1、Arvo Krikmann, Estonian Literary Museum,THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING AS THE BACKGROUND OF PERSONIFICATORY AND DEPERSONIFICATORY METAPHORS IN PROVERBS AND ELSEWHERE,Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (18731962),The Great Chain of Being by A. O. Lovejoy,71 years ago, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, the founder of the history o
2、f ideas, published his famous book The Great Chain of Being.,What is the essence of the idea of the Great Chain? The naive folk model of the Great Chain of Being has governed the world view of humans in classical antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and later. According to that model, all kinds of o
3、bjects constitute a hierarchical system in which every creature or thing belongs inherently and immutably to a certain level of the Chain. The highest level is occupied by God, this is followed by the angels, various classes of people, animals etc.,Lovejoy argued that “through the Middle Ages and do
4、wn to the late eighteenth century, many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question the conception of the universe as a “Great Chain of Being,“ composed of an immense, or by the strict but seldom rigorously applied logic of the principle of cont
5、inuity of an infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through “every possible“ grade up to the ens perfectissimum or, in a some-what more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of creature, between which
6、and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite every one of them differing from that immediately above and that immediately below it by the “least possible“ degree of difference.”,Encyclopdia Britannica, for example, emphasises just the three “initial ideas” originating fom Plato Th
7、e so-called Principle of Plenitude, continuity and gradation. Actually, however, the main course of development of the GCB model took place much later, and just after Plato and Aristotle the “ladder of being” ob-tained most of its concrete rungs. Plotinus and other neoplatonists contributed greatly,
8、 as did St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and the impact of the Middle Ages in general was quite strong, as was that of Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment I will decidedly have no chance to recount the fate and decay of the GCB in detail. At the same time, each step in its development and elab
9、oration in some sense meant the undermining of its authority. Linn, Lamarck and others transformed the initial ladder into a tree. Herder and other romantics began to emphasize the individual value of the human person instead of his or her belonging to a certain class or group. The final deathblow t
10、o the GCB came from Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution put the GCB to move. Therefore I will offer just some texts, images and schemas depicting the GCB or some of its parts.,The following is a very frequently quoted fragment of Alexander Popes (16881744) An Essay on Man (1734): Vast chain of
11、 Being! which from God began,Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,From thee to Nothing. On superior powersWere we to press, inferior might on ours:Or in the full creation leave a void,Where, one step broken, the
12、great scales destroyed:From Natures chain whatever link you strike.Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike (I.8.233-46),Medieval model of “three cosms” and “three estates” of human society Bruce R. Magee, British Literature (a lecture course) http:/www2.latech.edu/%7Ebmagee/201/intro2_mediev
13、al/estates&chain_of_being_notes.htm,The same with more detailed categorization of the“mesocosm”:God AngelsKings/Queens Archbishops Dukes/Duchesses Bishops Marquises/Marchionesses Earls/Countesses Viscounts/Viscountesses Barons/Baronesses Abbots/Deacons Knights/Local Officials Ladies-in-Waiting Pries
14、ts/Monks Squires Pages Messengers Merchants/Shopkeepers Tradesmen Yeomen Farmers Soldiers/Town Watch Household Servants Tennant Farmers Shephards/Herders Beggars Actors Thieves/Pirates Gypsies Animals Birds WormsPlantsRocks,The Great Chain of Being. From Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana (1579).
15、,The “ladder of intellect” from Shakespearean times by Michael Best, Shakespeares Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria: Victoria, BC, 20012005 http:/ise.uvic.ca/Library/SLTnoframes/ideas/chain.html,Contemporary status of the GCB: metastases and fans It is true that b
16、y the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, the GCB had lost its status as the basis of the existing philosophical and scientific world picture. Nevertheless, the GCB is not an altogether forgotten and abandoned topic of research. It is mentioned in a huge number of histories of the
17、 natural sciences, theory of evolution, philosophy, art and literature, and so on. A search in Google provides about 63,000 results.,There are also several good reasons for this:(1) it has left multiple metastases in present-day science and scholarship, such asthe problem of directionality versus sp
18、ontaneity of evolution;the meaningfulness of the very term of progress in general;the problem of the place of mankind in nature;problems of racism;the problem of the very existence of and chances to contact the superhuman, spiritual and divine regions of being.(2) a certain simplified version of it
19、hitherto sits very deeply in our common minds: that humans represent the highest degree of being (if God does not exist), animals are lower, and so on.,The GCB also has its contemporary fans, albeit mostly among semi-esoteric authors such as Ernst Schumacher (on the left) or Ken Wilber (on the right
20、), the developer of the so-called theory of everything and integral psychology,The Traditional Great Chain of Being in several works by Ken Wilber. Seems to be strongly influenced by Ernst F. Schumachers sequence m (m + x) (m + x + y) (m + x + y + z) in his book A Guide for the Perplexed (1977), p 2
21、7 and elsewhere),The Great Chain in Various Wisdom Traditions compiled by Huston Smith (graphic layout by Brad Reynolds) from not yet published Toward A Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies by Ken Wilber,Ken Wilbers Model of Four Quadrants,A simplified clarification of the Model of Four Quadrants
22、 by Ken Wilber,“Model of seven kingdoms” from The Reflexive Universe (1976, Chapter IV) by Arthur M. YoungMolecules have three axes of symmetry and no freedomPlants and atoms have two axes of symmetry (radial and cylindrical) and one degree of freedomAnimals and nuclear particles have one axis of sy
23、mmetry (bilateral) and two degrees of freedomLight and the “seventh kingdom” (i.e. the spiritual or divine domain) have no symmetry and complete freedom,Now I would like to consider briefly relationships of the GCB with metaphorsSamuel Levins favourite and recurring example of metaphor in his The Se
24、mantics of Metaphor (1977) is The stone died. Levin lists and analyzes different possibilities for the interpretation (or construal, in his own terms) of the sentence, and obtains, for example, the following variants:1) some mythological stone died mythologically;2) the stone eroded, was destroyed3)
25、 the blockhead numskull, or perhaps heartless person died and so on.,Some of Levins combinations feel counterintuitive, because they violate the basic rule for simple linguistical conventional metaphors: The target comes first, and the figurative part follows.The very concept of the conceptual, or c
26、ognitive, or experiential domain largely used in the Lakoffian cognitive theory of metaphor is quite vague and ambiguous:for some authors it is practically a synonym for the notion of schema,for some others it means some abstract categories passing through whatever parts of being and cognition,for s
27、ome authors it coincides with the main divisions of the GCB, which is the topic of my discussion today.In addition, the conceptual domain is a tricky term because it seeks to embrace, simultaneously both the ontological and gnoseological epistemological aspects of being and cognition.,Anyway, as we
28、know that metaphorical transfers are not made casually, from wherever to wherever, but the traffic between some conceptual areas is very intensive and between some others almost nonexistent, we evidently need some more general frame of reference for the construction of our observations about the dir
29、ections of metaphor-making. As concerns cognition and epistemology, in recent decades the view of the modularity of the human mind has become more and more entrenched in many areas of research: linguistics, the theory of religion, developmental and evolutionary psychology, so-called cognitive archae
30、ology, philosophy and so on. Jerry Fodor, Pascal Boyer, Jean Piaget, Howard Gardner, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Steven Mithen, Dan Sperber and many others have compiled their own lists of mental modules. These sets of modules differ greatly in the number and content of their constituents. As to t
31、he ontological categories proper, we must return, once again, to the GCB.,My own drawing inspired by the book More than Cool Reason (1989, Chapter IV) by George Lakoff and Mark Turner,A simplified version of the left figure: here “LOW” means material, physical, “natural” “HIGH” means “specifically h
32、uman” (mental, intellectual, aesthetic, social, “cultural”),In their seminal book More than Cool Reason (1989), George Lakoff and Mark Turner used a certain variant of the GCB model to describe the directionality of proverbial metaphors.,Thus the human is the focal link in all metaphoric and other m
33、ental and linguistic transitions between the areas and levels of the GCB. The observations of many researchers of figurative language convince us that there are two important distinctors or axes that govern metaphorical traffic HUMAN / NON-HUMAN, and PHYSICAL / MENTALThus all metaphors can be divide
34、d, by and large, into depersonifications and personifications. Thus, paradoxically, man is himself simultaneously the most known and the most unknown and mysterious object; the most typical target and the most typical source of metaphors.,Many observations suggest that depersonification is the preva
35、iling direction of transfers in the newer layers of metaphors. Thanks to investigations made by Jean Piaget, Stewart Guthrie and others, however, there are serious reasons to suppose that anthromorphic-animistic, i.e. personifying metaphors most likely prevailed in earlier layers of metaphor. Why an
36、d when did such a radical change take place, then? One hypothesis can be derived from the supposition about animal metaphors in the same book More than Cool Reason by Lakoff and Turner.,Here is the fragment from More than Cool Reason, pp. 193194:One of the most elaborate domains in which we understa
37、nd the nonhuman in terms of the human is the domain of animal life. There we have well-elaborated schemas characterizing what animals are like, and we usually understand their characteristics metaphorically in terms of the characteristics of human beings. Here are some common propositions that occur
38、 in schemas for animals: Pigs are dirty, messy, and rude. Lions are courageous and noble. Foxes are clever. Dogs are loyal, dependable and dependent. Cats are fickle and independent. Wolves are cruel and murderous. Gorillas are aggressive and violent.These are metaphorical propositions within schema
39、s. They all involve conventionalized instances of the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR, through which properties of things lower on the chain are understood in terms of human properties. Our folk understanding of what these animals are like is metaphorical. We understand their attributes in terms of human chara
40、cter traits. We think of them, react to them, and treat them as if we would a person with such traits.,The GCB and proverbsSome of my observations on the direction of metaphorical projections in proverbs, published in the 1970s have later proved to be cases of a more universal tendency. For example:
41、 “The proverbial trope is mostly paradigmatic, i.e. metaphorical. To be more exact, proverbial transfers seem to be not simply transfers “from the left to the right” or vice versa, but specifically directed and orientated. The proverb tends, very predominantly, to explain the more complicated throug
42、h the more simple, the less known through the better known; it usually presents, for example, the mental through the physical, the ideal through the material, the social through the biological, the abstract through the concrete, etc. The oppositions non-human human and natural cultural seem to play
43、leading role in these alterations or transcodings”After encountering Lakoffs and Johnsons arguments, I formulated four rules that (with many eventual concessions and exceptions) seek to define the behaviour of metaphors in proverbs.,Rule 1 If a proverb consists exclusively of words literally denotin
44、g objects and concepts belonging to “higher” levels of human functioning (i.e. mental, social etc.), and/or abstract concepts that also belong only to humans, then the proverb is already “at home”, i.e. has already become meaningful without any need or possibility for further projection or mapping.
45、In some cases a metonymic correction is necessary. The bulk of proverb examples below are taken from three classical editions:“A Dictionary of American Proverbs” (AP) by Wolfgang Mieder et al.,“European Proverbs” (EP) by Gyula Paczolay, and“Proverbia Septentrionalia” (PS) by Matti Kuusi et al.,Rule
46、1: examplesThere is nothing new under the sun (EP No. 104)Every beginning ( To begin) is difficult hard the hardest (EP No. 72)(If the) end (is) good everything (is) good (EP No. 52)So many men, so many minds (EP No. 10)Every man has his faults (EP No. 49)One learns until one lives until death (EP N
47、o. 31)Never ( Do not) put off till tomorrow what you can do today (EP No. 11)A true friend is known in need adversity (EP No. 26)Better late later than never (EP No. 33)Rather hear see than speak (EP No. 44)He that will not work, shall not eat (EP No. 47)Do not do wish others that you do not like to
48、 be done to you (EP No. 57)He that lies also steals ( A liar is a thief) (EP No. 75)Like mother, like daughter Like father, like son (EP No. 21, 28 ),Rule 2 If the literal meaning belongs exclusively to the non-human realm (i.e. only animals, plants and/or substances are mentioned as agents and obje
49、cts, and also the qualities, actions or relations predicated upon them are of non-human character) and the text is already meaningful (semantically consistent) at its literal level, we are dealing with a sentential metaphor, i.e. the whole sentence is the metaphor and must be reconceptualized to ref
50、er to something human.,Rule 2: examplesWhen the cat is away, the mice will play (EP No. 17)A horse has four legs and still it stumbles (EP No. 25) The wolf fox dog may change its hair but not its nature skin (EP No. 32)Hawks Ravens . will not pick out hawks . eyes (EP No. 13)Its an ill stupid bird t
51、hat soils its own nest (EP No. 106)One scabbed sheep calf . will mar spoil a flock (EP No. 56)One swallow does not make a summer (EP No. 4)Big fish eat little fish (EP No. 91)No rose without a thorn (EP No. 66) The apple pear fruit cone does not fall ( never falls) far from the tree trunk root (EP N
52、o. 48) A rolling stone gathers no moss (EP No. 14)Constant dropping ( Many drops) wear(s) away the stone (EP No. 71)No smoke without fire (EP No. 1)Empty vessels make much the most greatest sound (EP No. 23)New brooms sweep clean well better best (EP No. 12)Still waters are run deep ( have a deep bottom) (EP No. 78),
