Review Articles An early Dutch treatise on language and communication 1 Erik Heijerman In 2004 Avishai Margalit published his interesting Ethics of Memory. In this book the central question is whether there exists a moral duty to remember certain persons or events. Margalit holds for example that humanity has a duty to remember deeds that were radical evil in nature, deeds that undermined the fundament of morality itself. Memories that qualify for humanity as a universal moral community most of the time are negative in character (horrible deeds or events from the past), whereas local moral or religious communities (such as a nation) also have positive memories, for example the liberation from Egypt for the Jewish people or the resurrection of Christ for the Christians. Now we could make a difference between persons or situations that we have to remember, and persons or situations that are just good to remember. This is an interesting point for historians. In Holland there was a recent vehement discussion about the so called historical canon. Which persons and events from the past do we have to remember and teach in our schools, and why? Are they persons and events we ought to remember (an ethical goal) or are they just good to remember (for those who are interested in history)? Frederik van Eeden was not included in the canon, but the editors of the Logische Grundlage der Verständigung (Logical Foundation of Understanding) by this Dutch writer, poet, philosopher and social reformer hold that this treatise deserves a place in the history of culture and ideas, and therefore seem to regard it as their duty to publish the treatise and make it possible to remember it and its author. Their main reason is that it contains interesting psychological and philosophical ideas, and more specific reflections about language, knowledge and communication that are still meaningful to us in the 21 st century. So leaving aside the more general ethical question whether it is a moral duty of historians to write biographies and monographs about scholars, scientists, philosophers, writers and artists from the past, we can assume that it is at least good to remember them and to keep alive their ideas. It helps us in the first place to remember that we are a product of history and that most of our ideas are not created ex nihilo, but also that in some cases the ideas of past authors are even still actual. I agree with the editors that this last point is also the case with Frederik van Eeden, at least with respect to his reflections on language and communication. So who was Van Eeden actually and what does he have to tell us in this treatise? K O D I K A S / C O D E Ars Semeiotica Volume 31 (2008) No. 3 - 4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Erik Heijerman 340 Born in 1860 Van Eeden studied medicine in Amsterdam and shortly worked in Paris and Nancy, where he became interested in psychotherapy. He became a doctor, but soon also developed literary ambitions. He was one of the founders of De Nieuwe Gids (‘The New Guide’), the mouth-piece of the new generation of writers in Holland which rebelled against the traditional romantic poetry. He formulated his philosophical and mystical ideas in a didactic poem, Het Lied van Schijn en Wezen (‘The Song of Appearance and Essence’), and some years later became internationally known as a writer with his philosophical novel De kleine Johannes (‘Little John’) which was even translated into Chinese. The philosophical treatise Redekunstige Grondslag van Verstandhouding (‘Rational Foundation of Understanding’) appeared in 1897, and can be considered as the first signific work in the Netherlands. In 1892 Van Eeden had met Victoria Lady Welby, who had coined the term ‘significs’ for her theory of signs and communication. It was Van Eeden who introduced the term in the Netherlands in 1908 and was responsible for the spreading of Welby’s signific ideas in Holland and Germany. In the twenties he participated in the Signific Circle together with Jacob Israël de Haan, L.E.J. Brouwer, Gerrit Mannoury and Jacques van Ginneken s.j. A great deal of his life was dedicated to social reform, and he became especially known as the founder of the colony Walden near Bussum. During visits to the United States (1908-1909) he tried to stimulate the same sort of social-anarchistic initiatives there. Later on he became more elitist and took the initiative to found the Forte Kreis, an international society of ‘Royalties of Mind’ that had to lead humanity to a better world, with a.o. Gustav Landauer, Walther Rathenau and Martin Buber, and in 1916 he participated in the foundation of the International School for Philosophy (near Amersfoort in the Netherlands, which still exists and where this reviewer is a staff member). Van Eeden was a man with many interests, and philosophy, psychotherapy, poetry, drama and social reform went hand in hand with a personal form of mysticism (not that remarkable, because around 1900 mysticism was in the air). In 1922 he was converted to the Roman Catholic church. After 1924 his mental faculties gradually declined, and he died in 1932. The Logische Grundlage is a remarkable treatise. It contains seven parts: I. Reality and Gradation, II. Word-Value, III. Truth, IV. Certainty, Reason and Mystery, V. The I, VI. Timelessness and Immortality, VII. Direction, Freedom and Goal. These parts are built up of numbered aphorisms. This reminds one directly of Wittgensteins Tractatus, and indeed the similarities between both treatises are spelled out by Bastiaan Willink, whose introduction to an earlier Dutch edition (1975) is taken over in this bilingual publication. The Logische Grundlage parallels the Tractatus not only in form but also in content: both contain a picture theory of meaning, and their central theme is the analysis of human means of expression and communication. Besides these similarities in form and content there is also a common ethical goal that characterises both treatises. The editiors cite Janik and Toulmin on this point: ‘Language can thus represent facts by means of propositions, or alternatively convey emotions in poems. The aim of the Tractatus is to distinguish the two, and thereby protect them from confusion’. Now the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus actually held that the only meaningful language is the language of science and that what is most important in life (ethics, aesthetics, religion) cannot be said, but Van Eeden was less strict and more optimistic in his opinion that poetry is able to speak about ‘the highest and the holiest’, because poetry is able to give expression to our inner feelings - ‘one who tries something else, corrupts language and violates what is most Holy’. The main difference between Wittgenstein and Van Eeden is that the relation between language and the world is treated by Wittgenstein in a logical way (the tradition of Frege and Russell), whereas Van Eeden tries to capture this relation in more An early Dutch treatise on language and communication 341 introspective and psychological terms. The editors of the Logische Grundlage hold that Willink has been too careful in his comparison of Van Eedens treatise with the Tractatus, and point in one of their comments at the end of the book convincingly to still other resemblances, e.g. the relation of both authors to Spinoza, their conception of (the aim and method of) philosophy, their treatment of the concept ‘eternity’, passages on life, death and immortality etc. This is interesting, because it shows that the spirit of Wittgenstein’s Vienna was also vivid in Holland. After the introduction by Willink follows the text, in Dutch on the left pages and in German on the right. The translation into German, as far as I can judge, is very reliable and without doubt a nice co-production between a German author (H. Walter Schmitz), a Dutch one (Jan Noordegraaf) and a German who lives in The Netherlands (Wilhelm H. Vieregge). A critical point is that the book could have had a greater international distribution if the translation had been in English, as (unfortunately) the knowledge of German seems to decline rapidly, even in Holland. The text is followed by a part with comments and interpretations by the editors. This starts with a clear exposition of the development of Van Eeden that led him to write the Logische Grundlage. The only problem for the non-Dutch reader with this chapter is that he may not be acquainted with several Dutch writers and authors such as Gorter, Multatuli, Verwey, Heymans, Mannoury and others, and with the movement in Holland known as significs. This is just a minor point (it is not difficult to follow the text without knowing these details), but it would have been good to give a short list with descriptions of persons at the end of the book. After the biographical part follows a clear and profound summary of the ideas in the Logische Grundlage. This concentrates on the central problem complex of language, knowledge and communication, by far the most interesting this treatise has to offer us, and excellently exposed by the editors. Van Eeden distinguishes between symbolic and intuitive knowledge, which are expressed in different languages. Symbolic knowledge is expressed in the language of mathematics, and refers to an abstract world which is (in a sense) not real. The meaning of the symbols in this language is quite stable and precise, and understood in (more or less) the same way by different people. On the other side of the spectrum intuitive knowledge refers to the most concrete and actual objects: our inner world and our feelings. This world is a very complex one because the life of the mind is very subtle, diversified, individual and idiosyncratic. Therefore it is very difficult to express to other people what exactly goes on in our mind and what our feelings are. For Van Eeden only poetical language is (more or less) able to formulate our inner feelings. Music does so even better, as it reflects in the most direct way our feelings and emotions. However, because thoughts cannot be expressed in music, this art form can only show (in the Wittgensteinian sense) and is no good instrument to communicate. As Van Eedens formulates it: ‘In the light of our considerations it becomes clear how every rational discussion of higher and deeper things has to end in absurdity, and how every higher reflection necessarily will be teeming with contradictions. (…) However, we can speak about all these things, but only in poetry.’ (p. 62). Now for Van Eeden symbolic and intuitive knowledge and their corresponding languages (symbolic and expressive language) are only the two poles of a whole spectrum. They relate to what is most abstract and most concrete, but in between there is a variety of intermediate forms of knowledge and language. For example, between mathematical knowledge and the knowledge of our inner world there is knowledge of the outer world, of the things that exist in time and space. This stems essentially from a principle already formulated by Spinoza and quoted by Van Eeden: Sunt diversi gradus realitatis sive entitatis (there are different degrees of reality or Erik Heijerman 342 being). Van Eeden draws from this principle the consequence that there is a correspondence between the objects of our knowledge (from abstract to concrete), the related kinds of knowledge (from symbolic to intuitive knowledge) and the language levels in which this knowledge is formulated (from the symbolic language of mathematics to the expressive language of poetry). The theory of language levels was later developed in more detail by the Dutch significists, but Van Eedens insights already have a direct pratical consequence, namely that misunderstanding or contradictions may result from the mixing up of language levels. For example, trying to formulate religious experience in scientific language will miss surely the point (which is not to say that religion cannot be studied in a scientific way). I skip a discussion of Van Eedens theory of signs and end with some critical points about this edition. The last chapters contain some reflections about the actuality of Van Eedens Weltanschauung and his mysticism, and the question whether he has something to say about the meaning of life, the Absolute and God which is still relevant for us in this century. In this chapter the tone of the editors seems to change (‘Suchend sind wir alle’), and sometimes becomes even moralistic. They hold for example that questions about the Absolute and God are not to be dominated by the ‘zwangsneurotische Rollen, die die Kirchen zu vergeben haben’. The demonstration of the relevance of Van Eeden for our times is carried through in a way that seems rather forced to me. For example, they give an exposition (note: on the basis of Rudy Ruckers Infinity and the Mind) of the liar paradox (and other logical paradoxes) to show that Van Eeden already had foreseen the consequences of that paradox for the concept of truth (Gödels incompleteness theorems). They state (p. 113) that (Rucker has shown) that truth is not definable form a strict logical point of view, and that the same has been done by Van Eeden in his treatise. But this is of course nonsense. Van Eeden uses a rather metaphorical language (using the image of a mirror) to make his point clear that ‘absolute truth is something impossible’, and thereby has formulated an intuition which can be interesting in its own way. But real understanding of course has been reached only by Gödel, who developed the mathematical technique to formulate exactly what the consequences of the Liar paradox are for mathematical systems: no misunderstanding is possible here. This proves exactly what Van Eeden said about the use of language for certain problems: do not use mathematical language to describe you inner feelings, but also do not use metaphorical language to get real insight into logical paradoxes. Only confusion will be the result. A second example of the forced way in which the editors try to show the relevance of Van Eedens worldview concerns Van Eedens reflections on questions about the Absolute and God. Here the editors seem to fall into the same trap, because they argue for not accepting the dogma’s of the churches but to create an own image of God with help of the state of knowledge of the sciences. Again this seems to me a confusion of domains of knowledge, for which Van Eeden has already warned us (although he acknowledges that the borders of science may lead us to a mystical view on man and world). Furthermore, the editors seem to sympathize with the New Age movement (‘one of the most important spiritual movements of the last decennia’, ‘a human institution’, p.114) that tries to transcend the gap between science and religion. But this is not what (I think) Van Eeden intended: only poetry and drama can really give expression to our ideas about life - as the editors rightly remark. (Apart from this: a very recent study shows that only two percent of the Dutch people are interested in the New Age Movement. The reader may draw his own conclusion.) A last point about the argumentation is that the relevance of Van Eedens world view is indicated by confronting it with contemporary authors. Now this may be a valuable line of argumentation if you refer to several authors who are representative of our times, but the editors refer to only to author who tries to ‘embed