Ganymed

For David Wellbery

My claim is, to begin with, simple. Goethe's Ganymed is the poetical enactment of a grammatical feature of language, the ambiguous genitive. My claim, in the end, is far reaching. My claim is that this grammatical feature of language became the philosophical insight of a generation, a philosophical insight that has fallen out of fashion and continues to reverberate into the present day.

When we read the lines:

Deiner ewigen Wärme

Heilig Gefühl

we can read them two ways, as the genitivus subjectivus and the genitivus objectivus. The genitive combines two nouns, but it does so ambiguously. We can formulate the ambiguity in terms of two alternative propositions:

1. Your warmth is the source of my feeling.
2. My feeling is the source of an imagined warmth.

In the formulation "the x of y", we are presented with two possibilities: that x contains y, or that y contains x. When we speak of "the judgment of God" or "the passion of Christ", we understand the former to be the subjective genitive (God judges us) and the latter to be the objective genitive (The Romans tortured Christ). We also understand that there is a way to misunderstand these genitives. The "judgment of God", for example, would be the Enlightenment, when humans decided that they could reach, by virtue of their power of judgment alone, a decision on the existence or non-existence of God. Likewise, Christ was surely a passionate man, a man whose passion for his beliefs changed the course of his life and many others.

When "x" and "y" contain religious terms, they pose the religious question. Thus the question in Ganymed is whether God's eternal warmth is, like Hume claimed, a mere figment of my imagination, a runaway projection of some obscure feeling within me, no doubt caused by an overactive nerve in my body. Or, alternatively, whether this "holy feeling" is, indeed, the only evidence we need of God's eternal warmth.

It is indicative of Goethe's generation that they seemed to formulate the Either/Or of the genitive without answering it. Wilhelm von Humboldt, in his analysis of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, offers just such an ambiguous formulation:

Was die Alten also ausserhalb der Gränzen der Erde im Olymp aufsuchen, das ist unser Dichter genöthigt, um es dem Alltagskreise der Begebenheiten zu entziehen, in die gleich verborgnen Tiefen unsres Gemüths zu versenken.

What is it, exactly, that the Greek's were searching for on Olympus? And what does it have to do with our feelings?

Fichte provided his generation with a philosophical formulation of the problem. He called it "Wechselwirkung":

Licht und Finsterniss sind überhaupt nicht entgegengesetzt, sondern nur den Graden nach zu unterscheiden. Finsterniss ist bloss eine sehr geringe Quantität Licht. – Gerade so verhält es sich zwischen dem Ich, und dem Nicht-Ich.

Darkness, penetrating into light, is itself penetrated by the light. Indeed, the mistake is to ever think that light and darkness were ever separate.

Hegel calls the figure of the ambiguous genitive "solicitation." The one power, soliciting the other, becomes, itself, solicited by the other. It is no coincidence that Hegel makes repeated use of the ambiguous genitive, speaking, for example, of "the concept of the power". There can be no doubt that the power of the concept is the concept of the power.

There arose a new age, our present age. It can only see one side of the ambiguity. Hegel's "power" refers, in this paradigm, to physical powers. Power objectified is "force". Everything Hegel says about this power can only say something about knowledge "allegorically".¹ This new paradigm cannot accept the premise that the power is the concept itself. It cannot grasp that Hegel's game of powers (Spiel der Kräfte) is the game of thinking. But Goethe's generation was clear: thinking is the power; it's not an allegory; it's an equality.

At the vanguard of this paradigm shift was Frege. The world consists of objects. Thinking is an operation on objects. Thinking is the application of a function on an object. The biggest lie of this new paradigm was that truth itself could be such an object:

Ich sage nun: «der Wert unserer Function ist ein Wahrheitswert»

This seemed to open the door to limitless possibility. A function, applied to an value yields a new value. In the case of the "functions" of language, this meant that the output of one utterance could be the input of another:

• «Caesar eroberte Gallien»: Caesar is the object, applied to the function "...eroberet Gallien"
• «Caesar eroberte Gallien» is True.
• I think «Caesar eroberte Gallien».

The question whether or not "I think «Caesar eroberte Gallien»" is a true statement has, on this view, nothing to do with the truth of «Caesar eroberte Gallien». It only has to do with the question of whether or not I think a certain thought, a question similar in kind to whether or not I had roast beef for dinner. This should have been reason enough to see that something was horribly amiss. Truth cannot be objectified.²

It is no coincidence that Frege, in defending this view, trained his sights on the ambiguous genitive:

Als mögliche Functionswerte sind schon vorhin die beiden Wahrheitswerte eingeführt. Wir müssen weiter gehen und Gegenstände ohne Beschränkung als Functionswerte zulassen. Um hierfür ein Beispiel zu haben, gehen wir etwa aus von dem Ausdrucke

«die Hauptstadt des deutschen Reichs».

Dieser vertritt offenbar einen Eigennamen und bedeutet einen Gegenstand. Zerlegen wir ihn nun in die Teile

«die Hauptstadt des»

und

«deutsches Reich»,

wobei ich die Form des Genitivs zum ersten Theile rechne, so ist dieser ungesättigt, während der andere in sich abgeschlossen ist. Ich nenne also dem Früheren gemäss

«die Hauptstadt des x»

Ausdruck einer Function. Nehmen wir als ihr Argument das deutsche Reich, so erhalten wir als Functionswert Berlin.

A function consumes an object, which yields another object that can be embedded in a new function. When I say: "I live in the capital of Germany", "the capital of" is the first function. It consumes "Germany". This yields "Berlin". It is taken up in the next function: "...live in Berlin", which consumes "I", in "I live in Berlin."

Frege chooses as his example the projection of the world onto a flat surface: Berlin is the capital of Germany. Germany is a continent in Europe. Europe is a continent on Earth. Earth is...and so on and so forth. In such a universe, there are only objects, and the containers that contain these objects, and the containers that contain those containers, etc.

The ambiguous genitive stubbornly resists this view of the world. It says that "embracing, we are embraced". That's not a relationship one can draw on a map.

Wittgenstein offered the most spirited defense to date of this other, older, worldview. "Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge." The world does not consist of things. And the world only consists of objects (Gegenstände), insofar as objects enter into the composition of a fact "Tatsache." Objects (Gegenstände) are nothing outside of their involvement in a fact (Tatsache). This was a decisive move against Frege's idea that we could separate "objects" (Gegenstände) from the "claims" (Behauptungssätze) that engage these objects.

Wittgenstein attempts to recover the older paradigm: "Das Subjekt gehört nicht zur Welt, sondern es ist eine Grenze der Welt." The world begins and ends with us, its subjects. We are subjected to experience and the authors of experience. Embracing the world, we are embraced.