All beauty consists in similarness or identity of relation.
\n<\/i>. . . it be what we are more concerned with, than anything else whatsoever:
\n<\/i>yea, we are concerned with nothing else.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u2013Jonathan Edwards (1724)<\/p>\n
Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.
\n<\/i>. . . we possess nothing but metaphors for things\u2014metaphors which
\n<\/i>correspond in no way to the original entities.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u2013Friedrich Nietzsche (1873)<\/p>\n
Some perspectives seem impervious to dialogue. One could scarcely imagine two thinkers as remote in their presuppositions or discordant in their aims as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jonathan Edwards. The 19th<\/sup> century German nihilist\/existentialist and the 18th<\/sup> century American theologian\/metaphysician do not seem likely candidates for concord. Contrast Nietzsche\u2019s \u2018will to power\u2019 with Edwards\u2019 \u2018sovereign grace.\u2019 Contrast Edwards\u2019 claim that God is \u2018Being in general\u2019 and \u2018Being itself\u2019 with Nietzsche\u2019s claim that \u2018God is dead . . . and we have killed him.\u2019 (Edwards 1754, 432; 1724, ccxxx; 1722, 418; Nietzsche 1891, 88; 1882, 120). We may find it all the more remarkable, then, that the two philosophers seem to hold their most foundational position in common: both grant aesthetics pride of place in their respective systems, cutting against the 2,500 year-old grain of Western philosophy to do so.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/span> Both treat metaphysics, epistemology and ethics as modes of aesthetic inquiry, and in so doing, both affirm a role for metaphor that is pervasive and constitutive. In other words, both argue that the act of understanding one kind of thing in terms of another constitutes the only viable account of knowledge, thought and action. In this article I wish to bring the aesthetics of Nietzsche and Edwards into dialogue. Far from being in full agreement or utter discord, neither of the two aesthetic philosophies is adequate on its own; rather, the two should ultimately be understood as interdependent. Their integration, however, requires at least one mediating perspective absent from each: the necessary role of the human body in meaning construal.<\/span><\/p>\n I argue this position dialogically, using a historical heuristic to identify divergent, but complementary, themes between the two systems. Two fatal flaws of classical modernism and two living hopes for contemporary thought emerge in the process. First, each thinker participates in a distinct weakness of classical modernism: Edwards assumes a sharp divide between mind and matter\u2014ultimately reducing the latter to the former\u2014while Nietzsche assumes the autonomy of the subject\u2014ultimately relinquishing the very possibility of meaning. Each also prefigures currents of hope in contemporary thought: Edwards forsakes the autonomy of the individual in favor of an ontology of relations, while Nietzsche forsakes mind-matter dualism in favor of organic continuity between sensory percept and mental concept. The two systems blend beautifully and should be granted equal status as early catalysts in the meta-level paradigm shift that seems to be underway in Western thought. <\/span><\/p>\n This observation is particularly relevant when considered in light of an emerging synthesis that I will, for the sake of convenience, dub \u201cphenomenological pragmatism\u201d\u2014a shorthand inclusive of numerous schools of thought that currently seem to be working toward a meaningful transformation of the Western worldview. In particular, the pragmatist philosophy of C. S. Peirce, the embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the hermeneutic inquiry of Paul Ricoeur, and other related roots are implicated, many of which constitute the rediscovery and development of ancient pathways, but all of which eschew dualist-reductionist presuppositions and seek transdisciplinary dialogue. <\/span><\/p>\n Metaphor theory, semiotics and embodied cognitive science are three contemporary approaches that are particularly implicated. As discussed below, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science is moving away from computational models of mind and behaviour and toward theories in which the lived human body is situated as interdependent mediator between mind and world; this sets the stage for an understanding of the human experience and meaning construal as pervasively analogic or \u2018metaphoric.\u2019 With this in mind, Edwards\u2019 emphasis on relational ontology should receive the long overdue attention it deserves. Edwards foreshadows the \u2018triadic\u2019 (purpose-driven, interpretive) approach to logical relations that underlie C. S. Peirce\u2019s science of semiotics. As recent appeals have illustrated (Danaher 1998, Haley 1999, S\u00f8rensen et al. 2007, M\u00fcller 2008), relational ontology and triadic semiotics are in need of more active integration with contemporary advances in embodied cognitive science. As will become clear below, the ongoing development of metaphor theory is ultimately enmeshed in the same concerns.<\/span><\/p>\n We have been conditioned to think of \u2018metaphor\u2019 as a marginal or decorative rhetorical device restricted to linguistic surface forms, such as the sentence \u2018your navel is a rounded goblet\u2019 in Canticles 7:2 or phrase-level evocations of \u2018rosy fingered dawn\u2019 in Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/i>. This view has little to do with metaphor as we practice it and everything to do with the worldview we have inherited. In this section I will review the development of, and resistance to, constitutive views of metaphoric action. If, as cognitive science now asserts, metaphor is the interpretive human activity of understanding one kind of thing in terms of another, we cannot limit our accounts of metaphor to language use, much less poetic language use. Even if we insist on a narrow view of metaphor by restricting its range to surface-level linguistic tokens, we can provide no justification for limiting linguistic metaphors to special syntactic constructions or novel, poetic utterances. Rather, metaphor is pervasive in language, just as it is in all other modes of human meaning construal including the arts.<\/span><\/p>\n The preceding claims may seem straightforward, or at least worthy of further investigation; but, until recently, they had been ignored by virtually the entire Western tradition. The implications of this neglect are staggering. The neglect of metaphor through the millennia has occurred hand-in-hand with another form of neglect: the marginalization of aesthetics. Both may be traced back to a collective cognitive habit, or bias, in classical-modern thought. Johnson identifies the habit as the simple, but peculiar Western assumption that \u2018feeling\u2019 is somehow distinct from \u2018thought\u2019 (Johnson 2007, 209-211). This seemingly harmless, but unwarranted assumption has prompted us to treat aesthetics as something distinct from epistemology and imagination as something segregated from knowledge. As a result, we have come to uncritically accept (or, ironically, imagine<\/i>) distinctions between subjective and objective experience, and analogous distinctions between figurative and literal language. Ultimately, both in popular and academic discourses, this has led to emotion being misconstrued as a character foil for disinterested reason. Such presuppositions have also resulted in the derogation of art, the segregation of natural and social sciences, and dismissive attitudes toward artists of all stripes. Conversely, meaning has come to be associated with stimulus-response, fixed-code and\/or computational models of language in which linguistic forms somehow straightforwardly \u2018contain\u2019 meaning (Reddy 1979) while speakers combine and exchange these meanings using disembodied, objective sentence forms, behaviourist language games, decontextualized semantic metalanguage and\/or innate algebraic mental formulas (see Chomsky 1966, Davidson 2005, Grice 1957 and Wierzbicka 2001b for representative perspectives). <\/span><\/p>\n Inquiry into the aesthetic nature of meaning, thought and behaviour has been marginalized for centuries in mainstream Anglo-American thought; and, with some late exceptions, the same may be said of European thought since Plato.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/span> A dormant fault-line opened early in the 18th<\/sup> century, but due to the rolling success of enlightenment-era reductionist thought, distant tremors from dissenting thinkers such as Jonathan Edwards and Giambattista Vico were scarcely felt. Nevertheless, later in the century, Immanuel Kant\u2019s synthesist program rocked the Richter scale of Western philosophy. Although Kant himself participated in the disparagement of the imagination by indulging in what Hans-Georg Gadamer has dubbed the \u201csubjectivization of the aesthetic\u201d (Johnson 2007, 214; cf. Daniel 1994, vii), his influence on such seismic thinkers as S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard and C. S. Peirce in the 19th<\/sup> century set off a slow tectonic shift that has been moving Western thought toward a reconciliation of body and mind, subject and object, and away from various polarized formalist\/positivist modes of dualist-reductionist thought.<\/span><\/p>\n In Kant (1790), aesthetic judgments are ultimately subjective, simply because they involve feelings of pleasure and displeasure. As Johnson points out in his review of Kant\u2019s Critique of Judgment<\/i>, the foundational presupposition that thought is distinct from feeling determines<\/i> that Kant\u2019s philosophical program must ultimately disallow aesthetic judgments from granting us serious, rational understanding or \u2018conceptual knowledge\u2019 (Johnson 2007, 214-215). As a consequence of this assumption, meaning is further ostracized from both emotion and art; so-called \u2018figurative\u2019 language is pitted all-the-more stridently against \u2018literal\u2019 language and absolute \u2018objectivity\u2019 was bolstered as a bastion against pure \u2018subjectivity.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n Metaphor, likewise, has long been disparaged in Western thought as deviant and dangerous or dismissed as merely decorative and derivative of objective (or \u2018literal\u2019) language (see discussion in Johnson 1981). As Plato warns in the Sophist<\/i>, \u201ca cautious man should above all be on his guard against likenesses: they are a very slippery sort of thing\u201d (see Pender 2003, 60-61). In Aristotle\u2019s Poetics<\/i>, metaphors are associated with words that deviate, strange words and words that do not belong. In Hobbes\u2019 thought, metaphors are classified with \u2018senseless and ambiguous words.\u2019 More recently, in Davidson (1973), metaphors are \u2018patently false,\u2019 and in Wierzbicka (2001a), metaphors are \u2018dangerous\u2019 and associated with \u2018false images drawn from this world.\u2019 As should become clear in the remainder of this paper, these attitudes work in tandem with the marginalization of aesthetics in theories of meaning, thought and behaviour.<\/span><\/p>\n In the interest of reuniting our concepts of feeling and thought, embodied cognitive science, or \u2018second generation cognitive science\u2019 (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999) calls such trenchant assumptions about metaphor and aesthetics into question. In their modern classic on conceptual metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson recommend an overarching \u2018experientialist synthesis\u2019 for more adequate, responsible approaches to philosophy, linguistics and everyday life (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 192-3). The experientialist synthesis proposes a reconciliation of reason and the imagination in public and academic discourses and rejects the false-dichotomy imposed on epistemology by the infamous objective-subjective split. Chiefly implicated in the reconciliation is metaphor; as they clarify that<\/span><\/p>\n Metaphor is not merely a matter of language. It is a matter of conceptual structure. And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect\u2014it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience \u2026These dimensions structure not only mundane experience but aesthetic experience as well\u2026Aesthetic experience is thus not limited to the official art world. It can occur in any aspect of our everyday lives\u2014whenever we take note of, or create for ourselves, new coherences that are not part of our conventionalized mode of perception or thought.<\/p>\n (Ibid, 235-6)<\/p>\n Three decades later the experiential soil of metaphor is acknowledged as embodied<\/i> experience. The human experience of the body in space yields a rich strata of universal human associations which, in turn, supply source domains from which we may reason abstractly about the ultimate<\/i> nature of our embodied commitments in space. Building on themes developed by late-modern thinkers such as Edwards, Vico, Nietzsche, Peirce, Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty, metaphor and aesthetics are now being considered widely and seriously. In the words of Johnson,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Aesthetics is the stone that was cast out by philosophers who thought they were constructing large metaphysical, epistemological and logical monuments. On my view, however, the very stone that was cast out shall become the cornerstone of a theory of meaning.<\/p>\n (Johnson 2007, 208)<\/p>\n Contemporary metaphor theory seems to be largely driven by the implications of embodied cognitive science. The literature on metaphor since the 1980\u2019s continues to mushroom. Recent collections such as Gibbs (2008), demonstrate that metaphor theory is being applied far beyond the study of linguistic phenomena to fields that were once considered strictly segregated domains of inquiry such as mathematics, visual art, marketing, music and neural architecture. Among the many questions that continue to fuel inquiry into the nature of metaphor is the degree to which metaphor is ubiquitous or constitutive of all human meaning construal\u2014thought, behaviour and reality. <\/span><\/p>\n As reviewed by Lakoff and Turner, primarily in relation to language and thought, both strong and weak positions of the ubiquity thesis may be identified (Lakoff and Turner 1989, 133-5). Although Lakoff and Turner conclude that \u201cit is misleading to think of concepts as a whole as being either all metaphorical or all nonmetaphorical\u201d (Ibid, 58), they clarify their position as a weak version of the ubiquity thesis by arguing, \u201cevery linguistic expression expresses a concept that is, at least in some aspect, understood via metaphor\u201d (Ibid, 134). Ruthrof criticizes this position as all too<\/i> weak by insisting that cognitive theories of metaphor tend to forget key features of metaphoric ubiquity such as the diachronic nature of metaphoric action, the semiotic web of metaphoric action and the extra-linguistic evidence of metaphoric action (Ruthrof 1997, 160-7). When we consider metaphor as a human interpretive activity rooted in time, habit (see esp., M\u00fcller 2008) and a vast network of interlacing associations, we realize how few \u2018literal\u2019 concepts we ultimately have access to\u2014and even these are being formed aesthetically and imaginatively (Johnson 1987; 2007).<\/span><\/p>\n If metaphor plays a pervasive or constitutive role in human experience, linguistic and otherwise, this has been so from time immemorial. Awareness of its ubiquity, however, has been widely held to originate in the 19th<\/sup> century with Nietzsche and a handful of Romantic poets (Johnson 1981, 15-16; 1987, 220; Lakoff and Turner 1989, 218; Hinman 1982). This point is in need of more careful examination. Earlier versions of the ubiquity thesis seem to be implied in presocratic thought and are hinted at, though not pursued, in passages from Aristotle. In the 18th<\/sup> century, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico asserts his own version of the thesis, as does his contemporary, Jonathan Edwards. In the 19th<\/sup> century, Nietzsche\u2019s contemporary, the American polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, also provides a version of the ubiquity thesis that is arguably the most comprehensive and systematic claim to date. <\/span><\/p>\n The primary difficulty we face in identifying early constitutive views of metaphorical action is terminological. As discussed above, in the Western or \u2018classical-modernist\u2019 tradition, the title \u2018metaphor\u2019 has conventionally been reserved for the description of novel linguistic comparisons. This being so, we should not expect Western thinkers prior to the late 20th<\/sup> century to apply the narrowly defined rhetorical term to experiences of analogy and association broadly conceived\u2014whether perceptual, conceptual, gestural, visual, musical, mathematical, linguistic, or otherwise. <\/span><\/p>\n Barry Sandywell, for instance, identifies an awareness of metaphor\u2019s constitutive role in presocratic thought, in spite of the fact that rhetorical \u00b5\u03b5\u03c4\u03b1\u03c6\u03bf\u03c1\u03ac<\/i> was not invoked. Single icons such as Water, Fire or Air were recommended as source domains for understanding the Whole, or \u03bb\u03cc\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2<\/i>, of reality. The approach emerged from a sense of the fundamental continuity between the Logos and human discourse which were assumed to function in a reflexive relationship. Sandywell notes that one \u201cfundamental aspect of the Whole is that the source of intelligibility does not lie exclusively in human speech or action; meaning derives from the Logos itself\u201d (Sandywell 1996, 61). <\/span><\/p>\n The Presocratic use of \u2018iconic logic\u2019 is, nevertheless, decidedly monistic in contrast to later claims of metaphoric ubiquity, and as Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 363) point out, Presocratic thought in this regard is the seed that would grow into the oddly anti-metaphoric, reductive and analytic approaches to philosophy we have inherited\u2014a slow growth that would eventually engulf all varieties of classical modernism. One might also note that the Presocratic approach is more metonymic (part for whole) than metaphoric. If the term \u2018metaphor\u2019 is allowed to include all forms of identity, analogy and comparison, however, this is not problematic\u2014an allowance that has been granted since Aristotle (M\u00fcller 2008, 117). Notably, Aristotle in his Poetics <\/i>and Rhetoric<\/i>, respectively, also muses that metaphor functions both as the \u2018trademark of genius\u2019 and as the fodder of mundane conversation\u2014two observations to which he devotes little attention.<\/span><\/p>\n Two of the earliest statements of the ubiquity thesis emerge in the 18th<\/sup> century with the publication of Giambattista Vico\u2019s New Science<\/i> (1725) and the outworkings of Jonathan Edwards\u2019 ontology of aesthetic relations. The Vico connection is affirmed and developed by Ponzio (2006) and the Edwards connection will be discussed in more detail in Section 4. Notably, for now, Edwards\u2019 first clear statement of his constitutive position on metaphoric action came, at most, only one year prior to Vico\u2019s publication of New Science<\/i>. Notably, Vico\u2019s views on metaphoric ubiquity are, in a way that is notably unlike<\/i> those of Edwards, rooted in gradient change through time. Among Vico\u2019s many visionary contributions is an early statement of the bodily basis of linguistic metaphor (1725, 159-62, 312-5). <\/span><\/p>\n The ubiquity thesis in 19th<\/sup> century thought was heralded by philosophers and poets alike. Although Nietzsche is usually regarded as the first to clearly assert the thesis that human cognition and conceptualization are composed of layer upon layer of metaphor, Johnson (1981) points out that many 19th<\/sup> century Romantic poets struck related themes\u2014albeit more carelessly\u2014well before Nietzsche adopted them. John Stuart Mill is another 19th<\/sup> century philosopher whose ideas on inferences arising from the association of ideas strongly suggest a ubiquity thesis, and Johnson (1981) notes related themes in the thought of Rousseau.<\/span><\/p>\n More importantly, Nietzsche\u2019s 19th<\/sup> century contemporary, C. S. Peirce, devoted his career to articulating a version of the ubiquity thesis that now appears to be more comprehensive and integrative than anything that precedes or follows (though Deely 2001 roots Peirce\u2019s thought in overlooked renaissance sources of late scholasticism). Ongoing work by Peirce scholars mentioned in the introduction and conclusion of this paper continues to reveal the depths of his commitment to what we now know as metaphoric action. An aesthetic congruence pervades his system, and his science of semiotic relations illustrates metaphoric action to be inseparable from meaning construal. \u201cA pure idea without metaphor or other significant clothing is an onion without a peel,\u201d writes Peirce (1998, 392). In addition to prefiguring conceptual metaphor theory, and identifying metaphoric action as a vast web of semiotic relations (linguistic and otherwise), he also outlines the embodied spatial relations (image schemas) underlying language and thought that metaphor exploits:<\/span><\/p>\n If a logician had to construct a language de novo<\/i> \u2026 he would naturally say, I shall need prepositions to express temporal relations \u2026 spatial relations \u2026 [and] motions into and out of these situations. For the rest, I can manage with metaphors.<\/p>\n (Peirce 1894, 16; cf. Haley 1999, 425)<\/p>\n As discussed above, Nietzsche\u2019s contributions to the study of metaphor have been widely recognized. This, no doubt, is due to his own awareness that the traditional rhetorical label \u2018metaphor\u2019 signifies human activities inclusive of, but also ranging far beyond, our experiences with linguistic surface forms such as \u2018your navel is a rounded goblet.\u2019 For Nietzsche, metaphoric experiences broadly construed involve a person in the activity of poetic comparison, typically moving from sensory-motor percept to mental concept and then, eventually, to automated, ossified form. Although token examples of these experiences at first seem novel and illuminating, over time, the elaborate networks of metaphor they produce in the memory become habituated, are taken for granted, and come to seem obvious: hence the illusion of objectivity. Nietzsche and C.S. Peirce\u2019s accounts are among the first to note the organic development of metaphor through time. Unlike Peirce\u2019s account, however, Nietzsche\u2019s is subject-driven and individually defined. Thus, for Nietzsche, the experience of metaphor is ultimately meaningless. In this section I will attempt to summarize Nietzsche\u2019s profound contribution to the ubiquity thesis and then criticize his position as internally inconsistent with the greater goals of his own system due to his tacit acceptance of subjective autonomy. <\/span><\/p>\n For Nietzsche, the visceral, imaginative process of meaning construal through metaphor is \u201cthe fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself\u201d (Nietzsche 1873, 121). Our attempts to discover similarities between phenomena occur through multi-layered, interlacing processes of metaphorical association that slowly become fossilized in the mind: \u201cEvery concept arises from the equation of unequal things\u201d (Ibid, 117). Left to habit, this elaborate network of metaphors slowly comes to seem obvious and is taken to be<\/i> the essential \u2018thing-in-itself\u2019:<\/span><\/p>\n What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.<\/p>\n (Ibid, 117)<\/p>\n We will assess the status of Nietzsche\u2019s ontological conclusion in Section 3.2. For now, a closer look at his most important contributions to metaphor theory will be helpful: namely, his gradient, organic and diachronic perspectives. <\/span><\/p>\n First, Nietzsche portrays metaphoric action as being implicated from the most basic instances of sensory-motor perception to the most abstract operations of conceptual synthesis and analysis without breaks or gaps. At each gradient stage, however, occurs what he describes as an \u2018overleaping of spheres,\u2019 such that we accept wholesale the source domain experience as if it were<\/i> the target domain. We might justifiably say from Nietzsche\u2019s perspective that we reduce the former to the latter. <\/span><\/p>\n Take the concept \u2018leaf\u2019 for instance.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/span> In our first experiences of what we will eventually come to call a \u2018leaf,\u2019 the essence of the thing is perceived as a bundle of nerve stimuli, and these nerve stimuli are perceived as an individual image.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/span> We then begin to compare these individual images with other individual images. Dissimilarities between this metaphorical perception of the first object, which we will later come to call a \u2018leaf,\u2019 and other proto-\u2018leaves\u2019 are experienced as if they were similarities (for no leaf is actually identical in any respect, much less every respect). These similarities, in turn, are then accepted as concepts; and these concepts are experienced as verbal signs, such as linguistic sounds. At this stage, we may hear or produce the syllable \u201c\/lif\/\u201d and accept it, via an \u2018overleaping of spheres,\u2019 as the concept itself. Such conceptual signs are then admitted as perceptual categories and come to seem objective or fixed. These perceptual categories are then admitted as members of conceptual schemas that may be compared with other related concepts and categories. Leaf taxonomies develop, as well as part-whole relationships, and \u2018leaves\u2019 are allowed to be treated as if they were \u2018pages\u2019 in books or sections of \u2018tables\u2019 or the action of turning \u2018pages\u2019 rapidly in a book\u2014as the entire process repeats itself at successively distant removes. Over time these schemas become more and more elaborate and begin to coagulate through habit for the sake of convenience. As conceptual schemas coagulate, we slowly come to take them for granted. Coagulation then leads to petrification, whence comes what we are conditioned to refer to as \u2018literal\u2019 meaning. <\/span><\/p>\n This embedded, interlacing series of gradient metaphors, moving gradually from percept to concept, anticipates a staple value of phenomenological pragmatism dubbed the \u2018pragmatist continuity thesis,\u2019 a foundational thesis for the movement originating in Peirce\u2019s concept of \u2018synechism\u2019 (Johnson 2007, 122-3, 176). Dewey framed the concept as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n . . . a continuity of the lower (less complex) and higher (more complex) activities and forms. The idea of continuity is not self-explanatory. But its meaning excludes complete rupture on one side and mere repetition of identities on the other; it precludes reduction of the \u201chigher\u201d to the \u201clower\u201d just as it precludes complete breaks and gaps. The growth and development of any living organism from seed to maturity illustrates the meaning of continuity.<\/p>\n (Dewey 1938, 23)<\/p>\n This \u2018organic\u2019 metaphor is particularly apt for illustrating the continuity thesis of phenomenological pragmatism. Not only does the analogy enable us to better understand the gradient growth of knowledge through metaphor, it also enables us to better understand the ways in which metaphors harden or petrify to provide structural consistency. Just as the xylem of a tree coagulates as the tree grows and hardens to produce a new ring in the heartwood through the course of a year, metaphors slowly harden through habit, providing structural predictability in the process. While it may be an inevitable feature of gradual growth, repetition leads to coagulation, which leads to automation, which entails the gradual loss of attention. As with organisms, so with human meaning making: sensory associations seem fresh and lively; then slowly, habitual repetition leads to automation and loss of attention, until \u201cthe impression is petrified: it is captured and fenced in by means of concepts, then killed, skinned, mummified, and preserved as a concept\u201d (Nietzsche 1872, 71; cf. Kofman 1993, 43).<\/span><\/p>\n In speaking of \u201cthe hardening and congealing of a metaphor,\u201d Nietzsche situates the process of metaphoric sign creation in time; in so doing, he prefigures groundbreaking linguistic research into processes known as grammaticalization and lexicalization by more than a century (Nietzsche 1873, 120). Linguistic features that we are trained to think of as abstract, grammatical, literal, prosaic, functional, idiomatic or lexical have resulted from dynamic, historical, community-negotiated processes of semantic change that have been facilitated by imaginative metaphorical mappings. These processes are known as grammaticalization (semantic bleaching) and lexicalization (semantic enrichment).<\/span>6<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n Brinton and Traugott (2005) provide a recent review and synthesis of research on grammaticalization and lexicalization, reporting that the fundamentally time-oriented, process-dependent and metaphoric bases of the two processes are now affirmed across a wide spectrum of documented linguistic research perspectives, language stocks and linguistic typologies (cf. Heine and Kuteva 2002). Although Nietzsche\u2019s ubiquity thesis is by no means restricted to language change, his insights in this regard are affirmed as being keenly perceptive and ahead of their time. Whether we are discussing semantic enrichment or semantic bleaching, organic continuity or structural hardening through time, his insights into the practical, developmental nature of metaphor help us affirm the constitutive nature of aesthetics in human meaning making.<\/span><\/p>\n Nietzsche\u2019s view is not without its consequences. When he makes such famous claims as \u201cwe possess nothing but metaphors for things\u2014metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities\u201d (Nietzsche 1873, 116), he is not simply celebrating the triumph of aesthetics. Like Kant, Nietzsche\u2019s presupposition of a basic chasm between subject and object\u2014a presupposition he inherits from classical modernism\u2014determines the nature of his philosophical inquiry. Since, from his perspective, metaphor is merely a subjective means, and since it is our only means of inquiry into the nature of the objective universe, we are doomed to the impossible scenario of using subjective means for the discovery of objective ends. As a result, the age-old searches for essence, meaning and discrete, universal categories taken so seriously by scientists and philosophers are deemed to be preposterous. Nietzsche takes his views on pervasive metaphoric action to be undermining, or rather demolishing, the possibility of truth and certainty, which are ultimately nothing more than illusions of objectivity due to collective cognitive habit. Naturally, the circularity of his argument is problematic for Nietzsche and his poststructuralist progeny alike (see Pavel 2001, 12). The holocaust of meaning does not spare the prophet who announces its arrival. A more basic problem in Nietzsche\u2019s aesthetic account, however, is his presupposition that metaphor is a reductionist activity rooted in the primacy of the individual subject. <\/span><\/p>\n Nietzsche argues that the search for truth implies our ability to perceive correctly. However, the concept of \u201ccorrect perception\u201d is contradictory and impossible since it requires a \u2018subject\u2019 to express an \u2018object.\u2019 Subject and object are separate: <\/span><\/p>\n For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue \u2013 for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force.<\/p>\n (Nietzsche 1873, 119)<\/p>\n As discussed in the previous section, Nietzsche takes metaphoric action to be a reduction of one kind of thing to another, after which the reductive subject tends to forget that the two are or were distinct: \u201c[the subject] forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves\u201d (Ibid, 119). The mediating force of aesthetic relation is understood as an artificial imposition from outside the system. Nietzsche assumes a profound alienation between the human interpretive subject and the objective cosmos; and, in sharp contrast to Edwards and Peirce, is unwilling to consider the possibility of pre-existing aesthetic relations.<\/span><\/p>\n Thus, metaphoric action can only be subjective illusion for Nietzsche at every level: \u201cthe illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept\u201d (Ibid, 118), and only by self-deceit\u2014only by pretending that our web of illusions is actually objective\u2014are we able to function in the world:<\/span><\/p>\n Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.<\/p>\n (Ibid, 119)<\/p>\n At this point, we will do well to ask after the nature of the \u2018creating subject.\u2019 The subject is assumed to be primary and agentive for Nietzsche. He recognizes the problem but is unable call the problem itself into question. If the subject is not primary\u2014if the basic split between subject and object is itself called into question\u2014we have a substantial foothold for criticizing a key aspect not only of Nietzsche\u2019s system but also of classical modernism in general. Traditional precedent is our only justification for accepting the subject as sufficient and basic. As we will see in Edwards\u2019 criticism of Cartesian individualism in the next section, our understanding of the subjective self is not primary; it is dependent on any number of underlying relationships and experiences of dialogic exchange that have allowed, and continue to undergird, the formation of its identity. If we choose to ignore such dynamics in favor of the convenient shorthand of classical modernism, our progress will be hobbled. <\/span><\/p>\n Discrete, independent objects would be equally seditious illusions under this view. If we forsake the illusion of independent subjects in favor of the relations that enable them, we also forsake the illusion of the independent objects that exist as their opposite alter-egos. If we assume everything to be interrelated, a position which Jonathan Edwards argues with force, the human attempt to discover such relationships would not be doomed to absurdity; furthermore, we would have no grounds for assuming the task to be fit for a reductionist approach. Essentialist metaphysics operates on the assumption that entities are ultimately discrete and independent in themselves. If we reduce one such entity to another in the process of metaphoric action, we miss the things themselves. If, on the other hand, relationships are basic, and entities dependent on these relationships, the aesthetic experience of one kind of thing in terms of another may be understood as an interpretation of the relationships that enable them to exist in the first place. If the discovery of relationships is the point of human inquiry, metaphoric action is far from absurd; on the contrary, it is the only suitable mode of inquiry.<\/span><\/p>\n In his aesthetic criticism of objectivist epistemology, and in his assertion of gradual, organic processes underlying human meaning construal, Nietzsche breaks with classical modernism. Paradoxically, however, he surrenders to the assumptions of the system he criticizes. Nietzsche\u2019s inconsistency implicates him as a classical-modernist participant in the unfounded assumption of the subject\/object dichotomy along with one of its corollary oversights: the indispensible role of the human body in meaning construal\u2014a theme to which we will turn in Section 6.<\/span><\/p>\n Due to a cocktail of preconceptions and misconceptions that continue to blur Jonathan Edwards\u2019 legacy, the pervasive role of beauty in his system has been largely ignored for more than 200 years (Delattre 1980, 137). With this in mind, we have little reason to wonder why, until now, no discussion has identified Edwards\u2019 relational aesthetic with metaphoric action. Due to factors discussed in Section 3, above, Edwards did not identify his own views as involving \u2018metaphor\u2019 per se<\/i>; nonetheless, it is clear that his aesthetic vision entails what is now considered to be \u2018metaphoric\u2019 or \u2018analogic\u2019 activity: the activity of experiencing one kind of reality in terms of another by bringing the two into harmonious relationship\u2014or, rather, for Edwards, recognizing their inherent harmonies. His most focused statement of this radically constitutive view of metaphoric action is found in a document entitled \u201cThe Mind\u201d, a work begun in 1724 (Chai 1998, 56). Yet, this position informs his entire corpus and is usually referred to as his \u2018doctrine of excellency\u2019\u2014a doctrine which frames all existence in terms of aesthetics.<\/span><\/p>\n For Edwards, nothing is more urgent or more manifest than our need to affirm a comprehensive analogical aesthetic and, consequently, to engage with its implications. In his own words:<\/span><\/p>\n There has nothing been more without a definition, than Excellency; although it be what we are more concerned with than any thing else whatsoever; yea, we are concerned with nothing else . . . Excellency consists in the Similarness of one being to another\u2014not merely Equality and Proportion, but any kind of Similarness.<\/p>\n (Edwards 1724, ccxxviii)<\/p>\n As Stephen Daniel (1994, 2006) has demonstrated in his groundbreaking work on the philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th<\/sup> century theological philosopher\u2019s thought cannot simply be filed away under the rationalist and empiricist debates of his day (or those of our own). Although he is not completely free from such assumptions (as is discussed in the next section), Edwards makes a number of clean breaks with pivotal tenets of the entire Western tradition (see Daniels 2006, 162). For Edwards, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics breathe the oxygen of aesthetics, and aesthetics is bound up in beauty, association and existence\u2014three concepts that cannot be understood in isolation. Thus, equally central to Edwards\u2019 system is his ontology of relations. Since beauty is nothing less than harmonious correspondences or associations between things\u2014nothing less than their \u2018relations\u2019 to use Edwards\u2019 term\u2014and since nothing would exist apart from these relations, existence itself must be aesthetically construed (cf. Daniel 1994, 177; 2006, 162). In Edwards\u2019 own words:<\/span><\/p>\n All beauty consists in similarness or identity of relation. In identity of relation consists all likeness, and all identity between two consists in identity of relation . . . Two beings can agree one with another in nothing else but Relation; because otherwise . . . they become one.<\/p>\n (Edwards 1724, ccxxviii)<\/p>\n Edwards argues that the act of recognizing identities between things must not devolve into, or be mistaken for, a reduction of one to another; for, if two collapse into a static unity, or if one assimilates the other, the two are no longer in relation:<\/span><\/p>\n One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such case, there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore no such thing as Consent. Indeed what we call One may be excellent because of a consent of parts, or some consent of those in that being, that are distinguished into a plurality some way or other. But in a being that is absolutely without any plurality, there cannot be Excellency, for there can be no such thing as consent or agreement.<\/p>\n (Ibid, ccxxix)<\/p>\n Ideas, actions, persons, material objects and all other presumed entities are only capable of existing and being perceived in terms of their associations with other supposed entities. Consequently, some of the most widespread impulses of the classical-modernist tradition are called into question. Pinings after objectivity, pure observation, formalization and decontextualization that have become tantamount to the classical-modernist approach are particularly implicated\u2014whether the activity of inquiry in question be religious, political, scientific, or some other form of meaning construal. Attempting to treat an entity as if it were divorced from its comprehensive network of relations pits the objectivist not simply against the poet, but against existence itself, due to the fundamentally relational nature of existence. In Edwards\u2019 system, the ontological always implicates the aesthetic via shared relations. Conversely, the dismissal of relations is the denial of existence and the propagation of a lie. \u201cThat which is beautiful, considered by itself separately, and deformed . . . or beautiful, only with respect to itself and a few other things, and not as a part of that which contains all things -the Universe;-is false beauty and a confined beauty\u201d (Ibid, ccxxix).<\/span><\/p>\n Chiefly implicated in this break with classical modernism is the status of the so-called \u2018Cartesian individual\u2019\u2014the person who assumes his or her individual identity, and the identities of others, are discrete, primary and foundational. Since the presumed experience of individuality, or personal autonomy, cannot be accounted for on its own terms, any person or collective worldview which appeals to the solitary subject as reliable and foundational must be deluded, or, as Edwards argues, fallen (see Daniel 1994, 144-51). Classical modernism had attempted to establish foundations for reason on skeptical parsimony and individual primacy; nevertheless, \u201cCartesian minds and simple natures, Hobbesian bodies, and Lockean simple ideas simply cannot be the starting points for a legitimate philosophy, because such insular entities are unintelligible apart from the network of relations that identifies them in the first place\u201d (Daniel 2006, 162). <\/span><\/p>\n Rather, a true experience of identity<\/i> requires the metaphoric action of identification<\/i>\u2014identification of dependent relationships (moving from source domain to target domain) and interdependent relationships (blended or conceptually integrated). Nor can the experience of metaphoric action be dismissed as \u2018subjective\u2019 under Edwards system. Since there is no possibility of realizing a \u2018subject\u2019 perspective, properly considered, the epithet has simply lost its power to paralyze. By establishing his philosophy on a semiotic web of meaningful relations, the perennial classical-modernist blood clots of \u2018subject\u2019 and \u2018object\u2019 are both dissolved. <\/span><\/p>\n This also means that God must not be imagined as the Grand Cartesian Subject. Instead, God is portrayed in Edwards\u2019 system as the ultimate participant in a semiotic web of relations (Daniel 1994, 26) and, more specifically, as the relations themselves enacted in space. For Edwards, then, God is to be identified with Space, Being and Relations\u2014with Space insofar as Space is necessary for Relations, and with Being insofar as Being is the activity of Relation (and resistance, or differentiation). Edwards subverts the age-old habit of portraying God merely as a supreme noun-like entity (i.e., the greatest conceivable \u2018being\u2019) and insists, instead, that God must be understood as verb-like event (i.e., that which is<\/i> by virtue of \u2018being<\/i>\u2019); or, in Daniel\u2019s assessment, \u201cthe activity of differentiation and association by which all beings are constituted in the first place\u201d (Daniel 2006, 163). The active, spatial, aesthetic nature of God also entails an active plurality\u2014a threeness, or Trinity in Edwards\u2019 view\u2014a view that comes to signify for C. S. Peirce the interpretive, or \u2018triadic\u2019 nature of relations in general, such that signifier and signified can no longer be treated as bound in a fixed, static relationship; rather, a sign (Spirit) stands for an object (Father) to a purposeful mediator (Son) in an irreducible, interdependent relationship, by which means meaningful understanding emerges.<\/span><\/p>\n Edwards\u2019 aesthetic vision of pervasive metaphoric action cuts against the grain of classical modernism. In this way he is an early herald of phenomenological pragmatism;<\/span>7<\/sup><\/span> in other ways, he accepts the dualist-reductionist distinctions of his day as valid debates and chooses sides. I wish to argue that the consequences of his dualist-reductionist commitments contradict the spirit of his own ontology of relations. Chiefly implicated is his reduction of matter to mind.<\/span><\/p>\n In spite of his break with Cartesian subjectivity and mechanistic objectivity, Edwards still qualifies, in certain features of his thought, as an epistemological rationalist and a metaphysical idealist (see discussion in Fiering 1988). The former commitment is made clear by his affirmation of Platonic dualism, and the latter commitment is made clear by his careful arguments against the reality of material existence. Since Edwards\u2019 idealism actuates his rationalism, his idealist arguments should be carefully considered.<\/span><\/p>\n Edwards\u2019 argument against material existence takes as its antecedent proposition the immateriality of colour (and light). His ensuing argument may be summarized as follows: Since colour is thoroughly mental, or ideal, all that remains is solidity, time and space (by which we may account for such basic phenomena as \u2018motion,\u2019 \u2018figure\u2019 and \u2018texture\u2019). Since time and space are immaterial, solidity is the only remaining candidate for material existence. Ultimately, solidity can only be described as \u201cspace resisting\u201d (Edwards 1724, ccxix). But since resistance is an activity, and since an activity requires an agent, the resistance we encounter in space is not in itself a sufficient explanation for its own existence. In other words, the solidity of what we take to be material is not primary. Solidity is resistance, but resistance cannot be said to depend on \u2018resistance.\u2019 Rather, resistance requires a resisting agent. This Agent must be none other than God: the Being-as-event, Space-for-relations, ultimate Aesthetic Participant. From this Edwards concludes that material existence is reducible to ideal existence. <\/span><\/p>\n With this argument in mind, I propose that Edwards\u2019 idealist commitments should be called into question on three accounts, all of which undermine his constitutive aesthetics. First, we may call into question his antecedent argument for the immateriality of colour. Acting as a spokesperson for the patent knowledge of his day, Edwards states, \u201cIt is now agreed upon by every knowing philosopher, that Colours are not really in the things, . . . but strictly no where else but in the mind\u201d (Ibid, ccxvi). <\/b>Elsewhere, he reiterates: \u201cit is very plain, Colour is only in the mind, and nothing like it can be out of all mind\u201d (Ibid, ccxix). Considered in terms of neural circuitry and retinal rods and cones, the non-objective status of colour is well-founded; but, considered in terms of ambient conditions and the relative wave lengths of reflected light, we now know that the non-subjective status of colour is equally well-founded. Colour is neither ideal nor material. The dichotomy itself leads us to ignore something profound: the experience of colour is \u201cinteractional\u201d\u2014the result of the human sensory motor system and the external world, being mediated by the metaphoric action of the situated human bodymind (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 23-6). The puzzling nature of Edwards\u2019 claim is his apparent assumption that colour is itself an isolated concept, a discrete category that can be spoken of apart from the web of semiotic relations supposedly prized by his own constitutive aesthetic. Does Edwards receive immunity from his own claim? \u201cThat which is beautiful, considered by itself separately . . . is false beauty and a confined beauty\u201d (Edwards 1724, ccxxix).<\/span><\/p>\n Even if we decontextualize colour and accept it as ideal, Edwards\u2019 overt dualism and his ensuing reduction of all matter to mind still seem to violate his relational aesthetic. His dualist-idealist convictions are stated unequivocally and frequently in his work: \u201call material existence is only idea\u201d (Ibid, ccxvii), he says; and elsewhere, \u201call existence is mental, [and] the existence of all exterior things is ideal\u201d (Ibid, ccxix). He asserts a clean distinction between individualistic idealism and theistic idealism, however. Individual minds do not create the illusion of solid matter. For Edwards what we perceive as solidity \u201cis nothing but an infinite resistance in some part of space caused by the immediate exercise of divine power\u201d (Edwards 1723, 241), by which he ultimately concludes that solid entities are fixed ideas in the mind of God communicated over time. As noted above, Edwards identifies God with space, and the action of differentiating and associating aesthetic relationships in space. <\/span><\/p>\n Nevertheless, the mental nature of matter does not necessarily follow from the conclusion that a resisting agent is active in all matter. If we accept Edwards\u2019 line of reasoning up to this point, we only have warrant for concluding that matter is dependent<\/i> on mind, not that it is reducible to<\/i> mind. Metaphoric action will not allow the reduction. In Canticles <\/i>7:2, to draw an analogy, understanding the source domain, \u2018your navel,\u2019 is dependent on the target domain, \u2018a rounded goblet.\u2019 Similarly, if matter is divine resistance, the source domain \u2018matter\u2019 is dependent on the target domain \u2018divine resistance.\u2019 To mistake the experience of matter for the act of resisting by reducing the former to the latter would be as misguided as mistaking your navel for a goblet by attempting to drink from it. Both miss the point of metaphoric action, which is ultimately concerned with the aesthetic experience of fresh awareness or understanding that results from the recognition and interpretation of harmonious relationships. In other words, when we realize that we cannot account for our experience of the persistence of matter self-referentially (i.e., by insisting that material entities are simply basic, or given), matter has fresh potential for being understood in a way that warrants belief: like colour, matter may be understood as the emergent aesthetic experience of an interactive event that is realized when the resistant surfaces of our bodies encounter intentional resistance in space.<\/span><\/p>\n Ultimately, since Edwards\u2019 radically idealist commitments lead to a form of dualist reduction that is inconsistent with his more basic aesthetics of relation, his imported idealism should be abandoned.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/span> The incompatibility of Edwards\u2019 idealism with his relational aesthetic is perhaps most clearly seen in his resultant rationalist commitments. Edwards\u2019 rationalist epistemology assumes sharp breaks between the sensory perception of beauty through harmony and the spiritual perception of divine forms through love. As a result, behavioural and phenomenal knowledge are cast as merely formal shadows of transcendental knowledge in every domain: \u201cAs bodies are shadows of being, so their proportions are shadows of proportion,\u201d says Edwards, and just as \u201cthe objects of our external senses are but the shadows of beings; that harmony, wherein consists sensible excellency and beauty, is but the shadow of excellency\u201d (1724, ccxxix). Spiritual being is also assumed to be independent of material being:<\/span><\/p>\n As nothing else has a proper being but Spirits, and as Bodies are but the shadow of being, therefore the consent of bodies one to another, and the harmony that is among them, is but the shadow of Excellency. The highest Excellency therefore must be the consent of Spirits one to another.<\/p>\n (Ibid, ccxxix)<\/p>\n These assumptions intensify toward the end of Edwards career when he clarifies, four years before his death, that phenomenal, natural beauty is not only derivative of but also inferior to transcendental moral beauty (Edwards 1754, 127). The neo-gnostic overtones must be understood as the mature results of Edwards\u2019 youthful insistence that matter be assimilated to mind. If we truly assume a relational ontology, however, we have no more reason to insist that matter is inferior to mind or that musical harmony is inferior to social harmony in our ontology than we have reason to insist that the navel is inferior to the goblet in Canticles<\/i>. In each case, the value-based comparison is simply beside the point and should not be allowed to distract from understanding the relation itself. Rather, both members of each pair are necessary for the third level of metaphoric action that leads to intensified growth in understanding the target domain. The difference between source and target<\/span>9<\/sup><\/span> in uni-directional mappings such as these (moving from source domain to target domain) is that the source domain comes to be transformed in our imagination. What we thought we understood about the dependent target domain is revealed as inadequate due to a fresh experience of consciousness that emerges from thinking of it in terms of the source domain.<\/span><\/p>\n Thus, in spite of his best efforts to depart from the objective\/subjective split in classical-modernist epistemology via aesthetic grounding, an age-old dichotomy Edwards imports from his own radical idealism serves to disrupt the continuity of his first principles. As we saw above, according to Edwards, \u201ctwo beings can agree one with another in nothing else but Relation; because otherwise . . . they become one\u201d (Edwards 1724, ccxxviii). This is theoretically unacceptable for Edwards, since \u201cone alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such case, there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore no such thing as Consent\u201d (Ibid, ccxxix).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Ironically, Edwards\u2019 inconsistency<\/span>10<\/sup><\/span> implicates him as a participant, however unwitting, in the classical-modernist disparagement of natural aesthetics and the indispensible role of the human body in meaning construal\u2014a theme to which we will turn in the next section.<\/span><\/p>\n Extreme opposites, considered in terms of each other, may begin to seem similar. Extreme ideas, both in spite of and because of their potential to transform, are often left unpublished. Both Edwards\u2019 \u201cThe Mind\u201d and Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cTruth and Lies\u201d were written early in the respective careers of their authors, and both works were published posthumously. Yet, for both thinkers, these early works went on to define their respective approaches to philosophy\u2014approaches that are remarkably similar and, as I will argue here, functionally interdependent. Insofar as Nietzsche\u2019s aesthetic is subjectively conceived and Edwards\u2019 aesthetic imports idealist assumptions, each participates in a key unwarranted presupposition of classical modernism. To the degree that Edwards promotes an aesthetics of relations and Nietzsche promotes an aesthetics of continuity, however, each sows seeds for phenomenological pragmatism. Notably, moreover, the tensions are complementary: the limitation of Nietzsche\u2019s aesthetic are supplied in Edwards\u2019 innovation; and, conversely, the limitations of Edwards\u2019 aesthetic are supplied in Nietzsche\u2019s innovation. <\/span><\/p>\n Thinking of Nietzsche and Edwards reciprocally involves us in a metaphorical blend or \u2018conceptual integration\u2019 (as in Fauconnier and Turner 2002, cf. Grady 2005). In differing and complementary ways, each is the source domain and each is the target. The metaphoric action implicated is ultimately not concerned with the reduction of one to the other. Rather, the experience of the blend is the experience of an unexpected relationship, and that experience leads to fresh potential\u2014the potential for a new coherence.<\/span><\/p>\n Edwards acknowledges that disproportion and disharmony may appear as features of some greater harmony: \u201cParticular disproportions sometimes greatly add to the general beauty, and must necessarily be, in order to a more universal proportion\u201d (Edwards 1724, p#<\/b>). The disproportion of his own aesthetics shows itself most strongly in the implications of his incompatible idealism (as discussed above), but this disproportion is accounted for when related to Nietzsche\u2019s gradient, organic approach. Since Nietzsche assumes no sharp breaks between sensory-motor percept and mental concept, he is also able to fill in a profound element never addressed, to my knowledge, by Edwards\u2019 system: the dynamic processes of diachronic change involved in human metaphoric action, processes whereby we come to think abstractly, communicate intelligibly, and develop interpretively.<\/span><\/p>\n Nietzsche\u2019s disharmonious assumptions on the primacy of the individual find their own complement when related to Edwards, who offers an ontology of relations as a welcome replacement for the age-old co-dependent schism between subjectivity and objectivity. In true (non-reductive, non-linear) metaphoric action, there is no room for either. What we call \u2018subject\u2019 and \u2018object\u2019 are interdependent, and both are simultaneously dependent on untold webs of meaningful relationships. Since Edwards assumes no sharp break between subject and object, he is able to fill in a profound element Nietzsche\u2019s system never addresses: the dynamic ground of interpretation\u2014in whom we live and move and have our being\u2014whose action we experience when we recognize aesthetic relationships between resistant material in space.<\/span><\/p>\n Edwards draws our attention to the mystery of space. Nietzsche draws our attention to the mystery of time. Nietzsche highlights Edwards\u2019 need for sensory-motor\/conceptual continuity. Edwards highlights Nietzsche\u2019s need for a relational ontology. In the process we stumble upon two of the most pernicious presuppositions of classical modernism\u2014presuppositions so subtle they specialize in undermining the very systems of thought used by those who seek to overthrow them: subject\/object dualism and idealist\/materialist reductionism. Neither Edwards nor Nietzsche fully escapes these traps. In attempting to blend the two systems into a functional alternative, certain elements are still missing. <\/span><\/p>\n One missing element needed for a functional blend of Edwardsian and Nietzschean aesthetics is a thoroughgoing logic of semiotic relations, a connection that lies beyond the scope of this essay. Another, something even more basic, is the role of the human body in meaning construal. As discussed above in Section 2.2, the embodied grounding of metaphoric action is becoming more and more widely acknowledged. Although Vico understood something of the profound nature of embodied cognition, neither Edwards nor Nietzsche seems to have considered the possibility that the experience of the body in space shapes our consciousness in specific ways necessary for reasoning and meaning construal.\u00a0 <\/span>Nietzsche comes close by acknowledging the necessary role our sensory-motor capacities play in metaphoric action, but both miss the interpretive hermeneutic of human incarnation. <\/span><\/p>\n For Edwards the human body \u2013 along with all other \u2018bodies\u2019 \u2013 is reducible to mental reality. Far from our specific incarnation working in tandem with the cognitive potential of our minds to prepare our specific human consciousness for the interpretation of semiotic relationships, Edwards asserts that both body and mind are determined by the mind of God:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That, which truly is the Substance of all Bodies, is the infinitely exact, and precise, and perfectly stable Idea, in God’s mind, together with his stable Will, that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to . . . the infinitely exact and precise Divine Idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable Will, with respect to correspondent communications to Created Minds, and effects on their minds.<\/p>\n (Edwards 1724, ccxix)<\/p>\n Edwards seems to be comfortable with the possibility of thought independent of sensory perception (cf. Daniel 1994, 129). In this way, he is further from an embodied perspective than Nietzsche. If, as Edwards argues, truth is the agreement of our ideas with existence, and if existence is the full determinate series of associations and dissociations of ideas in the mind of God, then the human mind supposedly transcends the body to identify with the mind of God. For someone who wishes to reject the Cartesian subject, this is a compromising move. Edwards argues that \u201cnothing has any existence anywhere else than in consciousness,\u201d and yet he is known for incorporating feeling into his philosophy: \u201cagreeableness of perceiving being is pleasure, and disagreeableness is pain. Disagreement or contrariety to Being, is evidently an approach to Nothing, or a degree of Nothing; which is nothing else but disagreement or contrariety of Being, and the greatest and only evil\u201d (Edwards 1723, 204; 1724, ccxxviii). Considering the importance of embodied human emotion to his overall system, acknowledging the necessary role of the proportionate, sensory-motor body in metaphoric action would benefit Edwards\u2019 system and its devotees.<\/span><\/p>\n Nietzsche\u2019s complementary system would benefit, in turn, from recognizing with Merleau-Ponty (1945) that the body is neither subject nor object but a paradoxical unity of both, co-arising with and coupled with environment and community. Furthermore, if the body is not alienated from its environment, but inherently related to it\u2014indeed, arising from it, and if metaphoric action does not involve reduction, but rather recognition and interpretation of those relations, the human body offers the Edwardsian\/Nietzschean parallel aesthetic its most fundamental missing link: the interpretive key for metaphoric action that provides universal grounding between cultures and individuals. An embodied grounding redeems the possibility of meaning for anyone who is tempted, along with Nietzsche, to identify metaphoric habit with absurdity. Consider Nietzsche\u2019s absurdist critique of the concept of \u2018being\u2019 for example, one of Edwards\u2019 own cherished concepts:<\/span><\/p>\n The concept of being! As though it did not show its low empirical origin in its very etymology. For esse basically means \u2018to breathe\u2019.\u00a0 <\/span>. . .\u00a0 <\/span>The original meaning of the word was soon blurred, but enough remains to make it obvious that man imagines the existence of other things by analogy with his own existence.<\/p>\n (Nietzsche 1874, 84; cf. Sandywell 1996, 334)<\/p>\n Under an embodied aesthetic of metaphoric action this critique would not lead to absurdity; rather, we would recognize that the original embodied metaphor that slowly fossilized into an abstract concept was not itself a reduction of existence in general to human existence. Rather the original aesthetic event would have been an experience of metaphoric action whereby our earlier sensory experiences of existing objects (target domain) were imagined in terms of our own more basic, embodied experience of breathing (source domain). The constitutive role of metaphor would no longer undermine foundationalist assumptions about truth and meaning, because the foundationalist assumptions themselves would be irrelevant. <\/span><\/p>\n As Johnson does well to note, theories of metaphor always implicate us in discussions of truth, reality and knowledge (Johnson 1981, x, 43). Nietzsche should not be so quickly dismissed when he urges us to acknowledge that the distinctions we assume to exist between the factual and the imaginary are highly suspicious\u2014and yet these are the very distinctions we assume to lie at the heart of our separation of science and philosophy from poetry (see further discussion in Kofman 1993, 17). If we accept that there is no inherent conflict between artistic and scientific interpretation, science and philosophy may even be considered forms of poetry, and vice versa. To various degrees and with various caveats, Nietzsche, Edwards, Vico and Peirce are all comfortable with the idea of integrating poetry and philosophy\u2014or, more broadly, aesthetics and science\u2014claiming, from different perspectives, that the related pairings have, in practice, never been at odds to begin with. Since Nietzsche accepts the classical-modernist distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, however, he sees no other choice than to collapse both into absurdity. Science and poetry, on his account, are to be understood as equally illusory. For Edwards, on the other hand, both subjectivity and objectivity are evidence of our fallen nature\u2014our sin separating us from an awareness of the pervasively relational nature of reality. If we are willing to relinquish our view of the self as basic and relinquish our epistemological demands for discrete, reductive categories, we might begin to approach the real world as it really is: actively related. Would scientific progress not benefit?<\/span><\/p>\n And yet, Edwards is not without his own shortcomings. Each needs the other. Edwards offers Nietzsche relational ontology; Nietzsche offers Edwards organic continuity. Edwards offers Nietzsche non-reductive metaphorical action; Nietzsche offers Edwards processually gradient metaphorical action. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Edwards has been overlooked by generations of mainstream philosophers and historians of philosophy, and his contributions to metaphor theory have not been previously recognized. The time is ripe for considering his perspectives, especially since his thought constitutes an anticipation of, and partial inspiration for, the relational semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. As M\u00fcller (2008) argues, a more active consideration of the triadic (purposively interpretive) nature of metaphoric action is called for in embodied cognitive science; and, as Danaher (1998), Haley (1999), S\u00f8rensen et al. (2007) and others describe, the movement has much to gain from a radical integration with Peircean thought. <\/span><\/p>\n Can the constitutive aesthetics of Edwards and Nietzsche be reconciled? I answer that neither system seems to work apart from dialogic relation\u2014relation in an integrated metaphoric blend. Can science and aesthetics be reconciled? Peirce answers that the two have never been separate:<\/span><\/p>\n I hear you say: \u201cAll that is not fact<\/i>; it is poetry.\u201d 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 of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.<\/p>\n I hear you say: \u201cThis smacks too much of an anthropomorphic conception.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n (Peirce 1903, 193)<\/p>\n Brinton, Laurel J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. Lexicalization and language change<\/i>. Research Surveys in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.<\/p>\n Chai, Leon. Jonathan Edwards and the limits of enlightenment philosophy<\/i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.<\/p>\n Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian linguistics<\/i>. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.<\/p>\n Daniel, Stephen H. The philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A study in divine semiotics.<\/i> The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.<\/p>\n _______. Edwards as philosopher. In The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards<\/i>, ed. Stephen J. Stein, 162-180. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n Danaher, David. \u201cPeirce\u2019s Semiotic and Conceptual Metaphor Theory.\u201d Semiotica<\/i> 119-1 (1998)\/2: 171\u2013207.<\/p>\n Davidson, Donald. Meaning, truth, language and reality.<\/i> Eds. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.<\/p>\n Deely, John. Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century<\/i>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.<\/p>\n Delattre, Roland Andr\u00e9. \u201cBeauty and theology: a reappraisal of Jonathan Edwards.\u201d In Critical Essays on Jonathan Edwards. <\/i>Ed. William J. Scheick, 136-150. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co, 1980.<\/p>\n Dewey, John. Logic: The theory of inquiry<\/i>. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938.<\/p>\n Edwards, Jonathan. \u201cNotes on scripture.\u201d In Works of Jonathan Edwards<\/i>. Vol. 15. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1722\/1998.<\/p>\n _______.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cOf Being.\u201d In Scientific and Philosophical Writings<\/i>. Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6. Ed. Wallace E. Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1723\/1980.<\/p>\n _______. \u201cThe Mind.\u201dIn The works of Jonathan Edwards,<\/i> vol. 1, ccxiv-ccxxxi. Avon: The Bath Press, 1724\/1834.<\/p>\n _______.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cThe Nature of True Virtue.\u201d In The works of Jonathan Edwards<\/i>, vol. 1, 122-145. Avon: The Bath Press, 1754\/1834.<\/p>\n _______.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cFreedom of the Will.\u201d In Works of Jonathan Edwards<\/i>, vol. 1.\u00a0 <\/span>Ed. Paul Ramsey. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1754\/1957.<\/p>\n Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind\u2019s hidden complexities<\/i>. New York: Basic Books, 2002.<\/p>\n Fiering, Norman. \u201cThe Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards\u2019s Metaphysics.\u201d In Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience<\/i>, 73-101. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.<\/p>\n Gibbs, Raymond W., ed. Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought.<\/i> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.<\/p>\n Grady, Joseph. \u201cPrimary metaphors as inputs to conceptual integration.\u201d Pragmatics<\/i> 37 (2005): 1596-1614.<\/p>\n Grice, H. P. \u201cMeaning.\u201d Philosophical Review<\/i> 66 (1957): 377-388.<\/p>\n Haley, Michael. The semeiosis of poetic metaphor. <\/i>Bloomington: Indiana University Press.<\/p>\n _______. 1999. \u201cMetaphor, mind and space: What Peirce can offer Lakoff.\u201d The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic Analysis<\/i>. Vol. 4. Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Language and Peircean Sign Theory, Duke University, June 19-21, 1997, 417-440. New York: Berghahn Books, 1988.<\/p>\n Harris, Roy. The semantics of science.<\/i> London: Continuum, 2005.<\/p>\n Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. World lexicon of grammaticalization<\/i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.<\/p>\n Hinman, Lawrence M. Nietzsche, metaphor and truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research<\/i>, 43.2 (1982): 179-199.<\/p>\n Johnson, Mark. \u201cIntroduction: Metaphor in the philosophical tradition.\u201d In Philosophical perspectives on metaphor<\/i>. Mark Johnson, ed., 3-47 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.<\/p>\n _______. The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason.<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.<\/p>\n _______. The meaning of the body: Aesthetics of human understanding<\/i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.<\/p>\n Kant, Immanuel. Critique of judgement<\/i>. Trans. James Creed Meredith, Ed. Nicholas K. Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1790\/2007.<\/p>\n Kofman, Sarah. Nietzsche and metaphor.<\/i> Trans. Duncan Large. <\/i>London: Athlone Press, 1993.<\/p>\n Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors we live by<\/i>, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983\/2003.<\/p>\n _______. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought<\/i>. New York: Basic Books, 1999.<\/p>\n Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor<\/i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.<\/p>\n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of perception<\/i>. London: Routledge, 1945\/2002.<\/p>\n M\u00fcller, Cornelia. Metaphors dead and alive, sleeping and waking: A dynamic view.<\/i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.<\/p>\n Nietzsche, Friedrich. Notebook 19: P I 20b. Summer 1872-Early 1873. In Unpublished writings from the period of Unfashionable Observations<\/i>. Trans. Richard T. Gray. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 11. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1872\/1999.<\/p>\n _______. On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense. In Duncan Large and Keith Ansell-Pearson, eds. The Nietzsche reader<\/i>, 114-123. Oxford: Blackwell, 1873\/2006.<\/p>\n _______. Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks.<\/i> Marianne Cowan, trans. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1874\/1962.<\/p>\n _______. The Gay Science.<\/i> Josefine Nauckhoff, trans., Bernard Williams, ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882\/2001.<\/p>\n _______. Thus Spake Zarathustra.<\/i> Adrian Del Caro, trans., Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, eds. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891\/2006.<\/p>\n Pavel, Thomas G. The spell of language: Poststructuralism and speculation<\/i>. Thomas G. Pavel and Linda Jordan, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.<\/p>\n Peirce, Charles Sanders. \u201cHerbert Spencer\u2019s philosophy.\u201d Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition<\/i>, vol. 6 (1890\/2000): 1886-1890, 395-400.<\/p>\n _______. \u201cWhat is a sign?\u201d In The Essential Peirce<\/i>, vol. 2: 1893-1913, Nathan Houser and Christian J. W. Kloesel, eds., 4-26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1894\/1998.<\/p>\n _______. \u201cThe seven systems of metaphysics.\u201d In The Essential Peirce<\/i>, vol. 2: 1893-1913, Nathan Houser and Christian J. W. Kloesel, eds., 179-195. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1903\/1998.<\/p>\n _______. \u201cThe basis of pragmaticism in the normative sciences.\u201d In The Essential Peirce<\/i>, vol. 2: 1893-1913, Nathan Houser and Christian J. W. Kloesel, eds., 371-433, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1906\/1998.<\/p>\n Ponzio, Augusto. \u201cMetaphor and poetic logic in Vico.\u201d Semiotica<\/i> 161-1\/4 (2006): 231-248.<\/p>\n Reddy, Michael J.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cThe conduit metaphor: A case frame conflict in our language about language.\u201d In Andrew Ortnery, ed., Metaphor and Thought<\/i>, 164-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979\/1993.<\/p>\n Sandywell, Barry. Presocratic reflexivity: The construction of philosophical discourse c. 600-450 BC<\/i>. Logological investigations Vol. 3, London: Routledge, 1996.<\/p>\n S\u00f8rensen, Bent, Torkild Thellefsen and Morten Moth. \u201cMetaphor and cognition from a Peircean perspective.\u201d Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society<\/i>, 43.3 (2007): 562-574.<\/p>\n Savan, David. \u201cC. S. Peirce and American semiotics.\u201d In The Peirce Seminar Papers, <\/i>Vol. 2., Michael Shapiro and Michael Haley, eds., 179-208. Providence\/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994.<\/p>\n Vico, Giambattista. New science: Principles of the new science concerning the common nature of nations<\/i>. Trans. David Marsh. London: Penguin Books, 1725\/2000.<\/p>\n Wierzbicka, Anna. What did Jesus mean? Explaining the sermon on the mount and the parables in simple and universal human concepts<\/i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001a..<\/p>\n _______. \u201cLeibnizian linguistics.\u201d In Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse: A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer<\/i>. Istv\u00e1n Kenesei and Robert M. Harnish, eds., 229-253. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001b.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by\u00a0Jamin R. Pelkey All beauty consists in similarness or identity of relation. . . . it be what we are … 2. The ubiquity of aesthetics: \u201cWe possess nothing but metaphors for things\u201d<\/h2>\n
2.1 The marginalization of metaphor, imagination and aesthetics in Western thought<\/span><\/h3>\n
2.2 Embodied cognitive science and the \u2018experientialist synthesis\u2019<\/span><\/h3>\n
2.3 A brief history of the ubiquity thesis in light of contemporary metaphor theory<\/span><\/h3>\n
3. The constitutive claim in Nietzsche: Subjective continuity<\/h2>\n
3.1 Constitutive metaphor in Nietzsche\u2019s organic epistemology<\/span><\/h3>\n
3.2 Nietzsche\u2019s linear subjectivity as problematic for his constitutive account<\/span><\/h3>\n
4. The constitutive claim in Edwards: Relational idealism<\/h2>\n
4.1 Constitutive metaphor in Edwards relational ontology<\/span><\/h3>\n
4.2 Edwards\u2019 idealist commitments as problematic for his constitutive account<\/span><\/h3>\n
5. Edwards and Nietzsche in dialogue: \u201cThe equation of unequal things\u201d<\/h2>\n
5.1 Relational continuity as the blending of Edwardsian and Nietzschean aesthetics<\/span><\/h3>\n
5.2 The missing body in Jonathan Edwards and Friedrich Nietzsche<\/span><\/h3>\n
6. Conclusion: \u201cWe are concerned with nothing else\u201d<\/h2>\n
\nNotes<\/h2>\n
\n
References<\/h2>\n