The Philosopher as a Riddle-maker

Among the people who were particularly characteristic of the intellectual life at the end of the nineteenth century, we must mention the philosopher Franz Brentano, who died in the spring of 1917. (I have spoken of him in this weekly journal on the occasion of the publication of his book on Christ and in an obituary that forms the third section of my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Puzzles of the Soul).

Franz Brentano wanted to gain a philosophy from the science of the soul. He only allowed the first volume of his grandly intended psychology to appear. He wanted to build up the science of the soul according to a method that should be oriented towards the ideal of natural science. Everything he devised in a fine and ingenious way about the phenomena of the soul goes in the direction that is characterized here in this weekly journal as “anthroposophy”. The natural science in which Brentano had been trained, and to whose methods he clung, regards any penetration of the real spiritual world as fantasy. And Brentano could not understand a “spiritual science” that proceeds from an intuitive perception of the spirit but is as rigorous as modern natural science. He could not consciously rise to the level to which all his trains of thought pointed. So his work remained unfinished.

But it is precisely through this struggle that the soul of this “soul researcher” becomes an apparition that repeatedly and powerfully attracts the spiritual-scientific soul observer. The smallest gift of his literary achievements offers unlimited interest.

There is now a small booklet “Aenigmatias” (New Riddles by Franz Brentano, 2nd edition, Munich 1909) by this philosopher. He says himself in the preface that the numerous riddles he has created and communicated in this booklet are “really products of the occasion”. “I repeatedly found myself in circles that liked to entertain themselves with such games of wit; and it is only to my desire to please them that my riddles owe their creation."

And yet, if you look at these puzzles with affection, you can see the special character of this thinker in them. Brentano's strict scholastic training led him to a sharp treatment of thought. Asking questions about life and the world became the finest art of the soul for him. Formulating clear, luminous concepts was his in an unlimited field. But in his immersion in the natural science of his time, he came upon a spiritual experience that did not seek to grasp the essence of things; for him, the “limits of knowledge” coincided with a mind driven to infinity. And so he could only feel about the things and processes of the world with this acumen like someone who has something in a light covering in his hands and who now tries to guess what this covering encloses.

Those who have an ear for the undertones that resonate from a person's thoughts can discern the “enigma seeker” everywhere in Brentano's profound books and treatises. The riddles of nature and the mind arise in a special way in him because there is something tentative in his questioning that does not want to approach things because it believes that grasping too carelessly is to perceive reality too crudely. This ultimately becomes the prevailing mood of all of Brentano's thinking.

And such thinking may, without being untrue to itself, withdraw for recreation into the playful regions, where questioning becomes the witty wrapping of what is intended. This is how one feels about Brentano's riddles. For with him the same state of mind is at work in a light-hearted way when he sets riddles for people, which is elevated to the utmost seriousness when he ponders the “riddles” of existence. One notices the subtlety of thought when Brentano sets the riddle:

"Sweet am I and delight to children's hunger;
There I swiftly vanish like snow in the sun's ray.
But when the young fantasy spreads its wings,
Then I swell, grow above all hills
And bar the paradise of fantasy as a broad bolt.

And one can feel the same subtlety when Brentano classifies the expressions of the soul.

When this philosopher wants to entertain people humorously, he does so by casting the spirit of his philosopher's impulse into the joke. And if the philosopher feels how thinking is such a remarkable alchemist that makes a profound world riddle out of the smallest event, Brentano, through a similar transformation, manages to express a joke in such a way that it is enveloped in a “tragedy in words”:

"Whom did they throw into boiling water?
Whose belly was slit with a knife?
(His innermost entrails were now hanging out;)
Whose soul was torn from his body?
Whose tail was cut off to make a sad stump?
Whom did they push down into the quagmire swamp?
Whom did they drag away, mutilated in his body?“
“Me, who describe it all.”

(Brentano says of many of his riddles: “If one often encounters great difficulty in solving them, it is the fault of the skill of those for whom they were intended. The finest and most whimsical tasks wade through their dearest ones, and none remained unsolved.” But since I cannot assume that the readers of this weekly publication are any more skilled, I omit the solutions in the examples. Brentano does not provide any in the book either).

Sometimes it is appealing how the philosopher introduces something into the riddle that almost has the weight of the world of a philosophical question, for example:

“I am a sea, an ocean
That half the world covers,
A grave that thousands embrace
In equal peace.” I am a witch who
Weaves you a web of deception,
I am the earnest teacher
Who lifts the veil of creation for you.

The enigma shows that a tiny thing can be meaningfully enveloped in an almost dialectical torrent of words:

"Because a small, inconspicuous thing,
If you often pay little attention to it,
What created confusion.
When it floats in the air,
The hissing stops, and it lifts
The call of wonder. Yes, a wise scholar (Hegel)
Did not hold his breath,
Spoke the great word,
In the well-ordered state
Is the prince, which in fact
This in his place.

Brentano became a riddle writer because, at the bottom of his mind, he had much more power than he could live out in his philosophy; but he was such a great philosopher that he remained one even when he was making jokes. His riddles are of the most diverse kinds: charadoids, doubling charades, filling riddles, and so on, are among them; but all are such that one feels: it is the spirit itself that becomes the joker.