"L'idée vient en parlant": Kleist and Gadamer on Wheels

"L'idée vient en parlant." With this statement Kleist's essay "On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts during Speech" parodies the French maxim "L'appétit vient en mangeant," as part of a playful, anecdote-filled exploration of how the act of speaking is related to the act of thinking.⁴⁷ Kleist represents the connection between thinking and speaking using a metaphor of wheels: "The chains of ideas and of their designations [Bezeichnungen] proceed together at the same speed, and the mental documents [Gemütsakten] for the one and for the other agree. Then speech is not an impediment, a sort of brake on the wheel of intellect, but like a second wheel running parallel with it on the same axle."⁴⁸ The emphasis in Kleist's image is on the parallel operation of thinking and speaking.

In his essay "To What Extent Does Language Regulate [or 'Dictate' (vorschreiben)] Thought?" Gadamer, however, glosses Kleist's explanation in this way: "The flywheel [Schwungrad] of thoughts must be set in motion."⁴⁹ A flywheel can be described, most simply, as a mechanism that stores energy and provides it as needed for a rotating device of which it forms a part—for instance, so that the work surface of a pedal-operated potter's wheel spins at a consistent speed.

Gadamer translates Kleist's image of wheels sharing an axle into an image of a flywheel mechanism. As the flywheel of thought, speaking would maintain thought's smooth flow, providing it with energy as needed. Gadamer's further comment on Kleist's essay portrays speech in even more generative terms: "In speaking, one word brings forth another, and hence [dadurch] our thinking unfolds [breitet sich aus]."⁵⁰ Gadamer thus interprets Kleist's wheel image as a one-way image of production, in the direction from speaking to thinking.

Gadamer's gloss of Kleist's wheels introduces an intriguing distortion. Kleist emphasizes that the two wheels, representing speech and thought, are parallel and move at the same speed. The relationship between them is one of congruence. One wheel is not portrayed as producing the energy for the other or as modulating the output of its energy. This is precisely not a flywheel image.

The difference between the Kleist image and Gadamer's interpretation may be read as an allegory of the models of language in hermeneutics and poetics. Gadamer's hermeneutic interest evokes a dynamic, one-directional relationship between a flywheel and another

Fig 2.

Wheel and axle (eschooltoday.com/science/simple-machines/what-is-a-wheel-and-axle.html)

Fig 3.

Sewing machine (www.gettyimages.com/license/645103994)

Fig 4.

Flywheel (active.sweatband.com/buying-guides/elliptical-cross-trainer-buying-guide.html)

wheel, in which speaking produces thinking. Kleist's image, in contrast, is one of parallelism—one that does not in fact illuminate a starting point or generative origin of the energy that turns both wheels or generates both speech and thought.

It is perhaps relevant that Kleist's essay does not itself proceed in a smooth and rational fashion. It shifts abruptly from scene to scene, with no apparent principle of appropriate sequence. It displays an anacoluthic, rather than hermeneutic, logic in which a fable of La Fontaine is supposed to be a return to the matter at hand, following the scene of Mirabeau's refusal of the king's command, which itself has interrupted a speculation about Molière, which followed a reflection on his own process of thinking and speaking to begin with.

Indeed, the narrator asks what it means "to find an end [ein Ende zu finden]" to a beginning once he boldly commences speaking. He describes his strategies of deferral, including drawing out connecting words, inserting "inarticulate sounds," "possibly even using an apposition," and "employ[ing] other tricks which will prolong my speech in order to gain sufficient time for the fabrication of my idea in the workshop of reason."⁵¹ Poetically speaking, the essay...