A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action( Vol 3) Language, Modernism, Consciousness and the Metaphorisation process.(Jaynes and Ricoeur)

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In the published articles of Julian Jaynes we encounter an article entitled “The Routes of Science” in which he argues that Psychology is indeed a science but it is not to be compared with the science of physics which he characterises thus:

“Physics is like climbing a mountain: roped together by a common ascetisim of mathematical method, the upward direction, through the blizzard, mist, or seering sun, is always certain though the paths are not. The problem of each new generation is easy: rope on, test the pitons, follow the leader, look out for the better lay-backs and foothills to the heights.”( The Julian Jaynes Collection, Edited Kuijsten, M., Jaynes, J., The Julian Jaynes Collection. (Henderson, The Julian Jaynes Society, 2012. P.37))

Psychology, however, is characterised by a very different image:

“It is less like a mountain than a huge entangled forest in full shining summer, so easy to walk through on certain levels, that anyone can and everyone does…..The direction out of the forest is unknown, perhaps nonexistent, nor is it even certain that that is what one is meant to do. Multitudes cross each others paths in opposite directions with generous confidence and happy chaos. The bright past and the dark present ring with divergent cries and discrepant echoes of “here is the way!” from one vale to another. Ear plugs and blinds curiously replace boot cleats and pitons.”(Ibid, P.38)

The subject matter of the inorganic world does not naturally oppose itself to the atomistic reduction of the elements of the field of exploration to variables in accordance with the maxim “To be is to be the value of a variable”. This maxim motivates a scientific view in which to manipulate a variable is to bring about a change in the world that is viewed in terms of a cause-effect schema—a schema of causes and effects in a physical world represented by the values of the respective variables of cause and effect: values that are logically independent of each other. We recall in this context, the claim by Piaget that a cause can “imply” an effect. This, he maintains in relation to Pavlovian experiments with dogs where there is a learned response of salivation to the artificial stimulus of a bell. The only explanation for a logical relation between two independent events would be that the two events were related by a principle, e.g. an energy regulation or pleasure-pain principle in the case of Pavlov’s dogs. Behaviourism, however does not appeal to principles, but prefers to inductively “discover” the relations between events that appear to be juxtaposed in space and time. Mere juxtaposition, however is not sufficient, and requires the postulation of a connecting “mechanism”. In this case the postulated mechanism is the Humean psychological mechanism of “association”(stimuli are associated with responses and with each other). What is discovered in such investigations are Humean regularities. The justification or explanation of such regularities requires 1. behavioural concepts embedded in a theory of conditioning which describes the experimental process of the manipulation of an independent variable in order to observe and measure the effect on a dependent variable and 2. the postulation of connecting mechanisms. The question that Psychologists themselves have raised in this context is whether the behavioural explanations /justifications we are provided with, is in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. Even Psychologists committed to the scientific method are sceptical about the claims of any theory that does not admit the role of Consciousness in the production of behaviour attempting to solve a problem that cannot be solved with habitual responses. The claim is that the relevance of animal experiments for Psychology and Human Learning Theory is questionable because the variables involved fall outside the realms of human consciousness and rationality. Even experiments involving humans raise questions as to whether all possible variables have been controlled, especially those connected with expectancy effects and demand characteristics. Kant would question such experiments and place them in the category of what he called Physical Anthropology. Humans can of course be conditioned, but this, if adopted generally as an educational practice would deny the freedom, choice and self determination of human learning. For Kant, a bell ringing, signalling dinner, does not signal salivation but rather perhaps the thought “I ought to go to dinner”. In the human world regularities are important(e.g. bells signalling dinner) but such regulators are consciously produced by principles, e.g. expectancy of restoring the energy regulation system of the body to a state of equilibrium,(ERP) eliminating the pain of hunger(PPP), anticipating the pleasurable banter of discourse during dinner, and perhaps expecting after-dinner cultural activities relating to conversations about books read, countries recently visited and perhaps musical recitals(RP). In this form of life (going to dinner, having dinner, after dinner socialising) three Freudian-Aristotelian principles are involved: energy regulation principle(ERP), pleasure-pain principle(PPP), and the reality principle(RP). In this form of life, we find ourselves in the realm of action discourse and rationality: a realm that animals do not inhabit, In this realm the stimulus of the bell might well “imply” my thought-responses and the kind of awareness we can expect at this symposium-like dinner event. The bell in such a context is more than a physical stimulus because it “signals” a complex response that manifests the presence of all three principles from the context of explanation/justification(ERP, PPP, RP). The dinner is an activity that is regulated by activities that take the form of instrumental imperatives(teleological judgements) and categorical imperatives(making a promise to pay a debt, not violently attacking disagreeable guests, not stealing their wallets). A human relationship to a bell would also assimilate it under general schemata of instrumentalities, whereas a dogs relation to the smells and the bell is a relation to particularities that might not even categorise these particularities as persisting objects. It is not clear that the dogs representations are unified in an inter-sensory system of the kind that anticipates thought.

The bell ringing would, for Aristotle, constitute a change in the world, a change that can be thought about in the human world in terms of a sonorous category, and inserted into a human context of involvements that can be studied in various ways by the various Aristotelian sciences(productive science, practical science, and theoretical science.) Such studies would reveal much more than the bare bones of conditioning theory. Modern theoretical science would reveal, for example. the events of sound waves of a particular frequency, a spatio-temporal phenomenon uniquely individuated as part of a spatio-temporal matrix. This is only one of the paths in the Jaynesian forest of explanation/justification relating to the entity of the bel,l and the phenomenon of its ringing. Another path leads to and from the bell of a church that signals the time for worship and reflection. Here the bell, viewed from a Kantian perspective , would be inserted in a context of involvements or matrix of belief and hope. Bells are so much more than signals especially when they are muffled as they are in the case of the summons to a funeral. Three chimes symbolise the dying, the death, and the final chime announces the potential arrival in another kingdom.

Jaynes claims in an essay entitled ” A Study of the History of Psychology” that Psychology is necessarily a historically constituted study. He claims:

“There is, for example, a kind of truth in the history of a science which transcends the science itself. The history of a science as a kind of meta-science is rarely seen by the individual scientist confined to his own specialty. For the historical contexts that bestow significance on any discovery or specialty reach back in time to prior contexts, which in turn have been generated by still prior causation.”(P.66)

Kant. of course, would be sceptical of such reasoning and insist that science ends and begins with principles embedded in the search for the totality of conditions. We do not, that is, have to forever forage in the forest for these conditions primarily because answers to the question “What can we know?” reveal themselves in the tribunal of explanation/justification in which the principles of science are applied to phenomena. There are of course, limits to what we can know: one of the laws regulating such activity is the law of non contradiction. Kant argues in the context of principles and laws, that the domain of philosophy is circumscribed by 4 philosophical questions: “What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?”, “What can we hope for?” “What is man?”. The 4th question in its turn is linked to a number of conditions and principles that are historically based, rationally contextualised and understood universally. Aristotle would have attempted to answer this 4th question by referring to three sciences: productive sciences(techné, rhetoric, poetry), practical sciences(ethics politics anthropology), and theoretical sciences(Metaphysics, Physics, Mathematics,Theology, Biology). Perhaps only physics and mathematics can be said to be about the physical world per se, and claim to exist independently of the thinker, (but perhaps not independently of his sensibility, if space and time are principles of intuition-sensibility). If this latter Kantian thesis is true, then even the spatio-temporal framework owes a debt to the human mind.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were obviously problematic in many different respects for the advance of philosophical thinking, connected as they were, with the eclipse of Aristotelian thought. The sixteenth century post Renaissance period saw a rise of the practical science of engineering and increasing interest in technology of all forms, especially those forms involved in animating stationary objects. Jaynes discusses this in an article entitled “Animate motion in the 17th century”:

“The background of this concern with motion was complex. In the Aristotelian heritage motion was of three kinds: change in quantity, change in quality, and change in spatial locality. While the 16th century was beginning to use the word only in the third sense as we do today, the mysterious aura of its other two meanings hung about like ghosts into the next century.”(The Julian Jaynes Collection P.69)

What Jaynes refers to above, is one of the consequences of the decline of hylomorphic theory during the period when Platonic dualistic theories and materialistic theories were in the ascendency. The spirit of the time is well reflected in Descartes’ conscious rejection of Aristotelian theory. Many attribute Descartes’ penchant for the meditative method associated with the cogito, to Mathematics (the lone mathematician in his study with his pencil and paper making calculations). In the above essay Jaynes provides us with a fascinating psychological portrait of Descartes that not only explains his modernism but perhaps also helps us to understand one of the propelling forces of the modern era. Jaynes points out that Descartes was a maternally deprived 18 year old when he experienced the first of a number of mental breakdowns. He retired to St Germain where the only recreation possible would have been a visit to the Royal Gardens in Paris. He would have been able to visit the gardens in virtue of having been a student at the King’s school for Jesuits. The Gardens were famous for their hydraulically propelled statues that spoke and danced in the eery setting of a series of underground chambers or caves. These figures, Jaynes argued might have provided companionship for the melancholically disposed young man trying to find substitutes for the absence and loss of highly cathected objects from the past. These surreal companions were not just infecting the fragile ego of Descartes but also expressing the signs of the times.

The Latin term machina, Jaynes argues, carries the meaning of trickery and in this connection Descartes would have been familiar with Louis Brabant and the trickery of ventroliquism advertised widely at the Royal Court. Stepping on hidden plates in the catacombs of Paris released the eery machine like movements and speech of the statues. Our modern attitude toward the word machines of our times no longer are associated with trickery or fraudulence but we moderns have become used to the fantastic and may even be prepared to believe the Cartesian claim that animals are machines. This fantastic claim shattered the Aristotelian framework used for all forms of life and partially explains the eventual referral of Cartesian theory to the materialistic machine of all machines, namely, the brain.

Materialists throughout the ages have, of course, been grateful for the Cartesian claim that only I can know what I am thinking, others must guess that I think. Others must hypothesise that I can think, many materialists now argue. That the brain should be the final explanatory source for both movement and thought well reflects a world of absent or lost objects, a world whose motion and speech is machine-like, a trick of the brain: a world in which both life and quality of life has been suspended. This also creates a space for a substitute world which can be dominated by machines: a world that would eventually find a principle(the Turing principle) which will ensure that no one will be able to tell the difference between a human activity and the activity of a machine(e.g. the difference between a chess master playing chess and Deep Blue, a chess program).

Hobbes too, participated in this modernist attempt to transform the world by attacking Aristotle and dualism. Hobbes goes further than Descartes and claims that human life and movements are like the moving mechanism of a clock. The Greek conviction that the movements of automata were only “poor imitations” of living movement was being slowly and surely replaced by a striving to identify these two categorically very different kinds of motion. Much modern brain research indeed over the ages, but especially in the 20th century, was motivated by the principle that the brain is an electro-chemical system that happens as a matter of fact to possess the property of life. The elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen sulphur, phosphate and a few trace metals are organised into bone, tissue and organ forms and this picture reinforces the idea of a continuum of physical reality in which the brain is merely a specific combination of these elements. The Greek concept of arché(principle) has almost completely disappeared in this account( even if the energy regulation principle must be operating in all forms of living material. With Descartes, we conceive of motion as a means to an end that springs into existence and comes to an end(magically like the speech made by a ventriloquists doll or puppet). In some brain research, the brain is conceived of as a magical source generating motion, speech and even consciousness. The form of consciousness was such that it encouraged the use of the Turing test to support the claim that a machine may be conscious, or at least, may become conscious in the future(despite the major differences in the combination of the elements we find in the brain compared to that of a machine). These latter reflections and conceptions were typical of 20th century mind/brain discussions that sought among other things to refute dualistic views of the mind(a task fully accomplished by the theories of Aristotle and Kant).

For Descartes, the movement of animals resembled the hydraulically propelled statues in the caves of Paris. Jaynes describes how Descartes dissected animals without anaesthetic and with mild amusement at their screams of pain. According to Jaynes these responses were no more to him than the hissing and vibrations of the statues in the Royal Gardens. Jaynes concludes with the following fascinating observation:

“He seems to view the entire physical world as though it were modelled on Francini’s work. It was nothing but a vast machine. Just as in the Queen’s Gardens, there was no spontaneity at any point. He loathed animism. He loved the statues. Later he named his only child, and illegitimate daughter, Francine, perhaps after their creator.”(P.74)

The loathing was perhaps broader and deeper than Jaynes imagined, incorporating as it did a loathing for the Philosophy of Aristotle, in spite of the fact that there is considerable evidence that he never studied Aristotle’s work carefully. Add to the above biographical reflection, the fact that when Descartes was a soldier he combined his fondness for mathematics with his fascination with machines, when, as a member of the corps of Engineers he occupied himself with the design of machines to protect and assist soldiers on the battlefield. This concern with the world as a vast machine may have led to Descartes being forced to leave France when Richelieu began to imprison the free thinkers of the French realm. His involvement as a mercenary in a war is of course a very modern combination of the influence of military and economic globalisation mechanisms. The mercenary is a fighting machine fuelled with money. The mercenary obviously dreams of possessing the ultimate weapon and the destruction it can cause, a dream that would continue well into the technological era of the 20th century where the dream would bear the fruits of a nightmare. By this time , of course war had become a combat arena for machines in the sky, machines on the sea and machines on land. We should also recall that Descartes lived and fought in the 30 year war, one of the most brutal wars in History with over 8 million casualties(20%of the German population died). The treaty of Westphalia called forth a new International order based on the dubious principle of “The balance of power” in order to maintain the elusive prospect of “perpetual peace” sought later by Immanuel Kant. In Kantian terms the above negotiated peace was transient and lacked the backing and authentication of being rooted in the ideal of Human Rights which was to follow from Kantian moral and political philosophy.

The absence of reference to arché or principles during this pre-Kantian Cartesian period, often regarded as the historical beginning of the modern era, is rooted in a materialist machine-obsessed mentality that projects the absence of psuche into a world without arché. This, as we know, eventually resulted in a mathematical world of variables whose values are in question and solely to be determined by methodologically based observation and experimentation. This idea of “the value of a variable” is a key idea in mathematics and has acquired categorical status because mathematics has a logical structure relying partly on hypothetical forms of deduction . In scientific contexts, however, this idea takes on a technical instrumental value whereby a quantitative content is searched for, and subsumed under the name of the variable. The variable is a quantitative universalisation for use on a number of different occasions, and thereby meets the Wittgensteinian criterion for a concept(a concept is for use on many occasions). This is in contrast to the categorical universality we encounter in Kantian critical Philosophy, where substantial, qualitative, quantitative, and relational categories are characterised logically, and the activity of measuring the content of a variable is relegated to the level of sensibility and intuition(the empirical level). The idea of a variable is also critical in the activity of computer programming in the 20th century, because by this time, the motion of a machine and the action and thought of men to all intents and purposes fall into the same category of judgement and understanding. Recall that the Hobbesian Leviathan begins with the assumption that life is matter in motion. The inevitable consequence of such a state of affairs is a dehumanised world in which good and evil is reduced to the realm of pleasure-pain(the two sovereign masters of mans existence). Life is then characterised in terms of the simplistic operation of moving toward and away from objects. The Leviathan of Hobbes is a reference to an overwhelming power(of the state) that in turn is represented by the image of a sea monster(found mentioned in the book of Job). A more modern conception that incorporates the mechanisation of mans thought about himself and his society could be illustrated by the image of a Juggernaut. Just as on Hobbes ‘ account mans motion was merely an impulsion to keep moving and avoid death, so the idea of this huge machine is merely to keep moving and eliminate all resistance in its path. In this barren world of variables, mans value is calculated by Hobbes as determined by a market: in terms, that is, of the value placed upon the use of mans power . This power in Hobbes’s view is best used for the purposes of commodious living and for the behaviour associated with the fear of death . The market itself is constituted of covenants or contracts of various kinds. The implicit social contract each man has with the state is imposed upon him irrespective of his will and if this covenant is broken the threat of punishment by the sword is in the background:

“Covenants without the sword are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”(Hobbes, T, Leviathan, (London, Penguin Books, 1651, Ch 17, P.85)

The Sword , of course, refers to one of the instruments of absolute power of the Commonwealth Leviathan. Hobbes clearly does not believe that the pen(that writes and signs the laws) is mightier than the sword. Such a belief would be a consequence of embracing the Aristotelian definition of the citizen of the commonwealth(rational animal capable of discourse). For Hobbes the Commonwealth is not “organic” it is an “artificial being” whose body is constituted by social contracts with the head representing the Sovereign. There is the suggestion of something sinister and fearful underlying this image, the source of which is a Biblical sea monster. The Leviathan is an animal that lives in a state of Nature and for whom the words of language or the law would be mere sounds like the waves crashing on the shore. Arché has been replaced by the image of an artificial machine like monster that Hobbes has named very concretely, avoiding any reference to the idea of principles.

So on one side of the channel we have the dualistic worlds of humans and animals differentiated by the hyper quality of consciousness: on the other side there is only one form of substance, matter in motion best explored by the Baconian formula for activity in a context of exploration/discovery. Animal and human activity is merely a special case of this motion that at best obeys the two “sovereign masters” of pleasure and pain, expressed best in the activity of retreating away from an object and advancing towards it.

The question to raise in the context of Descartes view of the world as a huge divinely created mechanism in which animals do not and humans do possess the hyper-quality of consciousness is the following: “What is preventing us from conceiving of the animal and human forms of life as spatio-temporal entities in a spatio-temporal matrix?” Hylomorphism and Critical Philosophy claim that such a scientific characterisation of these life forms is possible on the condition that there is no attempt to regard such characterisations as sufficient explanations of the essence of the life form. Both philosophical positions would reject the reduction of the organic to inorganic elements(carbon, hydrogen oxygen nitrogen sulphur phosphate and a few trace metals) either for the purposes of explaining the behaviour of these life forms, or for the purposes of characterising the arché or principle of life (psuche). Inorganic elements cannot of course possess the arché of the life principle that in turn is necessary for the development of the hyper quality of consciousness.

Freud claimed that the preconscious “image”(perhaps capacity or disposition would have been better terms) is a critical condition for the forming of the vicissitude of instinct he called Consciousness. He also claimed that the formation of this vicissitude required a hypercathexis of energy.

Julian Jaynes in an essay entitled “Representations as Metaphiers” claims that machines cannot be conscious because their mode of functioning is not linguistic:

“Representationalism has of course been central to problems of artificial intelligence and is now influencing aspects of neuroscience…Metaphiers such as “information”, “memory”, and even “representation” have all but thrown off their psychological meanings. We may read that in order to build a computer that can pass the Turing test of conversing in a conscious-like manner we must build into it ” a representational system, an active self updating collection of structures organised to mirror the world as it evolves”—as if this abstract simplification were really what was going on in ourselves. It perhaps seems as if this were our consciousness but careful examination of introspective experience shows that it is not. Consciousness is primarily an analogue”I” “narrating” in a “mind-space” whose features are built up on the basis of metaphors. Even if computers could simulate metaphoric processes, they still would not have the complex repertoire of physical behaviour activities over time to utilise as metaphiers to bring consciousness into being. Computers, therefore, are not..and cannot be -conscious”.( Julian Jaynes Collection, P.145)

Metaphier is a term for the understanding of something in terms of something else: the metaphor is the thing to be understood and the metaphier that which we use as a standard of comparison(e.g. physical behaviour patterns such as remembering or imaging something). Jaynes also points out that a consequence of his theory is that it is not just computers that lack consciousness, but also animals. Animals, however, for Jaynes are not machines as they were for Descartes, but forms of life behaving in accordance with the ERP, PPP, and a truncated form of the RP principle. The relation between the ERP, PPP and rationally based RP is not however raised in this article. This is sufficient to raise doubt as to whether we can connect the theory Jaynes presents with the hylomorphic theory of Aristotle. In this essay Jaynes wishes to challenge a conception of representation even insofar as it applies in the context of the simple experience of colour. Jaynes argues that we have convinced ourselves that colour is the wavelength of light impressing itself upon the eye which in turn gives rise to a sensation that represents the colour concerned. He points to experiments from the 17th century which prove this not to be the case. Jaynes argues that it is likely that the colour field of the retina works rather in terms of the ratio and relations between different specialised colour areas of the retina. This activity is also related and weighted by comparison with activity in the pre-striate areas of the visual cortex and other neural networks.

Jaynes’ theory of Consciousness is , however, hylomorphic in the sense of conceiving of conscious activity as built upon an evolutionary history of animal instinctive and affective behaviour. Reptiles evolved with an instinctive repertoire generated by genetic mechanisms. In an essay entitled “A Two Tiered Theory of Emotions: Affect and Feeling” we encounter in fact a three tiered hylomorphic account of the emergence of consciousness. First reptilian repertoires of instinctive behaviour(regulated for the most part by the homeostatic energy regulation principle) constitute a range of what he calls affects or attitudes toward specific classes of stimuli. With the evolution of the mammalian brain and a more advanced form of life, certain areas of the key organ of the brain(limbic and cortical area) began to function in an inhibitory fashion for a certain sub set of affects or attitudes. This in turn generated a more complex form of behaviour. The human brain, in its turn, with its more complex brain structures, including frontal lobe development, generated a future orientation connected with language and planning that simpler mammals were not capable of. Expectation and curiosity became key attitudes toward the environment. These attitudes were spontaneous characteristics that differed from what Aristotle called “pathe”, a term applied to states that appear to happen to the agent and affect him(cf the effect of alcohol). Recall that Aristotle, when speaking of the phenomenon of akrasia, claims that one can “be drunk with passion”. “Pathe” is a state of mind related to external stimuli, bodily expression, and behaviour. Such states are propelled by desire, yet are susceptible to rational influence and voluntary action, but probably not to the extent that one can spontaneously form the conscious intention to be angry, afraid, and choose the accompanying bodily expressions and behaviour.

The difference between the human form of life and the animal form of life also relate to structures of the brain that not merely inhibit existing capacities and dispositions but also produce a system of interactions that generate an internal evaluation of these capacities and dispositions–create, that is, a higher capacity or disposition to experience the pleasures and pains associated with them. Jaynes claims that Consciousness must be a necessary condition for such an evaluative activity and he connects language(language centres are not present in the mammal brain) with the formation of this vicissitude of instinct. Consciousness, for Jaynes, is not a genetically produced state or function, but rather a capacity or disposition to be acquired sometime during the course of human history. It needs conditions of acquisition that include the cultural acquisition of language: a process which itself shows its connection with instinct by the fact that there is a window of opportunity for acquisition which, when it closes, prevents the acquisition of the language capacity and its associated dispositions. This critical period regulates the syntactical substrate of language and points to a limitation of the neuro-plasticity of the brain. The critical period for the acquisition of language depends of course upon ones definition of language. Naturally occurring “case studies” of deaf children learning a sign language seem to suggest that a critical condition may involve the areas of the brain responsible for the perception of an object and areas of the brain responsible for the naming of the object.

Aristotle in his comments on the structure of language pointed to the subject predicate structure of a sentence which in its turn appears to be intimately connected to the activity of thinking something about something. For both Aristotle and Kant there is no truth unless a property is “predicated” of something. Something has to be either affirmed or negated of something else. In De Interpetatione (The Complete Works of Aristotle (Guildford Surrey, Princetown University Press, 1984, P. 25) Aristotle uses almost Freudian language when he characterises linguistic symbols in terms of affections of the soul. These “affections” are “likenesses” of things. What is involved in the process of becoming conscious of these affections, then? Jaynes suggests that conscious thinking is partly constructed by the analogue “I” “narrating” in a mind space and this might be a preparatory stage for the act of conceptualising or predicating something of something in a context of explanation/justification.

The imperative judgement, “Promises ought to be kept” displays this structure of saying something about something, but here the verb is in the future tense and can therefore be regarded as a “property” predicated of promises(which are meant in a quantitative universal sense): a property that can be brought about by a logical implication of the act of promising, or rather the act of making the judgement true by delivering upon the promise. The justification of this judgement is Kantian: “So act that you may will the maxim of your action to become universal law”. The categorial imperative is the result of practical reasoning in the ethical realm of knowledge. We should recall that, for Kant, as was the case for Plato and Aristotle, Knowledge is defined as Justified True Belief. It is also important to recall in this context of ought-judgements, that pointing to actual instances of agents failing to keep promises cannot logically falsify the major premise of the argument simply because the verb is in the future tense and the property to be actualised is a potentiality and not a present actuality, It was Aristotle who alerted us to the fact that the verb of a sentence is tied to an indication of time in a way that substantives or nouns are not. The form of the verb is obviously also important in judgements relating to the metaphysical existence of Being which Aristotle maintained can be said in many ways. Two of the Aristotelian categories of Being are particularly of interest in the context of this discussion, and these are the categories of acting and being acted upon. Both hypothetical and categorical imperatives fall into the Aristotelian category of acting. Hypothetical imperatives are divisible into imperatives of skill and imperatives of prudence. Moreover, relating this discussion to Kant, and his four questions defining the realm of Philosophy (What can I know?, What ought I to do?, What can we hope for? What is man?), we find that two of these questions are teleologically structured. Their meaning is very much concerned with the above Kantian ontological distinction between what one does and what happens to one(what affects one, “Pathe”).

It is conceivable that when the Kantian activity of apperception(“I think”) is organising the manifold of representations ( apart from preparing the representations to be conceptualised( by abstracting from the differences between representations)) there is a possible operation of comparison of the representations in accordance with the principle of the resemblance of differences. This may be occurring in the metaphorical judgement “Man is a wolf”, where there is a resemblance relation between animals that is being referred to at the expense of the conceptual species-difference. The question to raise in this discussion is whether the metaphor is merely a species of analogy and we are using an analogical reasoning process similar to the proportion model we encounter in the mathematical model A is to B what C is to D. If this were the case the analogy of Being involved in the claim that Being is said in many ways would be merely calculative, a mathematical matter. Aristotle clearly differentiates between the mind when it is contemplating the Being that can be said in many ways and the calculating mathematical mind. This position, of course, rests upon the correct interpretation of the term “ousia”:an interpretation that translates the term as “primary Being” as Politis does in his work “Aristotle’s Metaphysics”:

“Summarily, the aporia is this: we cannot conceive of Being by distinguishing it from not-Being, but neither can we conceive of being as the sum of all kinds of beings that there are. So, apparently we cannot conceive of being at all either by distinguishing it from something outside of it, i.e. from not-being, or by distinguishing it from what is inside it, by conceiving of it as the sum of all kinds of being that there are in general, i.e. the sum of everything that there is….for something to be primary being is for it to be a being, something that is simply in virtue of itself, and not in virtue of its relation to other things.”(P 10-11)

Politis further correctly argues that it is incorrect to characterise being in terms of substance. Substance is Latin for what underlies something, and it carries materialistic implications which Aristotle does not accept. Aristotle’s term for something that underlies something else is hypokeimenon. Politis argues that it is the essence of being that is more important to primary being than its particularity or universality. One of the keys to understanding this idea of primary being that we find in the work of Aristotle, is to be found in the relation between Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics. Plato’s theory states categorically that changing things do not have an essence whilst Aristotelian theory focuses upon the forms as principles of change. Categories of existence, for Aristotle, must therefore be seen against the background of Change and not (according to Politis) to be interpreted in terms of the bipolar opposition of particular beings and Universal being. This it should be added is an interpretation attributable to the dominance of Platonism in the post Aristotelian period in which we saw Aristotelianism wax and wane as religious scholasticism aligned itself with what was Neo Platonism or at best a Platonic interpretation of Aristotle.

The fundamental metaphysical attitude in Aristotle’s metaphysical theory is reflected in the grammatical category of the interrogative, which is unleashed by a change from something into something else: a change that raises the question “Why?” in the consciousness of man. It is this principle that moves the mind to desire to understand the change that occurs, a desire that seeks different kinds of explanation in accordance with the metaphysical structure of the thought of Aristotle. These kinds of explanation are essence specifying explanations/justifications and incorporate the idea of principle(arché) Aristotle embraces. This idea is captured in an essay on Aristotle entitled “Inquiry into Principles” (Articles on Aristotle 1:Science Edited by Barnes J., et al London Duckworth, 1975):

“What matters here is not the triad of being, coming to be, and coming to know, so much as the fact that in all these spheres there is an analogous formal structure supplied by “the first from which”(to prôton hothen), the expression used to specify the concept of a principle. The important role which the pollachôs legomena(“things which are called what they are called in many ways) play in Aristotle’s thought is to be understood precisely in terms of the fact that a plurality of concepts is held together by the unity of a formal structure. Thus the four causes, for example, have in common the fact that the formal structure of the question “why?” (dia ti) underlies them all.” P.139)

The kind of formal abstraction Aristotle is highlighting here is not the conceptual form of abstracting from the differences between objects( although there is the use of the idea of resemblance between entities, e.g. man and wolf). The resemblance referred to is obviously suggestive of a relation between the essence of men and wolves, a resemblance, that is, between the principle regulating the essence of men and wolves: a principle encapsulated in the conceptual truth that both entities are animals.

The essence of man, for example, is given in the essence specifying explanation that he is a rational animal capable of discourse(Logos). If man resembles a wolf, it is of course the case here that we are not speaking of the essential potentialities he possesses of being rational and capable of discourse. The metaphor “man is a wolf” is then, highlighting his animal nature.

To metaphorise well, Aristotle claims, requires an intuitive operation of the mind(imagination), that enables one to see similarities in entities that may be fundamentally dissimilar. We need, that is, to see man as a wolf and register this in a linguistic expression that creates a new meaning by the juxtaposition of two fundamentally different terms. This new expression then re-describes reality hypothetically but not fictionally. The metaphor “Man is a wolf” obviously is an assertion that says something about something and in that sense is striving to say something true about man(not that he literally is a wolf). Hylomorphism is a philosophy of change and not of classes where particulars are classified logically. A hylomorphic theory of language will therefore follow the transposition of meaning in new metaphorical expressions in terms of logical and metaphysical principles. Aristotle uses the word “epiphora” to characterise this linguistic movement which is not intended as a deliberate falsehood but rather a revelatory linguistic operation, the analogy of which could be expressed by the Greek term phusis. Phusis is the Greek term for Nature, the part of physical reality that is actualising a process into a telos( e.g. the growth of the plant that produces ultimately a flower). The power of nature both creates an actuality and “reveals” the end or telos of the growth process. This actualising of a potential in the metaphorising process is a linguistic process in which the power of the imagination strives to reveal what the Greeks called “The Truth” and “The Good”. The understanding of the revelation is schematic. The schema focuses upon the resemblance between man, the animal, and wolf, the animal–a focus which presupposes the essence of animality. The schema is essentially aimed at a perceptual recognition of a resemblance.

There is an important analogy between meanings of Being and forms of life. Primary being or ousia focuses on the many meanings of being and Life is the principle of many forms of life we understand the essences of.

Initially the statement “Man is a wolf” looks like a category mistake but this fails to notice the cognitive role of the schema of the resemblance between the human form of life and the lupine form of life. There is no mistaking the role of the essence of animality in this transferring of meaning from the wolf to the man. Resemblance alone, however, is not a sufficient reason for metaphorising. There are experiences for which there is no name and these experiences are not easily communicated. Metaphor reaches into this region of the unnamed world and uses existing terms and processes to identify and individuate these regions. In the movement of meaning from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, there is very often an anthropomorphisation involved in the metaphor, e.g. the arms and legs of a chair: this latter is an example of so called “dead” metaphors. The concern referred to above with the unnameable is more related to to practical goods rather than theoretical truths. Naming the arms and legs of the chair enables us to ask someone to fetch the newspaper on the arm of the chair or asking the removal men to place the chair in the removal van with the legs pointing upward. There is also metaphorising in poems where there is no practical interest at issue. Monroe Beardsley claimed that a metaphor is a miniature poem and this interpretation is supported in the complex metaphor “Man is a Wolf”. From Aristotle’s point of view we are clearly, with reference to this example, in the realm of learning and the pleasure associated with learning: a realm in which some of our practical attitudes are suspended in favour of a more contemplative attitude toward Being. The message behind the metaphor of man being a wolf is partly the Freudian message that all forms of consciousness and rationality are vicissitudes of instincts. The message behind the message may also involve learning that man can be the best of animals(worship the gods, lead the contemplative life) and the worst of animals(prey upon his fellows , savage them). Aristotle’s purely grammatical remarks about metaphor include claiming that there is an application of an alien name”Wolf” to the subject of the statement.

Paul Ricoeur in an essay entitled “between Rhetoric and poetics: Aristotle” claims the following:

“In giving to a genus the name of a species, to the fourth term of a proportional relationship the name of the second term, and vice versa, one simultaneously recognises and transgresses the logical structure of language.”

Logical structure requires as a logical condition that a term does not shift in meaning when it occurs in different premises. When, therefore, the metaphor metaphorises by the suggestion/creation of a new meaning, there is no logical contradiction and the new meaning must be judged on the basis of whether it contributes cognitively to the understanding of the subject. In the above there are two linguistic contexts to bear in mind, each one of which operates under different principles. The operation of the creation/discovery of a new name, e.g. “the arms of a chair” is logically related to the principle behind the transference of meaning. What once needed either to be ostensively defined is described in relational terms, and has thus become an easily identifiable term for a region of reality that had no name, but can now be used in a naming operation. This region as a consequence of this operation can be referred to “in absentio”. There is no violation of the laws of logic in this metaphorising process because ,in the case of “Man is a wolf”, the message is not a contradictory one for a mature language-user. The only sense in which it is true to say that the logical structure of language is “transgressed” is through the process of semantic enhancement in which a new use of words is suggested to a community of users. Logical principles relating to constancy of meaning will once more come into play once the new meaning is accepted: in the case of the “Man is a wolf” metaphor, the genus in common between the two species of mammal more or less guarantees acceptance. The underlying reason for the success of the metaphorising process takes us into the territory of the theories of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Ricoeur, and perhaps also Julian Jaynes for whom this process of metaphorisation is partly constitutive of Consciousness. The process obviously enables the designation of an analogous “I” living in an analogous world. Indeed, the narrative of ones life by someone who knows you, may carry the message “NN is the worst of animals”. Metaphor for Aristotle is clearly a cognitive phenomenon that focuses on the genus of the entity involved in the metaphorisation and, as Aristotle puts it in the Rhetoric, “conveys learning and knowledge”. This obviously could not be done if there was a problem with the logical structure of the metaphorical judgement. A conceptual hierarchy, determined by logic, is obviously involved in a process of re-describing or renaming reality thus enabling us to see Man as a wolf or the chair as having arms and legs.

Whenever imagination is involved we seem to eventually encounter the term “genius”(Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement). Aristotle too, argues that to metaphorise is a gift of genius to see resemblances. Aristotle also claims in the “Poetics” that it is the poet who “perceives similarity”(1459 a 8). The Rhetoric refers to an excellence of mind. Both Rhetoric and Poetics are creative productive sciences for Aristotle but they obviously contain some reference to theoretical and practical knowledge. Productive science concerns itself with technai and the knowledge involved in this kind of activity is knowledge of the probable. The kind of argument we encounter in both Poetry and Rhetoric is dialectical argument in which it is common practice to juxtapose opposites and attempt to synthesise theses and antitheses. Enthymemes differ from inductive procedures because they have an essentially deductive character. They are rhetorical devices in the arena of probable judgements of authoritative judges and can therefore be placed categorically in contexts of explanation/justification. We are also likely to encounter enthymemes in the realms of Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. Practical principles are as important in Aesthetics or Technai as they are in Ethics and Politics: these principles guide action. Rhetoric, for example, is the task of politicians and must also relate in various ways to Ethics and Politics. The aim of rhetoric is to persuade people but not at the expense of rational argumentation. In Aesthetics, principles are used to construct plots with characters and imitated actions of significant magnitude that induce in an audience the emotional responses of pity and fear. Learning will still take place, but probably in the realm of Sensibility and intuition, via the mechanism of imagination. Audiences obviously bring their knowledge of the world to the performance but because of the requirement of psychical distancing connected to the fact that muthos in this context is in the mode of mimesis, the audience will see the events of the play organised in accordance with the principle of exemplary necessity rather than in accordance with the hard logical requirement of metaphysical necessity( found in the theoretical natural sciences). In the case of the moral sciences the major premises of moral arguments are usually those assented to and believed in by wise authorities, but are nevertheless only probably true(predicated perhaps on the continuing stability of the state or community we live in). Positivism in its various forms have interpreted this state of affairs to mean that moral judgements cannot be proved and are therefore “probably false”, which if one considers the Kantian proof by means of three formulations of the categorical imperative, is a misleading judgement. The following is the account Kant provides of exemplary necessity:

“But what we have in mind in the case of the beautiful is a necessary reference on its part to delight. However, this necessity is of a special kind. It is not a theoretical objective necessity–such as would let us cognise a priori that everyone will feel this delight in the object that is called beautiful by me. Nor yet is it a practical necessity, in which case, thanks to concepts of a pure rational will in which free agents are supplied with a rule, this delight is the necessary consequence of an objective law, and simply means that one ought absolutely(without ulterior object) to act in a certain way. Rather, being such a necessity as is thought in an aesthetic judgement, it can only be termed exemplary. In other words, it is a necessity of the assent of all to a judgement regarded as exemplifying a universal rule incapable of formulation.”(P.81)

For Kant, even if aesthetic judgements are subjective, it is still the case that everyone ought to give the object(“Man is a wolf”) their approval. Kant speaks in this context in terms of a common sense which refers to principles that we find relevant to our sensible/imaginative responses to aesthetic objects. Judgements of Taste, e.g. “This(aesthetic object) is beautiful” are formed in “free conformity to law of the imagination”. This is a complex claim referring to both the pleasure-pain principle and reality-principles as conceived of by Aristotle and Freud as well as to the aesthetic idea governing the organisation of the object(Kant), e.g. the idea of the relation of the species of man to the genus of animal and species of wolf in the metaphorical judgement “Man is a wolf”. The organisation is “analogous” to conceptual organisation but different. In this context the aesthetic idea can be either an indeterminate concept of reason(judgement of the sublime) or an indeterminate concept of the understanding(a schematised idea). The interesting question to raise in the context of this discussion is whether the judgement “Man is a wolf” is a judgement of taste or some other kind of judgement. The mind obviously either meets some resistance or rejects the idea expressed in the metaphor “Man is a wolf” because the suggestion that there is a connection between animals and man in the practical and productive sciences is problematic. The pleasure associated with the learning involved in a creative metaphor must be linked with ideas of reason which appeal to what Kant calls a “higher finality”( C of Aesth Jud P.92). What appears to be different( the different species of man and wolf) is in fact subsumable under the schema of resemblance in spite of the seemingly shocking effect of applying lupine predicates to homo sapiens. Perhaps the shock to the imagination results in the imagination being “quickened” into the attitude of reflection upon the subjective finality of the judgement. This process of reflection for Aristotle will be guided by the psuche principle in forming the judgement based upon an indeterminate idea. For Kant it is ideas that are sublime and not forces of nature. The process of judgement upon the sublime awakens a supersensible faculty, but it is not clear that the forces of psuche can overwhelm the imagination in the way required for a judgement of the sublime. One can imagine that, involved in this metaphorical judgement, is a narrative of events that might illustrate the meaning but it is clear that the scientific and logical link between genus and species must transcend any imaginative narrative. Any justification of this judgement must involve an appeal to the essence of animal life and the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Ideas of the sublime typically transcend the faculty of Sensibility and the power of the imagination. The idea of the animal kingdom as a whole(including man) is an idea that exceeds the power and capacity of the imagination, but it does not exceed the capacity for thought, which can obviously think the infinite whole without contradiction. In this sense, and perhaps also in the senses of space being infinite, the idea of the infinite is perhaps involved in the thought process connected to our metaphor. The idea of the infinite is an idea of reason because the understanding cannot grasp it in one quantitative act of (numerical) understanding. Here we are attempting by means of a sensible/intellectual faculty to grasp the noumenal aspect of nature via an idea that quickens in us the feeling of our own moral power and dignity. This latter power is obviously an analogous power to the physical powers of nature. Kant suggests that it is in this experience of the sublime that the roots of religion may partly lie. The man, he argues, who is overwhelmed by the presumed presence of his God prostrates himself before him, or bows his head , all as part of the behaviour pattern of fear: whereas the man who holds his head high and reflects upon his own capacities to resist overwhelming physical forces, reflects upon his own dignity, and can as a consequence more readily meet these forces unbowed but with respect and esteem. Here man finds himself on one of the battle grounds between the giants of Eros and Thanatos fighting for the fate of civilisation. We can see in this Kantian reflection, an interesting possible opposition between an immature religion demanding the behaviour of fear, and a morality based religion that acknowledges ones own self sufficiency and dignity. Kant speaks in this context of the possible withdrawal from society on the grounds of refusing to witness the evils man brings upon himself by his own acts of will: a state of affairs that Kant describes as “melancholically haphazard” and which can provoke a motivated state of melancholy. For Kant it is the activity of the super-sensible faculty of our thought(reason) that invokes the idea of God, an idea that is closely allied not just to the power of nature but to its infinity. In a footnote to the chapter entitled “Analytic of the Sublime”(Critique of Judgement) we find the following:

“Perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance or a thought more sublimely expressed then the well known ascription upon the Temple of Isis(Mother nature): “I am all that is, that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.”

In this footnote of Kant’s we encounter the metaphor of “The veil of isis” which Kant claims is a sublime thought. Indeed the idea that even the sun was born from the womb of Isis carries with it the suggestion of the infinite magnitude of nature: its noumenal aspect, an aspect that lies beyond the scope of human understanding and comprehension. The question to raise here is whether the metaphorical judgement “Man is a wolf” is of the same form as a judgement of the sublime. Certainly the metaphorical judgement puts into question the rational powers and dignity of man in a similar way to the way in which a powerful waterfall does. The movement of resistance to the initiating stimulus in the case of the wolf analogy, might be somewhat more intellectual in the sense that the categories of understanding appear to be more involved than any particular idea of reason. This might suggest that there are different species of metaphor on the Kantian analysis: or perhaps the image of “The veil of Isis” is a metaphysical analogy? This image emanates from the linguistic imagination which , Aristotle claims in relation to the metaphorising process, “sets something before the eyes”. Aesthetic ideas also use this metaphorising process to place something before our eyes. Some commentators, however, insist upon a significant difference between ideas of the imagination, insofar as the reference of the respective kinds of discourse is concerned. Imagination works in the region of schemas of the mind that have been created in various ways by various processes.: some by perceptual processes, some by categories of the understanding( e.g. causal schemas) or by ideas of Reason(God, immortality of the soul, freedom etc). Most kinds of metaphors such as “Man is a wolf” set something before the eyes(e.g. man seen as the worst of animals). Metaphysical analogies, on the other hand,(e.g. “The veil of Isis”), lying as they do at the limits of thought, may anthropomorphise Nature, but this in turn assumes a noumenal reference to a world of things-in-themselves about which we can both metaphorise and conceptualise. The linguistic space of the metaphor for those philosophers who wish to marginalise the significance of poetical and rhetorical discourse is an imaginary space composed of the connotations of terms rather than their denotations. This together with the view that the meaning of literature is to be found in itself rather than in its relation to the world merely confuses the issue of how to logically characterise this form of judgement. Paul Ricoeur in an essay entitled “Metaphor and the New Rhetoric” comments on this issue in the following way:

“The space of language, in effect, is a connoted space, “connoted more than pointed to, speaking rather than spoken of, which betrays itself in a metaphor like surfacing of the unconscious in a slip or a dream.”(Genette Figures, I, 220)….On this basis, when the author writes “one could almost say that it is space that speaks”(ibid, 102), his own speaking is to be interpreted more in terms of what it connotes than in terms of what it denotes: “Today, literature–thought– no longer articulates itself except in terms of distance, horizon, universe, surroundings, place, area, routes, and home-ground: naive figures, but characteristic figures, par excellence, in which language spatialises itself in order that space having become language, may speak and inscribe itself in it”(ibid 108). In fashioning this brilliant maxim, the author produces the sign of his allegiance to the school of thought for which the meaning of literature is to be found in literature.”(P.147)

Ricoeur contests this position and objects to the suggested suspension of the function of reference. Yet it is clear that the metaphorising process of literature cannot occur anywhere else than in the mind. Ricoeur suggests that the concept of a mood that is rooted in being-in-the-world is a better alternative than the subjective entity that was marginalised by the Philosophy of logical positivism (and logical atomism). The metaphor ought to be conceived as having a reference, Ricoeur argues, because:

“it teaches something and so it contributes to the opening up and the discovery of a field of reality other than that which ordinary language lays bare.”(P.148)

Heidegger is obviously a source of inspiration behind these reflections. We know that, for Heidegger, mood indicates a way of being aware of something in the world. According to him, our being-in-the-world manifests itself as a burden which expresses itself in the state of mind we possess, a state of mind that accompanies all our forms of understanding. This “ontological” state of mind discloses how we are faring in the world. Heidegger argues that we have been thrown into the world, and there is therefore nothing more natural than a tendency to turn away from such a state of mind in an effort to avoid thinking about our being-in-the-world as a whole. There is, that is, a resistance to this disclosure, a resistance to submitting to a world we desire to master(with , for example, our presence, our discourse, our technology). Even the most theoretical state of mind, Heidegger argues, manifests a mood which reduces everything it reflects upon in terms of entities uniformly present-at-hand. The anxious state of mind is perhaps what ultimately transforms itself into fear and thence into the reaction formations that wish to master the world rather than contemplate its holistic complexity. That man is an animal is the underlying assumption that prevents the metaphor above from embodying a contradiction. That the infinite complexity of Nature surpasses the categories of the understanding is what partly generates the sublimity of this metaphysical analogy. Heidegger insists that what is understood in such an analogy is neither an actuality nor a necessity but rather falls under the modal category of possibility. Dasein, Heidegger argues, understands itself in terms of its possibilities, possible ways of being-there. The Kantian schemata invoked in this process are obviously results of the operation of the productive imagination rather than the reproductive imagination(the home of sensory images). It is the productive imagination that creates and understands “figurative meaning”. The figure of Dasein is obviously best represented by the expressions of the face which are intimately associated with both state of mind and behaviour. The metaphor “Man is a wolf” ignites the productive imagination to schematise the possibility of being a wolf via the verbal image of the term “Wolf”, that must include the image of the possible uses of the term. In the metaphorising process, it is man that one is thinking about and applying the schema of the concept of wolf(against the background of our knowledge of men and wolves). Ricoeur suggests the application of the Fregean apparatus of sense and reference in order to solve the problem of metaphor. Ricoeur points to the Fregean maxim that “all sense strives toward reference”. Frege does not however say anything about how this occurs in the metaphorising process. Firstly , it must be pointed out that generally, sense relates to a way of picking out the reference of an expression. “The author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and “The Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Cambridge” share the same reference but picks this reference out via different concepts. Heidegger points out how in the process of saying something about something in a subject-predicate statement, when we say or think something about something, the process is a truth-making or veritative synthesis into a fact.

In the metaphorising process, on the other hand, the synthesis may state a fact(that man behaves like a wolf in certain situations) but the primary purpose of the synthesis of these concepts may be somewhat different. What we may be dealing with here is an ethical judgement made on assumptions expressed in ethical premises relating to what we ought and ought not to do, what one ought or ought not to be. In such contexts of explanation/justification, practical reasoning will be decisive in determining the exact implications of the statement. In the case of the metaphysical analogy relating to “The veil of Isis”(out of whose womb the sun was born)we are clearly invoking a theoretical idea of the origins of the universe as well as the limitations of our knowledge of this vast physical realm. It is, therefore, not clear whether one can subsume metaphor under analogy or vice versa, since categorical knowledge and categorical imperatives belong to different universes of discourse for Kant. In the universe of practical reasoning , action and its telos is of central concern, i.e. the reasoning is an attempt to answer the aporetic question “What ought I to do?” in categorical and universal terms. In the universe of discourse of theoretical reasoning it is belief and its justification that is the central focus. In this context of explanation/justification the reasoning involved is attempting to answer the question “What can I know?”. The implications of the meaning of the metaphor “Man is a wolf” is clearly, then related to the judgement “man ought not to behave like the worst of animals”. The implication of the metaphor “The veil of Isis”, on the other hand, will be closely related to the Kantian distinction between things in themselves in the noumenonal realm of reality and empirically real things and events in the phenomenal realm: the issue of the limits of our theoretical knowledge and the practical knowledge of the noumenal realm is part of the meaning of this metaphor.

Ricoeur, in an essay entitled “The Work of Resemblance” discusses the possible relation between a verbal moment and a non verbal sensory moment in terms of what he calls the “wolf of psychology” let loose on the “semantic sheepfold”(The Role of Metaphor, P.208).In accordance with the above discussion we must acknowledge that involved in what Ricoeur calls the schematism of the metaphoric attribution, there are two kinds of schemata involved: one, non verbal to do with the objects of man and wolf, and one verbal to do with the possible uses of the terms “man” and “wolf”: both aspects are integrated into one mood or attitude. Psychologism is of course a risk here, especially if one conceives of these relations causally in the context of a method seeking to reduce one aspect to the other. Ricoeur wishes to “anchor” the imaginary in a semantic theory of metaphor, and speaks of “the pairing of sense with the senses”(P.209). Poetic language is contrasted with ordinary language which, according to Ricoeur, exhibits its reference to reality more directly than is the case with poetic language. He accuses Wittgenstein in the course of this discussion of not having a theory of poetic language. Wittgenstein himself would not regard his remarks in this domain of discourse as constituting a theory but they are nevertheless both descriptive and explanatory. In a lecture entitled “A course of lectures on Description”(Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Edited by Barrett, C., (Oxford, Blackwell, 1970, P.37) Wittgenstein contrasts the use of poetic language with description and claims, as is the case with music, there is a tendency to be unable to describe what one experiences, and further that what one experiences is similar to experiencing the sound of the music one hears as a gesture. Wittgenstein then further specifically argues against reducing this gesture to a set of sensations. In his “Lecture on Aesthetics” he elaborates upon these remarks by challenging us to look closely not just how words are used, but also at how they are taught. Aesthetic terms, he argues, are substituted for facial expressions or gestures in an enormously complicated situation involving a matrix of activities. He further points out that in the case of many Aesthetic Judgements of a critical nature, the terms of the judgements are often applied to practices, e.g. “appropriate”, “right”, “correct”, and these can be likened to linguistic gestures of approval. He is trying to describe appreciation:

20 “It is not only difficult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. To describe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment.”(P.7)

He elaborates upon this claim in cultural terms:

27. “You can get a picture of what you may call a very high culture, e.g. German music in the last century and the century before, and what happens when that deteriorates. A picture of what happens in Architecture when you get imitations–or when thousands of people are interested in the minutest details. A picture of what happens when a dining room table is chosen more or less at random, when no one knows where it came from.”(P.7)

Wittgenstein is pointing to the fact that the language associated with great art is embedded in a Culture of expectations and responses that are not merely correct. Generally, however, for Wittgenstein aesthetic terms are used as gestures accompanying complex activity embedded in a Culture. In such a language-game and form of life it is unimportant if an individual claims a poem is boring and another claims that they cannot stop thinking about it. For Wittgenstein it is the hurly burly of groups and communities and their forms of life, that decide the meaning of the terms of their language-games. He also specifically rejects any form of causal explanation for his gestural theory which means he also eschews any attempt to situate Aesthetics in a Psychological context of experimentation. He claims:

36. “Aesthetic questions have nothing to do with Psychological experiments, but are answered in an entirely different way”(P.17)

We need, rather, Wittgenstein argues, to ask the question “What is in my mind when I write or read a line of poetry?”. Some form of contentment related to the learning process associated with aesthetic experience is always an element for both creator and appreciator. Aesthetic appreciation of a poem, for instance might also involve placing it in a genre, relating the style of the poem to the style of other poets or other poems written by the same poet. When the poem employs metaphors, suggesting perhaps that “Man is a wolf” in line with the Delphic prophecy that everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction, the poet is saying “See man like this!”. Freud used much of his theoretical language in the spirit of metaphor when he urged us to “See mental illness like this!”. The poem might pick out mans achievements in a certain way reminiscent of the way in which sense picks out the reference of individual expressions and descriptions. Many commentators see persuasion as a form of propaganda but this is merely failing to appreciate the role of persuasion in the realms of poetry, rhetoric and theories of the mind. Freud’s theories have consistently been portrayed as unscientific exactly because they employ the philosophical technique of persuasion insofar as both his patients and his critics are concerned.

Wittgensteins remarks on Aesthetics and Culture transported us into the realm of Culture where the theme of resemblance can be raised to the level where we attempt to see the likeness between a poet and a musician living at the same time in a “high Culture”:

“You can sometimes find the similarity between the style of a musician and the style of a poet who lived at the same time, or a painter. Take Brahms and Keller. I often find that certain themes of Brahms were extremely Kellerian. This was extraordinarily striking.”(P.32)

Now it would be extremely difficult(without describing the Culture of the time completely) to say exactly what this resemblance consists in, but we do know the kind of description that would not be acceptable–one in which causes in the form of spatio-temporal events, brought about independently characterisable effects. Context is obviously very important for Wittgenstein as it was for Aristotle. Recall Aristotle’s political remarks that the laws of a society are what help to make a bad man good. Laws, that is, provide a society with an ultimate actualisation framework(for the actualisation of rationality). Wittgenstein imagines Culture to be constituted by large groups of people leading complex forms of life and speaking a language constituted by complex language-games. This whole context would be part of a world view or picture of the world that is an assumed background of aesthetic, ethical, and political judgements. We know the important role rhetoric played in Ancient Greece and we know the importance of persuasion by good arguments and enthymemes insofar as the political and aesthetic life of the community was concerned. Paul Ricoeur, discusses this issue in an essay entitled “The Decline of Rhetoric: topology”:

“Indeed, since the Greeks, rhetoric diminished bit by bit to a theory of style by cutting itself off from the two parts that generated it, the areas of argumentation and of composition. Then in turn the theory of style shrank to a classification of figures of speech, and this in turn to a theory of tropes. Topology itself now paid attention only to the complex, made up of metaphor and metonymy, at the price of reducing the first to resemblance and the second to contiguity.”(P.44-5)

Aristotle is named as the father of this model for reasons that are unclear but may hark back to Aristotles early work of the Categories where substance(and its attributes)is defined in terms of particulars. This account was later replaced by substance and its attributes as defined in terms of forms or principles. Converting the discussion of sense and reference( in the context of naming and predication) into a Wittgensteinian discussion in terms of language-games and forms of life, is indeed an Aristotelian move that enables one to move away from the simple primitive language-game of naming to the more complex language games at issue in the metaphorising process. This move is manifested in Wittgenstein’s discussion of style in which it is claimed that practical reason and argumentation has not been severed from composition and style.

Metaphor is clearly a rhetorical tool requiring argumentation, composition and style all of which are required if metaphor is involved in the learning and teaching processes. If, then, metaphor is a teaching tool–one that “teaches through genus”, to use Aristotle’s words, then the understanding must also be involved in such processes. Genus is the principle of all the species that are subsumed under the genus. Its use in fictional contexts retains this learning teaching aspect with some modifications. In the metaphorising process, however , where we think or say something about something by partly seeing something as something, e .g. making a tiger of an angry man or a wolf of a man, there is a transformation of nouns involved in this process, but there is nevertheless much more to be described and explained. This “much more” refers to argumentation, composition, and style in a context of actualisation processes organised by principles or forms. All of these aspects are involved in the mood or attitude that is organising what it is we are thinking about and the way in which we are thinking about this something(this part of the world). Imagination and perception also play different roles in the formation of metaphorical schemata: metaphorical schemata have a different structure to the veritative schemata controlled by categories of judgement used in knowledge claims in the context of the justification of beliefs. Truth is still part of the structure because even in practical ought-claims, reference is made to premises of arguments that claim to be probably true. Persuasion is needed because even if the premises concerned are self evident for the wise, common people need to engage in a process of learning to arrive at the position argued for.

What is interesting is Ricoeur’s claim that we have seen a decline of the importance of Rhetoric throughout the ages. He refers to a marked decline in the mid 19th century but the process may well have begun much earlier with the decline of Aristotelian Philosophy we described in the Cartesian- Hobbesian period which in its turn built its materialistic and dualistic structures on the colonisation of all forms of Culture by Religion and Science. A restoration of Hylomorphic theory occurred during the Enlightenment with the Philosophy of Kant but this was only for a short period until the eclipse of Kantian Philosophy by the usurper Hegel who colonised the Humanities.The underlying actualisation processes of Culture created by Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy continued an underground form of existence in the University system and permeated society slowly and painfully as a Cultural Cosmopolitan counterpoint to the militaristic and economic globalisation forces.

The role of reference to the world that we find in metaphorical ascription and the metaphorising process is undoubtedly enigmatic. Ricoeur, in an essay entitled “Metaphor and Reference” claims that the central operation of discourse is the synthetic act of predication and that this act “intends” an extra linguistic reality. This interesting move is however overshadowed by Ricoeur’s admission that the working hypothesis of his paper hopes to use the ideas of sense and reference found in Fregean theory. This thesis is further diluted by a problematic characterisation of “Sense”:

“The sense is what the proposition states: the reference or denotation is that about which the sense is stated.”(The Role of Metaphor, P.217)

Aa we indicated above this is only a partly correct characterisation of sense. A better characterisation would point to the way in which sense picks out or selects the reference of the expression. Ricoeur also wishes to use this dualistic pair(sense and reference) in relation to larger units of discourse than the sentence. In Frege’s theory we encounter a tendency to return to his controlling idea of the logic of proper names, even in relation to the truth-value of sentences. Frege claims, for example, that the proper name of a sentence refers to a state of affairs. That the synthesis of subject and predicate should result in a rigid designator like a proper name does appear to be a form of logical atomism that would be difficult to apply to larger forms of discourse of the kind we find in literary and poetic texts. Given these assumptions, Ricoeur is forced to concede the possibility that literary terms:

“seem to constitute an exception to the reference requirement.”(Ibid P.219)

Ricoeur does however agree that when we are dealing with complex works of the above kinds new categories of evaluation must emerge, namely activity categories, or as he calls them:

“categories of production and of labour” (Ibid P.219)

The work of composition involved in the production of literary and poetic texts testifies to a “disposition”, a totality that is irreducible to the sum of its elements, even if these elements are objects or states of affairs. “Disposition” is the word that Aristotle uses for the form of organisation we find in the mind of those who are virtuous. It is this form of organisation of the mind that is responsible for the organisation of the text into a genre via “rules of the game”, to use Wittgensteinian language. The controlling science of such activity is techné, a productive science. The activities involved in this process obviously strive towards a world and presuppose the world that a reader or audience brings to the work. Hermeneutics, Ricoeur argues, is the philosophical theoretical science that is best equipped to explore the relation between literary/mythical works and the world.

If, as Aristotle claims, “Being has many meanings”, then hermeneutics for Ricoeur is the roundabout route one takes to catch a glimpse of this Being–perhaps in the spirit of the claim by Turbayne:

“We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us”(Turbayne, Myth and Metaphor, 64).

Aristotle is surprisingly invoked in support of the above position:

“We shall use as our touchstone the Aristotelian doctrine of the analogical unity of the multiple meanings of being, ancestor of the medieval doctrine of the analogy of being. Aristotle’s doctrine will provide the occasion for showing that there is no direct passage from the semantic functioning of metaphorical expression to the transcendental doctrine of analogy. On the contrary, the latter furnishes a particularly striking example of the autonomy of philosophical discourse.”(Ibid, P.258)

The earlier work of Aristotle focussed upon substance and its particularity as well as its relation to other categories of existence. Aristotle’s later work(hylomorphic theory) transformed substance into principle or form in a context of actualisation that involves powers or potentialities actualising over time given appropriate conditions. This hylomorphic theory of change invokes principles and causes(explanations) for the 4 kinds of change(substantial, qualitative, quantitative and locomotion). Being is said in many ways in this theory and it is this theory that provides us with the categorical framework that contains the metaphorising process or metaphoric attribution in the epistemological context of the justification of probable truths understood by the great souled men of Aristotle’s time.

We know that Kant regarded Aristotle’s Categories of existence as rhapsodic rather than as essence determining principles but there nevertheless would probably be agreement upon the following idea we find in Aristotle’s Metaphysics:

“the causes of all things are the same or analogous”(Metaphysics A 5, 1071, a 33-5)

We are no longer in the territory of the Categories but rather in the labyrinth of hylomorphic theory. Analogy in this context clearly has a transcendental quality which exceeds the scope of the mathematical idea of analogy defined in terms of proportionality: A is to B as C is to D. In this mathematical idea of analogy we are in the realm of the calculating faculty of the mind rather than the more philosophically inclined contemplative faculty. We know that Aristotle used this form of mathematical reasoning in his biological investigations of animals but he also uses it in the arena of Psychology–“as sight is to the body, so is reason in the soul”(Nichomachean Ethics 1:4 1096 b 28-29). Such a statement of course could also be embraced by a dualist.

Logical positivism, logical atomists, pragmatists, dualists and materialists all view metaphysics sceptically and would also view the idea of transcendental resemblance among the primary meanings of being as unverifiable and unscientific. Theological speculation on the nature of our relation to God is reconstrued in Aristotle on the model of perfection and imperfection. The Aristotelian God does not act authoritatively in relation to material in the way in which an artist does, but rather creates and organises the world in acts of self reflection. God, on this theory is primary Form in relation to analogous forms rather than Substance and its infinite modes(Spinoza). Matter is a mode of God’s thought but not separated from it. Human thought at its most philosophical, proceeds in accordance with hylomorphic theory and is guided by forms or principles analogous to God’s thought but is imperfect in being restricted to finite spatio-temporal limitations: i.e. limited in power and possessing the virtues(dispositions) to a limited degree. God, in other words, is perfection(omniscient, omnipotent, absolutely good, etc) and man can only strive for these “virtues”. One is reminded here of the Platonic metaphysical relation of “participation”(man appears to be “participating” in the Being of God). God communicates his being to us in his self reflective thought. Here there is reference to a transcendent resemblance that humans have access to via analogical calculation. Being, however is not a genus and if this is so, then the function of metaphor to teach via genus means, it could be claimed, that we are not in the realm of metaphorical discourse. If, however, God is the ordering principle of being, the Primary Form of Being, he would be the genus of all principles or forms that we humans understand. If this argumentation holds there are grounds for maintaining that a metaphorising process is occurring when , for example, we attribute(metaphorically) the virtues of wisdom, etc to Man. This would relate to poetic and theological discourse in which the relation of God to Man is the issue and this in turn might explain the poetic quality of Religious texts and the divine quality of poetic texts. This line of reasoning accords with Heidegger’s claim that “The metaphorical exists only within the metaphysical”. We should recall that in the contest of this discussion poetry is as revelatory as Philosophy of the Being of the World.

Analogies abound in Plato’s Republic and perhaps the three most famous analogies are those of the sun, the divided line and the Cave. The sun is a metaphor for the knowledge of the Good and here the analogy concerns the relation of 4 terms: the sun is to the health and necessities of the body as the knowledge of the good is to the health and necessities of the soul. The divided line is a mathematical metaphor where the mathematical divisions symbolise the different organising principles of knowledge in the soul. The Cave is an all embracing metaphor best summed up in the maxim “Knowledge sets you free”.

Let us now return from our long detour to Julian Jaynes and his claim that “Consciousness is primarily an analogue “I”, “narratising” in a “mind-space” whose features are built up on the basis of metaphors”(Julian Jaynes Collection, P. 145). In another essay entitled “The Origins of Consciousness” Jaynes elaborates further upon the above view of consciousness:

“What then is it?….Subjective conscious mind is an an analogy of what we call the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogies of behaviour in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to short cut behavioural processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics it is an operator rather than a thing or a repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision. Consider the language we use to describe conscious processes. The most prominent group of words used to describe mental events are visual. We “see” solutions to problems, the best of which may be “brilliant”…these words are metaphors and the mind space to which they apply is a metaphor of actual space. In it we can “approach” a problem perhaps from some “viewpoint” and “grapple” with its difficulties. Every word we use to refer to mental events is a metaphor of something in the behavioural world.”

The real world is obviously made up of sensory-motor activity and the residue of such activity in the mind. Language has both sensory and motor connections but it also possesses an ability or power to represent reality in its absence via the meaning of words and our knowledge of the world that emerges from the “residues” of our experiences of the world. Metaphorisation is therefore a key function of language and leads us to ask whether Freud’s claim that Consciousness is a vicissitude of instinct is an answer to Jaynes’s question “What is it?”. For Jaynes, Consciousness and Language are interrelated in various complex ways: both would appear to be “operators” sharing the task of problem solving. Both assist in the process of delaying the instinctive reflexive reaction to stimuli in the environment via a characterisation or picture of the environment and/or residual memories of previous encounters. The typical cause of the delay between sensory stimulation and behavioural response is that a question arises if the stimulus suggests a problem needs to be solved. This requires a conscious representation of the future and of something that needs to be done in order for the representation to be actualised. It is this delay in the behavioural response that Freud characterises as the secondary process–the process of thinking. At its most complex and abstract levels we will encounter conscious reasoning about the problem, but prior to that we encounter a more concrete form of consciousness involving the analogue I narrating what metaphorical me’s ought to do in this virtual constructed space, the space of planning and decision. This carries with it the implication that the operator of Consciousness is working in accordance with a practical logic designed to bring about an action-response to a problem. The operating space for this activity is a normative space operating in accordance with the logic of “the good” or “ought-premises”. This space contains both instrumental and categorical imperatives as principles in which both imagination and reasoning is working. Recall Aristotle’s claim that the metaphorisation process “places something before the eyes”. Language places what is absent before the eyes, metaphorically. The question that this poses is whether language possesses a necessarily metaphorical structure. We are reminded of the Kantian account of language acquisition in which the first use of the word “I” awakens the intellect and this may be part of the structuring of the “space of consciousness”. Prior to that moment children typically narrate what they are doing(egocentrically according to Piaget) and they use the model of narrating what others are doing that others have used in relation to their activities. They use, for example, the name that others use to call them, e.g. Charles wants to eat. At this stage(before the use of the “I”) there is no evidence of planning and decision making in the narrative of the narrator. The case study of Helen Keller and the awakening of her intellectual powers with the first use of naming in sign language, indeed suggests that the naming of things is a necessary condition of the development of consciousness. Wittgenstein testified to this fact when he claimed that the language game of naming was a primitive language game which of course was not Primitive in any atomistic sense , since it too required other conditions.