“The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor”
Sparshott (1974: 84) writes, “A language is nothing but a necropolis of dead metaphors.” The more we examine the growth of languages, the less hyperbolic this statement appears to be; the lexicon of a language, at least, is grounded to a significant extent upon buried (if not dead) metaphor.
Consider the semantic evolution of the word scruple as a case in point (see O.E.D 2685). The process of unearthing the word’s metaphoric skeleton also turns up a host of other figural relics. Apparently, the early referent of scruple’s Latin “ancestor” was something like “a small sharp stone”—perhaps of the sort that might get into your shoe and annoy you, but not usually enough to make you stop, pull off your shoe in public, and shake the little stone out. Now, in American English, the primary referent of scruple is “a reluctance or hesitation on grounds of conscience.” This evolution from the little rock to the idea of morality is no random change; rather, it strikes me as a rather teleological change, for it has a certain wit about it: The small sharp stone is metaphorically the cause for moral halting or hesitation. Despite the fact that scruple’s quaint history has dropped out of common knowledge, once we are reminded of it, we take conscious pleasure (or displeasure) in finding the worrisome little pebble still there, for a moral scruple is not a major cornerstone of our ethical foundation; it is simply a small pebble of conscience that we seldom think about until it turns up under foot to pang us if we tread upon it. The metaphorizing of scruple is an instance of a kind of poetry buried deep in the nature of ordinary language and semeiosis. Even dead metaphor fertilizes semantic growth—of language, of poetry, of thought.
The very large number of examples of this kind, however, should not be taken as evidence for the false notion that ordinary language or even metaphor is all there is to poetry. Throughout this study I have emphasized the differences between ordinary and poetic metaphor, which itself of course is not the whole of poetry, though it is clearly central to it. On the other hand, I have also tried to show that the differences between ordinary and poetic metaphor are differences in the use and degree, not in the kind, of linguistic or semeiotic competence.
To be sure, such differences are vitally important. One difference seems to involve a contrast in the amount of time required for the growth of metaphorical meaning to emerge. That is, the poets among us are those who are able to achieve, in an instant of time, the sort of convincing and natural “leap” which might take centuries for the ordinary evolution of language to effect. Scruple may have changed in one such leap to a new meaning, which immediately became fashionable, but probably it did not. More likely it changed in stages which, considered individually, appear to form a loose chain of drift, broadening metonymic association, and minor extension, as Henle (1958: 188) has pointed out in the case of the word cosmos:
This evolution is strikingly parallel to the iconic movements of at least one kind of complex poetic metaphor we have examined. The evolution of cosmos, however, took centuries; poetic metaphor leaps across those centuries, transcending linguistic time, accelerating the process by which word meaning—along with the world view delineated by word meaning—is convincingly made and remade. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that very often in poetic metaphor, the “ontogeny” of meaning “recapitulates the phylogeny” of language.
If my hypothesis in chapter 6 is correct—that both the ontogeny of a poetic molecule and the phylogeny of language are but discoveries, in one way or another, of a semeiotic macrocosm like the one I have sketched from the leading suggestions of Peirce—then the evolution of the word cosmos itself would make good sense:
While it is unnecessary to accept these particular designations of the category distinctions, such examples (and they are legion) suggest that there must be an overarching and relatively stable hierarchy of broad semeiotic domains which fosters and guides (or at least marks the inherent logic of) many new meanings. It is not enough to say, with Bloomfield, that “refined and abstract meanings largely grow out of more concrete meanings” (1933: 429-430). It is not enough because, as Bloomfield also said, that much is obvious from the mere “surface study of semantic change.” It is not enough because—in examples like the evolution of cosmos, where any given intermediate stage may seem an accidental mutation or free associative hybrid—the sequence of palpable categories which emerges over time suggests an internal logic not accounted for by simply noting the abstract result. Additionally, it is not enough because the growth of meaning is often in the reverse order (from abstract to concrete) as we have already seen in the case of the metaicon in poetry (some further comments to follow here). What makes us feel that a case of semantic change constitutes “growth” is not the particular result in a given case of change, but the “certain general character” of such changes, in Peirce’s words (CP 1.211, emphasis added). The evolution of metaphorical meaning is teleological, I believe, because of the very orderliness and goal-directedness of the process of change itself. While the particular “goal” may be abstraction in individual cases of metaphorical extension, in cases of metaphorical narrowing (as when new diagrams or images are generated from a metaicon), the particular “goal” is concretion. Thus the “certain general character” of the goal in metaphoric growth can be thought of as the emergence of a general system (in the literature and in the language) by which meanings can be either extended or narrowed metaphorically, to contextual and cognitive advantage.
Now the importance of metaphor in semantic growth has often been noted (see especially Anttila 1972: 142 and 1977: 18, where he ranks metaphor as “our chief means to expand our use of language”). The next step in metaphor study, I believe, ought to be the development of a meta-theory of semeiotic/linguistic phyla and evolution, which would do for semantics and poetics what Darwin’s Origin of Species has done for biology. The grossly oversimplified taxonomy of alleged “natural kinds” and the primitive cross-predicative functions of “natural selection” which I have proposed in this (mainly synchronic) study will probably not answer the need for such a meta-theory. Nevertheless, if such a theory is possible at all, I am convinced that the makings of it are to be found in the semeiotic of C. S. Peirce. (In this connection, see Rauch 1984, especially page 19.)
In passages mentioned previously (CP 2.222, 2.290n, 7.590), Peirce noted the helpfulness, the plenitude, and the creative power of metaphor in the generation and new application of symbols both in language and in logic. Despite his early antipathy to figurative language as noted in chapter 2, his definitions for words in The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1889) and in his materials for a “Dictionary of Logic” (1867, MS 145) sometimes offer illustrations or etymologies showing a keen appreciation for metaphor in the growth and function of language (see especially his definition of analogy and related terms in The Century Dictionary, CB 373: 195, and his appeal to “the original metaphor” of the verb to abstract, W 2: 116). Still, it seems obvious that metaphor as such occupies only a modest, if not negligible, position in the Peircean semeiotic.
This is not to say, however, that the Peircean semeiotic must in turn be limited to a modest role in the study of metaphor, including the function of metaphor in the general growth of language. On the contrary, I believe that a thorough application of Peirce’s semeiotic to metaphor will ultimately lead to a much deeper recognition of the crucial role played by metaphor in the evolution not only of language but of all thought and culture. To take one step in that direction, I will explore in this final chapter one further extension from Peirce’s seminal description of metaphor in the hypoicon passage (CP 2.277, first discussed in chapter 2).
Specifically, I will offer that Peirce’s placement and treatment of metaphor along with the image and diagram suggest (perhaps beyond his intent) a potential developmental sequence in the evolution of the Icon. This sequence of development in the Icon begins in imagery and tends toward pure metaphoricity (which I have termed the metaiconic type), via asymmetrical diagrammatic extension upward. “Pure metaphoricity” can thus be viewed as a final cause in iconic evolution, a natural principle of selection that determines which images and diagrams will survive their immediate contextual uses. Once this metaiconic type reaches its full entelechy, it then becomes an efficient cause, a formal law by which an endless progeny of fresh (and reliably symmetrical) diagrams and images are generated, not just in poetry but throughout the sign system.
Proving this hypothesis is beyond my scope here. But if the hypothesis can be demonstrated as feasible at least, it would suggest a much more important role for metaphoricity in the birth and growth of symbols than might have been previously thought. That is, while any metaphor might be the immediate origin (or new extension) of a symbol (CP 2.222), the principle of pure metaphoricity itself, as archetypal Icon, might be the prototypical Symbol. The archetypal metaphor of poetry, then, might be seen as an approach to a first principle of language, and the actualization of this principle in poetry would be perhaps the greatest debt owed by a language to its creative literary tradition.
First, though, let us see if the hypothesis is feasible. What it amounts to is an application of Michael Shapiro’s reading (following Short 1980; 1981a and b; 1982; 1983) of Peircean final versus efficient causation in semeiosis. Shapiro’s most focussed development is given in his “Teleology, Semeiosis, and Linguistic Change” (1985b) where he applies the theory of Peircean causation to examples of teleological development in Russian phonology and morphology. Elsewhere, he applies a similar scheme to the evolution of orthographic signs, marks, and diacritics (1985a), and to other topics in connection with Edward Sapir’s notion of “drift” (1987). To Shapiro and to Short (and naturally to Peirce), then, I am indebted for this theoretical approach, though of course none of these men is responsible if this application of it does not work.
Shapiro’s explication of Peircean causation in “Teleology, Semeiosis, and Linguistic Change,” as it relates to the feasibility of my application, involves the following crucial points: one, Peirce follows Aristotle in explicitly dissociating final causes from conscious purposes; two, final causes are present (or antecedent) but not mere possibilities; three, final causes are general types, or principles of selection; four, final causes operate in language through a tendency towards diagrammatization; five, the entelechy of final causation is the establishment of formal laws which then operate as efficient causes. In the rest of this chapter, I will take these points up in order.
First, Shapiro calls the notion that a final cause is a conscious purpose “one of the most damaging misconstruals of teleology,” for it is this notion which attributes “wanting” to inanimate objects. Shapiro points out that it is “absurd to imagine genes or languages wanting or purposing anything” (1985b: 2). Although for Peirce “a symbol is essentially a purpose” (NEM 4: 261), Shapiro notes, “Peirce does not thereby intend to restrict his own understanding of final causes to purposes” (10), because Peirce explicitly states that “a purpose is merely that form of a final cause which is most familiar to our experience” (CP 1.211).
How does this point apply to the question of feasibility in my hypothesis? What it does is to dissociate the alleged “drift” of metaphorical extension, its tendency toward the ideal of pure metaphoricity, from the conscious purpose of the poet or of the linguistic community. The actual innovations or extensions in the usage of the word cosmos, for instance, might have been effected for any of a number of conscious purposes—many of which might have been at variance with what emerges over time as the result—or for no conscious purposes at all (if the new usages were mistakes); what is important is that just those innovations survived which make the (alleged) overarching semantic structure more explicit. Perhaps this is a tautology, but one which nonetheless serves as an explanation: The multiplicity of examples such as cosmos or scruple exhibit a pattern so striking that it would be “too improbably coincidental if there were no final causes that explained them,” to borrow Short’s words applied to a different topic (1981a: 369). Similarly, in the case of that sort of “instantaneous leap” made by a poetic metaphor (if I am right that it achieves in a moment what often happens only in centuries of drift), there is no need to suppose a conscious purpose on the part of the poet to produce an indexical pattern of innovations anything like what I claim to be the emergent metaiconic force and direction of such metaphors. My claim may be wrong, but it is not infeasible in this regard, for it simply makes no claim as to conscious purpose in proposing a final causation in such patterns.
Moreover, Shapiro’s and Short’s reading of Peircean causation—in subordinating conscious (human) purpose to a master pattern—actually increases the feasibility of my proposal, I think. Specifically, it encourages an application to the phenomenon of metaphor. Shapiro writes:
Holding, as he did, that matter is “effete mind”, Peirce is consistent in describing his concept of teleology as anthropomorphic: “Rationality is being governed by final causes” (2.66); “psychicality [consists] in being under the governance of psychical, i.e., of final causes” (1.253); “the mind works by final causation” (1.250). But the mental, for Peirce, is continuous with types of teleological process other than those found in the human mind. Peirce can thus speak of the behavior of microorganisms, biological evolution, and even the growth of crystals as exhibiting mentality. This does not mean that there is something occult called “mind” animating inorganic processes such as crystal formation; rather that there are processes constituting human mentality that are also to be found in simpler form elsewhere throughout nature. (1985b: 13)
This certainly fits my reading of the Peircean “metaphor” as metaicon. As we have already seen (chapters 2 and 4), reciprocal symmetry is what distinguishes a host of archetypal metaphors such as Man-Symbol (including human-to-natural-symbols), Mind-Space, Voyage-Quest(ion), and so on. I suspect that all metaphorical (poetic and religious) personifications, even asymmetrical ones, are attempts at the metaiconic truth of Peirce’s objective idealism. In other words, I think such metaphors are motivated, not just because of literary habit, but because I think Peirce was absolutely correct in subordinating human habit and feeling to a master type of Universal Reasonableness which finds yet another token of itself in physical nature. It is this that makes the lawfulness of nature (and yes, its fortuitous heterogeneity as well) an icon for all forms of human life and rationality (and vice versa). This conception is also clearly provided for in the “master hierarchy” of chapter 6, which depicts human experience as the tiniest (perhaps most concentrated) domain at the center of a vast circumscribing sphere of Metaphysical Being.
This aspect of the model I am proposing encourages one additional speculation (and I emphasize that it is only a speculation). Specifically, I think it suggests a way to envision what is meant by the “growth of consciousness” in evolution. In figure 7.1, I present my own personal notion as to the literal scope of the predicate “mind” as plotted on the “metaphor map.” Please test my notion against your own. (The scope of mind as I conceive it is shown in the shaded area of the graph.) In other words, my present concept of “mind” as a predicate reaches its “highest” (most literally appropriate) points at the categories of Human and Metaphysical, its lowest at the categories of Inertial and Objective. Perhaps this is nothing more than a graph of my personal intellectual history. (For Peirce, there may have been no “curve” in the graph at all.) I would guess, however, on the basis of psycholinguistic experiments I conducted with Ronald Lunsford (see Haley 1975), that this graph might be fairly typical of at least many Western conceptions of the universe. Further—and this is the important notion—I would speculate that, if this is roughly the Western view, it was not always thus. That is, I would guess that Western culture, and probably many cultures, began with literal conceptions of Mind and Being more like that illustrated in figure 7.2.
Roughly, this would represent a conception of the universe which was literally and utterly anthropomorphic, a world view in which there was no indexical “otherness”—in the mind of man—between his own mind and nature’s. It would thus have been a world view in which metaphor, as such, was impossible (indeed, it is doubtful that even the other categories above Human in the model would have existed per se in the human mind at such a stage). I also suspect that such a view of the world is rather typical of young children today; they cannot imagine that anything in nature would go against their wishes and feelings and thoughts. Under such a conception, there would be a dawning “awareness” (as we see among lower animals), but there would be no consciousness; for consciousness, as psychologist Julian Jaynes has put it (1976: 75), is awareness of awareness—the ability not only to think, but to think about thinking. Shapiro also writes, “The sort of higher order of self-control that distinguishes human beings comes about as the result of man’s ability to subject even the principle of self-correction itself to (further) correction” (1985b: 13).
If my speculation of early anthropomorphism in culture is correct, the kind of “self-correction” I think Shapiro is talking about might have begun with some act of indexical differentiation (probably between the Human and Animate in the model). This would have led to a world view which might be characterized as the next stage in the growth of consciousness: namely, Animism (as opposed to anthropomorphism). What is most important for this study, however, is the fact that this event would have been precisely the intellectual development in human history which first made metaphor possible, for now we would have that important interactive “otherness” by which similarity (as opposed to a mere confusion of identity) is made potent and actual to the consciousness. In other words, the growth of consciousness in human evolution must have been inextricably bound up with the development of metaphor. Perhaps some fortuitous speech act of metaphorical indexation in human semeiosis was even what occasioned or facilitated this growth.
If we take Peirce’s trichotomy of hypoicons as a developmental sequence (image > diagram > metaphor), this speculation would make good sense. That is, I would guess that the earliest iconic thoughts of man were pure imagery, a near total lack of differentiation between icon and object (thus the condition of “collapse” between mentality and objective reality). Growth beyond this stage must have occurred in the direction of diagrammatization. But as we have seen, metaphorical diagrams are characteristically asymmetrical (usually concrete-to-abstract). Thus, the asymmetry of the first diagrammatic leap upward towards metaphoricity might have been precisely what first actualized indexical differentiation in the human mind. For my purposes, we might just as well suppose the reverse: Perhaps some event which at first “alienated” the human mind from nature is what made possible the first asymmetrical diagrammatic icon; that event (to the degree to which it was guided by the final cause of some metaiconic type) would have led, in turn, to the achievement of pure metaphoricity—an achievement by which the human “alienation” from nature’s objectivity would have begun to be resolved, if not relaxed, into a condition of harmonious and balanced separateness (an isomorphism between mind and nature).
I hope it is not too presumptuous of me to suggest that the “parabola” shape in my graph of the “mind”-predicate in figure 7.1 depicts just such a condition of isomorphic harmony and balance between human reason and nature: The two arms of the parabola provide for the mind-to-nature isomorphism; the nose of the parabola provides for the important indexical point of balance. On the other hand, perhaps my parabola shows only a stage in my growth of consciousness, as I am sure some of my friends in the university would be quick to suggest. That is, they would point out that my “parabola” in figure 7.1 differs from the curve of figure 7.2 (literal anthropomorphism) by the relative expansion of the “mind” scope at the bottom of the parabola figure as compared to a decrease in its scope midway in the graph. And they would predict that, when I come to intellectual maturity, I will draw a graph with all the mind space down at the bottom, in the Human category where it belongs. I hope that they would be wrong in that prediction, for if they are right—if man really is the measure of all things—then metaphor as such (at least as I now conceive it) would once again become impossible. If everything is metaphor, metaphor is nothing.
But I will leave these speculations, now, to return to Shapiro’s important second and third points: Final causes, in the Peircean (and Aristotelian) sense, are present but not mere possibilities; they are general types which tend to emerge. Shapiro writes:
Traditional antipathy to teleology stems in part from the received idea that it is antiscientific obscurantism. How could the future influence the present? In this form, teleology sounds like occultism. But as the careful exposition of Peirce’s concept of final cause has made clear, teleology is rather the doctrine of the potency of present possibilities. There is nothing mysterious or occult in this once it is coupled with the idea that types bring about results of a general kind. (1985b: 27)
I have already presented (in chapters 2 and 4) my best arguments for considering Peirce’s hypoiconic “metaphor” as a metaiconic type. In chapter 3, I have detailed a doctrine of metaphorical possibility, based loosely on Peirce’s notions, which seeks to make the antecedence of possibility (before its discovery in poetic metaphor) seem feasible, and so I will not belabor those issues here. What remains for me to do now is to make a few suggestions about how these notions regarding metaphor might help to define its role in diachronic linguistic (and broader semeiotic) growth.
First, in what sense can the evolution of words like cosmos and scruple be considered “growth” as opposed to random change? As already indicated, it cannot be the mere fact that such change often tends toward abstract senses. There is nothing “better” about an abstract sense per se (now that cosmos refers to the whole universe, its meaning is not “better” than when it referred only to a lady’s headdress); indeed, Shapiro points out that Peirce departs from Aristotle on this point: unlike Aristotle, Peirce does not attribute the potency of final causation to its “goodness” (1985b: 12). But then, in what sense might evolution towards a general type represent “growth”? If we call it that, we must mean that the outcome or result of such change represents “progress” of some sort towards a goal, even if the goal is not “goodness” per se. Perhaps we might define growth as the acquisition of increasing complexity, as in biological evolution. I think that comes close to the mark. But when we consider the evolution of meaning in words like cosmos and scruple, the abstract or general meanings they have attained are not necessarily more “complex” than their original meanings. True, these broader and more general senses are parallel to greater complexity in human mental development, but in a very important sense (especially where metaphor is concerned) these general senses in themselves are actually simpler or less complex than their original meanings. Even if we could appropriately consider these abstract meanings as “final outcomes” in themselves (which we cannot reliably do, of course, as they are almost certain to change again), these “outcomes” would not necessarily be more complex in every way of looking at them.
The question of “growth,” at this point, narrows itself to the question of what the “final outcome” really is. It is not the generality of a word’s meaning all by itself which constitutes the outcome; it is rather the fact that this generality implies—and has been attained through the crystallization of—continuity in the sign system. Peirce wrote:
Looking upon the course of logic as a whole we see that it proceeds from the question to the answer—from the vague to the definite. And so likewise all evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite. The indeterminate future becomes the irrevocable past. In Spencer’s phrase the undifferentiated differentiates itself. The homogenous puts on heterogeneity. However it may be in special cases, then, we must suppose that as a rule the continuum has been derived from a more general continuum, a continuum of higher generality. (CP 6.191)
What a pompous view it would be to think that we, as human beings, were the “goal” of biological evolution! The goal of evolution is the proliferation of species (the heterogeneity of nature), because it is only under that condition that the homogeneity of nature manifests itself clearly as Sign—a Sign of a still greater continuum of higher generality yet, of a whole that calls out its parts (CP 1.220).
Similarly, we have nothing to congratulate ourselves about when we consider, by themselves, the abstract meanings to which words like cosmos and scruple have evolved. Indeed, it is only when we observe where these meanings came from, and the stages though which they passed (helping, as they did so, to differentiate those stages), that we get a sense of the real growth or progress involved. The goal towards which this progress tends is a general type, but it is not the general type of a particular meaning in itself; it is rather the the general typology of meaning whose emergence is made definite by the growth of particular types. I am not so presumptuous as to think that the semantic hierarchy I have proposed represents the final or ultimate state of such a typology; but I believe that this model, or something like it, broadly describes the present state of our semeiotic progress towards the goal of that typology. And I believe that metaphor (in its degenerate imaginal and analogical forms) is the principal vehicle of that progress, just as surely as I believe that the principle of metaphoricity itself (in its purest form) is at least part of the goal. For it is the metaphorical index that is forever forcing us to understand and appreciate the proliferation of semantic species; and it is the metaphorical icon which is forever encouraging us towards the discovery of the ultimate homogeneity in nature, as well as between nature and our minds.
Consider how this notion of metaphorical teleology might be roughly recapitulated on the smaller scale of a child’s linguistic acquisition. As Julia Falk has noted (1978: 324-325), many investigators of children’s acquisition of word meaning have observed that early definitions tend to be overly specific; then, in the next stage, children tend to overgeneralize a word’s meaning, applying it inappropriately to referents not included in the adult usage of that word; finally, the children “narrow down” the definition to the proper adult usage. Falk illustrates this principle with some interesting samples she collected from the speech of her own daughter, Tanya. At seventeen months of age, Tanya used the word [dus] (her pronunciation of “juice”) to mean, in her mother’s translation, “only fruit juice given in highchair.” (Presumably, the same fruit juice in a different context was not [dus] at all.) Then, at eighteen months, Tanya was using [dus] to mean “any liquid.” (Tanya must have had [dus] falling from the sky when it rains, or being put into the car’s gas tank when it was empty! Falk does not say so, but I think we are safe in assuming that Tanya finally got juice narrowed down to something like “a fluid naturally contained in plant or animal tissue,” probably before she stopped pronouncing it [dus].)
In one way of looking at this, of course, the telos of childhood word acquisition is the adult usage. But in another sense—one recommended to me by my interest in metaphor—the adult usage of a given word is not itself the real teleological outcome of this sort of growth at all. Rather, I think the true “goal” of such development is the acquisition of a semantic framework, a semeiotic typology of word-referential and hierarchical classes which will allow the child to learn an ever-increasing multitude of new word meanings and to remember them without specific contextual cues. What to me is even more important about such a typology, however, is that it will provide the child a framework—one which she can use throughout her life—to make and understand metaphor. In other words, I predict that the first time Tanya hears someone use “juice” in context to mean “electricity” (if she does not happen to say it first herself), she will know what is meant. At the very least, because of her own vital experimentation with word meaning during early childhood, she will already have (unconsciously) in mind the categories of meaning and experience necessary to interpret juice metaphorically in this way. And in the best case, she will understand that this metaphor tells the truth in a deeper sense than the idiomatic or contextual sense—namely, the sense in which the organic origin of juice really is but a token of its membership in a more general type of energy which spans electricity as well.
Thus I do not see that children’s “overgeneralization” in semantics (and the same thing occurs in phonology and syntax) is “inappropriate” in the least. In relation to adult norms, of course, these childlike experimentations with language are bound to produce “mistakes,” but ones that I believe are highly fortuitous. We must learn the keyboard before we can make the music. If nothing else, this process of starting too low and then reaching too high gives the child exercise in what may come close to being a first principle of all language and semeiosis—asymmetrical diagrammatic extension from the known to the new. While analogy is the “syntax” of this remarkable transformation, I believe, its controlling “deep structure” is the hope (though not the conscious purpose) of metaphoricity.
This brings me to Shapiro’s fourth crucial point: Final causes operate in language through a tendency towards diagrammatization. He shows explicitly how this occurs in phonology and morphology (1983, 1985b) and elsewhere in orthography and drift (1985a, 1987). In what I believe is a brilliant seminal insight, he also suggests a way of extending his notions to the iconization of all sorts of symbolic activity:
( . . . if B and Y are symbolized by A and X, respectively, then the relation < BY > tends to be diagrammed by the relation < AX >, so that < AX > is the icon of < BY b, though A is not an icon of B nor X of Y).
Why? One might speculate: there is a telos beyond diagrammatization. The telos of language is to express, and diagrammatization contributes to the clarity and efficiency of expression. The opacity of language becomes a transparency. Words show us their objects in their own characters. Whereas there is a movement in linguistic change away from one form of this—onomatopoeia—there is a counter movement toward it in a more profound sense—diagramming relations. That the latter is more profound is indicated by the tendency of modern thought from Galileo to Peirce to Whitehead to make relations the primary reality and relata secondary. The telos of linguistic change that is beyond and accounts for diagrammatization might be something a la Heidegger, i.e., the revealing of being. (1985b: 26)
My own reading of the Peircean hypoicons would accord with this exactly. Beginning in chapter 2, I have hypothesized a continuum of iconicity, the simplest form of which is the image. Even in metaphor, this requires only the “low-level” perception of sensory likeness. The diagram, however, is more challenging to the mind, especially in metaphor, for it requires the more abstract understanding of how relations may be related, rather than single objects. It is more profound, I think, because it encourages thinking not only in relationships but also about relationships. Because the similarity of the diagram is actualized in a clearly dyadic form (whereas the image is nearly monadic), I believe diagrammatic thought must have been the breakthrough which crystallized the differentiation of semantic levels in language and consciousness. And so I fully agree that final causation shows itself as a tendency towards diagrammaticality.
What interests me most about Shapiro’s statement, however, is his suggestion of a telos beyond diagrammatization. Note that Shapiro gives two suggestions (not mutually exclusive) as to what that telos might be: one, the clarity and efficiency of expression; and two, the revelation of being.
This is precisely what I have said about the two kinds of “motivation” for metaphor of the analogical sort (and thus redundantly of the imaginal sort, albeit to a lesser degree). That is, I have suggested that some metaphorical diagrams are merely rhetorical or expressive, while others (those that belong to a metaiconic type) are revelatory or prophetic. For my purposes, then, I am most interested in Shapiro’s second possibility for a telos beyond diagrammatization. It is just here that I think my hypothesis of Peirce’s hypoicon trichotomy as a developmental sequence in the evolution of iconicity becomes most feasible. If there is sometimes a telos beyond diagrammatization (besides efficiency of expression), why not think of it as given by [image > diagram > metaphor] (with “metaphor” as “metaicon”)? This would explain, at least, why some metaphors (and perhaps some iconic signs of all sorts) tend to outlive the immediate rhetorical applications to which they are put and to remain continually productive of new discoveries about “being.”
One natural objection to thinking of the hypoicon trichotomy in this way is the fact that (apparently) neither Shapiro nor Peirce thought of it in this way. For Shapiro (1983: 185), the Peircean metaphor is actually a sub-species of the diagram, as it is based on “parallelism” in Peirce’s description (CP 2.777). My own view is that Shapiro is right in this respect—two things which are parallel at the diagrammatic level are not (qualitatively) “more parallel” at the metaphorical level. I am simply venturing an additional guess that diagrams which are purely dyadic (not grounded in a third metaiconic type) have a lower life expectancy; they serve the cause of expressive efficiency, but no final cause in metaphorical teleology. Still, it is clear that the “logic” of even a metaiconic relation reaches its most objectifiable “syntactic” form at the level of the diagram (the metaicon, because of its vagueness, needs its multitude of diagrams precisely for their logical rigor). Indeed, it seems clear (from his usual treatments) that if any icon had “typical” or “prototypical” status for Peirce, it was the diagram. For instance, he wrote: “A concept is the living influence upon us of a diagram, or icon, with whose several parts are connected in thought an equal number of feelings or ideas. The law of mind is that feelings and ideas attach themselves in thought so as to form systems” (CP 7.467). Similarly, the “revelatory” or “prophetic” power which I want to attribute to the metaicon, Peirce seemed ready to grant any icon (CP 2.279; 4.530; CB 296: 182; CB 1128: 492-493).
Here, however, an important caution arises: Icons, in themselves, give only one kind of assurance of truth: “Namely, that which is displayed before the mind’s gaze,—the Form of the Icon, which is also its object,— must be logically possible” (CP 4.531, emphasis CSP’s). Icons reveal “hidden truths” about their objects (which might be “pure fictions”) precisely by making us aware of possibilities which we had not considered before, or which may not even have been actualized. Now as we have already seen, there are different sorts of possibilities. As Shapiro shows, the greater potency of some possibilities is fundamental to Peirce’s notion of final causation in teleology. If there is a teleology in the development of iconicity, then it must be that certain iconic possibilities are more potent than others. That is all I wish to claim for metaiconic possibility: It is the final type of iconic potentiality towards which all diagrams and images (except those motivated only by the need for expressive efficiency) tend to gravitate.
But why, then, did Peirce have the habit of treating the diagram itself as somehow the most representative icon? Borrowing Shapiro’s argument about the relation of final causes and conscious purposes, I would suggest that Peirce, even if he did treat the icon as “essentially” a diagram, did not thereby limit the notion of iconicity to the level of the diagram. That is, the diagram was simply that form of the icon which was most familiar to him in his studies. His primary use of icons was in connection with his system of existential graphs. These are clearly diagrams (although an interesting future inquiry might be to consider whether his system of existential graphs could be viewed as belonging, ultimately, to some kind of metaphorical typology that Peirce himself had not consciously worked out). In other words, Peirce was most interested in the logical “syntax” of iconicity, and that is diagrammaticality. On the other hand, in the course of this study we have seen that Peirce often appealed—in some of his most profound passages—to something beyond “mere” verbal analogy. And, as I have argued in chapter 2, I believe the hypoicon passage itself is enough to suggest that Peirce at least provided for the possibility of an iconicity beyond diagrammaticality; if so, however, it is a possibility that cannot do without diagrammaticality.
Other passages also suggest that Peirce provided for a developmental sequence of iconicity in linguistic evolution. He wrote:
Rudimentary languages, when men first began to talk together, must have largely consisted either in directly imitative words, or in conventional names which they attached to pictures. The Egyptian language is . . . , as far as we know, the earliest to be written; and the writing is all in pictures. Some of these pictures came to stand for sounds, letters and syllables. But others stand directly for ideas. They are not nouns; they are not verbs; they are just pictorial ideas. (MS 404: 7)
Note that this description suggests a sequence: First come pictures (pictograms, or drawings of objects; these would correspond to images in Peirce’s hypoicons). Next, these pictures come to stand for sounds, letters, and syllables. What Peirce was referring to here is called the rebus principle in linguistics, a process by which pictograms, for instance, come to have phonological value in writing systems which begin as pictographic. I believe this must occur by several sorts of diagrammatic extension from pictograms.
Here is how the rebus works: Suppose, for instance, that you begin with a pictographic drawing like to represent an eye. For efficiency of expression, you might next come to represent it as
. Already, you see, the sign has come to be grounded less on pure imaginal resemblance and more on diagrammatic proportion: it is less a “picture” and more a “map” of an eye. But then, for even greater efficiency of expression, you might start using
to represent the first-person pronoun “I,” not because the drawing looks like, or even maps the physical outline of, the first-person referent (at least we hope not), but because your pronunciation of “eye” sounds like your pronunciation of “I.” For even greater efficiency yet, you could begin to use
to represent any sound belonging to the phoneme /ay/. Thus, the whole process would have begun in imagery and moved through several stages of increasingly asymmetrical diagrammatic extension. For efficiency of expression, the rebus completes its cycle by using (originally) pictographic signs to diagram phonological relations.
Is the rebus diagram motivated by anything besides efficiency of expression? It is interesting to speculate. Bolinger and Sears (1981: 286) describe an interesting example of the rebus:
Hans Jensen in his Sign, Symbol, and Script tells how the Yorubas of West Africa developed rebus messages using material objects. Cowrie shells were used as tallies—six of them stood for the number six, for which the Yoruba word is efa. But efa also meant “be attracted to,” and a boy would send six cowries to a girl to say “I love you.” To return his love, she might send eight cowries—the word for eight was ejo, which was also a form of the verb jo, “to be in agreement”—“I love you too.”
In such ways the rebus principle allows not only for efficiency but for a certain revealing cleverness and semantic richness in diagrammatic relations. The above example seems to involve the following analogy:
six cowries / eight cowries :: I love you / I love you too
Here, numerical relations (tallies), reinforced by the rebus, are used to diagram amatory relations. In this particular case, then, we might want to say that the diagram is well on its way towards metaphor in its indexation of semantic species. But with regard only to the iconic factor, is there perhaps a glimpse, here, of a metaicon—perhaps something like multitude ≅ fervency? At the very least, the girl’s response of eight cowries seems to be a delightfully revealing and creative metaphor of the analogical sort: It seems almost to say, “I herewith return your six cowries . . . and two more.”
But what of the third level of orthography provided for in Peirce’s description of Egyptian writing, the use of pictures to represent ideas? These are called ideograms in linguistics, and they are highly metaphorical. Fromkin and Rodman (1983: 143) write:
In the course of time the pictogram’s meaning was extended, in that the picture represented not only the original object but attributes of that object, or concepts associated with it. Thus, a picture of the sun could represent “warmth,” “heat,” “light,” or “daytime.” Pictograms thus began to represent ideas rather than objects, and such pictograms are called ideograms (“idea pictures” or “idea writing”).
The example Fromkin and Rodman give here suggests that metonymic association played a part in what ultimately emerges as metaphorical similarity. This accords with Shapiro and Shapiro (1976: 21, note schema C), Eco (1979: chapter 2), and Factor (1984: 29-33). Peirce also explains how the mere association of experiences in human thought leads ultimately to higher orders of inference by similarity (CP 7.451-456). As I read these facts, they suggest that association in experience (say, of the sun with “warmth”) may be a “force” or efficient cause, in the growth of that form of consciousness whose telos or final cause would be metaphoricity. Other examples Fromkin and Rodman offer—for instance, the one in which the picture of a star also meant God (145)—even more clearly show the emerging metaphorical character of such ideograms. In fact, ideograms are often formed by combining simple pictograms (Bolinger and Sears give examples, 1981: 286-287). The metaphorical/poetic character of Chinese ideograms was so potent for Ezra Pound that he said they “couldn’t help being and staying poetic in a way that a column of English type might very well not stay poetic” (1934: 22).
It is also interesting that by the time pictograms develop into ideograms, they are highly abstract and conventionalized in their drawn forms. Their users may be completely unaware of the ideogram’s pictographic origins (that is, the ideograms might have become “dead metaphors”). In the case of Egyptian hieroglyphics, for instance, the very elaborate pictures from the early period later came to be replaced, in everyday usage, with much more simplified and stylized forms that are clearly symbolic, rather than overtly iconic, in their mode of representation. Even more interesting, the elaborately drawn early forms nevertheless continued to be used—only in religious inscriptions (Akmajian et al. 1985: 375-378). Perhaps the priests were trying (consciously or not) to keep the “mystery” of the ideographic metaphors alive by maintaining a strong iconic content in the symbolic forms.
This brings me now to what I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that the principle of metaphoricity itself, viewed as the final cause of iconic teleology, might in turn be the prototypical Symbol. Recall that every “sufficiently complete” symbol must involve an index, just as every sufficiently complete index must involve an icon (CP 2.295; NEM 4: 256). If the Icon is the primal “core” of the Symbol (as we have just seen in the case of some orthographic symbols), and if metaphoricity is the telos of the Icon, then metaphoricity would have precisely a prototypical role in Symbol formation and growth.
Further, recall that Peirce said: “Every symbol is, in its origin, either an image of the idea signified, or a reminiscence of some individual occurrence, person or thing, connected with its meaning, or is a metaphor” (CP 2.222). On the surface, this would seem to allow that metaphor is only one of three possible origins for a symbol, and in the case of a particular verbal metaphor, say, becoming directly lexicalized, it is of course only one of three—the other two being the image and the memory. But if we take this “image” here to be the first stage in a developmental sequence of image > diagram > metaphor, then metaphor—as the final cause of imaginal evolution—would account for two of the three possible origins for symbolicity. (This would be to predict that images most likely to survive to become conventional symbols tend to be those which are “called out” by a metaiconic type.) That would leave only the memory, or “reminiscence,” as an alternative to metaphor in the birth of symbols. But if we think of this “memory” as the kind of “association” from which (if it ultimately results in symbolization) the higher orders of “similarity” emerge, then metaphoricity would be bound up with all three origins of the symbol.
Peirce elsewhere gave a supporting example of how a “memory” might serve as the germ of a symbol’s meaning, specifically the meaning of the word natural, as in natural class:
Every class has its definition, which is an idea; but it is not every class where the existence, that is, the occurrence in the universe of its members, is due to the active causality of the defining idea of the class. That circumstance makes the epithet natural particularly appropriate to the class. The word natura evidently must originally have meant birth; although even in the oldest Latin it seldom bears that meaning. There is, however, a certain sub-conscious memory of that meaning in many phrases [in which] . . . there is the idea of a springing forth, or a more vegetable-like production, without so much reference to a progenitor. . . . But nature is an inheritance. (CP 1.214, emphasis added)
It seems clear enough that Peirce’s appeal, here, to “sub-conscious memory” in discussing the origin of the word nature’s meaning involves the explication of a striking metaphorical etymology. Perhaps it is only an analogy bred out of association; in that case, being also a “memory,” it would nicely fit the niche (as does the diagram among hypoicons) between “image” and “metaphor” in Peirce’s delineation of symbolic origins. In any case, as a diagram comparing a “natural class” with a thing undergoing “live birth,” it certainly recalls Peirce’s “great analogy” discussed in chapter 2 (W 1: 497-498), an analogy which I believe is grounded in a metaiconic type.
Thus the three origins of every symbol—the image, the metaphor, and even the memory—can all be related, in one way or another, with the notion of metaphoricity. Of course I am not implying that every individual symbol is in fact born in some particular act immediately identifiable as metaphor; that could easily be refuted by our inventing some arbitrary symbol on the spot and then agreeing to use it to mean such and such. I intend only to suggest that metaphor, in its purest form, as a final cause of iconicity, is the natural prototypical ideal for symbolic origins. Thus, I would suppose, unless we are consciously trying to invent an “arbitrary” symbol (and perhaps even then), we might tend to find a sign whose iconic content is ultimately grounded in some metaiconic type. At least, if the symbol we “invent” catches on and grows in the language and culture, we shall have been given some evidence that the “image” or “memory” or “metaphor” we have drawn upon in the symbol-making was by no means private or idiosyncratic, but that it had a broader grounding in the shared signifies of human culture. Finally, to the extent that this symbol in turn becomes a powerful culturally determining sign, we shall have been given some evidence that the sign’s final causation was indeed metaiconic—and with that would come a reminder that human semeiosis is but a token of the universal semeiotic. What I have in mind is illustrated in figure 7.3. It is meant to hypothesize two distinct but interlocked developmental sequences: Icon > Index > Symbol and Image > Diagram > Metaphor (as metaicon). More precisely, it speculates that at least those actual symbols which begin as icons are prefigured in their scope and power by varying potentials within the icon itself. Or, the growth of symbols from icons is provided for by a parallel potency for growth nascent in the icon (as image, diagram, or metaicon). What I have in mind might be compared again to biological development: The Symbol is the cell of all conscious thought; the Icon is (prototypically) its nucleus; inside this nucleus would be written, from the beginning, the genetic code of the symbol’s cellular growth and development. Hence, the actual organic development of such a symbol would be a recapitulation, at the macro-level of Sign, of a parallel genetic hierarchy at the micro-level of Icon. Metaphor, in this view, would be more than a single “gene” in the nucleus; the principle of metaphoricity itself would become the “DNA” of the most powerful symbols.
This hypothesis would suggest the following predictions about the kinds and degrees of iconicity in signs:
1. As the iconic content approaches simple imagery, the Sign/Object relation becomes more overtly Iconic.
2. As the iconic content approaches diagrammaticality, the Sign/Object relation becomes more overtly Indexical.
3. As the iconic content approaches metaphoricity, the Sign/Object relation becomes more overtly Symbolic.
These predictions seem to accord with many facts already observed. In the case of orthographic signs, it is of course easiest to see the iconic ground among those which are overtly pictographic. As such signs lose their elaborate imaginal details, maintaining only the broad outlines of shape, their iconic grounding (as more abstract diagrams) tends to become more loosely associational; thus their iconic function begins to require more assistance, at the Sign/Object level, from purely Indexical connections such as temporal or spatial contiguity; in other words, unless the diagrammatic sign is proximate to its object, its iconicity might not even be interpretable. Perhaps more important, the associational breadth of the diagram (as we have seen) leads to new semantic (including iconic) applications. The iconic evolution from image to diagram—actualized in the sign relation as a shift from overtly iconic resemblance to looser indexical association—implies growth towards pure symbolicity. And, not surprisingly, once the pictogram becomes a highly conventionalized symbolic ideogram, with its original iconic content being almost entirely covert, then that iconic content nevertheless acquires new and exceedingly powerful metaphoric scope.
Before looking at how this might work in verbal signs, I would like to offer one more example from pictography. In my classes, I sometimes draw the male symbol ♂ on the board and ask the students to explain not what it means but how it means. A few students will know that this sign has evolved from a picture of the shield and spear of Mars. Never once have I given this little exercise, however, without many students saying that the “arrow” on the circle of the male sign is a reference to the male phallus. Are they wrong? I think not. The arrow may not have been consciously intended to have that reference, but it does now—and not only because it is so in the minds of many interpreters. I think it is rather a case of a sign which originally appeared as a pictographic (imaginal) icon acquiring quite a proper and predictable metaphoric scope in the process of becoming a symbolic ideogram. I would even speculate that this metaphorical potency was there from the beginning, not in the spear-image itself of war-like Mars, but in a persistent metaiconic typology controlling a multitude of metaphorical diagrams and images relating weaponry in one way or another to maleness (as marked historically for assertiveness or perhaps, anatomically, for “insertiveness”). We may wish to say that these are cultural attitudes or associations, and I do not object to that; I simply wish to suggest that the cultural attitudes or associations are not unmotivated.
This brings me now to the final point I wish to borrow from Shapiro: The entelechy of final causation is the establishment of formal laws which then operate as efficient causes. Shapiro writes of a teleological pattern in Russian inflection (1985b: 18):
Before it became the norm and while still in statu nascendi, the pattern had the power of final causation: in Peirce’s words, it was “that kind of causation whereby the whole calls out its parts” ([CP] 1.220; emphasis added). But once the period of testing was over and the new inflection had established itself as the canon, conformity to the pattern ceased to be governed by final causation in the way it had theretofore. Once it became automatic, a matter of “habit” in Peirce’s sense, the rules of Russian inflection (i.e., the set of norms comprising the latter) became “a simple formal law, a law of efficient causation” (6.101). In other words, every instantiation subsequent to the codification of the new system conforms to Peirce’s definition of efficient causation as “that kind of causation whereby the parts compose the whole” (1.220; emphasis added).
I am suggesting the same thing about metaphor in the growth of symbols: Metaiconicity is at first a nascent archetypal pattern which serves as a final cause of iconic growth. It is deeply embedded, perhaps, in the collective unconsciousness of humanity or of a particular culture—but that, I believe, is because human culture tends to be isomorphic with the universe. In any case, once the metaicon is actualized (through the emergent plenitude of its iconic tokens both in nature and in language), it then becomes a formal law of efficient causation in the culture, directly stimulating further growth (via further application of the metaicon) throughout the sign system. We have already seen how this happens in the case of archetypal metaphors in poetry, which actually suggest fresh diagrams and images. What I am now suggesting is that this is by no means limited to poetry. That is, if the hypothesis of figure 7.3 is correct, Icons achieve the most powerful Symbolicity as metaphoricity emerges within the iconic function itself. It is natural to expect fresh metaphorical extensions or applications from all symbols, especially those which have evolved from icons; but those which have evolved from icons having metaiconic potential become the most creative and culturally provocative symbols. I think this is precisely what we have just observed in the case of how my students tend to interpret the “spear” of the male symbol.
But how would this pattern show itself in word growth? Returning to the three predictions from the hypothesis of figure 7.3, several possibilities occur to me. First, it is of course easiest to see the iconic ground of words like buzz in which the iconic function approaches simple onomatopoeia; in other words, as the iconicity tends toward simple imagery (sound imagery in this case), then the Sign/Object relation becomes more overtly Iconic. This is so obvious that it is not very interesting. Being also now a conventionalized symbol, buzz has many colloquial metaphorical extensions, but I think it is a “weak” symbol in the sense that its iconic content is more or less bound to a sensory (though not necessarily a sound) image; that is, the icon does not appear to be called out by any emergent metaiconic type, and so its growth potential and its innate power (not counting whatever power it might gain from external sources) seems rather limited, at least in terms of how “culturally provocative” a symbol it may be.
The second prediction (that as the iconic content approaches diagrammaticality, the Sign/Object relation becomes overtly Indexical) is more interesting. We have already seen ample instances of this in poetry: Analogical metaphors, because of their strong icon-to-object asymmetry, have a powerful indexical component (semantic tension); they thus engage the mind more actively, suggesting more imaginative possibilities, than do most purely imaginal metaphors. But what might this prediction imply about “ordinary” word symbols? Consider the word boy. Apparently, its ancestor meant something like “to fetter” (see O.E.D, 260, boy sb.2). If that is in fact its origin, its original application to the object of a male child must have been iconic—specifically, diagrammatic (perhaps young males have to be restrained as young goats have to be fettered). Now, of course, the word has come to be a fully conventionalized symbol. There are apparently at least two consequences of this. First, in order for the word’s (covert) iconic content to become overtly active again, it requires the assistance of some noteworthy indexical opposition with an object—for instance, “My husband is such a boy!” Of course I am not implying that the speaker is consciously aware of the etymology, but only that the diagrammatic logic of the etymology is re-emergent in this indexical situation. Had the highest possible level of the word’s original iconic ground been imaginal, it would probably not require such indexation in order to be re-activated.
But the second consequence of boy’s growth from diagrammatic icon to conventional symbol is more important: Boy seems to be a rather powerful symbol, suggesting many significant metaphorical extensions and having great cultural ramifications. For instance, in America it is highly provocative and insulting to call a black male “boy,” even if the person happens to be a young male. No doubt this symbolic power reverts, most immediately, to a historical fact of the culture—white slave owners referred to all black male servants as “boys.” But again, the cultural condition is not unmotivated: Why was boy the choice here? Because it was a way of reminding the black man of his shackles, the same diagrammatic “logic” by which all young males originally got “fettered.” One example is not enough to prove the prediction, but it does suggest the feasibility of supposing that the scope and range of a symbol is at least partly conditioned by the level of iconicity nascent in its origin: Symbols of diagrammatic iconic origin require pointed indexical assistance for the icon to re-emerge; but once this happens, the symbol fosters additional metaphorical extensions and strong indexical associations of a social and cultural nature.
Consider how the same principle (or a corollary) might work in the case of a demonstrative pronoun like that. This symbol is of course predominantly indexical—it requires spatial or temporal proximity to its object in order to indicate it. What iconic content does its meaning have? Disregarding its etymology, consider only how it is interpreted in context. I think the interpretation requires something like the construction of a mental diagram. In written text, for instance, that refers to something antecedent on the page (rarely to a cataphoric referent). The spatial relationship on the page diagrams a relationship between ideas in the reader’s mind. Also, when that and this are opposed to each other in context, the low-to-high vowel opposition (reinforced by the front-to-back opposition of those and these) seems to work as a phonological diagram of a spatio-temporal opposition: far-to-near. This is nothing new, of course, but I think it gives additional credence to the notion that the predominating level in the Sign/Object relation of a symbol (in this case, Indexical) is systematically related to the level of iconicity at which it is interpretable (in this case, diagrammatic). The secondness in the Sign is paralleled by the secondness of its Icon.
Finally, what of the third prediction—that as a sign’s iconic content approaches pure metaphoricity, the Sign/Object relation becomes more overtly (and powerfully) Symbolic?
It is too tempting not to use the word symbol itself as an example: Etymologically, it involves “throwing together” things which “conform in likeness” (O.E.D 3208), although of course the primary meaning which has now emerged is of “Something that stands for, represents, or denotes something else (not by exact resemblance, but by vague suggestion)” (O.E.D 3206). This meaning seems consonant with Peirce’s notion of the symbol, especially if the “vague suggestion” of resemblance involved with a symbol in the O.E.D.’s definition is interpreted in the light of Peirce’s Logic of Vagueness (chapter 2). That is, a symbol’s original iconic content would tend to be grounded in an ultimate possibility not limited to “exactness” (as in the case of the sensory image or the logical diagram), but would tend to be typologically—and, not incidentally, teleologically—“vague.” This is precisely what I mean by “metaphoricity,” as prescinded from its diagrammatic and imaginal tokens. In chapter 2, I argued that this sort of metaphoricity was also what Peirce might have meant by “metaphor as the merit of metaphysics”—namely, that sort of metaphor involving “broad comparison on the ground of characters of a formal and highly abstract kind” (CP 7.590). (In that same lecture, it is clearly this sort of “comparison” which serves as the predicative ground of Peirce’s Man-Symbol metaicon.) Thus the growth of the word symbol itself might have progressed from a notion of “throwing things together” by way of their immediate “likeness” (probably in an imaginal or diagrammatic sense) to the notion of an ultimate (vague) “likeness” in things by way of their being “thrown together” (in a metaphorical sense). The original “throwing together” must have been the forerunner of the symbol’s overt or immediate “arbitrariness,” just as the original “likeness” must have been the prototype of its covert or ultimate metaphoricity. My point is not that the word’s iconic origin dictated, by way of efficient causation, the development of its later (more powerful) conception, but that its icon survived to become a part of this powerful conception because it belonged to the final cause of a type which was at least partly metaphoric—that of the fortuitous “thrown-togetherness” of things ultimately but covertly alike.
Peirce seemed to recognize that “likeness” of this sort was not only important in language but was fundamental to it:
Inference from resemblance probably implies a higher degree of self-consciousness than any of the brutes possess. It involves a somewhat steady attention to qualities as such; and this must rest on the capacity for language, if not on language itself. Primitive man, however, reasons in this way; for mythology is built of such inferences. Our ancestors saw something manlike in the sun, and could even tell what kind of a man the sun-god was. (CP 7.455)
Peirce’s “however” in this passage about the reasoning of primitive man is intended to remind us that inference from similarity is by no means always correct. Primitive man saw something manlike in the sun, and thus inferred that the sun was a god; therefore, such inferences (perhaps, more accurately, abductions) must be forever subjected to the self-corrective scrutiny of reasonableness. As I have already suggested, I believe such self-corrective measures in human consciousness must have arisen as differentiation—the metaphorical similarity cannot be apprehended for the truly far-reaching and creative phenomenon it is except in the presence of conscious indexical opposition between semantic species. But once this differentiation has been achieved, what are we left with? That is, when man began to see that the sun was not really a god, what did he have left to believe in? The whole history of our literature, as well as Peirce’s own objective idealism, answers this question eloquently: There is something man-like in the sun, and something sun-like in man! Undifferentiated “awareness” of an icon has evolved into the critical “consciousness” of a metaiconic symbol.
And it is so with some of the most “ordinary” but most powerful symbols in our language. Consider just the ten or so words to which C. S. Lewis devoted his delightful book, Studies in Words (1967): Nature, Sad, Wit, Free, Sense, Simple, Conscience (with Conscious), World, Life. Three strong impressions about these words arise from Lewis’s book: one, the uniformly iconic, and I believe metaiconic, origin and development of these words in each language is strikingly parallel to the development of their counterparts in other languages; two, these words, though simple, have developed some of the most profound varieties of senses of any words in any language; three, despite this proliferation of semantic variety, the original senses of these words (as far back as we can trace them) are amazingly persistent, right down to the present day.
Consider what Lewis wrote about Nature, echoing Peirce:
Those who wish to go further back will notice that natura shares a common base with nasci (to be born); with the noun natus (birth); with natio (not only a race or nation but the name of the birth-goddess); or even that natura itself can mean the sexual organs—a sense formerly borne by English nature, but apparently restricted to the female. It is risky to try to build precise semantic bridges, but there is obviously some idea of a thing’s natura as its original or “innate” character.
If we look forward, the road is clear. This sense of natura, though soon to be threatened by vast semantic growths of another origin, has shown astonishing persistence and is still as current a sense as any other for English nature. Every day we speak about “the nature of the case” (or of the soil, the animal, the problem). (1967: 25-26)
How do we explain this proliferation of senses? the disappearance of some senses (narrowly analogical ones, like nature = sexual organs)? or the “astonishing persistence” of the root sense? Keeping in mind Peirce’s notion of a natural class as one whose members share a common “inheritance” (CP 1.214), and his further designation of this heredity as a law by which “the offspring shall have a general resemblance to the parent” (CP 1.215), the answer seems clear: The evolution of the word natura itself, with all its derivatives, is an example of the teleological emergence of a natural class in language. It might be thought that this is true of any word’s evolution, and to a certain extent this is true, but not to the extent it is true of word families like natura. Contrast words like buzz, in which the original icon is obvious but the proliferation of senses is rather narrowly constrained; or words like boy or scruple or cosmos, in which the cultural ramifications are somewhat more potent than with buzz but in which the original senses are lost or radically changed. Such words simply do not approach the innately fertile power and persistence of natura in our language and literature, as Lewis clearly demonstrated by devoting a full thirty pages of close and careful literary exegesis to the family. This reading of Latin natura is also supported by Lewis’s exegesis of a striking parallel in the evolution of the Anglo-Saxon kind (26-42).
Here is how Peirce defined “Kind” in Baldwin’s Dictionary (after criticizing Mill’s distinction between “kinds” and “real kinds”):
Any class which, in addition to its defining character, has another that is of permanent interest and is common and peculiar to its members, is destined to be conserved in that ultimate conception of the universe at which we aim, and is accordingly to be called “real.” (CB 776: 601)
If I am correct that the words natura and kind are themselves natural classes and real kinds, what “character” in them might be of “permanent interest” and thus “destined to be conserved in that ultimate conception” of the language/universe at which we aim? In Peirce’s words, it is that original idea in their meanings and extensions of “a springing forth,” or “birth,” of general resemblance by inheritance, which is the basis of his own symmetrical metaphor of Man as Symbol. This metaphor is a fundamental one, I believe, not just to Peirce’s conception of semeiotic, but to a prime enterprise in all language and literature—that “commerce of icons” between man and the universe. Thus, symbols whose original icons are grounded in this sort of metaiconic type have a perennial freshness and power which resists the “death” of those icons by lexicalization in the language or by conventionalization in the literature.
This is not to belittle the power of words such as scruple and cosmos, nor to imply that their development is not also teleological. But I am now perhaps in a position to make an important distinction: The evolution of words such as scruple and cosmos plays its part in the master teleology by passing through (and thus helping to codify) a hierarchy of semantic species. On the “metaphor map” that I have proposed, for instance, their growth can be configured as the sort of “figural displacement” we have observed in poetry. But only a large multitude of such examples brings about the consciousness of these “stages” as “species.” Because their displacement between stages seems immediately justified only by rather narrow imaginal or analogical correspondences or associations between contiguous stages, each new level of growth seems to “forget” the previous level, whereby the overall drift is lost to consciousness (until it is reconstructed from historical evidence). Conversely, in words like nature and kind, with all of their “organized heterogeneity” (CP 6.101), we have nearly the “whole map at once,” as it were; each new development is justified not only by imaginal or analogical connections between contiguous categories but by an immediate offering to consciousness of the master typology itself, the archetypal hope of a continuous homogeneity and isomorphism between mind and nature, between life and the universe.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the evolution of the words conscience and conscious (with their related forms). Lewis pointed out the etymology in Latin: cum (“with”) and scio (“I know”), hence the original meaning, “I know together with, I share (with someone) the knowledge that” (1967: 181). The question immediately arises, Who is the “someone” with whom knowledge is shared in “conscience” or “consciousness”? Lewis pointed out that in its earliest classical sense the sharing of knowledge was between two or more people. The notion of conscience or consciousness as private knowledge within a person, especially in relation to some standard of what ought and ought not to be, is a comparatively recent development in the word’s sense. This explains why Lewis noted an interesting oddity in Thomas Hobbes’s use of the term:
Hobbes, in a curious passage which is perhaps not very true to the idiomatic English of his own day, gives English conscious exactly the classical meaning of conscius: “When two or more men know of one and the same fact [i.e., deed] they are said to be conscious of it one to another.” (Leviathan I, vii, 31; Lewis 1967: 185)
In other words, by Hobbes’ time conscious had already come to mean “private knowledge,” so Lewis thought it strange that he should revert to the classical sense of “shared knowledge.” Further, Lewis wrote:
Jeremy Taylor makes the semantic situation unusually clear by noting the ancient meaning of conscientia—Horace’s conscire sibi—and saying that while this is correct so far as it goes it is not “full and adequate; for it only signifies conscience as it is a witness, not as a guide”. Under the name conscience we must also include “that which is called synteresis, or the general repository of moral principles.” [Ductor Dubitantium, I, i, I, para. 24]
If popular language had followed these distinctions, much confusion, and perhaps not a little bloodshed, would have been avoided. But that is not the way of common language. It would have nothing to do with the word synteresis though it was ready to talk abundantly about the thing. It therefore used the single word conscience, sometimes to mean the consciring of what we have done, sometimes the Inner Lawgiver who tells us what we should or should not do, sometimes the inner nagger or prompter that urges us to obey the Lawgiver here and now, and sometimes other things as well. All the senses work upon, and in and out through, one another, and often, no doubt, men did not know themselves, much less make clear to others, exactly what they meant. (1967: 195)
What Lewis sees as “confusion” here I see rather as teleology; he is closer to the truth of it when he says that “all the senses work upon, and in and out through, one another.” Specifically, I think Taylor’s erudite synteresis was not adopted in English to name “the general repository of moral principles” precisely because conscience, from its very origin, was fully up to that task. How so? How indeed, unless the original meaning of knowledge shared between people was a driving metaphor, perhaps in the actual development of human consciousness as well as in the evolution of the word which names it, of that self-corrective knowledge within people?
What I have in mind, again, is something very close to Julian Jaynes’s (1976) theory that internal consciousness as we know it is a relatively recent development in human history, just as the sense of an “inner conscience” is a relatively late development in the language—both of which developments, I believe, are inextricably bound up with developments in human community. Those who have rejected Jaynes would do well to reconsider him in the light of Peirce (see, for instance, CP 7.453, which might have come straight of out Jaynes’s book). My interest in this theory is motivated by an interest in the metaphor upon which Jaynes shows that the whole notion of consciousness is predicated. I believe this metaphor may be the metaicon of all metaicons: the spatialization of mind. Indulge me in this rather long quotation from Jaynes, for he explains, better than I can, the enormous power and fertility of this metaphor:
Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or 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”, and the person “brighter” and “clear-headed” as opposed to “dull”, “fuzzy-minded”, or “obscure” solutions. These words are all 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, or seize together or “comprehend” parts of a problem, and so on, using metaphors of behavior to invent things to do in this metaphored mind-space.
And the adjectives to describe physical behavior in real space are analogically taken over to describe mental behavior in mind-space when we speak of our minds as being “quick”, “slow”, “agitated” (as when we cogitate or co-agitate), “nimble-witted”, “strong-” or “weak-minded.” The mind space in which these metaphorical activities go on has its own group of adjectives; we can be “broad-minded”, “deep”, “open”, or “narrow-minded”; we can be “occupied”; we can “get something off our minds”; we can “put something out of mind”, or we can “get it”, let something “penetrate”, or “bear”, “have”, “keep”, or “hold” it in mind.
As with a real space, something can be at the “back” of our mind, in its “inner recesses”, or “beyond” our mind, or “out” of our mind. In argument, we try to “get things through” to someone, to “reach” their “understanding” or find a “common ground”, or “point out”, etc., all actions in real space taken over analogically into the space of the mind. (1976: 55-56)
I believe Jaynes is absolutely correct to call each of these figures in the language an “analog”—they fit the notion of the Peircean diagram rather precisely. I would add only one note: Not even this impressive sum of the analogs can exhaust the metaphor, for it is grounded, I believe, in the same metaicon which, as we have observed in chapters 5 and 6, is one of the most productive in Western poetry (voyage in space ≅ quest(ion) of being). This is a prophetically symmetrical and reciprocal metaicon. It may explain, in part, how something that started as a secret between people in communion (“consciring” in one sort of external space) might have become the iconic ground for that self-reflective, self-corrective knowledge within man (the very secret of man), whence it emerged again—with manifold new significance—into the public domain of the culture.
Peirce’s own notions about physical/mental space in general provide something of a metaiconic backdrop for his entire semeiotic. Ideas about space and time—as well the movement, within these dimensions, of forces and masses—were among those primal ideas he called “irresistible,” for it was these “upon which all science rolls” (W 3: 317-319). “It appears to me that the method of designating temporal relations by their analogies with spatial relations must date from the very beginnings of speech,” he wrote to Lady Welby. He went on in that letter to say that even the first few “common memories” of the first two users of language “could not be indicated by gesture, without their analogies to spatial relations” (PW 47). He probably agreed with Kant that Space was “a form of thought” (PW 117), though he would have defined “thought” in a much wider sense—the sense, noted often within this study, by which Peirce understood that we are in thought, rather than thought being in us. After all, it is exactly this truth which renders to “man in thought” that status as symbol of a larger thought, whereby different men in the same thought become the same symbol (NEM 4: 262-263).
In a 1909 letter to Lady Welby, in which he was discussing some crucial principles of “word-formation,” Peirce was suddenly reminded of something he had not “thought of for half a century”:
. . . how as a boy I invented a language in which almost every letter of every word made a definite contribution to its signification. It involved a classification of all possible ideas; and I need not say that it was never completed. I remember however a number of features of it. Not only must the ideas be classified, but abstract and psychical ideas had to be provided with fixed metaphors; such as lofty for pride, ambition, etc. (PW 95)
How often, in the course of this study, I have wished that Peirce had completed that boyhood system of language. Perhaps Manuscript Number 1137—with its attention to the Persons, the Phenomena of Influx to the Senses, the Energies (Light, Sound), Space, Position, Intuition, and so on—is a record of his early results. Had he finished it, he might well have concluded by showing us exactly how a logician without equal would “construct a language de novo” (CP 2.290n). All that such a master Scientist of Signs would have needed is a few prepositions to express temporal relations, spatial relations, and motions into and out of these situations. As for the rest, he would naturally say, “I can manage with metaphors.”
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