Language and the Sense for Reality or Its Lack

In Wolfram von Eschenbach[^1] you will find a characteristic figure of speech, showing us first of all what was considered important at the time: description through vivid images, and secondly, various nuances of feeling for things or processes that would today seem rather contemptuous. When von Eschenbach describes in a serious manner a duchess coming toward a gentleman, he says, Her appearance penetrated his eye and entered his heart, wie eine Nieswurz durch die Nase ‘like a sneezewort through the nose’. This is a vivid metaphor, for the scent of sneezewort penetrates one’s nose in a very lively way, one could even say ruchbar ‘smellable’ (see lecture 2, page 30), but we would certainly not use the phrase today. It shows how the world of feeling has changed, and this change in the world of feeling must be studied in order to get at the science of language in a nonmaterialistic way.