2.
All mental activities occur in the world of appearances.
In the Theaetetus, Plato recounts the story of the Thracian girl who laughs at the philosopher Thales when he falls down a well while staring at the stars. Gazing up, he was unable to see the world at his feet. Even when we retreat in thought, we are still conditioned by the fundamental facts of the human condition: plurality and fabrication. The fact that men and not man inhabit earth and make the world in common. Everything we come into contact with immediately becomes a condition of our worldly existence.
Hannah Arendt asked: Where are we when we think? And, how does thinking appear? To the first question she offers a conception of The Gap Space, a timeless time, caught between the forces of past and future, embodied in Franz Kafka’s parable “He.” In thinking, we absent ourselves from the world of public appearances, but we never escape the world altogether. To the second question, thinking occurs in the invisible space of the mind, and is made into a thought-thing which can appear, like a poem, or a metaphor. Metaphor, from metapherein, means “carrying over.” Metaphors do the work of carrying thinking over into the world of appearances. And poems are the form closest to thinking itself. They exist between the life of action and the life of the mind, and contain a certain density, which makes them durable in the world.
Another answer to Arendt’s questions might be found in a poem she wrote on August 24, 1954, titled Goethes Farbenlehre/Goethe’s Theory of Colors:
Gelb ist der Tag.
Blau ist die Nacht.
Grün liegt die Welt.
Licht und Finsternis vermählen
sich im Dunkeln wie im Hellen.
Farbe lässt das All erscheinen,
Farben scheiden Ding von Ding.
Wenn der Regen und die Sonne
ihrer Wolkenzwiste müde
noch das Trockene und das Nasse
in die Farbenhochzeit einen,
glänzet Dunkles so wie Helles –
Bogenförmig strahlt vom Himmel
Unser Auge, unsere Welt.
The day is yellow.
The night is blue.
The world lies green.
Light and darkness marry
in darkness as in daylight.
Color allows all to appear,
colors separate thing from thing.
When the rain and the sun
tired of their cloud-quarrels
unify the dry and wet
in a wedding of colors,
dark will shine like light –
bowing radiant from heaven
our eye, our world.
In Arendt’s poem, color is the condition of appearance and color separates thing from thing. At the same time, color also illustrates the human condition of plurality by illustrating how all things, even in their separateness, exist in relationship to one another. In this way, the language of color illustrates how linguistic concepts fail, because a word alone cannot contain the plurality of worldly existence. Arendt writes, metaphorically truth “is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.” Our thinking moves from experience in the world of appearances, but like the ground and the sky, the world of appearances is always moving. Concepts are never the end of a thinking process, they are the wellsprings from which we begin to do the work of thinking, and the work of thinking only ceases when the breath stops.