I. Inner Experience of Language I

Even the adjective is much better than the noun. I'm speaking much more concretely when I say “he who is diligent” than when I say “The diligent”. But “the diligent” is indeed much more concrete than what I call up the dreadful specter (for the dead really feel it a dreadful specter), the dreadful specter “diligence”. When you speak of “the how”, “the what”—Goethe once claimed the apt phrase “I ponder the What, I should rather ponder the How” ( Das was bedenke, mehr bedenke Wie)—it is for the dead a speech full of life because they themselves need to feel concretely when you use such words as what and how as now. Today when you talk about a principle—“I take a certain standpoint on principle”—you have for the dead called up to specters, first the “principle”, were generally no one now thinks of a principal at something concrete, secondly “standpoint”. Consider this ghost of a “standpoint”. It has generated greatly already in our language and in all West European languages,, so that in speaking of it for the most part, everything significant is left out. Sometimes the compositor even corrects one! When in the manuscript I write “when one sees something from out of a certain standpoint” then the compositor generally cross out the “out”, and one has to insert it again in one's revision; for people have become accustomed to utter the nonsense “When one sees something from a standpoint”. To speak in concrete terms one has to say “to see something from out of a standpoint”, and thereby say something concrete but when one speaks of seeing a thing from a standpoint—for one speaking concretely the only possible conception is that one sees something from a point on which he stands; a little piece of a point! Now, a little piece of a point is surely a bit difficult to think of.