LiberaPisano Misunderstanding Metaphors: Linguistic ScepticisminMauthner’s Philosophy Nous sommes tous dans un désert. Personne ne comprend personne. Gustave Flaubert¹ This essayisanoverview of Fritz Mauthner’slinguistic scepticism, which, in my view, represents apowerful hermeneutic category of philosophical doubts about the com- municative,epistemological, and ontological value of language. In order to shed light on the main features of Mauthner’sthought, Idrawattention to his long-stand- ing dialogue with both the sceptical tradition and philosophyoflanguage. This con- tribution has nine short sections: the first has an introductory function and illus- tratesseveral aspectsoflinguistic scepticism in the history of philosophy; the second offers acontextualisation of Mauthner’sphilosophyoflanguage; the remain- der present abroad examination of the main features of Mauthner’sthought as fol- lows: the impossibility of knowledge that stems from aradicalisationofempiricism; the coincidencebetween wordand thought,thinkingand speaking;the notion of use, the relevanceoflinguistic habits,and the utopia of communication; the decep- tive metaphors at the root of an epoché of meaning;the new task of philosophyasan exercise of liberation against the limits of language; the controversial relationship between Judaism and scepticism; and the mystical silence as an extreme conse- quence of his thought.² Mauthnerturns scepticism into aform of life and philosophy into acritique of language, and he inauguratesanew approach that is traceable in manyGerman—Jewish thinkers of the earlytwentieth century as such as Landauer This verse of Flaubert is quoted by Mauthner;cf. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, nd edition, vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, ): I, . It is worth sayingafew wordsabout the peculiar conception of mysticism—so called “neue Mys- tik”—that was developed in Germanyatthe turn of the twentieth century by poets and writers as Ju- lius and Heinrich Hart,Wilhelm Bölsche, WillyPastor,Rainer Maria Rilke, AlfredMombert,Bruno Wille and others.This new kind of mysticism does not deal with the traditional idea of amystical union between God and soul, but rather with an awarefeelingofconnection between the individual and the community,the present and the past.This kind of secularised mysticism combines aestheti- cal-linguistic aspects—it is not by chancethat most of these authors were writers and poets—with a political and social idea of regeneration of humankind.Cf. Walther Hoffmann, “Neue Mystik,” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,eds.Friedrich Michael Schiele and Leopold Scharnack, vol. (Tübingen: Mohr, ): –;Uwe Spörl, Gottlose Mystikinder deutschen Literatur um die Jahr- hundertwende (Paderborn: Schöningh, ); Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Mystik der Moderne. Die vi- sionäreÄsthetikder deutschen Literatur im .Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler ); Anna Wolko- wicz, Mystiker der Revolution. Der utopische Diskurs um die Jahrhundertwende (Warsaw: WUW, ). DOI 10.1515/9783110501728-007, ©2016 Libera Pisano, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs3.0 License. 96 LiberaPisano and Wittgenstein. My goal is to show how the practical aim of Mauthner’s logos-scep- ticism,i.e., liberation from the illusions of words, is in line with the therapeutic value of ancient scepticism and, moreover,his mystic silence—as the extreme conse- quence of aradical mistrust of language—is amodern(and tragic) achievement of ancient ataraxia. Philosophy of LanguageorLinguistic Scepticism? Linguistic scepticism could be broadlydefined as adiscussion about languageand its limit,which constitutes one of the most extensively discussed problems in Wes- tern philosophy. Even if this binomial is not as common in the history of scepticism, it’sworth analysingbecause on the one hand,itisthe expression of aradical and paradoxical form of scepticism, which concerns language, seen as adeceptive tool at the root of human knowledge and as the onlymedium by which we can develop asceptical enquiry; on the other hand, this sceptical enquiry of languagespans the entire history of philosophy, which—starting from ancientGreece—has always mis- trusted vocal expressions and the articulated thought.³ However,if—accordingtoAristotle—philosophybegins with wonder,one can say that philosophyoflanguagearisesfrom doubts about languageand its communica- tive,epistemological, and ontological value.⁴ To sum up, the main problems are as the following:the main targetofcommunicative doubtconsists of the assumption that there is an isomorphism between reality and language, which constitutes the basis for the communication; in fact,linguistic referencetothe world is possible onlyifreality and languagehaveananalogical structure;ifnot,the latter is only an obstacle to knowledge.Epistemological doubtrefers to the verifiability of state- ments through the connection between subjectand predicate, which should be proved in order to have knowledge;⁵ ontologicaldoubt dealswith the power of the wordand its conformity to the essence of the object it signifies,faced with the so- called ‘archaic fusion’⁶ of wordand thing and the question of the correctness of names, which is connected to the long-standing juxtaposition of fusei–thesei,i.e. This linguistic-sceptical–attitude is related to the etymology of the word ‘theory’,which comes from the Greek theorein—‘to consider,tospeculate, to look at’—,which is connected to sight— horáō—and not to the hearingthat is the sense of language par excellence. Cf. Adriana Cavarero, A più voci. Filosofia dell’espressione vocale (Milano:Feltrinelli, ): –. Questionableisthe position of Weiler,who sawthe critique of languageonlyasapeculiar argu- ment of scepticism, from Sextus Empiricus to Hume. See Gershon Weiler, Mauthner’sCritique of Lan- guage (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, ): . This is the logos apophantikos (apophantic speech) of Aristotle that is not the task of languagein general, but apeculiar form of logos semantikos,which could also be logos praktikos and logos poie- tikos. Cf. Aristotle, On Interpretation,trans. Ella M. Edghill, in TheBasic WorksofAristotle,ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, ): ch. ff. Cf. Guido Calogero, Storia della logica antica. Logica arcaica (Bari: Laterza, ): –. Misunderstanding Metaphors 97 the debate about the relationship between sound and meaning as occurringbynat- ure or by arbitrary negotiation.⁷ Traces of this discussion can be found throughout the history of philosophy, combined with other issues such as the origin of language, the heterogeneity of languages, the possibility of translation, the correspondence be- tween voices and meaning, and so on.⁸ However,inthe history of Western metaphysics,languagewas always treated as asecondary subject or as an insurmountable obstacle to epistemology. With the ex- ception of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), it was onlyinthe nineteenth century that the question of language—thanks to the works of Hamann, Herder,and Humboldt— did become acentral philosophicalsubject by itself, to be investigated in all its nuances.Among the philosophersoflanguage, Fritz Mauthner(1849–1923)was cer- tainlythe precursor of the linguistic turn of the twentieth century, even if he was for manyyears alargely forgotten figure. Mauthner’sthoughtisvisible in the debate on the role of languagesupported by Neogrammatical School of Hermann Paul (1846–1921), who offered aradical empiri- cist approach to languagebyasserting that there are onlyindividual speech-acts.⁹ Moreover,the context in which we should locate Mauthner’sscepticism is the so called Sprachkrise,acomplex phenomenon of linguistic critique diffused in the phi- losophical and literarydebate among German-speaking thinkers,poets, and intellec- tuals before World WarI,¹⁰whose works consist in a ‘provingground for world As is commonknowledge,this was one of the most discussed issues in the theory of language: from Plato’s Cratylus,Aristotle, Stoicisms,and Sextus Empiricus,passingthroughthe Middle Ages, the Baroque,and Romanticism, up until the twentieth century,whenSaussurestated that language is an arbitrary signand thereisnonatural link between signifier and signified. Cf. JürgenSchiewe, Die Macht der Sprache: Eine Geschichte der Sprachkritik von der Antikebis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, ); Eugenio Coseriu, Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie von der Antike bis zurGegenwart (Stuttgart: UTB, ); Hans-GeorgGadamer, Truth and Method,trans.Joel Wein- sheimer and Donald G. Marshall(New York: Crossroad, ). In his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte,Paulhighlights the roleofmetaphors in phonetic and se- mantic shifts,seen as individual products based on the dialectic process between ausual meaning of aword and an occasional one. Cf. Hermann Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Tübingen: Nie- meyer, ). Mauthner quotes Paul in his Beiträge. Cf. Mauthner, Beiträge,I,: ‘Sprache ist Ab- straktion. Es gibt nur individuelle, atomisierte, momentaneSprechtätigkeit.’ Viennese culturewas anodal point at the turn of the last century,characterised by crisis,based on adistrust of reason,afailure of bourgeois values, and ageneral demystification of tradition. Dur- ing this period therewas afin-de-siècle reassessment in manycultural fields:inpaintingwith Klimt und Schiele, in music with Schönbergand Mahler,inpsychology with Freud and in physicswith Ernst Mach, whose theory of knowledge as ordered sense-experiencewas decisive for Mauthner. Cf. Christian Mittermüller,