“The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor”
METAPHOR AS IMAGE, DIAGRAM,
AND METAICON
In this survey of the Peircean conception of metaphor, let us begin with the full text of a passage cited in chapter 1, namely Peirce’s description of the hypoicons. Just prior to this passage, Peirce explained that a pure icon (a pure resemblance) can only be a possibility, not an actuality; but an actual sign “may be iconic, that is, may represent its object mainly by its similarity, no matter what its mode of being” (CP 2.276). Such an iconic sign, which represents its object mainly by resemblance to it, Peirce named a hypoicon. We may thus think of the term as referring to any actual embodiment of an icon proper. (See Ransdell 1979: 55 and Anderson 1984b: 455-456.) Next Peirce classified the hypoicons:
Hypoicons may be roughly divided according to the mode of Firstness of which they partake. Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (CP 2.277)
Despite my earlier provisional alignment (chapter 1) of the elements from this statement about metaphor with the definitions of metaphor by others, I believe the statement should not be taken as a global definition, or even a complete Peircean definition, of metaphor. Rather, we should keep in mind that Peirce was setting out here to classify hypoicons, not to define metaphor, and I believe this classification of metaphor deals explicitly only with the iconic identity of metaphor proper; it just so happens that the iconic identity of metaphor proper is perfectly fitted to and thus prefigurative of its other dimensions. But these other dimensions—namely, the indexical and symbolic—are in themselves critically important; they may not have been important to Peirce in his briefest treatments of metaphor, and they are only tacitly acknowledged here by his use of the term hypoicon (which allows that more than pure iconicity is involved), but his semeiotic provides for a combination of symbolic, indexical, and iconic functions in signs generally (CP 2.295, 5.119; NEM 4: 256). Thus a complete and correct Peircean definition of metaphor as sign would not be limited to or constrained by this passage. Most important, attempts to pack into this passage everything that needs to be said about metaphor in light of the Peircean semeiotic invariably distort the passage and obscure what I believe is its real potential—a provision (though undeveloped here by Peirce) for a deeper understanding of metaphorical similarity proper, or of metaphorical iconicity in the epitome, we might say.
In order to get a better idea of how I am approaching this passage, consider the following analogy. Suppose we walk into a room where some sort of social function is going on, with a large number of U.S. servicemen in attendance. You explain to me, “Those dressed in navy blue uniforms with little white hats are sailors. Those in brown and khaki with polished leather boots are infantrymen. Those in green camouflage with commando rifles slung over their shoulders are marines.” Now, have you given a complete definition of what a marine is? Of course not. You have distinguished the marines only from the infantrymen and sailors in the room, not from all persons or roles, and you have done so only with regard to their uniforms and equipment, at that. True, the green camouflage and commando rifles may indeed furnish a powerful suggestion as to some special attribute of the (arche)typical marine, but it does not define “marine.”
Likewise, Peirce’s description of the hypoicons does not furnish a whole definition of metaphor. I believe it does not attempt such a definition; it only offers a distinction between metaphors and diagrams and images, and that only with regard to their respective iconic conditions. When Peirce said that the metaphor represents not just the simple quality or analogous structure of a thing (as with images and diagrams) but instead the “representative character” of a thing, I believe he offered a powerful suggestion about the kind of similarity which is (arche)typically metaphorical, but he did not define metaphor. For this reason, with apologies to Peirce for straining his ethics of terminology (see CP 2.219-226; Ketner 1981), I will ultimately wish to reserve the term “metaphor” in this study to refer to the global (symbolic, indexical, and iconic) definition of the metaphorical sign as explained in chapter 1, and I will introduce the term metaicon here to refer to what I think Peirce was really talking about in this passage; that is, only that sort of iconic character which is peculiar to metaphor proper, or to metaphor in its highest form.
What besides my own view of metaphor justifies my constraining the interpretation of Peirce’s words in this way, not to mention further complicating the matter by introducing a new term? If we take only a quick, preliminary glance at the passage (and I must admit that Peirce might very well have been happy with just that), I believe we can see that the opposite view actually leads to more difficulties if not to total failure. Treated as a global definition and stripped of all its technical terminology, Peirce’s description could be saying, simply: “Metaphor is a symbolic statement that represents one thing as an icon (image or diagram) of something else.” On the surface, this would indeed seem to work nicely. After all, Peirce had already clearly explained what he meant by hypoicon: an embodied icon, an icon dominating an actual sign of mixed breed. Perhaps, then, Peirce’s “metaphor” is nothing more than any symbolic/indexical assertion of an iconic proposition. For instance, the whole assertion “My brother John is like a hairy ape” would satisfy this “definition”: It is a symbolic/indexical assertion representing a hairy ape as an icon of my brother John (who would be the “something else” in the passage on this reading of it).
Then what is wrong with this? Strange as it may sound, I think it is not wrong (as a reading of the passage in question) in its failure to distinguish metaphor from simile. The example above is of course a simile, not a metaphor, and I have suggested in chapter 1 that a thorough application of the Peircean semeiotic makes the indexical and symbolic distinctions between (global) metaphor and simile absolutely crucial. I must admit, however, that Peirce himself, because he was concerned with metaphor mainly as a kind of likeness, most often tended to ignore this distinction, so let us too ignore the distinction for the present and admit “My brother John is like a hairy ape” as “metaphor.” After all, especially if I am correct that the hypoicon passage expressly addresses only iconic conditions, then it would be difficult to distinguish between (global) metaphor and simile at this level, for the simile “John is like an ape” and the metaphor “John is an ape”—regarding only the possible similarities between John and the ape—are identical. This passage “fails” in not making that distinction, then, only if we expect it to give an adequate account of more than the iconic conditions of metaphor.
But let us assume, for the moment, that Peirce was trying to give a global definition of metaphor here, and that he was just a little sloppy with regard to the metaphor/simile distinction in allowing that any symbolic/indexical assertion of an iconic proposition is metaphor. If that is the case, Peirce was more than a little sloppy; he failed miserably. What of the assertion “My brother John is like me”? That is undeniably a symbolic/indexical representation that I am an icon of my brother John, or that my brother John is an icon of me (though not, I hope, on either reading, in respect of John’s also being like a hairy ape). Although this assertion satisfies the alleged “global definition” of metaphor, would it really satisfy anyone’s practical expectations of metaphor? I should think that even those who advocate the so-called “substitution” theory—that metaphor is merely elliptical comparison (more at chapter 3)—would reject this as an example. Only those badly misinformed souls who deny that there is any literal/figural distinction to be made at all in language, insisting that the general metaphoricity of all signs precludes any sign from being called metaphor in particular, would say that this example is as good an example of metaphor as we can hope to find. Peirce was certainly not among their number. If anything, as we will see, he was sometimes averse to metaphorical language because it offended his love of precise and literal terminology. So I cannot believe that he would accept “My brother John is like me” as “metaphor” in any salient respect. And yet that is precisely what we would force him to accept by demanding, of his hypoicon classification, a global definition of metaphor—either that, or we must begin by admitting his failure to anything insightful.
Although it may be merely my wishful thinking, I do not think that Peirce failed to say anything insightful. What he said is extremely compact if not cryptic, and what he meant to leave with us may very well have been nothing more than a vague suggestion which he himself had neither the time nor the desire to develop. But I am absolutely convinced that sense can be developed from his suggestion—great sense, perhaps many senses, of which my reading is only one. For the reasons given, though, I must base my reading on the notion that Peirce was suggesting not the distinction of metaphor from all other signs but its distinction from other hypoicons, the other two being the “image” and “diagram.” My hypothesis is that the Peircean “metaphor” is accurately described as a metaicon, a sign grounded in a type of iconicity which encompasses images and diagrams at the same time exceeding them by a critical magnitude.
At least this is the hypothesis I wish to consider further to see where it might lead. As a first step, I will compare it with a rather different hypothesis formulated by Douglas Anderson (1984a, 1984b), who (so far as I know) has given the most thorough and formidable explication in Peircean exegesis of this passage.
Noting the difficulty of this passage and the paucity of other passages on metaphor in Peirce’s writing, Anderson begins by saying that Peirce “places metaphors under icons” (1984b: 453), affirming that Peirce is “clear in subsuming metaphors, together with images and analogies or diagrams, under the class of icons” (455). Although he has little to say about images, one of Anderson’s main objectives is to explicate Peirce’s distinction between the metaphor (the third type of hypoicon) and the diagram (or analogy), which is the second type: The difference, Anderson maintains, is that “in the growth of thought analogies are effective primarily for science and metaphors primarily (not exclusively) for art” (455). The analogy belongs mainly to science, Anderson thinks, because it is grounded in “isomorphism” with its object, whereas the metaphor belongs primarily to art because it is grounded in “isosensism” (459). Basically, this means that analogy is the discovery of a real, objective, and antecedent link between the analogical icon and its object, whereas the metaphorical “resemblance” is “not traceable to antecedent links” but “is created in the articulation of the metaphor” (459). As Anderson points out, this coincides with the “interaction” theory of metaphor put forward by Max Black (extended treatment at my chapter 3).
Anderson’s argument for this position is based in part upon the observation (also noted by Pignatari 1978: 93) that metaphors are thirds in this trichotomy of hypoicons. “When Peirce holds metaphors to be thirds,” Anderson says, “he suggests the presence of a third thing which ties together the quality sets of the relata. But he does not tell us what this third thing is” (455). In order to get at what this third thing in Peirce’s formula may be, Anderson takes up the briefer but very interesting explanation of C. M. Smith: The third thing in the metaphor is “one quality mediating between two others” (1972: 26). Anderson says this accounts for Peirce’s claim that the metaphor’s parallelism is “in something else,” or, in Smith’s words, some “other medium.” Anderson concludes: “That is, the parallelism of a metaphor, in being between ‘other’ mediums, is between things which are not, or cannot be, isomorphically related. Therefore, they must create their own similarity or identity” (457).
If metaphoric similarity is a “created” relation, rather than a “discovered” relation (465), how then would Anderson explain the sense of “rightness” or “aptness” we often feel in a poetic metaphor? Anderson’s answer is that the metaphor is like the experience of “déjà vu,” which Peirce described in talking about self-signifying symbols (MS 517). In other words, Anderson says, as we read a creative metaphor, “a feeling arises which feels appropriate but has no object to which it is appropriate. Thus it is self-representing: it signifies its own created icon and refers, if at all, to its own created referent” (459).
My own hypothesis about metaphorical similarity is exactly the opposite in this respect: I propose that it is least of all, in its highest or purest form, a “self-created” thing comparable to a mental accident or mistake like “déjà vu.” Nevertheless, I believe that Anderson (along with Smith) is very astute in focussing on the question of what that “third” level might be in the Peircean formula for the metaphorical hypoicon. I simply think that Anderson has looked in the wrong place for the answer to that question. Specifically, instead of hypothesizing a genuine third ground of Firstness (a third ground of real iconicity or similarity in this case, I wish to say), Anderson has in fact looked to Thirdness itself for the answer—that is, to the symbolic complexity of metaphor, its actual (not potential) instigation of new configurations of meaning. Anderson has many illuminating things to say about that topic (460-467). But that topic takes us beyond the immediate focus of this passage (iconicity) and, in so doing, further obscures what I believe is its far-reaching though inchoate potential. While I certainly do not wish to deny the creativity inherent in poetic metaphor or the relevance of this passage to that creativity (as I will demonstrate in chapters 4-7), I wish to explore, just here, the alternative hypothesis that we need not go beyond the iconic level in order to understand how Peirce’s “metaphor” is grounded in a hypoiconic third.
In fairness to Anderson, I must note that he, too, attempts to keep his reading of metaphoric similarity from going beyond the iconic level. He argues, “Peirce claims that iconicity is most emphasized in a symbol which signifies ‘what it does’ and therefore signifies ‘itself alone’ (MS 517, p. 67)” (459). Thus, in the one example he is willing to call a “metaphor”—“the field smiles”—Anderson says we have “an iconic sign grounded in itself as pure icon” (459). This I find unconvincing, for it seems to me there is a confusion here as to what might be iconic of what. When asked to interpret, as metaphor, “the field smiles,” I think most people would begin by trying, at least, to think of some possible object in the field (perhaps a profusion of “gay” flowers?) which might be figuratively signified by the icon of smiling. Whether or not that effort is successful, we do not have, here, an iconic sign which signifies “itself alone”—a true example of which would have to be a smile that signifies nothing but a smile (one which therefore seems very familiar to us, but which we have in fact never seen before, as in déjà vu). In any event, this example of metaphor (a rather weak example on which to build one’s whole case, I think) does not escape analogical deconstructability as Anderson intends for it to do, even if the quotient of this personification is nothing more than a “feeling” like “well-being”:
While it is of course unnecessary for anyone to formalize or “intellectualize” the metaphor in this way, I believe that any interpreter who was successful in understanding it at all would have to take the first step of identifying any of a number of properties (X) in some field, properties with which the “blank” in the above analogy might conceivably be filled. Thus, while the field itself and its properties (the object) might be entirely imaginary, interpretation would have to proceed on the hope that the relations which hold between the parts of the icon [smile / human] might prove isomorphic with the relations which hold between the parts of the object [X / field]. I believe this is precisely what Peirce had in mind in the hypoicon passage when he described diagrams as iconic signs “which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts” (CP 2.277). While the object of a successful diagram need not be an actually existent thing, then, the isomorphism between icon and object in a successful analogy (a relation between relations, rather than a relation between single things) would be decidedly real. Although Anderson agrees that Peircean diagrams express real isomorphism, his effort to show that Peircean “metaphors” do not exhibit real similarities is therefore unsuccessful from this example. (The example is in fact a diagram embodied in a degenerate metaphor, a notion I will clarify later.)
Anderson’s difficulty in accepting metaphorical iconicity as real apparently stems from a requirement of excessive visual or physical precision which he places on the concept of isomorphism or likeness. For instance, he says that “the field smiles” cannot exhibit any real isomorphism between the qualities of the field and the qualities of the smile “unless the field has a curved furrow in it” (458). Must all (real) isomorphism be visual or even sensory? If so, we might be forced to the conclusion that even many scientific or mathematical analogies are to that extent “deficient” in reality—at least in comparison to images. Peirce wrote:
Turning now to the rhetorical evidence, it is a familiar fact that there are such representations as icons. Every picture (however conventional its method) is essentially a representation of that kind. So is every diagram, even although there be no sensuous resemblance between it and its object, but only an analogy between the relations of the parts of each. (CP 2.279; emphasis added)
Here, I take it, a picture would be mainly an “image” bearing a (predominantly) concrete sensory resemblance to its object. But a “diagram” proper is more abstract; while the diagrammatic icon itself may consist of physical parts, it is the relation of these parts that signifies a relation of parts in the object; the object (and its parts) need not be physical at all. The isomorphism of the diagram is therefore more general, but no less real than that of the image. It is important to note, however, that this passage does not preclude a diagrammatic sign from exhibiting a sensuous resemblance; as I will show, a sign which is predominantly diagrammatic may include elements of (vague) physical imagery; in fact, all of Anderson’s own examples of the diagram (and I think Peirce would agree that Anderson is correct in so classifying them) do happen to exhibit a sensory resemblance to their objects (specifically, of physical shape). What this passage does do, however, is to release diagrammatic similarity from that requirement. If the isomorphism of the Peircean diagram need not be sensory, is it any less real for all that?
Anderson would answer No, I believe, but here his neglect of the image in his interpretation of Peirce’s trichotomy of hypoicons becomes important. That is, had Anderson paid more attention to how a diagram differs from an image, he might have gotten a different clue as to how a metaphor, in turn, differs from a diagram. This brings me to the core of my hypothesis: The ultimate ground of the Peircean “metaphor” (metaicon) differs from that of the “diagram” just as that of the “diagram” differs from that of the “image”—that is, by degree of abstraction along the very same continuum of real iconicity. Diagrammatic similarity proper is no less “real” than that of the sensory image; it is simply more abstract, and thus not necessarily sensory at all. Likewise, metaphoric similarity proper is no less “real” than that of the diagram; its ultimate ground is simply more general yet, by the magnitude of one additional step—a step Anderson is not willing to take. At the risk of its being a misstep, I will try to take it: Far from crossing the line between reality and unreality, the step “up” from analogy to the level of Peircean “metaphor” per se is a step from analogical isomorphism into an overarching iconic type. It is not, of all things, a fanciful indulgence in the self-fabricating illusion of déjà vu, but a poetic experiment in archetypal iconicity (metaphoricity proper), which is not a “created” phenomenon, even though it may well be a creative factor in the genetic code of symbolic growth (more at chapter 7).
Anderson ably discusses the importance of metaphor with respect to the growth of symbols in Peirce’s system (CP 2.222 and 2.290n), and he attributes this in part to the “vagueness” of metaphorical similarity (461-462). Here, I think, our two hypotheses are within a hair’s-breadth of agreement—if only we could agree on the meaning of this term “vagueness.” As Jarrett Brock has shown (1979), Peirce had an elaborately formulated “Logic of Vagueness,” and he used the term “vague” in at least two different senses (45-49). In one sense, Peirce used the term to mean basically “imprecise” or, in Brock’s words, “insufficiently specific or informative” (45). In the other sense, however, the logical or philosophical sense, Peirce meant “definitional indeterminacy,” which has to do, among other things, “with the now familiar notion of borderline cases,” as Brock puts it (46). I believe it must be this sort of vagueness which characterizes what Peirce elsewhere called the “clustering distributions” of “purposive classes” as a final cause in evolution (CP 1.204-207). Peirce explained, “It follows that it may be quite impossible to draw a sharp line of demarcation between two classes, although they are real and natural classes in strictest truth” (CP 1.208). This sort of vagueness, then, signifies only an appropriate level of generality for broad typological truth and in no way implies a lack of reality.
It should be clear that I believe it is a necessarily vague (in the philosophical sense) but decidedly real resemblance which characterizes this highest ground of metaphorical similarity. Anderson, on the other hand, despite his statement that “vagueness is appropriate for creative metaphor” (462), persists in speaking of it as “notoriously vague” and “imprecise” (465). It seems clear enough that he considers the vagueness of metaphorical similarity as rather inimical to its reality, even though he affirms the reality of image-based similarity and diagrammatic isomorphism under the very same heading of the Peircean hypoicon. Yet he correctly admits that analogical similarity itself is “necessarily vague” in a different sense (468, n. 12). In another note, Anderson even goes so far as to admit that Peirce, in a 1906 paper on graphs, said that all icons are reducible to antecedent forms in their objects. (See also Ransdell 1979.) “My only defense,” Anderson candidly concedes, is that Peirce’s concern in that paper was “with logic and precision and not with poetry; and in the interest of clarity, he avoids mention of the vaguer side of thought” (468, n. 11).
I certainly do not wish to reduce metaphorical similarity to “logic” in any sense except that sense in which “logic” means “semeiotic.” (See Ketner 1983 and Fisch 1978.) I simply see no reason why metaphorical similarity must be banished from reality “in the interest of clarity.” On the contrary, I will argue that especially the poetic metaicon, not in spite of but because of its typological “vagueness,” is enormously real, that it is just as “clear” as it needs to be (and no more so) in order to embody—among radically dissimilar referents—compelling, far-reaching, substantive, and salient similarities. (Chapters 3 and 4 will develop and illustrate this claim at greater length.)
On the other hand, Anderson is correct, I believe, in suggesting that metaphorical similarity, in its highest form, has a decidedly less “preset” cast to it than that of an image or diagram (even when the image or diagram is embodied in a metaphorical frame). As another scholar, Andersen (1980: 202), has commented about Peirce’s hypoicons, “in the metaphor, the signans is allowed to represent its signatum by reason of an ad hoc recognized similarity between the two.” I can accept this statement so long as it is not taken to undermine the ultimate reality of the similarity; that is, so long as the “ad hocness” of the metaphor is understood as being in the recognition of reality. Poetic metaphor in the epitome requires greater creativity, greater “abductive effort” or “semantic reach” (as Michael Shapiro has suggested to me), than do images and diagrams, which usually embody “more statable preconditions.” But the greater effort required by the metaicon is rewarded with the discovery of a greater truth. This truth is “greater” not because its parallelism is (qualitatively) “more parallel” than that of the image and diagram, but because—in reaching across the vast semantic space of a metaiconic type to find its elements—it encompasses and helps to define a larger reality. The antecedence of this reality is not a “preset” truth; it is rather a potentiality evolving into truth, which operates through the fortuitous variety of ways which poets find to embody it and readers find to interpret it. Indeed, because of the vagueness and primal character of pure metaphoricity, I believe that individual acts of poetic metaphor are precisely what the metaiconic type requires in order to reach its full entelechy. In this respect, then, I am sympathetic with Anderson’s reading.
Further, I think Anderson has quite a valid point, especially as developed in his longer work (1984a), with regard to Peirce’s general attitude about poetry, including poetic metaphor. To say the least, it was an ambivalent attitude. Let us now examine it closely.
On the one hand, Peirce often seemed rather condescending toward, if not downright suspicious of, artists in general and poets in particular. The problem with artists generally, at least in comparison to scientists, is that they were neither practical men nor great seekers for truth, but rather simple men of “feeling” (MS 604; CP 1.43). Among these, the “litterateurs” were perhaps the most fragile, for it was their “lively sympathies, easily excited” that made them examples of Peirce’s third order of “pessimists” (unfortunate souls who do little in life but wring their hands at the world); this prohibited them from developing great minds (CB 1166: 111). Perhaps this is what made the “literary habit” seem ruinous to Peirce (MS 632). Poets in particular—unlike scientists, who were profoundly interested in the great uniformities of nature—tended to become engrossed (distracted?) by nature’s diversity (CP 6.100, at the end). “The thought of the writer is encumbered with sensuous accessories,” Peirce wrote (MS 573: 26). The scientific imagination was “calm,” but the “poetical” imagination was far “too passionate” and had “too little generalizing faculty”; left to itself, this kind of “genius” would express itself only in “sensuous forms” which were of “no value at all in science” (MS 1280: 14). At its most harmless, Peirce wrote, the “poet-imagination riots in ornaments and accessories” (MS 1284: 12-13); at its worst, it might lapse entirely into “hallucinations” (CP5.117).
Peirce’s attitude about artists and poets in general carries over somewhat into his view of metaphor specifically, if we judge only by his informal comments in passing. In discussing the profound power of words like justice and truth in the world, for instance, Peirce felt the need to say that he was not using “rhetoric or metaphor” (NEM 4: 244). As Donna Orange points out (1984: 52-53), Peirce would tolerate the use of metaphorical (personifying) language in speaking of God only as long as it was kept more or less in church where it belonged—away from science and philosophy. About such figurative religious language, Peirce said he had “no objection . . . except that it is wrapped up in figures of speech, instead of having the explicitness that we desire in science” (CP 6.199). In that same passage he spoke of such language as “incautiously clothing the idea [of God] in a garb that is open to criticism,” and he compared it to simplistic paintings of God which were “ludicrously figurative.” Even when he saw fit to praise a poet for his metaphors, the praise was more for the “feeling” than for the “idea”; one of his favorite poets, for instance, was George Herbert,
every one of whose pieces embodies some original and striking thought of which the intense sincerity is brought home to us all the more by the extreme oddity of the metaphors, some of which would border on the comical but for their powerful earnestness. (MS 683: 18)
Oddly enough, Peirce introduced one of his own most revealing “metaphors” with an apology. He offered what I judge to be a brilliant figure: The Symbol is the “complex whole” of the “main body of thought”; the Index consists of the “nails and teeth” and “hard parts of the body” that “hold us stiffly up to the realities”; and the Icon becomes the “blood” that “supplies the nutriment.” Before presenting this, however, Peirce confessed, tellingly: “A metaphor is not always to be despised” (MS 404: 15, emphasis added).
Now on the other hand, as if we were talking about an entirely different philosopher, Peirce often came rushing to the defense of artists and poets, and not just on account of their “earnestness” of feeling. After suggesting that the “highest kind of synthesis” finds, among data, “connections which they would not otherwise have had” (strong counter-evidence to my hypothesis), Peirce nevertheless went on to point out that poet, scientist, and geometer perform comparable tasks in that very respect:
The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man. The artist introduces a fiction; but it is not an arbitrary one; it exhibits affinities to which the mind accords a certain approval in pronouncing them beautiful, which if it is not exactly the same as saying that the synthesis is true, is something of the same general kind. The geometer draws a diagram, which if not exactly a fiction, is at least a creation, and by means of observation of that diagram he is able to synthesize and show relations between elements which before seemed to have no necessary connection. (CP 1.383)
The above passage seems in accord with the so called “aesthetic turn” in Peirce’s thought during the 1890’s (see Anderson 1984b: 466; Hocutt 1962; compare Peirce’s earlier and later classification of the sciences with respect to Esthetics as shown by Scott 1985: 45). As early as 1893, Peirce commented, in a footnote, that a “logician,” no less, could construct a new language entirely out of metaphors, given a few literal “prepositions” to work from (CP 2.290 n. 1). Certainly the evidence from around 1900 and after shows a more approving attitude towards poetry and metaphor. In 1903 (the year of our hypoicon passage), Peirce suggested that metaphor is a principal source and can be a “rather helpful” source for new symbols (or new applications of old symbols) to accommodate the “new conceptions” of science (CP 2.222). Peirce’s own metaphors, about this time, began to acquire an increasingly important cognitive and epistemic function. Consider for example his elaborate “metaphor” of consciousness as a lake. He began:
We are going to shock the physiological psychologists, for once, by attempting, not an account of a hypothesis about the brain, but a description of an image which shall correspond, point by point, to the different features of the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness is like a bottomless lake. . . . (CP 7.553)
After going through it a second time, he concluded, “The aptness of this metaphor is very great” (CP 7.554). In the unpublished portion of the manuscript from which the above is selected, Peirce went on to argue for the “aptness” of the figure at greater length, and it seems clear that he had in mind much more than “rhetorical” or “ornamental” aptness (MS 1113). The metaphor had become a revelatory mechanism for him, a better way of understanding consciousness than any physiological “hypothesis about the brain.”
Perhaps his changing view of metaphor was occasioned by his evolving view of the cosmos: “The Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem—for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony—just as every true poem is a sound argument” (CP 5.119). It is no wonder, then, that in his own “Neglected Argument . . .” (1908), Peirce put the poet right alongside the pure mathematician and other such thinkers (CB 1166: 91). Similarly, the older Peirce might very well have been carrying on a debate with the younger Peirce when he wrote:
I hear you say: “All that is not fact; it is poetry.” Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except for the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.
I hear you say: “This smacks too much of an anthropomorphic conception.”I reply that every scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is a hypothesis that there is something in nature to which the human reason is analogous; and that it really is so all the successes of science in its applications to human convenience are witnesses. They proclaim that truth over the length and breadth of the modern world. In the light of the successes of science to my mind there is a degree of baseness in denying our birthright as children of God and in shamefacedly slinking away from anthropomorphic conceptions of the universe. (CP 1.315-316)
Perhaps there is after all, then, a Peircean “continuity between creativity in science and creativity in art,” as Anderson himself says (1984a: 83; compare Scott 1985). If so, there must have been—at least for the older Peirce—a parallel convergence between the modes of “discovery” made possible by analogical models and by metaphorical, even poetic, conceptions of the universe.
I believe, however, that Peirce’s ambivalence toward poetry and metaphor offers a more important insight than a merely historical one. A closer look at Peirce’s negative comments about metaphor will show not only that they tend to cluster in his earlier writings but also that there is a rather persistent, specific complaint which these comments tend to share: Peirce detested “ornamental” figures of speech and circumlocutions. This recurring strain in his criticisms of figurative language might have a specific, identifiable source in his intellectual history that would make perfect sense of the big change in his attitude about metaphor. As Fisch (1978: 57) has shown, the younger Peirce was very much under the influence of Whatley’s nominalism as articulated in that author’s Elements of Logic. “But the Logic was not the only book of Whatley’s on which Peirce had to recite,” Fisch writes. “In both terms of his junior year and perhaps also in his senior year he recited on Whatley’s Elements of Rhetoric” (61). Fisch then quotes a passage from the Rhetoric which he describes as “advocating nominalism more vigorously even than the one that Ogden and Richards quoted from the Logic.” Here are, in part, Whatley’s words from that passage: “The full importance, consequently, of Language, and of precise technical Language, . . . can never be duly appreciated by those who still cling to the theory of ‘Ideas’; those imaginary objects of thought in the mind . . .” (1846: 20-21). What this same Whatley said about figurative language therefore comes as no surprise: Metaphor, he argued in the Rhetoric, is a needless deviation from “plain and strictly appropriate style” (1846: 34).
Was the younger Peirce’s view of metaphor heavily influenced by this attitude of Whatley’s? If so, perhaps Peirce’s movement toward greater and greater acceptance of the epistemic and ontological value of metaphor is parallel to his progress from nominalism toward realism, as traced elsewhere by Fisch (1967). There is an intriguing portent of this pattern of movement in a passage from the Lowell Lectures of 1866, in which Peirce’s early disdain for metaphor as a figure of speech is clearly present, but in which his future attitude of reconciliation of metaphor (viewed as icon) with reality may be prefigured. Peirce wrote:
Cuvier said that Metaphysics is nothing but Metaphor—an identity which is prettily typified in those acted charades, in the first of which two doctors come in at opposite sides of the stage, shake hands, and go out for the first scene, then repeat the same thing for the second scene and again for the whole word; and then do the same thing three times for the three scenes of the second word. The two words are of course metaphysician and metaphor; and their identity suggests that the charades must have been the invention of some one who thought with Cuvier that Metaphysics is another term for Metaphor. If metaphor be taken literally to mean an expression of similitude when the sign of predication is employed instead of the sign of likeness—as when we say this man is a fox instead of this man is like a fox—I deny entirely that metaphysicians are given to metaphor; on the contrary, no other writers can compare with them for precision of language. But if Cuvier was only using a metaphor himself, and meant by metaphor broad comparison on the ground of characters of a formal and highly abstract kind,—then, indeed, metaphysics professes to be metaphor That is just its merit—as it was Cuvier’s own merit in Zoology. (W 1: 497; CP 7.590, emphasis added)
What Peirce meant here by “metaphor” as the “merit” of metaphysics, namely, that kind of metaphor which involves a “broad comparison on the ground of characters of a formal and highly abstract kind,” might well be illustrated by his discussion of the syllogism which he presented immediately following (W 1: 497-498; this section omitted from CP 7.590). In his example, the major premise (“X is thus”) combines with the minor premise (“This is X”) to produce the (tacit) conclusion [This is thus]. What strikes me about this example is that Peirce discussed it not in the traditional vocabulary of deduction but in terms of sexual procreation: The unspoken conclusion is suggested as the embryonic “offspring”; the major premise, in supplying “the sphere” for that “new symbol,” is treated as the female; the minor premise, by injecting “the content,” becomes the male. This is no mere ornamental analogy; it may very well be, in Peirce’s words, a “great analogy” to human reproduction (W: 497). Given the context of this fascinating lecture, Peirce was by no means using the terminology of human procreation to “dress up” a lesson about the syllogism. On the contrary, he was using the laws of the syllogism as an icon of a much more universal type of growth which finds yet another token of itself in human procreation. The figure is rooted in the central metaphor which not only dominates this whole essay but appears quite often in Peirce’s thought: Man as Symbol. (See NEM 4: 262-263 and CB 27: 156-157, for instance. Singer 1984: 54-56 has an illuminating discussion.)
If Peirce’s 1866 description of “metaphysical metaphor” here only vaguely portends the hypoiconic metaphor of 1903 (MS 478; CP 2.277), at least his own actual use of the man-symbol metaphor throughout this piece is a superb example of what I think is the somewhat more clearly emerging conception of metaphorical iconicity in his later description of the hypoicons. That is, it is not that a symbol looks like man (though it might, as an image would); nor is it even that the symbol is merely analogous to man, though that is undeniably a part of it (specifically, the diagrammatic part); rather, at this “great” level of the analogy, man really becomes a symbol (just as his symbols really come to life), not because the one is manufactured or copied from the other, but because each is spontaneously generated in accordance with the law of a third thing. To apply the language of Peirce’s hypoicon passage directly to this figure: A symbol, in its role as metaphorical icon of man, “represents the representative character” of man (that is, signifies man’s own character as sign) by virtue of a parallelism between man and symbol in “something else.” And that “something else,” I believe, that third thing, is Reasonableness—here considered as a controlling iconic type, the archetype or universal pattern from which both man and his living symbols are cut (more of this later).
That is what I mean by a metaicon, even if it is not exactly what Peirce meant by “metaphor” in the hypoicon passage. In chapter 4, I will offer an argument showing how this conception might work in poetry. For the present, I am content to offer it as a hypothesis as to what Peirce could have meant, even if that meaning had not yet reached the level of clarity in the early 1900s that I and others are trying to give it in the 1980s.
Now let us examine this hypothesis in more detail. So far, I have suggested only the gist of it: Metaphorical iconicity is vaguer or more general though no less real than diagrammatic isomorphism; diagrammatic similarity, in turn, is more abstract but no less real than imaginal resemblance. (I use the adjective form “imaginal” instead of “imagistic” to avoid confusion with the meaning which the “Imagist” school of poets and critics have given to the latter; by “imaginal” I do not mean “imaginary.”) These distinctions are summarized in figure 2.1, where they are also aligned with the elements from Peirce’s hypoicon passage as I read it.
The increasing abstractness as we move from the image through the diagram to the metaicon has also been described above as a progress from concrete sensory resemblance through formal analogical similarity to general archetypal iconicity. The identification of imaginal similarity as sensory resemblance poses little difficulty, I take it; Peirce said the image is like its object in “simple quality,” and his most frequent examples of “quality” are the sense qualities like redness Certainly, more is involved in Peirce’s notion of Quality than the sense qualities, but the key word here is the “simple” quality of the image. I take it to mean “sensory” because, as we have already seen, Peirce contrasted a picture-image with the diagram on the grounds that a diagram need not possess any such “sensuous” resemblance (CP2.279). In that same passage and in many others, he identified the diagram with analogy, and in the hypoicon passage spoke of the diagram as embodying “analogous relations,” so I presume no one would have any difficulty with my reading of the second hypoicon.
How, though, can any sort of iconicity be typological, as I am hypothesizing the third kind of hypoicon to be? Ransdell points out that there are “laws and types which function iconically” (1979: 56), but he may not have had in mind the same thing I do. I am talking about a type at the level of Firstness. Am I not committing the same mistake I accused Anderson of making—that is, the mistake of going beyond Firstness to Thirdness for an explanation of third Firstness? To put it in my own terms, is not metaiconicity, precisely, “beyond iconicity”? This is certainly a difficulty I must deal with. Apparently, it is similar to a problem Peirce himself had to deal with, in his progress from nominalism to realism, when he found that he must “distinguish the generality of firsts from that of thirds,” as Fisch puts it (1967: 173). I believe J. Jay Zeman has expressed the possible solution very well:
The theory of abstraction is a theory of thirdness, but . . . the thirdness of abstraction is a first with respect to certain other viewpoints on thirdness. The “being” of abstractions consists, Peirce tells us, in “what they would or might (not actually will) come to in the concrete” (CP 6.485). (Zeman 1982: 221)
In other words, when I speak of the metaicon as being a type, an abstract third among Firsts, I am speaking of a possible law, a governing archetypal pattern in embryo as it were, a real and present possibility even before it is actualized in nature, let alone actualized in the metaphorical assertion. In this respect, I am suggesting that the metaicon might be a sort of final cause in the evolution of metaphorical thought in poetry and in language. In chapters 4 and 7, I will develop this notion more fully, but here it is useful to borrow Michael Shapiro’s lucid explanation (in a different application) of final causes:
Since it is often erroneously thought that final causation is “backward causation” (i.e., that the future exerts a causal influence on the present), it is appropriate to emphasize that Peirce follows Aristotle in construing a final cause as a present possibility, not a future actuality. From a mechanistic point of view it might seem equally paradoxical to attribute causal potency to present possibilities as to future actualities, since this would endow mere possibilities with the power of influencing what actually occurs. But Peirce’s argument is based on the assertion that some possibilities are more likely to be actualized just because they are the sort of possibilities that they are: “every general idea has more or less power of working itself into fact; some more so, some less so” (CP 2.149). (Shapiro 1985b: 11-12)
As I will argue in chapters 3 and 4, the metaicon, viewed as iconic possibility, is not only more likely to be actualized in poetry than certain other possibilities are, but it possesses an almost irresistible potential for poets. My effort here, though, is simply to clarify what I mean by this hypothesis that the metaicon, Peirce’s hypoiconic “metaphor,” is a typological or archetypal icon whose reality poets are very likely to discover. I mean it not in the sense of some mystical efficient cause which “forces” them to discover it, but in the sense of a final cause, “whereby the whole calls out its parts” (CP 1.220).
In what sense might this metaicon be a “whole” that “calls out its parts”? Herein lies a further possibility for understanding the distinctions and relations between the Peircean “metaphor,” diagram, and image. My reading of the hypoicons suggests a hierarchical relationship among the three: The “metaphor,” grounded in a universal archetype, would logically include (though it would not merely consist of) innumerable possible diagrams, which would in turn suggest many possible images. Or perhaps the relations among the three hypoicons may be more aptly conceived as a continuum of iconicity, suggesting that in every iconic experience there is at least some degree of metaphoricity, diagrammaticality, and imagery; the three grounds of iconicity would then be distinguished, in actual occurrence, according to which ground was judged as predominant In fact, I believe, this is precisely the case: Even an image that happens to be identical to its object in almost every respect—say, a full-size wax statue which is so lifelike as to be easily mistaken for the person it depicts—is necessarily an “analogue” in a weak sense, because the likeness is predicated across disparate media. In an even weaker sense, but for the same reason, that statue would also be “metaphorical.” (Indeed, this is the “weak” sense in which all languages, all signs, are “metaphorical.”) Conversely, if I am right that the essence of metaphor is typological iconicity in its purest form, then we might expect to find, in actual examples of poetry, signs which we recognize as highly metaphorical but which nonetheless contain many analogical and imaginal icons. I will argue in chapter 4 that this is precisely what we do find in poetry. Even the most universal and well-known poetic archetypes are variously expressible (though never exhaustible) in a multitude of poetic diagrams and images. Beyond that, we even find (more frequently) “degenerate” poetic metaphors whose similarity conditions seem predominantly analogical or imaginal. Their “degeneracy” (not a pejorative term) may obtain, in my view, from the simple fact that their overarching metaicons have not yet been fully conceptualized in poetry or in human language of any kind. In other words, the “whole” has not yet called out enough of its “parts” to be “discovered” as a type, its ultimate telos, viewed as a present but (thus far) ineffable possibility.
Perhaps this notion of “hierarchy” or “continuum” among the hypoicons can be clarified by analogy to Peirce’s most famous trichotomy of signs: the Symbol, the Index, and the Icon. As we have seen in chapter 1, any icon in general represents its object by some sort of similarity to it; any index represents its object by contiguity (spatial or causal) with it; and any symbol represents its object by a conventional rule (often arbitrary) linking the symbol to its object. But, as we have already seen, every actual sign involves a combination of these three modes of signifying; signs may be distinguished according to which mode is predominant in a given case. Thus, we find word symbols (like buzz) which are predominantly iconic; these we may call “iconic symbols.” Similarly, we find word symbols (like demonstrative that) which have a strong indexical or “finger-pointing” function—they hardly indicate any object at all unless they are in some kind of spatial or temporal relation with it; these we may call “indexical symbols.” Finally, we have word symbols (like boy) which are nearly pure “symbolic symbols,” if you will, because they have weak indexical functions and only covert iconic content; they represent their objects by convention, mainly, and so are symbols proper (see NEM 4: 243-255).
Why has something of the same sort not been said about Peirce’s hypoicons? If there is an isomorphism between the two trichotomies of signs (as would be natural to expect, given Peirce’s habit of delineating parallel trichotomies), we should find “degenerate” metaphors in which images dominate (imaginal metaphors), “degenerate” metaphors in which diagrams dominate (analogical metaphors), and metaphors “proper” in which—how shall I say it?—in which the very principle of metaphoricity itself dominates. Given the possibility of it, what might such a “principle of metaphoricity” be? If we wish to limit our answer to the realm of Firstness, we cannot look for the answer among the symbols and indices (except to take this hint from their hierarchical relationship). Thus all we can do, I believe, is to look in the direction indicated by the rather clear progression of image > diagram > _____. What could fill this gap better than the sort of archetypal icon which might also be described as a “master metaphor” (to borrow a term suggested to me by Jules Levin)? This reading would not make metaphorical iconicity into Thirdness per se; it would simply explain how metaphoricity might be related to the Icon (a third to a First) by the same logic in which symbolicity is related to the Sign (a third to a Third). Further, it might explain why metaphorical similarity, in its distilled essence, seems so naturally adapted to poetry, which I would describe as the distilled essence of language itself. In other words, the vast archetypal scope of the metaicon, its third Firstness, would naturally adapt it to serve as the rational iconic ground for the creative Thirdness of intensely poetic metaphors which characteristically link radically diverse referents. This would be the sense, referred to earlier, in which genuine metaphorical iconicity is perfectly fitted to and thus prefigurative of its other dimensions (indexical and symbolic).
In any case, I believe that there are metaphors in poetry which do indeed have a real iconic ground far deeper, more nearly universal, and more clearly suggestive of a teleology in the poet’s “making” of language, than are the many other metaphors which can be almost exhaustively described, in their present forms, as “analogical” or “imaginal.” Analogical and imaginal metaphors are far more frequent in ordinary speech. They are also more frequent in poetry than are genuine metaicons, but the similarities revealed by imaginal and analogical metaphors in poetry more often seem headed towards “something else,” to use Peirce’s words.
Before looking at a few examples, let us take one last look at Peirce’s words in the hypoicon passage:
Hypoicons may be roughly divided according to the mode of Firstness of which they partake. Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors (CP 2.277)
Indulge in an informal dialogue with me about these words. First, images clearly iconize their objects. How? By “partaking,” themselves, of some of the same simple qualities in which their objects partake. Photograph a red rose with a reasonably good camera, and the redness in the picture will depict the redness of the rose. Diagrams also iconize their objects. How? By modeling, “in their own parts,” the same general relation-of-parts in their objects. Draw up a calendar showing the days of the week as a series of blocks succeeding one another from left to right. Days are not rectangular, and time does not look, sound, feel, taste, or smell like anything which we can put down on paper. But the spatial sequence of the blocks on the calendar can serve as a diagram of the temporal sequence of days in actual time.
Again, what do images and diagrams iconize? Peirce said “thing,” presumably meaning objects, physical or mental. What is it about their objects that images and diagrams iconize? Simple qualities or abstract relations, respectively. And how do they get the means to accomplish this iconizing? By partaking, themselves, in those same qualities or by exhibiting, in their own parts, those same relations.
Now, with the same set of questions in mind, look again at this fascinating though cryptic description Peirce offered for “metaphor”: Metaphors (are “those” hypoicons which) “represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else.”
What does this “metaphor” iconize? Well, an object, of course, but Peirce did not call it an “object” or even a “thing,” as he did in the case of the diagram. He called it a representamen What is a representamen? It is another word for “sign,” or at least for “potential sign” (CP 2.275). What on earth could he mean by saying that the metaphorical sign has yet another “sign” as its object? Well, every “object” in the Peircean semeiotic is capable of being a sign in some connection (CP5.448n), but that would apply equally well to the objects of diagrams and images. Why did Peirce take the trouble, in just this connection, of singling out the metaphorical object as a sign in itself? (Hold that thought.)
Next, what is it about this “object/sign” that the metaphorical sign iconizes? Well, some quality or likeness, presumably, since the metaphor is iconic of its object, but Peirce did not call it a quality or likeness. He called it the representative character of the object/sign. So the metaphorical hypoicon is a sign which iconizes its object’s own character as sign. Character as what kind of sign? Sign of what? (Hold those thoughts, too.)
Finally, how does the metaphorical hypoicon get the means to accomplish such a feat of iconizing? Does it get it simply by partaking directly in the quality of its object, as the image does? Does it get it by merely exhibiting, in its own configuration, the abstract structure of its object? No, not directly at least, for Peirce said it gets its iconic power by representing a parallelism in something else. So the metaphorical hypoicon is a sign which iconizes its object’s own character as sign by means of a parallelism in some third thing. What is this third thing, and what does it have to do with the iconic relationship between the first two things (the metaphorical sign and its object/sign)?
It is now time to let go of all the thoughts we have been holding. You already know most of my thoughts, but I will present them again by way of summary and, for the sake of leading to some new thoughts, in reverse order:
1. What is the third thing in the “metaphor,” and what does it have to do with the iconic relationship between the first two things (the metaphorical icon and its object/sign)?
Answer: The third thing is a controlling (meta)iconic type. It “controls” in the sense of a final cause, a whole that calls out its parts. It provides for the iconic relationship between the metaphorical icon and its object/sign because they are, jointly, parts which may be “called out” by this type.
2. What kind of sign is this “object/sign”? What is it a sign of?
Answer: The object/sign is also an icon. It is a token icon of its controlling iconic type and is thus a (potential) sign of that type. Hence, it is also potentially a reciprocal sign of the metaphorical icon itself, as a by-product of their joint inheritance vested in the controlling type.
3. Why did Peirce take the trouble, just in connection with the hypoiconic metaphor (not in connection with the image or diagram), of singling out the metaphorical object as a possible sign in itself?
Answer: I cannot know his intention, but I am guessing that it may have been his vague purpose to distinguish the hypoiconic metaphor (from the image and diagram) by granting its object this character as a reciprocal icon.
Before explaining the “reciprocal” power of the metaicon, I offer a schematic summary, at figure 2.2, showing my interpretation of all three hypoicons. In the figure, the sign (≈) represents simple or sensory resemblance; the sign (::) represents analogical proportionality; and the sign (≅) represents something like “reciprocal, teleological congruency.”
What is the meaning of this “reciprocal teleological congruency” represented as (≅) in figure 2.2? I will argue (again at chapter 4) that the metaicon, actualized in its purest form as a poetic archetype, is characteristically (and powerfully) a reversible metaphor, unlike most metaphorical analogies and images. For the moment, I will explore this aspect of my hypothesis only so far as it may help to clarify my interpretation of the Peircean “metaphor” as metaicon.
Peirce’s own metaphor of Man as Symbol, as I have already said, is an excellent example of what I mean by the metaicon. (Remember that I am here discussing only the iconic character of global metaphor when I call “Man-Symbol” a “metaphor.”) Now note that this figure is reversible. (See CP 7.587, where Peirce said that “men and words reciprocally educate each other.”) On the one hand, many aspects of human life—especially its growth, creativity, and governance by reason—present revealing figures of the way all symbols in the universe, human or otherwise, live and function and grow; it is thus no accident that Peirce, in his efforts to explore the universe semeiotically, frequently employed a host of organic metaphors. On the other hand, the more we study the logic and life and growth of symbols, man-made or natural, the more we come to understand new things about ourselves as human beings. Symbolicity is iconic of humanity, and humanity in turn is iconic of symbolicity.
Wherein does this symmetrical figurality lie? If my reading of Peirce is correct, it does not lie in the mere fact that human beings make symbols, and so imbue them with their own idiosyncrasies, for that explanation leaves out the enormous iconic potential of natural symbols, indispensable to poet and anthropologist alike in their efforts to make sense of human life. Nor is it the case that even natural symbols just happen to exhibit, in their own structures, patterns which furnish serendipitous analogues for poets and anthropologists to use in telling what they already know of man. Someone who uses the Man-Symbol connection as mere rhetorical analogy is displaying a grasp of part, but not all, of its power, for the rhetoric of the analogy is but a “degenerate” form of the metaphor. Its real power is not rhetorical but revelatory, even prophetic. It is forever suggesting new hypotheses—alternately about the nature of symbols and about the nature of man—which frequently prove to be tellingly true. These hypotheses are confirmed by subsequent experience much more often than could reasonably be expected if there were not “something else” to the metaphor. And what, again, is that “something else”? In Peirce’s theory, it is the very Reasonableness of the universe itself—call it God, if you will, for that is undeniably an analogue related to the same metaphor. (See Donna Orange 1984 for a splendid exegesis of Peirce’s concept of God as Reasonableness.) But whatever analogical form this metaphor takes, it is grounded in a great archetype of which all symbolic replicas, including human creativity and rationality, are but tokens.
In Peirce’s “master metaphor,” then, humanity iconizes symbolicity, and symbolicity in turn iconizes humanity, not because the one has sprung from the other, nor because the one has been copied from or onto the other, but because each has been “called out of” or “copied from” a third thing. Consequently, as icons of this third thing (Universal Reasonableness), Man and Symbol are of course naturally and necessarily iconic of one another in their own qualities and structure, but not just in their own qualities or structure. Because their reciprocal iconicity obtains as a by-product of their joint but independent heritage in a master typology, their similarity cannot be fully understood—not as the highly suggestive and far-reaching phenomenon it really is—by merely considering the one token as an icon, pro tem, of the other. For we cannot begin to apprehend the prophetic power of their similarity until we see the symmetry of it; and the symmetry of it turns on the pivotal final cause of their emerging metaiconic type.
On the other hand, analogical and imaginal metaphors possess this symmetry and reversibility, I believe, only when they are fully lexicalized, which is to say “literalized,” or when they are living extensions of some clearly formed metaicon. This might at first seem to be a tautology, but let us examine some examples to see, first, whether imaginal and analogical metaphors can in fact be distinguished from one another at all, and then, second, whether or not they can be distinguished from metaicons by their lack of icon-to-object symmetry and reversibility.
Since poetic metaphors are the focus of subsequent chapters, I will indulge in a few examples from “ordinary” speech here, for the sake of simplicity. Consider just these four:
1. The boxer has an iron fist.
2. The president has an iron will.
3. That baby has creamy skin.
4. That executive is the cream of the company.
All of these are degenerate metaphors, I believe, because they are dominated rather exclusively either by imaginal or by analogical similarity. Two of them are imaginal metaphors, I think, and two are analogical. I invite you to test intuitions with me in my efforts to say which are which.
The boxer’s iron fist in sentence 1 is an imaginal metaphor because it is based on a simple sensory connection between two things—the connection being hardness or the like. We imagine the “feel” of the boxer’s fist striking the jaw directly with the momentum and hardness of iron. But what of the president’s iron will in sentence 2? Surely, hardness or the like (as inflexibility) is involved with the iron, but do we imagine “feeling” the president’s will as we do the boxer’s fist? If we try to imagine it, we quickly see that someone’s will is not the sort of thing that can be directly seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt. It is an abstract object. Thus, although the icon of iron is decidedly concrete, we cannot liken it to anything in the president’s will—except by analogy. The president’s will is to the wills of others (or perhaps to his/her other attributes), as iron is to other materials. One reading would therefore be:
president’s will / others’ wills :: iron / other metals
Here is no simple likeness between single elements; it is rather the relation of the president’s will to other elements in its abstract domain which is compared to the relation of iron to other elements in its concrete domain. There simply is nothing in our notion of a person’s will to accommodate a simple sensory connection or transfer to or from the hardness of iron, so we must (at least unconsciously) construct an analogy in order to understand the metaphor. Therefore, while the boxer’s iron fist is an imaginal metaphor, the president’s iron will is an analogical metaphor.
The same contrast may easily be drawn between the baby’s creamy skin in sentence 3 and the executive’s “creaminess” in sentence 4. I speak of the executive’s “creaminess” facetiously, of course, to point out how silly it would be to interpret these two metaphors at the same level of iconicity. In the case of the baby, there is an imagined but direct tactile (softness, smoothness) or visual (if it happens to be a white baby, more or less) or perhaps even olfactory or gustatory comparison (if the interpreter enjoys the nuzzling or kissing of babies or the smell or taste of cream). Whatever one’s preferences, the metaphor’s menu of possible similarities between the baby’s skin and the cream are all predominantly sensory. Perhaps someone will note that the tactile and visual connections, in this case, seem more direct than any possible smell/taste connection, the latter being so remote as to boarder on the analogical, if not to cross over into it entirely. But that would only underline my point: There is a continuum of iconicity from the sensory up through the analogical to the metaphorical proper. As Peirce put it, “All icons, from mirror-images to algebraic formulae, are much alike, committing themselves to nothing at all, yet the source of all our information” (MS 599: 42). The question is what ground of iconicity predominates in a given figure. In my judgment, sensory similitude dominates the comparison of the baby’s skin to cream. I am fully prepared to admit that even sensory perception, in a subdued sense, is itself broadly analogical, especially in cases of synaesthesia.
The idea of a continuum in iconicity, however, does not preclude our making quite valid judgments as to discrete levels within that continuum. The executive’s “creaminess” reminds us of that. Presumably, no direct sensuous connection between the executive and the cream in sentence 4 is intended. Although the executive is (probably) a physical object (a person), it is rather this person’s relationship with other persons (in the sphere of the company) which is compared with the cream’s relationship to other things in its sphere (perhaps to milk in a bottle). We can try, absurdly, to “visualize” it if we want to, but because the notions of “rank” or “privilege” or “excellence” in a company are so abstract, we find that the metaphor makes better “sense” at the level of analogy:
executive / others in the company :: cream / milk in a bottle
While truly poetic metaphors offer better evidence, as we will see in subsequent chapters, these conversational metaphors offer at least a preliminary indication that tropes which are predominantly imaginal may be clearly distinguished from those which are predominantly diagrammatic. That this view gets “fuzzy” at the edges merely reminds us that in human semeiosis (ana)logical possibility exceeds sensory possibility only in degree.
This hierarchical continuity between imaginal and diagrammatic similarity is even more apparent when we notice that it seems rather easy and entirely logical to expand an image into a diagram, even though (as we have just seen) it is difficult if not absurd to reduce any diagram to an image. For instance, if we wish, there is no trouble at all in reformulating the two imaginal metaphors above as analogies:
boxer’s fist / others’ fists :: iron / other materials
baby’s skin / others’ skin :: cream / raw milk
This fact does not destroy the distinction between images and diagrams; it merely indicates that the distinction is not a disjunction. The facts are just as the hypothesis would lead us to expect: What makes immediate sense in the metaphorical image is fully consonant with the more elaborate (ana)logical pattern of the metaphorical diagram; most any metaphorical image is thus expandable to the format of an analogy—redundantly so. Conversely, as we have already seen, it is difficult if not absurd to reduce a pure abstract analogy to an image. The mistake of demanding sensory clarity of all metaphors, by the way, is what blocks many people from understanding and appreciating some of the greatest poetry written.
A parallel but more forgivable mistake is made by those who think they have exhausted the potential of a genuine metaicon after they have solved the “riddle” of some analogical proportion it contains. As I will argue in chapter 4, for instance, one cannot get the full power of the “death-night” metaicon in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 simply by reasoning in linear fashion from the iconic analogue night/day to the conclusion that the object happens to be death/life; for in the sonnet, death/life is also an important icon, in its turn, of the object night/day. Night thus becomes much more than a mere euphemistic analogue or substitute for death; because the poem brings out the fact that death and night are jointly signs of one another, our attention ought to focus on what makes this so—the law or type of cyclical change which serves as the controlling icon for the whole poem. As extensions from this archetypal metaicon, even the multitude of images and diagrams in the poem acquire a beautiful and prophetic symmetry, just as we have already seen in Peirce’s Man-Symbol metaicon.
Do all metaphors have this symmetry? For the moment, I will limit the question to whether or not all metaphors display this symmetry. After all, even if I can demonstrate that some metaphors do not seem to be symmetrical, it is possible—given my hypothesis—that they lack symmetry precisely because some metaicon to which they belong has not yet fully emerged to our human understanding.
Within my present limits, however, many (in fact, most) metaphors seem asymmetrical to some degree, and thus are not productively reversible. But I must caution: When I say they are not productively reversible, I mean that they are not reversible to any novel epistemic advantage with respect to the same similarity. Because any object is capable of serving as a sign of any other object in some respect, it necessarily follows that any metaphorical object is capable of signifying its own metaphorical sign in some respect; the question is whether it may do so productively in the same respects. Metaiconic signs, as we have seen, iconize their objects in regard to the same typological attributes on which those objects, in turn, iconize them. The same cannot be said for most degenerate analogical and imaginal metaphors. Consider again the four examples we have just been discussing.
We have seen that the relation iron/other materials can serve as an effective icon for the object-relation will/other wills. Is this analogy reversible? With respect to just the same attribute of hardness or inflexibility, apparently not, or at least not with any new insight about the object (which would be iron/other materials in the reversed analogy). The original metaphor gives a new understanding about the abstract character of someone’s will (“stubbornness”) by re-configuring it as a concrete relation (“hardness”). That is the way many conversational metaphors work, and work very well. But that is also the cause of their asymmetry (concrete-to-abstract). Concrete objects serve productively in metaphor to configure abstract objects with respect to certain attributes, but abstract objects do not work so well in metaphor (with respect to those same attributes) to configure concrete objects—simply because, most often, we can already see how concrete objects are configured with respect to those attributes. Thus it is difficult to imagine how reference to someone’s stubbornness can help us to understand, any better than we already understand it, the inflexibility of iron. As Derek Bickerton has pointed out, iron is already “marked” for hardness in metaphor (1969). Of course you can easily imagine a context (say, someone is trying to cut through a piece of iron with a fingernail file) in which the remark, “Oh, this stubborn iron!” would make sense. But what sense does it make? I think the sense is mainly emphatic (via redundancy) of a lexical connotation already rather permanently attached to iron. If there is more to it than that, it must be some other similarity than simple hardness. This seems clear from considering what the exact reversal of iron will would be—willful iron. Here the similarity condition has apparently changed from mere “hardness” to something more like “unpredictability”: The iron acts capriciously, as if it had a mind of its own, and will not behave as you want or expect it to. Thus, while the metaphor of iron will is “reversible” in a sense, it is not reversible in just the same sense—not to any new epistemic advantage. Contrast this observation with what we have already observed of the metaicon, in which the sign function is reversible in the original set of typological senses with greater insight as to what they mean and how they apply.
The lack of advantage, or the change of sense, is even more apparent in efforts to reverse imaginal metaphors. “This iron is harder than a boxer’s fist!” does not do much (for me). We can do better of course—how about “bare-knuckled iron”?—but here a new metaphor brings in something besides an attribution of hardness; is it rawness? Perhaps the rough, angular edges of iron rivets? Consider, too, as a reversal of “creamy skin,” the idiom of “skinny cream.” Here the similarity is apparently thinness or lack of body, not softness or whiteness, as in the original; furthermore, this new sense is analogical, not clearly imaginal. I suppose I would have to admit “baby-skin cream” as an image of smooth cream, but it seems rather affected to me, purely ornamental, except for its introduction of a new (analogical) sense—“delicacy.”
It is interesting to note that the apparent asymmetry of these imaginal metaphors is not a concrete-to-abstract asymmetry. Iron may be harder in actuality than any boxer’s fist (if the boxer plays fair), but it is certainly no more concrete. Cream is no more concrete than a baby’s skin, either. Then what makes these imaginal metaphors seem asymmetrical?
A proposal I will make in chapter 6 might account for it. There I posit a semantic hierarchy, loosely based on Peirce’s theory of Being, in which decreasing levels of abstractness are replaced, at the lower end of the hierarchy, by increasing degrees of perceived “closeness” or “relevance” to human life. This, I argue, explains why we often tend to think of abstract ideas as spatially “remote” from “down-to-earth” human experience. But it also suggests that our habits of hierarchical classification (in the lexicon, for instance) are somewhat governed by the perceived relevance of phenomena to ourselves. For instance, a series of psycholinguistic experiments I conducted with Ronald Lunsford (see Haley 1975) suggest that most speakers (of English, at least) tend to classify objects like rocks “higher” or “further out” in semantic space (from the human category) than objects like flowers, even though rocks are certainly no more abstract than flowers. Flowers are simply perceived as being more like human beings. Interestingly enough, Peirce himself made an early and aborted attempt to classify “as many words as possible” from the standpoint of their relevance to human life (MSS 1136, 1137). His sketchy results (in MS 1137) are rather strikingly supported by the experimental data that Lunsford and I obtained.
Without pressing the notion too far, I would suggest that these facts might help explain why metaphors like “creamy skin” or “iron fist” seem irreversible without a change of sense: The asymmetry is not concrete-to-abstract, in these cases, but human-to-nonhuman. In other words, once a nonhuman object is “marked” for its relevance to human life in some respect, we tend to use that object (in metaphors) as a means to signify the same quality in ourselves; it then seems backwards or redundant to use ourselves as a means to talk about the object in respect to that quality. (After all, we are the important “tenor,” while it is but the “vehicle.”) And, conversely, once we have “condescended” to personify some nonhuman object, graciously “lending” it some attribute of our own, it then seems ridiculous to turn around and ask to borrow it back.
In any case, asymmetrical markedness of one sort or another appears to be at work in degenerate analogical and imaginal metaphors. Michael and Marianne Shapiro (1976; 1988) have far more things to say about markedness, asymmetry, reversibility, and hierarchy in figurative language than I have space for here. My point has been made as well as I can hope to make it, for the present: Imaginal and analogical metaphors seem constrained with respect to their reversibility in certain ways which do not affect the metaicon. The metaicon seems reversible with new insight into the same set of similarities precisely because that “set” is a broad type and because the two compared object-tokens hold rather equal (symmetrical) membership in that type. Conversely, the similarity conditions of the diagram, and especially of the image, lack that typological breadth; further, the two things compared generally do not share the similar quality to the same degree (in perception) or for the same reason—the resemblance is not by inheritance in the same ultimate iconic type. Thus, one of the compared referents is characteristically marked for some narrow attribute; this condition allows the marked referent to serve effectively as an icon pro tem of the other referent, but at the same time this markedness creates the metaphor’s asymmetry and militates against its reciprocity.
The apparent asymmetry of imaginal and analogical metaphor is probably due, in part, to the limits and idiosyncrasies of human perception (perhaps merely my own). But the symmetry of the metaicon itself, I believe, is not at all a simple matter of human perception. In Peirce’s Man-Symbol metaicon, for instance, it is a gross oversimplification to think that human beings merely “borrow back” those self-revealing attributes which they have unconsciously invested in their own symbols. It is more accurate—though not yet the whole truth of it—to say that there exists between man and all symbols, including his own, a free and open and equal and thriving commerce of icons. My reading of Peirce has brought me to believe (otherwise I would not be writing any book at all) that this condition of metaphorical trade-off is made possible and facilitated, not merely by human creativity and rationality, but by a certain Reasonableness in the universe—the archetypal law of which human reason and invention, as well as all of nature, are but concrete iconic tokens.
It is also a gross oversimplification, by the way, to think that this or any other metaiconic type can do without its iconic tokens what it can do with them. In subsequent chapters, I will show that the metaicon, for all its universality and potentiality, is not at all some sort of mystical, poetic nirvana. It needs the rigor of the Peircean diagram to give it structure (to our minds), the quality of the Peircean image to give it color (to our senses). Indeed, perhaps the greatest possibility of the metaicon, in the mind of a Shakespeare or Keats or Sexton or Peirce, is its genetic potential to call out a myriad of analogical and imaginal metaphors, investing them with its own symmetry and permanently growing significance as it does so. An examination of that kind of possibility in chapter 4, however, must await the development of a Peircean doctrine of metaphorical possibility in chapter 3.
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