Introduction: Ringing in the New Millennium
of Non-Aristotelian Semantics

My study, as stated, commences with the non-Aristotelian theory in pure and applied form and concludes with a neo Aristotelian adjunct that offers the most famous expositions of metaphor through the ages. In this introduction, however, I reverse that organization by starting with neo-Aristotelian problems and concluding with vital aspects governing my own theory. What Crystal (1971, pp. 208-209) had to say about the attitude of Bloomfieldian linguists toward meaning in the early decades ot this century is still applicable today, to approaches to metaphor as a supposedly “semantic” principle. Crystal notes that there was “no critical reliance on the idea of ‘meaning’ in making or formulating grammatical analysis. . . Meaning was felt to be an ‘internal’ phenomenon, a mental residue not susceptible to direct investigation . . .”

Critics of metaphor similarly circumvent “internal” phenomena and settle instead for the most tangible, “external” base a language has to offer in the way of presentational immediacy, and that is the explicit lexicon. The lexicon obligingly reflects empirical reality by representing it like a mirror and thus unwittingly leads those who cling to it into an unwarranted skepticism by undermining the genuine constitutive powers of language. Such an approach will never lead to the “scientific” semantics Bréal envisaged. To illustrate, I introduce my only comparison from the sciences. In a work dedicated to Einstein’s Universe, Calder (1979, pp. 9-11, 41-42) discusses movements of objects through space that are designated “blueshift” and “redshift” in physics. Without going into technical detail. I take up the part where Calder emphasizes that, of these two shifts, the former causes an increased and the latter a decreased frequency; what in terms of sensation becomes described in everyday parlance as “cool” blue or “warm” red turns into its “opposite” for the physicist. The senses yield one type of information and the scientific facts another.

Einstein’s ancient precursor. Euclid, lived close to the time of Aristotle. But physics has made such strides that it can separate sheer perception from a drastically different unseen condition, while the study of metaphor has yet to realize such distinctions. Scientists are thus cognizant of their separate roles as lay perceivers while experts of semantics still resemble the lay persons who associate a reaction to sensation with valid information about a function of linguistic signation. No expert should be needed to respond to the lexical surface of a language, any more than the public at large has to learn from a physicist why red feels “warm” compared to blue.

Curiously, critics of language possess one added advantage over physicists because, paradoxical as this may seem, the “lay speaker” within them is also a genuine if unconscious expert, as is made explicit by the reference to a “linguistic competence.” Perhaps it is also a disadvantage to be so close to the object under investigation as all humans are to their language. Therefore I advocate something like a Fichtean type of “intellectual introspection” (intellektuelle Anschauung): to “watch” oneself using words while articulating them. Persons who like myself are bilingual benefit doubly from this approach and, certainly, I shall draw on it frequently.

A concrete example of what happens to metaphor when sought as single, “odd” content in lexical incompatibility may be witnessed by a case I call the Ingendahl Experiment. I name this experiment after Ingendahl, the critic who wrote it up in a German essay (1972) that asked whether the concept metaphor still served any purpose. Since the outcome of the experiment is inconclusive, the answer would have to be in the negative (pp. 268-269). In this experiment, a group of individuals was asked to underline only metaphorical words extracted from a newspaper article on political elections. Out of 58 words, alone two were assessed as metaphors by all of the participants, and Ingendahl rightly laments this lack of consensus. Curious and yet typical is the fact that the experiment was conducted in a seminar devoted to “Poetologie.” What does literary language have to do with a feuilletonistic write-up?

No satisfactory answer can be supplied other than to predict that the question will arise in the course of such an experiment. The reason is the evidence of a practice I term “spotsighting.” This procedure reifies the localized content taxonomy single words bear, disregarding holistic criteria that bind contents to their mode of contextualization. One hardly needs the German original to conjure up colorful figures in English that similarly permeate the rhetorical oratory of political elections. Who has not heard of the political programs that become “platforms” like the dais candidates mount to present their plans? Who has not listened to the self pitying complaints of an “underdog” about having to confront an incumbent candidate fortunate enough to possess that coveted “seat” in government? No expert is needed to perceive what the lexicon so conspicuously releases as “metaphorical” excess, but discerning critics would provide a great service if they could explain what keeps these meanings nevertheless “literal” rather than genuinely “poetic.”

Such a critic I hope to represent. Thus I diagnose next how the lexical orientation produces the traditional metaphor. Reference in meaning is confused with a direct representation of the empirical reality, in essence a “pointing at. . .” a this or that. Meanings are thus considered stand-ins for things in the world. When meanings exhibit arepresentational pockets of lexical deviance, they are believed to have abrogated their “denoting.” Then meanings stand in as “proxies” for one another, at which point they partake of a transference yielding metaphor, in keeping with the etymological root of Greek “metaphora.” In this transferral, set analogies provide the underpinning for surface anomalies and thus keep the words bearing these meanings construable. Because this type of transference is based on a barter of semantic proxies, I call it the proxy-tenet. The majority of linguists, under the influence of Chomsky (1965, pp. 148-163), seek proxy-tenet transference in selectional violation of the lexicon. Current philosophers identify the same phenomenon as the category mistake introduced by Ryle (Concept of Mind, 1949/1963, p. 16; “Categories,” 1961, Flew, ed., pp. 75-76).

An annotated bibliography on metaphor put out by Shibles (1971) lists a plethora of studies devoted to the Rylean category-mistake, from Baker’s “Category Mistakes” (1956) to Cross’s “Category Differences” (1959), and from Hillman’s “On Grammars and Category Mistakes” (1963) to Drange’s Type Crossing (1966), to name a few. All these titles reflect a “categorician” stance which, ironically, swiftly lapses into an ontological category mistake when the mistaken “categories” are claimed to be mistaken by metaphor. In Rylean terms, these categoricians commit a “cross-sorting” as they “type-trespass” from logic into language on the basis of little more than a deviant surface. Equally ironic is the fact that they would all be right if they were to accept metaphor only at face value as an ontological category mistake. The traditional metaphor is not even “in” language proper; it straddles two forms of programming in what I term a momentary “collison” between logic and language, but without any detriment to linguistic competence. That is the only reason why metaphor stays construable, and not because it is based on some compensating analogy. That is also why metaphor so swiftly reverts to meaning when such a sense impression subsides.

My diagnosis of neo-Aristotelian theses, so glibly summarized here, took years of painstaking synthesis. Once isolated, the identifiable problems run like a thread through the neo-Aristotelian expositions. Since the metaphorical characteristics a tradition has pinpointed actually do not exist in language, such a principle remains a mirage. As already indicated, there is no such function as proxy-tenet transference anywhere in the generation of meaning, because the contents are selected for their precise purpose by authorial intent. The constituents are thus willed as chosen by a speaker, creating all “analogies” in the process. I use “author” and “speaker” interchangeably for the present since one term only is adjectival. And insofar as I function as author my illustrations more frequently, but not exclusively, emphasize the written word. In any case, to apply that introspective approach advocated, as potential speaker and as an author here, all my sentences consist of selected constituents harboring my intent through their denominations. Words are vehicles for speech; their primary task is to “name” what it is speakers wish to “say.” That is how they acquire their explicit and implicit contents, and for that purpose they become assimilated in the first place, not as neat lexical labels for realities outside of language.

Linguistic activity thus creates and validates norms--in one language at a time. That is the ontogenetic origin of meaning. When semantic redundance is complete, the oddest contents seem “proper” or “literal.” Language, and not its lexicon reflecting an extalinguistic domain, thus ordains what is “odd” or acceptable. For example, English has validated gadgets and machines that “work.” Speakers of English consider the predicate ordinary because semantic redundance has done its “work, ” so to speak. Yet in renewed contexts accompanied by punning the predicate may become strange in its connotations of a nine to five job, leaving these gadgets “linguistic robots.” The same happens in a bilingual cognizance; the equivalent German and French verbs, “arbeiten” and “travailler, ” apply only to persons in the labor force, not machines. By the same token, machines that function in these languages are made to “go” or, when literalized, even “march, ” in the respective “gehen” and “marcher,” giving rise to other types of robots by assuming the voluntary movement of live beings.

How do these oddities arise? While the full answer will take up a good part of this study, let me say for now that the implicit meaning of explicit contents becomes engendered in the crossfire between reference and transference. Therefore transference does exist in language, but not as a function based on juggled categories and proxy-barter. Rather, the meanings chosen to engender an authorial intent undergo a shift as their explicit denomination releases the implicit connotations relevant to the constitutional unit(y), as in this book’s every sentence. Since this processing occurs irrespective of lexical deviance, the traditional metaphor is deprived once more of its being, this time by losing its idiosyncrasy. Not only are its alleged categories not in language, its function when in language, and with some modification, belongs to any meaning. The problem here is not only one of focusing on superficial phenomena like the lexicon, but of relying on a vulnerable method which fails to specify a whole before its parts. To correct such faulty procedure, I introduce an obverse and reverse order. Drawn from the minting of coins, the adjectives distinguish “right side up” and “underside”: obverse meaning comes before reverse metaphor. When thus approached, metaphor will not end up invested with idiosyncrasies already owned by meaning. The full impact of this corrective will materialize in the neo-Aristotelian adjunct where critics are forever attributing to metaphor what meaning, when fully examined first, has already preempted.

My theory of non Aristotelian semantics thus does not pit transference against reference as the exclusive property of metaphor. Rather, the non-Aristotelian metaphor I develop after a thorough probing of obverse meaning is to be invested with a special mode of transference, still reinforcing the etymological root of “metaphora” without destroying its self-identity by positing violated categories and proxy-tenet substitutions that are not intrinsic to meaning-anywhere. My type of metaphor faces neither “death” nor “destruction” because it remains structurally based, meaning that its foundation is functionally and not lexically reinforced; it is context sensitive instead of content-sensitive.

To be sure, if methodologically one starts with reverse metaphor as an instance of transference, obverse meaning appropriates this quality and becomes accordingly “metaphor.” although the function is the very result of semantic generation, irrespective of content. Certainly, the traditional categoricians leave themselves open to making metaphor so ubiquitous that the principle becomes attenuated. The “nature” of meaning in a “natural” language is indeed very “unnatural” when held up against empirical nature, just because language is a volitional product of human intervention. Linguistic meaning is “metaphysical” insofar as it transcends “physis,” the Greek word for “nature.” Those familiar with the etymology of “metaphysics” know that the term stems from the arrangement of the Aristotelian volumes, which had the “metaphysics” come “after” and in a sense “beyond” the natural sciences or “physics.” I thus trade on this etymology. Critics today nevertheless insist on a “transcendence” unique to metaphor when language as bearer of any meaning partakes of it quite naturally. A principle that is everywhere--ends up being nowhere.

The main problem areas have been cursorily identified. Aristotle initiated them all, as the adjunct will prove. Curiously, despite his early affirmation of the “conventional” base of language, and despite his role in devising logical categories as well as isolating literary genres, Aristotle confused all these distinctions when he analyzed and illustrated metaphor as a linguistic phenomenon in a literary setting. Accordingly he also committed the first ontological category mistake by imposing erroneous logical categories on alleged lexical deviance as “alienation,” the Greek allotrios. Since an alien metaphora then gives rise to a series of transferrals he calls epiphoras, the functions entailed in those shifts have no other recourse but proxy-tenet substitution.

Some of these flaws, coming from so versatile and astute a thinker as Aristotle, disturbed the Classical scholars sufficiently to make them question the possible authorship of this exposition in the Poetics, leaving this principle on shaky historical ground as well. But the neo-Aristotelian followers throughout Western civilization, ancient and Christian, have remained strangely unperturbed by the weakness of the original concept. Despite a great proliferation of material, the theories manifest a stagnation in the field. By not correcting the vital flaws, these theories never really advanced from the ancient exposition, whose most immediate link from a present “retrospective” view was Latin rhetoric in the persons of Cicero and Quintilian. The principle, though lacking in the most basic areas indicated, was kept intact by these two rhetoricians and has been handed down that way.

Non-Aristotelian semantics, as stated, breaks with the traditional outlook and is guided by Ingarden’s phenomenology as well as Peirce’s semiotics. Phenomenology is particularly useful for underscoring semantic entities as “objects” of signitive consciousness, which to Ingarden are not only “pure-intentional” as targets of an “intending” act but also “heteronomous” insofar as they are dependent only on acts of meaning. Language is thus the sphere of “ontic heteronomy” whose entities, unlike those of “ontic autonomy,” are directly dependent on signitive acts. The contents that meanings own arise with the acts of meaning that use them and thus claim them as their “own” intrinsic products. Since linguistic activity is indigenous to a language, this ownership cannot transcend one language.

Ingarden’s phenomenological semantics eradicates the ontological category-mistake which in turn undermines the constitutive prowess of language by basing “categories” on a superficial content taxonomy obtained from the lexicon. Logic is once and for all barred from language although Ingarden, committing none of the defaults that mar the approach to semantics at large, certainly specifies where it has a part in the formation of the so-called proposition or judgment which, as “literal” language, then opposes a genuinely literary use. Again, the difference is functional; “truth,” too, rests on a special processing, termed “adequation,” through which language attains a reality-nexus irrespective of lexical appearances. This issue will be crucial to the study of metaphor, especially the “Fregean” contingent (after Frege, 1848 1925) among neo Aristotelians. And, unlike this contingent, Ingarden remained entirely methodical by heeding what I have termed here heuristically the obverse reverse order. Because he explained first what everyday language is, he could also deal with the literary kind of language which operates without a reality-nexus.

In reliance on the presentational immediacy exuded by the lexicon, critics naively identify deviance at that level with true or false conditions. Since their arepresentational metaphor no longer bears “reference,” it depends on the lexicon only long enough to extract incompatibility from it; once found, the lexicon is abandoned and metaphor is said to be “nondenoting.” Since their arepresentational metaphor is not first sought in function, it not only straddles logic and language but literal and literary language, a position which leaves it quite literally “use-less.” At the same time it is dimly realized that literary use, even when not deviant, possesses no reality-nexus and as a consequence this, too, is often held to be nondenoting. Frege. who was foremost a mathematician, tried his hand at language and, without adequate explanation, contended that the literary kind depended on “sense” only, minus “reference.” This dichotomy has been picked up by Fregean critics of metaphor, as enthusiastically as others have adopted the Rylean category mistake, with several individuals pleading non-existent “Contextualist Dilemmas” precisely because a literary or metaphorical context “means” or “refers to” something when it is falsely assumed to subsist on nondenoting contents.

Non Aristotelian semantics will remove not only such dilemmas but also the dichotomy underlying them. Just as reference cannot be split from transference, it cannot be separated from sense. When the theory moves from ontological placement to a detailed identification by the means of a semiotic “Picture of Language,” readers will be made to see where the ground of language begins with the “Qualisign” and where indigenous “truth” in language becomes anchored through the validating powers of the “Legisign,” which figuratively might well be termed a “linguistic copyright “--long before any government agency decrees it authorial rights. Simultaneously, the lexicon is to be relieved of its duplicative role and become reinstated in its rightful function of providing that vital explicit foundation for speaker intent instead of content surrogates for things in the world.

Semiotics is an excellent means for identifying every facet of language, and my theory thus moves methodically through the signs, listed first on the diagram of this so called Picture. The schema adheres to Peircean nomenclature in reference to his trichotomies and their triadic relation, though utilizing nine of his ten sign classes, with the tenth, “Argument,” modified to befit the state of linguistic semantics, ontic heteronomy. The Picture then reveals the difference between the traditional metaphor lodged at the Icon--to Peirce the “Hypoicon”--and the non-Aristotelian counterpart, which resides at the level of the Interpretant, specifically the Rheme. Since confused notions of “death” cling to the traditional metaphor, this Picture additionally clarifies what demise is in language, at various levels of degeneration. The non-Aristotelian metaphor, structurally secured, remains indestructible unless the entire context were to disintegrate, together with the language itself, in which case not even “meaning” is left. As shown, the semiotic terms are capitalized to signify my use (though Peirce, too, at times followed this practice).

Peirce enabled me to modify Ingarden’s phenomenology numerically, since the latter goes mainly by a binary system separating literal from literary use. The end result is, therefore, that I posit three linguistic structures, among them two literary genres. By “genre” I mean a functional composite and not the numerous historical subcategories based on the literary etiquettes current in one era, although some of even these formats are briefly mentioned in the chapter preceding the textual analysis which deals with issues of inception and reception of literary works of art. This is where temporal aspects also become relevant to literary constructs devoid of a reality-nexus, particlarly during construal in a processing Ingarden terms “concretization.”

Three structures, inclusive of just two literary genres, present deliberately a “Cartesian” type of reduction aimed at the bare minimum where nothing any longer is taken for granted. “Post-Aristotelian” followers may then differentiate further subcategories without conflicting with the basic non Aristotelian divisions. Such possibilities will be indicated. Nor are phenomenological and semiotic approaches in conflict. Ingarden may have looked to Husserl (1859-1938) rather than to Peirce for his phenomenology, but Peirce’s very definition in the Collected Papers (1960, p. 141, par. 1.284) of his phenomenological concept, the “phaneron,” becomes relevant: it constitutes a “collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not.”

This very “presence to the mind,” signitively induced and intersubjectively validated, is the core of linguistic reference. Conversely, positing a representational correspondence between a meaning and any “real thing” reflects as naive a stance as expecting the green and serrated form of a painted leaf, for instance, to ooze chlorophyll or engage in photosynthesis. No ontological measure applies to that relation beyond a loose description of theme, since two different modes of existence are involved, leaving the entities in relation to one another “category-mistakes” and those overriding their bounds the type-trespassers committing the ontological category-mistake. No one would confuse the visual arts this way, but critics of language succumb that naively to the visible lexicon although it subsists on an equally purposive foundation.

Other thinkers besides the two mentioned who aided me in isolating this foundation are, in their order of importance, the following. Ernst Cassirer (1874 1945) did so, specifically through ideas he laid down in his first volume on language comprising the tripartite Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, where linguistic and logical concept formations become separated. Although Cassirer is generally considered “neo-Kantian” in affiliation, he really exhibits his neo-Humboldtian roots in these discussions. But then the Humboldtian “energetic” tradition will be shown also to have preserved its neo Kantian or “Critical” roots, as indicated by none other than this neo-Kantian, Cassirer. Certainly, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 1835) made a point of stressing that language was the very “Organ” of its own thought; he realized that the “spoken” (das Gesprochene) serves new speaking (1963, pp. 191-192, 223, 426).

Heidegger (1889 1976) a hundred years later reiterates Humboldt’s point almost verbatim (1959, p. 16). He is relevant to my immediately ensuing discussion that leads to the ontological placement of language because he underscores the “coercive” nature of language which, in the dialectics between availability and acceptance, lets speakers feel “at home” in their language, no matter how transparent the lexical oddities. Part of that discussion is also taken up with Nietzsche (1844-1900) who commented on metaphorical ubiquity as a metaphysical predicament caught in the “extramoral lie.” Even empirical reality lapses into a “metaphor” by being tangible only as a transmitted sphere, filtered through human capacities. Yet Nietzsche is more an iconoclast of traditional values than a skeptic of human constitutive powers. Thus his thesis ultimately affirms the unique combinatory powers of poetic art, a sphere no more elusive than reality itself. I then extend his idea to cover the unique artifice of language itself which, if it did not possess such vital creativity from the start, could not serve poetry either.

However, no matter how much I am indebted to all these thinkers, I adopt none of their theories slavishly; nearly all require some modification in order to project metaphor as geniune semantic idiosyncrasy. That point applies no less to my emphasis on “structure,” a term which signifies a nonlexical orientation rather than a trendy “ism,” and despite the fact that I often quote Saussure (1857-1913), who has been tagged a “Structuralist,” Though disparaged by transformationalists, Saussure is one of the few linguists who grasped correctly the value of the “arbitrary” nature of language as a volitional medium. His notion of “opposition” combats the narrow deviance cult which would leave the very critics espousing it at such an atavistic state of juvenile competence that they could not even formulate their ideas. Finally, Saussure’s distinction between diachronic and synchronic planes enables me to explain why a “dead metaphor” is nothing more than meaning in developmental stages.

Although the ideas of the thinkers cited here have been extant a good many years, none has been appreciated sufficiently; they need to be reread rather than replaced by “modern” views. Ingarden, who had the courage to name the essence and major functions of language, fulfilled the hopes of Bréal by providing a system equal to a “science” of meaning. He really deserves to be called the “Copernicus of Semantics.” Unfortunately, postwar Marxists in his native Poland mistook his endeavors of isolating language for purposes of its much needed ontological identification for some form of elitism and were discouraged further by his somewhat abstruse style (Fieguth, ed., 1976, pp. XI, 135 ff.). Certainly Ingarden is not easy to follow but very rewarding when understood.

I end where I actually first intended to begin: this introduction was originally called “propaedeutic” in honor of Kant, employing a term used in the First Critique (Cassirer, ed., 1913, III, pp. 49, 562). There, Kant speaks about scrutinizing the “sources” (Quellen) and “bounds” (Grenzen) of the rational faculties, and a similar concern should accompany the investigation of linguistic capacities. Kant will be reinvoked in this study on a few occasions. Peirce rightly refers to Kant as the “King of modern thought” as he deferentially capitalizes to match the name of this monarch of the mind, and he later uses the comical figure of “udders” to convey how Kant influenced him early in life (1960, p. 193, par. 1.369; p. 64, par. 2.113). In addition, Peirce (p. 23, par. 2.36) made a connection between ancient and Enlightenment thought that is directly relevant to my topic; he calls Aristotle and Kant the two great exponents of metaphysical systems. Indeed, both thinkers incorporated logical categories in their metaphysical systems, yet with a difference. While in the First Critique Kant concedes that he named his logical concepts “Kategorien” after Aristotle, he renders them powerless in his Third Critique devoted to a purposive state such as art, an ontological distinction he expresses as being “without concept” or “interest” (Cassirer ed., 1913, III, pp. 98 ff.; 1914, V, pp. 280 ff.).

Language as a parallel autotelic system follows suit by bearing only the categories or “interest” of its own making. Kant, who recognized such an ontological difference that early, thus remains more “enlightened” than many a “modern” thinker. In one essay (1913, trans. 1970), Kant confronted his own age as he sought to provide an answer to what Enlightenment meant. It involves breaking out of a “self-incurred immaturity” which, for his time, pertained to the stern mentorship of the church, especially in its hold over the “fair sex.” Kant thus urges his contemporaries to “Sapere aude!”--“Have the courage to use your own understanding!” Two more centuries have passed since then, but because an enlightened theory of metaphor is still lacking, I set myself the laborious task of presenting one, lest the stagnation lapse into an “Age of Endarkenment.” Though of that sex Kant mentions-fair or otherwise--! “dared to know,” as his Latin imperative reads when condensed, in the hope that the tradition finally leave behind the teenage years in order to move forward into the year two thousand, the twenty-first century, as a new age of majority. For despite their mental residue, meaning and metaphor lie as much within human grasp as the use of language itself.