally about, what “reality” “really” means. With Plato, Pieper eschews the use of language to convince an audience of anything which is not the truth. If Plato was opposed to the sophists – amongst them the politicians –, Pieper is likewise opposed to discourse that leads to the “use” of philosophy to bolster a totalitarian regime or any political or economic system.

A fundamental issue for Pieper is “createdness.” He sees this as the fundamental truth of our being – all being –  and the fundamental virtue we can practise is the striving to live according to our perception of real truth in any given situation.

The strength and attraction of Pieper’s writing is its direct and intuitive character which is independent of abstract systematization. He advocates staying in touch with the “real” as we experience it deep within ourselves. Openness to the totality of being – in no matter what context being reveals itself – and the affirmation of all that is founded in this totality are central pillars of all his thinking. Given the “simplicity” of this stance, it is no surprise that much of it is communicated – and successfully – through his gift for illustration by anecdote. Like Plato, this philosopher is a story-teller and, like him, very readable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Release date: May 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781587312359

Josef Pieper

Josef Pieper, perhaps the most popular Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century, was schooled in the Greek classics and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also studied philosophy, law, and sociology, and he was a professor at the University of Munster, West Germany. His numerous books have been widely praised by both the secular and religious press.

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Index

Preface

In giving this book the title Exercises in the Elements [Buchstabier-Übungen] the author of the attempts at clarification summarized here had two guide-lines in mind which perhaps seem strangely at variance with one another. The first was the prolog to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, and the second a text from Bertolt Brecht.

Anyone who did not know how little the last of the great teachers of the as yet undivided Christendom was inclined to irony could see it as a well-aimed polemical understatement when Thomas says of his opus magnum that it is not for advanced readers but for the instruction of beginners.

I had this excellent declaration of his intention in mind. And of course, as I am well aware, the possibilities of finding an analogy to that fundamental book reflecting the European tradition of wisdom are already exhausted.

Far less embarrassing is the thought of a different kind of model: namely, the relatively well-known Brecht poem which formulates a series of aggressive questions of a reading worker. What to me appeared important in this was not its socially critical orientation but the unswerving insistence on an answer which does not cheat us of things which are elementary and obvious.

This is exactly the aim of the following exercises: that precisely this elementary aspect—which in learned writings is all too often and without much thought presupposed and therefore left out—be identified and named as clearly as possible, almost as in a primer or catechism, so that it remains unforgotten.

What Does Interpretation Mean?

The most precise answer I have seen for a long time is that of the Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan.¹ He says: An Interpretation is the expression of the meaning of another expression. As one can see, a formulation with the deceptive simplicity characteristic of a phrase that hits the bullseye. The first problem arises when one tries to translate this definition (into German)—in other words, to interpret it. (Translation is indeed a fundamental form of interpretation, and, in a certain sense, all interpretation can be understood as translation.) The problem in this present case is that the word expression, used twice, does not have the same meaning each time. The first time it means an activity, giving expression to something; whereas in the second case it is a substantive: something expressed. Interpreting means giving expression to what is meant by something already said by someone else.

The one who interprets is dealing with a particular kind of utterance: namely, with an utterance by which the person expressing himself means something. In short, he is dealing with an utterance that is meaningful—or, more accurately—significant. This comes about when, and only when, an intellectually gifted person actively, through perceptible signs, points to something different from these signs themselves and makes others aware of it. Amongst those perceptible signs a prominent place is occupied, undoubtedly, by the word, whether spoken or written. But also a bodily gesture—a shake of the head, for example, or a hand held out in greeting—belongs equally to the sphere of significant utterances, like all human symbolic activity. When Christopher Columbus came to Cuba and found in the natives’ settlements a blade of grass placed before the door, as much as to say entry not wanted, he saw himself confronted by an obviously significant utterance which he had to interpret to find its meaning—interpret in the strict sense. And, of course, musical or visual works of art are likewise deliberately constructed significant utterances.

Moreover, the deliberate nature of the communication does not necessarily imply that it would have happened consciously. An unconscious smile or furrowing of the brow is also a positive act which points to something else. Even in a spoken utterance, the use of a particular word can be intended to mean something of which the speaker is not conscious—something which possibly becomes clear to him only when he feels he is misunderstood. Perhaps we are not at all able to be fully conscious of what every word we use daily really means—even of what we ourselves subjectively mean by it.

That something which is different from the signs and which is pointed to by a significant utterance cannot well be understood as anything that is not in some way real; an utterance is significant and therefore able to be interpreted precisely because it points to reality. If, for example, someone states that the sentence The world is created is not a significant utterance but rather a meaningless statement, what he means by this is that there is no reality to which this sentence can refer and that, accordingly, the sentence is neither capable of or in need of interpretation.

On the basis of the above, with regard to the object, the concept of interpretation in the strict sense can be distinguished with some clarity from both a too broad and a too narrow usage. Of course, both types of usage are encountered in common speech. That the concept interpretation is used in too narrow a sense is obvious enough where it is limited—as in the case of both Schleiermacher² and Dilthey³—to spoken or written utterance (or text). Much more difficult is the distinction from various broader meanings of the concept—as, for example, when Bacon⁴ or Galileo speak of an interpretation of nature, or when the Festschrift⁵ for Guardini has the title Interpretation of the World. And is it not possible to speak justifiably of the interpretation of a neurotic symptom? But, above all, what are we to make of the classical case of interpretation of dreams, where the term is used not only in psychoanalysis⁶ but also in the Bible. It is used more than twenty times just in the Vulgate translation of the Book of Daniel alone. My answer to this is that, in the instances mentioned, we can in fact speak of interpretation in the strict sense—under certain presuppositions. As long as research into nature sees itself, no matter how vaguely and noncommittally, as a reading in the book of nature—and therefore as interpretation of a text by which the author has meant something—and as long as the things which derive from the divine Logos as creatura have themselves the character of word according to Guardini’s formulation,⁷ the quality of interpretability can be attributed to nature and to the world as a whole. Of course, it has to be kept in mind who, in fact, ought to be the interpreter of that which is interpretable. Furthermore, individual occurrences in nature, such as storms, the flight of birds, the flow of sacrificial blood, can rightly be seen as interpretable perhaps only by those who are interpreters by calling and have some legitimation—as long as all of these occurrences are considered a communication by some supra-human spiritual power. And possibly even the neurotic symptom is likewise understandable and interpretable in the strict sense insofar as the psychotherapist can take it to be an utterance of one who basically knows his own mind.⁸ But as far as the dreams are concerned, the attempt to interpret them can mean two things: both a causal explanation (based on the interaction, let us say, between libido, need for admiration, early childhood experiences, etc.) and an interpretation which precisely does not explain but is to be understood as the task of a prophetic mind interpreting a divine message. In the biblical context, interpretation of dreams has only this latter meaning.

To sum up: giving a valid interpretation of a significant utterance means to understand its author’s meaning and to mediate it, i.e., make it comprehensible to others. But this is a highly ambitious undertaking.

The first and crucial element of the concept, the understanding of what is meant by the significant utterance, can only be achieved on the supposition that a multiplicity of only imperfectly fulfillable demands are met which, into the bargain, cannot even be adequately named. Schleiermacher formulated one of the most important demands in his brief statement: All understanding of the individual thing is dependent on understanding the whole.⁹ But how much is included in this whole? —To begin with, a significant utterance is naturally part of a broader thought context. And it is almost a cliché, although a completely apt one, to say that if we are not to misinterpret a statement we are not to take it out of context. But in fact this is what happens all the time, not just in journalistic debate concerning current politics—which lives by such methods—but also in literature which has a claim to being scientific. An absolutely unbelievable example of this is to be found in the History of Logic in the Western World by Carl Prantl (Geschichte der Logik im Abendland), published¹⁰ one hundred years ago in several volumes and reprinted in a new unchanged edition in 1955 by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt. It is still seen as the standard work and, for example, in the short History of Logic (Geschichte der Logik) by Heinrich Scholz is praised¹¹ precisely for its admirable mastery of the material¹² and its exemplary exactitude in its presentation of the source material. The truth is that precisely these qualities are the ones which are definitely missing from Prantl’s work. For example, the author has hardly understood anything of the logic of Aquinas which he discusses at length in his book—not only because he takes individual sentences out of their context, but also because he bases his judgments and condemnations on statements which, while they are indeed to be found in the Summa theologiae, are there as Objektionen, i.e., as formulations of views which Thomas himself refutes. The whole which Prantl should have understood from the beginning, if he was to understand and correctly interpret the statements he quotes, was no more than the structure of the scholastic articulus—on average, one page in length. An historian could be expected to read the articulus in its entirety.

But, of course, a significant utterance is not feasible except in a language context. And only someone who has a command of the language spoken in a particular historical region at a particular time is at all equipped to understand something concretely expressed in it. It begins with the knowledge of vocabulary and gram-mar—and this is a precondition which is much more seldom met than people generally think. Socrates’ statement, for example, that he does not know, of himself, why a person is not allowed to take his own life but rather that he knows it ex akoés,¹³ ex auditu (as Marsilio Ficino says in his Plato translation; and the Vulgate translates the same phrase occurring in the Epistle to the Romans (10, 17)—that faith comes ex akoés, i.e., from hearing)—this, as you would think, completely clear statement of Socrates is rendered in all the German translations I know (Schleiermacher, Apelt, Rufener) of Plato’s Phaedo dialog: from hearsay!

Moreover, it is obvious here that the interpreter must not only know and have a command of the foreign language from which the utterance is to be translated but must likewise have a command of his own language in which he expresses his interpretation and communicates it—again something which cannot be taken for granted. If someone with responsibility for the official new German version of the Bible seriously thinks that the word beatitude (Seligkeit) means in current everyday German a condition enjoyed by children, lovers, drunks and also the dead,¹⁴ so that the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount no longer make sense—then it is permitted to ask whether anyone who is so little at home in his own language is not thereby disqualified as a translator and interpreter.

But someone who wants to be able to understand and properly interpret a concrete significant utterance must know much more than the peculiarities of the language of a particular country. In every historical language we can think of there is an infinity of modalities for expressing the same thought, and they, too, are an essential component of that whole that is always going to be misunderstood. I am thinking, for example, of the famous sentence from the final chapter of St. Augustine’s Confessions: We see things because they are; but they are because You see them;¹⁵ and I ask myself whether what is meant here can be completely grasped by someone who did not understand that this hymnic prayer says exactly the same as the conceptually sober sentence of Thomas Aquinas, according to which the things we find in world, by their very nature, exist between two knowing faculties—the divine and the human.¹⁶

Furthermore, for a person who does not already have direct knowledge of the fact that literature, along with factual statement, is an essential part of the whole of our forms of expression, and who does not understand the point of it, whole provinces of what can be said in human language must inevitably remain closed to him—and not just the province, in the narrower sense, of literature. Thus we might wonder what a learned translator and commentator could understand and make intelligible to others about the meaning of the Canticle of Canticles if he suspects that it originally was an invitation to join a spiritual society.¹⁷ Naturally, someone who is capable of valid interpretation must also know that there is such a thing as irony and must be able to recognize it. And how can an over-serious, perhaps foreign interpreter who does not suspect that there is such a thing as a playful use of language understand and make others understand a Gallows Song of Christian Morgenstern (Jaguar, Zebra, Mink, Mandrill . . .—how much must one be aware of if one is not to be completely lost when confronted with verse like this!). It is also obvious that one must be prepared for the possibility of the sophist’s misuse of language, the political speak, the propaganda, the almost completely ubiquitous presence of commercial advertising, where what is said has no meaning except to achieve an aim (The Stuyvesant Generation is going its own way), etc. The possibilities are