Portrait Gallery of Sketches and Echo Chambers I
Intervals and Respites to Complement
The Subjective Self: A Portrait inside Logical Space
Harwood Fisher
Gallery Sections
The Portrait Gallery is in three parts. To view sections 3-5, go to part II; to view sections 6-8, go to part III.Part I
Preliminary Sketches and Musical Analogies
Section 0. Sketch as Prolegomena
Section 1. For Chapter 10: A Play within the Play: Hamlet’s Conscience as Mobius Twist
Section 2. For Chapter 10: Incidental Music; The Third Man Theme
Part II
Section 3. For Chapter 11: Pocket Guide Map of the Three Determinants of Structuring
Section 4. Sentience and Opposition: A Synaesthetic Sketch
Section 5. For Chapters 13 and 14: Sketches to be seen Before Reading Chapters 13 and 14
Part III
Section 6. For Chapter 12: Paradox Lost: Music to Hear at the End of Chapter 12
Section 7. For Chapter 14: Sketch. A Diagram of Bracketing as Regress
Section 8. For Chapter 13: The Trouble with the Objective Self if it has no Subjective Space
Portrait Gallery Illustrations
Diagrams
Plates
MusicPreliminary Sketches and Musical Analogies
The Portrait Gallery provides portrait sketches and musical analogies. Think of these as if you’re looking at the sketches in small galleries, and as if you’re hearing the music of the analogies in the quiet echo chambers and prayer rooms you go to for rectification of your thoughts and feelings. In these rooms, you seek the harmonies of the many levels of your thought. You seek the musical ratios that apportion the sight of your images, the sounds of the voices of yourself and your others, and your remembrances of the feelings, percepts, sensations, and meanings of icons and symbols. As you pursue more perfect syntheses, you study this and that thought and picture. Sketches appear; often getting just a sub theme right. Mary Cassatt never did get the hands right. Rembrandt always got the eyes right. In the galleries are the earlier sketches and studies of sub themes of the portrait of the self you’re there to see in the book, The subjective self: A portrait inside logical space.
The portrait of a subjective self is so inviting. It should give you a look at a portrait of your self; so, your discovery of lost sub themes of preliminary sketches is like re-visiting homes of your childhood. With your entry into the subjective experiences of your own self are jumps from one impulse to another, from one sign to another, from one icon to another, and from the relations of one set of symbols to another. Restless jumps; they urge you seek musical analogies—orchestrated sets of relations of themes and categories that can bring your soul a sense of its own harmony in relation to the movements of the cosmos.
In the course of your reading the book I highlight the several points and times at which I think it’d be your best experience to stop off for a visit to the side galleries and chambers of this Portrait Gallery. So, the numbering here will follow the cues and notation in the Portrait.
If you wish, you can go on to visit the galleries and chambers by just following the sections and their numbers, as they are listed in the Portrait Gallery Index. When you enter the section, you'll note that the letter, "S", followed by the number of the section, corresponds to the Index "Section" listing.
Some sections of this Portrait Gallery may lend themselves better than others to a read that is independent of the book. They could make for an interesting visit, even before you dip into the book. For example, Sections like S0 and S3 may be general enough, so that they are mini-essays that may give you a good overview of the book. Other sections, though, are really more dependent on your reading the book, or parts of it, beforehand. Examples are S1, S2, S5, and S6. For instance, S2 is specifically meant to set your thinking in motion at the end of Chapter 10. The sketches in S2 complement Chapter 10; but the experience also should leave you in a kind of musical mode that I think enhances your reading of the book's ensuing chapters.
Sketch as Prolegomena
Self as a Visual Picture of Logical Space.
If you enter this gallery now, you’ll see the book’s thesis in three spotlighted circles, overlapping like three circles of a Venn diagram. Spotlight One shows you the meaning and its levels of reference. Sketchy lines suggest the completion yet to come; therefore, a sketch is a semantic tour de force—an incomplete picture, but the very incompletion leads somewhere. Spotlight Two is a metalanguage, revealing two levels of language in the thesis. Thus, the thesis that the self can be logically represented as a subset of its own space suggests a different level of language necessary for each of the logical orders. Crosscutting the two languages is Spotlight Three—a viewer’s perspective that determines the direction of logical ordering of meanings. A viewer might have a scientific perspective. The meanings for a viewer with this perspective might be ordered differently than those of viewer with an artistic perspective. The artist’s portrait of a subjective self circumscribes a theme of the universal within the particular. A scientific model must assert a thesis, which has general meaning, and under which the particular can be nourished. Since the thesis/theme has both the subjective and objective self to logically reconcile; the mix of the two perspectives on languages and metalanguage is necessary. And this mix is reflective of the state of affairs.
Theme and Point as Time and Space.
The thesis/theme is this. The self is logically limited. It grows, moving outward to construct layers of spatio-temporal representations. However, it has ultimate bounds. In its generative function to represent its categories of spatio-temporal events, it projects forms from an inner logical space. It directs reversible objects into that inner space. However, the self, as a subset of its own space, which has ultimate bounds, cannot progress from/escape its irreversible logical identity. This theme is a portrait—its picture made in the language of art and its propositions expressed in the language of science. I am pursuing a picture of a logical form. I visualize it iconically as a spatial structure, but only by utilizing both centric and eccentric composition. Since it’s an icon, not a mere abstract schema; the logical form never loses connection with its sources—the material neural and affective system structures and processes, on one hand, and its unseen past in evolutionary force and direction from the concentrated determinants of an individual organism, on the other.
With Rudolph Arnheim’s (1988) insightful relating of centric and eccentric composition, I begin to develop the idea of these compositional forms as conjoined in a portrait of the self. Arnheim describes "the interaction of centricity and eccentricity directly reflected in the twofold task of human beings, namely, the spread of action from the generating core of the self and the interaction with other such centers in the social field." (p. ix).
The pictorial form of this space involves the subjective self as a point of origin. I refer to it as an origin point (OP). It’s closed in by ontological and graphic realities. Within this OP, as in Kandinsky’s (1924/1977) depiction of a point, are tensions. They move in ellipsoid and circular resolutions of movements that enclose, contain, and stabilize subspaces.1 They dynamically become forms—categories—which constrain the objects, generated from the self’s OP and propelled as the self’s experiences and encounters with ecological contexts and forces. In light of these encounters, the subjective self also spirals outward, moving through time, creating coiling subspaces in which you can see these events, contexts, and forces.
The subjective self has a temporal dimension. An origin point is in its past; yet, as a subjective viewing point, it moves into the present time and imaginary future. How is this ever resolved? Look at the gorgeous fate of circles, which form in dependency on the overall structure of a continuing expansive movement—yet are solidified in Georgia O’Keeffe’s (1945) sculpture, Abstraction.
The subjective self as OP is a dead center. Ashes of the phoenix. Yet, within are dynamic forms—the categories—which can shape reflections of the experiences of the growing self and its objects into logically stable forms and relationships. Picture these experiences as viewed from the present by the self—moving as a particle, advancing growth and time in an outward spiral. If you think of a present viewing position as a particle point (PP), you can see its structure; although the point is in motion. There is also movement within the OP, and the reflection we see in its categories is a movement too—like the starry sky reflecting stars that existed long ago, yet no longer. The dynamics in the dead center are directed like a whirlpool, which either empties itself into a dark inner ending or creates a record of static concentric circles. In either case the closed and bounded energy system tends toward entropy.2 The subjective self, as OP is a closed system. A closed system ironically permits the compression of inner tensions and dynamics; yet, it also reveals the recording in circular traces of the movements marking the brave efforts of search and resolution. And yet further, the boundedness of circles and ellipses operate as limits, closing off the interior from its ecological context. I leave this point in motion—its obvious analogies to a closed thermodynamic system, on one hand, and the potentialities of an individual life, on the other.
From the vantage of the "subjective self of the present moment"—the particle point (PP)--the objects of the self are action patterns, schemata within a time frame depicting the causal structures of objects in ecological contexts. It is easy to picture an action pattern as a linear sequence, agent-action-outcome. However, viewing this pattern can also yield synchronic pictures of interactions at different points in time (a coordinated collection of the schemata of different time frames).
Transformations of the Schema and the Category as Icons of Time and Space.
All these patterns of movement, however they’re funneled through our kinesthesis and transmuted into our neural signals, become the forms of schemata and categories—or conform to those forms. Of course, what you and I get to think about and experience is yet another transmutation into the language of what we can see and symbolize. And no doubt, once we are in the land of representation, we straddle our own subjective experience and that of those with whom we communicate and share representations. Mitchell’s (1980; 1994) purpose is to understand the relation of word and image as two dominant forms of cultural representation. The sharing of human representation reaches into the future by way of its access in the domains of culture. But, are you not still there, in your straddling? If you don’t remember to go inward to the position of your self, you may represent the things of the world only as others tell you they seem. Like Polonius agreeing to every description of clouds Hamlet suggests! The experience of writing and reading this book as a portrait asks you to read and decode the "two dominant forms of representation," word and image—from the interactive subjective perspective of art and objective language and metalanguage of science.
The image of the self—yours or mine—is formed in/by the eye of the beholder. When the visual image of the self is in a painting, it’s the artist, who makes it from her image. It’s the viewer, who makes the image of the self from the painting the artist's image has become. When the work is purely text, say, a narrative, the same thing applies. While objectively the text is mere words, in the mind of the author and the reader, images are being viewed. Are these merely phenomenological? Physically, are they "really there" in the objective text? As the Ink Spots sang it, there's "my echo, my shadow, and me."
Peirce is right—the icon is our penultimate point of representation and the lever for our understanding. With an icon, we can capture an echo and a shadow. With the forming of the icon, we can present it to our selves. So, look at a phenomenological and a physical World, as if with figure-ground shifting. Go from your phenomenological experience of an image to the idea that the image is an objective event—one that can be set out, measured, and explored. We project an image of a space—and reflectively step back from and view it. But, you can cantilever out of the iconic World of yourself to immerse yourself in the representation that a space is there around us. We find ourselves inside the cocoon that is the icon of self, and we leave that icon to represent the ecological surround for our embodied thoughts and images.
Seeing the Icons as Perspectives on Time and Movement.
As regards the self and its perspectives on time, there are the two forms, diachronicity and synchronicity. How, by what form of time, do we see an icon? Do we move along with it, linearly; or do we "fly" above time, like Faust, seeing it in all directions at once? Mitchell (1980) pictures a visual space enclosing time. But when we interpret events, both diachronic and synchronic forms are involved. We employ icons of our perspective on time, and those icons interact with how we stand at the PP.
Mitchell describes diachronic progression in pictorial terms as linear; while, to accommodate synchronic time, he also makes room for another type of picture of space. This is of a structure that's tectonic. (An example he gives for this second type is that of a symmetrical grid structure).
When biologist Stephen Jay Gould accompanies one of his discourses about evolution with pictures of one creature succeeding another, we see the march of morph-changes as diachronic and linear. We feel ourselves moving along with a PP that marches across time. The picture of the morph-changes evokes a John Philip Sousa march, and the rhythm, in turn, has our fix on the PP—moving along in step with a linear march from one end of the Avenue to the other. We’re unconsciously tuned to moving the PP diachronically. In step, from frame to frame.
On the other hand, see if you have the same experience I do when viewing the artist, Escher’s, (1958) Path of Life II. While he depicts a "Path of Life" as growth and change, locatable in different sectors of his drawing; I experience the drawing as if time synchronically contains the movement and phenomena of growth at different points of development and at perspectives of the past, present, and future. If you see this painting as I do, it’s an icon. It’s from your perspective, which grasps the movement of events in relation to the movement of the PP. If we bear in mind that words and text require images be imagined and that the pictures require images be viewed; then you and I join in the enterprise of charting the subjective experience of causality as autonomy and of the definition of objects as embodied. The pictures can show linearity or tectonic patterns. So, our representations have characteristics that can depict our different Worlds.
I should explain the "different Worlds" to show the different patterns of objects and actions. Therefore, I repeat from the book's Introduction endnote 28. For this purpose, see a version of that endnote in the Portrait Gallery Notes below, section SO, note 3.
After reading note 3, I think you'll see how wide a range of objects and actions that different pictorial patterns help to depict. It includes not only concrete physical causal sequence as a linear schema; but also objective mental and linguistic actions as complex schematics. Most often missing is the music of the person’s individual internal prepotent rhythm—a sum of signal patterns influencing the way the self sees the PP. If we don’t synchronize the dance steps of the PP, which represent, with those dancing moves, which complement the icon being presented; then, we might not know the deeper self.
The concrete experiences of marching down Fifth Avenue or navigating through an ecological space—like finding one’s way through the forest—can result in a clear sense of a linear pattern of movements and events. When the World we're representing is one, not only of sentences about action patterns, but also, is one of thoughts; then, it seems clear that our icons yield both linear and tectonic structures. A linear schema, say, in the form of a surface sentence structure, may be succeeded or complemented by a tectonic structure. This structure can be in the form of a propositional tree, which, by its layering, accommodates an array or class of subjects and predicates. Or it can be in the form of a network, from which the nodes containing different functions and roles can be seen all at once, thereby structuring the collection of meanings—of a proposition or of a concept or category.3
The Music and Dance as Schemata.
Considering descriptions of the individual’s experience in the forms of these different sorts of schemata, I’ll go a step further into the transformations within the self’s logical space. To give some range to the schema as representation, think about separate schemata as plans or templates for action, and consider a conjoining of separate schematics. Each is coordinated with the other in service of an adaptive act, like solving a problem.4
This idea of coordination of schemata might well be applicable to the separate schemata representing the actions and products of the self, on one hand, and the generative activity of the self in categorizing or setting the bounds for its objects, on the other. However, I will develop more fully the point that the categorizing function, that of grouping objects, is a more fundamental cognitive act than the development of schematics that depict action and outcome. Before I make that argument, I must admit that a competing idea is also attractive. The two functions are "joined at the hip." This is an inviting, even an elegant view. This combination could mean that all cognitive activity is schematizing, and that, when the cognitive act ascends to a higher level of representation, it seems to be one of categorization.5 I get into this as general discussion with you in the course of the book. As you may know, Piaget has a most powerful view of the levels of consciousness and executive perspective by which to organize cognitive actions and structures. Still, I'd like you to keep in mind that the question of origins can be separated from a traditional mind-as-self description of the interactions of schemata and categories in the course of a person’s life.
For the moment, though, accept Piaget’s descriptions of coordination. The schematics of the self and its adaptations to its ecological contexts can be said to be "coordinated" operations, and these consist of categorial ways of symbolizing causal propositions. So, we have a complex interplay of cognitive actions and structures. I’m not shrinking from the position that categories are primary; yet, a lot is gained by this description of the complex interplay. In my statement of the theme/thesis of the self, schematic depictions are directed inward to the inner self and its centric structures of categorization.
The term "coordinated" pays homage to Piaget and his constructivist view of the development of mind and self-regulatory and reflective operations. The more contemporary term, "mesh," connotes an interaction between the non-conceptual and the conceptual. The common assumption is that there is a harmonious matching of patterns. Remember, though, in either case, these are schematic patterns. So, the idea is that of a regulated harmony of the actions that may occur on different levels.
The quest for these schematic correspondences is not quite for identity, but rather for finding corresponding identities within different patterns. Karl Popper (Popper and Eccles, 1981) looks for such matches in his philosophy of the thinking involved in discovery. The neurophysiologically oriented psychiatrist William Calvin (1998) sees this sort of matching in his reflections of the unconscious and the conscious contributions to problem-solving—only, to boot, he looks further for pattern "resonances." This time it is with the dynamics produced by neuronal patterns that generate " . . . the spatio-temporal patterns that are the precursors of movement . . ." (p. 399). Philosopher Christopher Peacocke, (1992/1995) relates the person’s ideas of space to first-person concepts. All this searching for harmony of pattern would argue that the perceptual signals and reactions and the conceptual summaries of the self are coherent.
Well, here we have a picture of the individual organism, and its schemata are patterns of its individual actions and movements. So, it's a given that the self is embedded in the particularity of the organism, its irritability, and all the physical and material sources of its biological sentience. Therefore, homage to Piaget’s concept of coordination is apt; since from his point of view, mind and cognitive operations are anchored to the biology of the organism. We'd be hiding under some rock, if we did not see how very much the contemporary preoccupation with finding the harmonies of intracommunicative mechanisms and signals is advanced by the technology of computers and by the research in neurophysiology. Still, for you and me, if we do our own searches into ourselves, the harmonies seem built by our abilities to climb up and down on a ladder from sensory-embedded mentation to higher abstraction. Whether we climb up or down the ladder, we, as selves, are still in interplay with our cognitive operations and structures. The construction of our thoughts and actions is by an embedded self, which is apparently compatible—almost too comfortably—with Piaget’s idea that schemata are coordinated in a progression to logical stability.6
Do "matches" and "meshing" qualify as reproductive strategies or quests? Copying mechanisms? Resonances? Do the coordinations of schemata qualify as competing patterns? As Calvin (1998) points out many of these ideas are really within the compass of Darwin’s. The issues of what terms best represent an unfolding process of growth and learning, are fundamental.
It is even more elemental to consider what happens in the very beginnings of thought. What happens is as haunting as a parent’s ghost, when the child takes on the job of visualizing the self, its role, and its logic in a space that also has a complex time dimension. What's elemental in visualizing the self? Peacocke argues that egocentricity and first person thought are essentials. He posits that, prior to non-conceptual thought, there are "proto-propositions" outlining the events in a space. More than one of my high school English teachers exclaimed about propositions emanating from some self, but presented as presumably objective statements, "The ‘I’ is understood," they hammered home. I still agree with these teachers. Egocentricity and first person thought have to be part of the picture. A proto-proposition may well appear to be about space and its objects and events; but, it’s a product—made by the self, even if the self doesn’t actively know it’s a self.
For the moment, we have the idea that the self functions to coordinate its own operations. Therefore, not only is the self an element, operating within a schematic like a proto-proposition; but also, the self is a function outside these operations. As such, with the Piagetian vocabulary we're using, we'd ask, "What is this outside function's operations? In a note (6) to this section, I describe these as movements within an encompassing space. The space includes the self, making categories from a position outside itself, and it also includes the self, represented within schemata. I must introduce the term metaphorizing to suggest what the self does to manage the movements back and forth from outside schemata to inside. The self metaphorizes, constructing an analogy as the bridge from schema to category.7 I'll now begin a description of the metaphorizing, but it will be a few moments and subsections before the sketch is made. Some terms have to be introduced first. Meantime, let me tell you that my purpose is to show how metaphorizing works to allow movement back and forth in the total space of the self and to accommodate the self's operations within and outside schemata. In fact, to whet your appetite, I'll say that it is this function of metaphorizing that allows a unified self, with a unique identity, to resolve the disparity of past, present, and future times that locate the self and its movements.
Metaphor and Analogy: Formula or Portrait?
The self as (PP) is at a present moment; yet it’s in motion, moving toward its tensions to resolve the problems of its life in its present environment. The diachronics of the movement are toward the tensions; while, synchronically, the self sees itself in various temporal directions. It finds its way to an understanding of its own idealizations—symbols of a deeper self in the past. These patterns whirl inward, as if grooves in the memory of the subjective self at OP. The self at PP is the self within the PP. Therein, the self is bounded by its own sentience of the present moment. We can picture this sentience as operating within a moving particle. I'm sure you've felt this. Your present moment is as omnipresent as your sense of yourself; no matter how clocks and events move and change. Your inner sense of the moment is as constant as your self; while the location to which it refers is continuously moved to another temporal perspective. The self in PP discovers how these patterns relate to its encounters with social and physical realities, and, while at a present moment, can contemplate how the patterns and events can haunt and guide the future.
The whirls and grooves of the bounded self and its journeys from the present are reminiscent of Plato’s picture of the circling of planets and of the circles of a soul that revolves "on itself." (This reference is from the Timaeus, p. 50. For complete citation of the references here and elsewhere in the Portrait Gallery, see the book's bibliography in its Reference section.) Plato depicts the orbiting of the soul in search of knowledge, and the "combinations of motion" producing a "path . . . which is spiral" (p. 54). These pictures in the Timaeus are part of a complex account of the origin of the universe. I invoke them here to show their range and function. They are metaphorical icons of the structure and movement of the inner sentience, and they encapsulate the sentient determinants of the individual’s behavior, sentiments, and reasoning. These icons not only have a long history in the poet’s imagination; but also, they have served scientific explanations of the movement of micro and macro-worlds—and, most recently, of movements and the relation of bodies in the universe.
The spiral is an icon, to which I return in the face of so many semantic connections! Of course, I'm not the only one. Its form has fired the imagination of artists and fueled explications of biologists and physicists. Since these symbols are so deep in so many minds and universes, they surely are fertile metaphors for a scientific perspective from which to make a psychological portrait of the subjective self. I call up Plato here to forestall any scientist’s fear of the art necessary to imagine time that no longer exists, or does not yet exist. Yet, I also mean to arouse a deeper fear—that of contemplating coordinations between the nature of macro-universal movement patterns and the harmonic strivings of the inner person—a mini-micro-world, in comparison.
Now, I'll clarify some of my confidence in the power of metaphor. On a broader thematic level, I'll give an example below that introduces Vico’s idea of the active powers of metaphor. Metaphor is creative as an origin and as a continuing vehicle to construct and modify categories.8 This active and creative element, it's generally admitted, is missing, not only from the traditional accounts of metaphor; but also from accounts of mind and self. I'd like to show that the very structures of metaphor help to relate the schematizations of a person’s experiences with the deeper and the experiencing self.
I know I've asked that you join me in holding on to Piaget's idea of coordinating schemata. But metaphor is very much connected with the act of setting schemata in motion, and I've described metaphor as central to the self's categorizing. I'll now briefly call on some of the implications of C. S. Peirce’s idea that there are categories of icons and icons of categories. I'll focus those icons, which are compatible with the idea of schematization, and hence, with the idea that icon formation and schematization should be pictured in an interplay. These icons would include diagrams and metaphors.9
For the purposes of this book, I stay with the commonly held idea that a metaphor is in the general form of A : B; while an analogy is in the general form of A : B :: C : D. My idea is simply that a metaphor compares two things. But when the metaphor is compared to another metaphor, one relating the two aspects of the self (PP and OP); we have an analogy that catapults the original metaphor to match a variety of targets.
My proposal is this. The experiencing self is at a point from which unseen times can be visualized; so, the metaphor and its "catapult" should launch legitimacy in the analogical structuring of perspective by which I’ll visualize these movements as circles and spirals.
My example is a schematic of a birthday party celebration. I choose it, because we are used to looking at the sort of observable actions involved, and they can serve as a given for what we want to infer ("see") about how they are structured in inner thought.
How I acted at and enjoyed the people, gifts, and celebration at my birthday party last year can be described in a schema. In it, I can place gift givers, emotional reactions, and celebratory behaviors in different slots of different propositions. The whole set of propositions centering on the birthday party plot could be something like computer scientist, Roger Schank’s famous scripts, with their behavioral algorithms. But also, it could be used to generate a story. Call the celebration of last year’s birthday party (BPly), which I might compare to all my others (a class of my birthday parties—BPg).
I can have a metaphor, BPly : BPg, which is now ready for expansion by way of an important analogy. I use the sample analogy to show the potential of metaphor to be an active creative act of the individual. The term, "potential," is not enough to convey the idea. The only way to get at it is to feel like Michelangelo. A sculpture, which is not yet made, is inherent in the shape of the original stone. While this idea has the tone of pre-determination; the stone still has to be viewed, and making an analogy with what the viewer can sculpt is a creative act. Peacocke’s point about a proto-proposition can come into play here. If you describe the self as an agent in the act of proposing a metaphor, is the picture simply a schematic for a metaphor? It'd be like the metaphor you have at the ready? Is the forming of a metaphor anything like the forming of a proto-proposition? Well, both involve a first person consideration.
If we regard the birthday celebration schematically, it can be represented by the propositions by which the different participants play out their roles and behaviors. I can certainly be included in the set of propositions, sometimes as the recipient of an action, like getting a gift; sometimes as the actor, who initiates an action, such as gratitude. So, the self is involved, at least as a schematized agent. However, I’m after a description of the process by which the metaphor begins and changes categories; so, I’ll make a sketch to coordinate with a logical picture of the self in relation to its metaphorizing, and I'll keep in mind Vico’s poetics of metaphor as creative origin.
Sketch of the Self Metaphorizing.
The self is part-and-parcel of the creative act of metaphorizing. What better way to see this than to see the self in the act of metaphorizing? The self defines by and is defined by the very form of transformation from metaphor to analogy. So, I'm going to show the metaphor relating one birthday to another as one relationship, which is brought into a ratio with a second metaphor, that of one aspect of the self with another. That's the "catapult" I described a few moments ago. What’s the role of the metaphor, when an analogy form brings into its apportioning the very relation of the metaphor to the self?
From the general form of the metaphor and analogy, I am going to set up some slots for the birthday example and the relation to the self. Consider the first (the "A") term as a schema of specific experiences of one birthday party and the second (the "B" term) as a category representing the essentials of various such parties. The maker of the metaphor is embodied in these terms, if not as actor in the specific experiences schematized and categorized; then, in the proto-propositions, resonating within the A and B terms.
Now extend A : B to C : D. In this analogy format, the schema (A) can be related to its very construction by the PP—put the PP in the C slot. To complete the analogy, the category (the B term) is related to its origin (in the OP) as the D term. This analogy is important, because it bears on the question, How is the metaphoric relation of the A : B terms conceived in the first place? The C and D terms to which the schema (A) and the category (B) are related in the analogy are those aspects of the self (PP and OP respectively), which appear instrumental to the making of the terms of the metaphor. The analogy relates the maker of the metaphor (A : B) with the making of the analogy (A : B :: C : D) by the alignment (in the general analogy form) of the A with the C and the B with the D terms.
With this sketch of the place and action of the self in a space, structured by metaphor and analogy, we can now look at the bounds and the construction possible in the "birthday"example. Reading it, diagramed below, you should see that the construction of the schema (BPly) is aligned with the self as PP. You should also see how there are acts of plumbing or reflecting the originating categories to construct a new category of past birthday parties (BPg). These acts are shown in relation to the self as OP.
So, the analogy in general and in example form is
A B C D (General form terms)
BPly : BPg :: PP : OP. (The example)
Look at the C : D terms as perspectives of the self. If we return to the idea that all of these relations are taking place in a logical space of the self; then the self within is depicted as at viewing points. There is the viewing point of the PP orbiting, and there are the vantagepoints of the rings, moving inward toward memory. BPly is something the self views from a particular perspective (how I look at it today—from a point PP); while BPg is a structure, reflective of the memorial rings of OP.
While I allude to the rings and orbiting as a testament to Plato’s intuitive portrait of the shape of the inner strivings for harmony, I also mean to say that memory and categorial structuring are intertwined in the acts of creating durable bounds for the objects of experience. To come up with a category of a generic birthday party, lots of details about specific ones have to be left behind. Within the category BPg, the spatio-temporal differences of various schemata, representing descriptions of different birthday parties I’ve had, are reduced down to "the essentials" of experience and memory. Categorial orbiting creates circles of inclusion. They're concentric. What's in the generic circles still has to resonate with the specifics--like an ideal of beauty that evokes all sorts of images that fit together to make a beautiful object. If the circles are concentric, and within each are the identifiable resonances to the others, then we'd have an optimization of harmony.
One sort of resonance, which would build to a status of harmony, is the capture of experience as memory. Picture memories thus, within the concentric circles--the categorial orbiting shaping into a spiral as time moves inexorably, as if a temporal whirlpool. Each rung of time seems to include the ones it succeeds. So, for instance, as in the etymology of a word, the personal history of my own word or idea for "gift"covers not only the recent birthday sweater I received, but may be conceived, as something that spirals outward in time, each time there’s a birthday. Therefore, it includes a toy I might have received as a child, a tie I might have been given as a young man, and so on.
Moments—the transitory moments of contact with and experience of self and object that we call "now"—are akin a special kind of consciousness. The metaphor within the analogy structure accommodating the self as maker and as making an idea is a way of beginning, of activating, the consciousness of self. In the analogy I sketched, self and its aspects are related to each other and to the metaphors (about birthdays) upon which the self operates. Now that I sketched this set of relationships and comparisons, I can now look at the self, too, as an object, as I proceed to view the self in relation to its metaphorizing. Therefore, with this view now revealed, I can use it, in its formalization, as an example of metaphorizing and analogy construction by the subjective self, and of the relations of the subjective to an object self, to describe consciousness—within the compass of my sketch. Can I now depict this consciousness? Do I simply try to formalize it? Just as in sketches that artists make, which mix icons of text (words) with those of pictures, I make the following statement (or is it a picture?) about this kind of consciousness by visualizations somewhere between languages—formula or portrait:
Consciousness is a particular kind of viewing by which a metaphor relating the schematic events to categories becomes an analogy of the "particle point" to the "point of origin."
When the formula is icon, the graphic nature of schemata and the potential localizability of points in relation to each other are measurable. When the portrait is icon, you can view something like the catapulting that takes place when a metaphor is extended by analogy. The viewer of a portrait is always the one, who is outside the painting. So, there’s a regress. The artist paints a portrait of what someone sees; but it is a portrait, only if someone else becomes a future viewer; and whoever that is, will have to step away and be succeeded by someone else. If we say that the artist’s view (A) is to the subject’s (B) as A : B; we have a metaphor; and if we say that a future viewer represents viewpoint C; then we’re almost there at an analogy. (D) is an idealization of what the painting intends; but it is attempted by the continued exposure of the painting to an indeterminate flow of spectators. So, (D) is not reached. A finite slot for a special category of infinitude.The regress is similar in the case of the conscious self as viewer. The conscious self is always outside. The regress is in the relationship of viewing by a consciousness; since it’s outside a given metaphor; and like the PP, it can continue to move to different positions in its "orbiting." The metaphor is a statement—an act and a product—something like a painting or picture that can be expressed schematically. Therefore, the PP has a view of the temporal and logical vicissitudes, expressible within the picture or metaphor. But also, the consciousness, within the PP, is always in a flow to another location or perspective, and that perspective is always a changing relation, not only of consciousness to the metaphor, but also, of the PP to the self as OP. So, the outside consciousness of the PP can create something like a painting or a schematic picture within the metaphor. And, by analogy, this outside consciousness of the PP expands on the objects within the metaphor and on its categorizations relative to the self in its two roles [(PP) and (OP)] in the categorizing process.
Children of the Self.
To fill out a logical picture from this sketch, we have to deal with the differences between the schema and the category. But it will be a bit of work; since this distinction has been absent from such constructivist views of thought and language and metaphor as Lakoff’s. (Or else, the distinction has been conflated.) So, even though contrast between schema and category is a major theme woven through in the course of the book, I briefly sketch some main considerations here:
The logical relation of schema to category is complex. A coherent picture calls for flexible structures like the icon, diagram, and metaphor. It’s by way of these structures that you view, set, and reset the symbolic representations of terms in positions of superordination. In terms of the portrait of the self and its positions of perspective, this liberalized view of depicting logical ordering allows the self as agent to appear at OP and at PP. And the causal direction of schema affecting category and category reshaping schemata can go both ways.
The Vichian perspective is very powerful. Perception is a creative experience; the organism uses the machines of selection and comparison; but it is imagination and inventiveness that pervade originating experiences of seeing objects and events, and that ignite ensuing historical forays to express and interpret them.
Past Constraints and Catapulting to the Present.
There is a tension between the constraining forms of the past and the use of (catapult of) those forms to meet the present by flights of imagination. Once formed, a metaphor's two terms (A : B) constitute a form of the past. The two-term comparison of self (C : D) that catapults the metaphor into an analogy, would then become the force of imagination. The C and D is operative, you remember, when terms relating the metaphor to the subjective self, are referred, respectively, to the PP and the OP. The C : D comparison, by itself, is, of course, also a metaphor in its own right. Anyway, look at the two terms of the A : B metaphor as the prongs of a Y-shaped stick, and the first of the two terms of the self (the PP) as a band stretched across to the two prongs. Now it’s a slingshot. The second term of the self (OP) is like David’s grasp of the band of the slingshot. The self at PP compares its percepts proto-categorially, and at OP aims to define the comparison in terms of a new category, the target or goal of the acting self.
In the tradition of the classic view of C. K. Ogden, a metaphor is an interplay of a percept and a category. This is an inexact interpretation of Ogden, but the idea I'd like to focus is this. In the act of metaphor-making, there is the image you select. And there's a category, serving as the vehicle by which to carry its meaning across different levels. The interplay of percept and category is complex. A case of comparable complexity may highlight the pragmatic aspect of metaphor, because it is action-based, and it is oriented toward the organization of experience. The case is that of the schema in relation to the abstract group. I can have a series of schemata for my actions with an apple (I eat it, store it, give it to someone, etc.). And I can assemble and subtract elements from the schemata to construct an abstract group for apples. These forms too can obviously be looked at as terms that interplay in a metaphor. One form, an action pattern, and the other, a conceptual ordering into which it fits. Not only does the one term--or, if you prefer, logical entity--inform the other, but also there are exchanges. One term structures the other at different points of time, function, and causality. Exchanges determine the orders of logic and meaning.
Exchanges of representations and their logical orders and meanings are set forth in Peirce’s idea of the icon and its vicissitudes of concrete visualization and abstraction. Also, Piaget describes them in the classificatory dynamics and epigenesis of logical groupings. The exchanges could not take place, unless there were identities that permit them. In this regard, patterns can be compared for equivalences and resonances. As I indicated, the meshing and matching idea is widespread—ranging from its Darwinian contexts, such as the resonating of thinking and neural patterns (Calvin, 1998), to philosophical descriptions, such as the consistency of perceptual and conceptual frames of reference in the context of "spatial reasoning" (Peacocke, 1992/1995).
A mesh-as-match idea is indigenous to the combination of physicalism and Darwinian evolutionary constructivism. Reality is physical, and the interactions of organismic action and physical dynamics yields change by construction. So, the mesh-as-match idea is therefore also fundamental to the assumption that we'll be able to see the resultant parallels in the many different sorts of linguistic schematizations that tend toward veridically representing cognitive space. Thus, the meshing in the ontological/pragmatic combination, and the matching of its parallels in models that are constructed, appear strongly in the ideas of cognitive linguist, George Lakoff. Probably the most graphic way to show the mesh-as-match construction of reality by equivalences is in the Escher drawings and paintings you'll find in my references here in the Portrait Gallery and in the book. Reality is a matter of transformation, if not by formal identity; then, by patterns that change and exchange, one into the other.
While, as you'll see in the course of the book, it’s my position, that this transformational approach explains away, but does not explain, subjective experience, I very much identify with a naturalistic approach to the icon and to logical forms. I assume constraints of form in how we perceive. From this assumption, I derive the natural logical structure of categories. With this view, we have an organism with internal self-regulatory functions and adaptive purposes in its goal setting. All of its metaphoric re-targeting to accommodate its internal regulations and ecological adaptations involves an exchange of its frame of reference with the contents of a frame—categorial or schematic. First the form has primacy over the content; then, switch! --The other way around. All of this exchanging leads to the complex interplay of category and schema.
In his review of this idea that we switch organizational frames with our focus on concrete details and features of information, Danesi (1993) points out that it found expression in the gestalt theory of percepts; wherein "categorical perception" is characterized as classification. This idea has its classical side in that categories take on a primacy; yet, it also can be seen to be presently very au courant, insofar as it’s related to meshing and matching. There's a third "m," too. It is the "mapping" of cognitive structuring, with and on representations of the exploratory navigations of the individual in ecological space.
Symbolize these exchanges of schema and category as a coin with two sides. Side one. The schematic. A collection of representations of details and features results in classification as a product or outcome. This sequence is typified by Lakoff’s view of the individual’s perceptuo-motor behaviors. Those behaviors, actions, and their networking, which succeed in navigations of ecological spaces, sum to a pattern he calls a conceptual category. Side Two. Categories. Peacocke describes the sequence of exchanges in an opposite direction: conceptual grasp precedes visualization.
From this Side two perspective, the primacy of categorization is multifariously rooted in different forms of comparison. You can discern many Aristotelian elements in Peacocke’s description of categories and of the odd classificatory exchanges of metaphor. The seminal idea for this perspective is in Aristotle’s view that thought and action serves the purposes of the living being, as actor. Even so, the search for the seminal idea of categorial primacy can certainly not have its stop point there. If I return to Plato’s view of thought, which is often seen as more abstract and less embedded in the biology of the organism, the primacy of categorization still appears, albeit in another form.
So, that's what I'll do. I return to Plato’s exploration of the harmonies of the soul and its tensions, and I see two things. A) The mini-micro-world of the individual moves and is set in motion by the forms and movements of the macro-world or cosmos. B) The soul of the individual revolves "on itself." Point A is compatible with the primacy of categories; since its forms and their harmonies are determinative in exchanges of movement and any resultant organization. Point B, in its focus on inner exchanges, is compatible with the role of the two terms of self (PP; OP). As I described it, this role is a function of a metaphorical relation.
Metaphor, the Proto-logical Catapult.
Along with these ideas of categorization's interplay with schematization, I posit a proto-logical phase, deep within the subjective self. To find this phase, you'd have to travel "way down deep" into the inward directed spirals of the OP. You might imagine this as a journey into the memorial rungs; hence, a retrospection. All objects of the self begin somewhere there as categories and have their juxtapositions in a complementary category of whatever they are not. For the self's ideas of the self, for the logic of their production, and for their meanings, as its products, there is growth; because the OP is generative and in a state of tension with the PP. Therefore, (and for other reasons), yes, there is growth, and yes, the growth is constrained. The categories are inner constraints. Let me supplement the book's descriptions of the movements of the OP and the PP with another image here. It's an image of the movement as two-way bridge traffic that can be self-regulated by mirrors.
The journey of the subjective self as particle point provides ecological information and patterns of features and events, refracted and reflected in categorial forms within the self, as origin point. The reflection and refraction is a two-way bridge traffic, each way guided by mirrors that show on the ends of the bridge—entry and exit—thereby displaying facing and leaving points for both directions of traffic.
Well, aside from these proposals of origin and constraint by determinative forms, what happens as a result of the interplay? How does the interplay take you from what you see in an ecological situation to a stable symbolization? I'll make some more sketches.
From the vantage of any present point of consciousness, you think backwards to your constraints. As if spun inward into the whirlpool, the objects of the self can penetrate the origin point, where they are re-formed within concentric circular boundaries. This is my "logical" picture of the transformation of groupings into groups or set structures. Now, so symbolized, all such projections from the self, reside in the inner rungs of its logical space, and have logical complements. They’ve originated there as products of vectors emanating from a center point. As products, they come to reside there in orbits directed inward toward a dead center point. Hence, the sort of composition Rudolph Arnheim describes as centric. All of this seems dynamic, especially in the eyes of the viewer, who can but look at the dead center point, helplessly watching the disappearance of the elusive origin.
Loss of Dynamic Origin and Gain of Transformative Operations.
Further, however, the viewer can see the concentric circles form a durable pattern that reflects a logical set and its complementary set structure. These constrain the dynamics of the self’s actions in generating and regulating its representations and their orderings. The constraint is the very set structures that circumscribe the characteristics of the symbolized projections of self. But, in establishing these constraints, the logic of the set and complement permit the inclusion of logical identity and contradiction. So, there's a consolation for the fact that the wonderful moment of origin fades into an irretrievable past. The tradeoff for the fading view of our generative dynamics is by way of the constraints, which are the residue and legacy of our origins. The generative dynamics are succeeded by what they, themselves, created. In this way, the forms remain, and by seeing through them, we gain control of transformative operations of transportability and reversibility.
Anyway, the objects that a subjective self can project can include representations of the individual self. I can come up with versions of my self that I portray for myself and that I communicate to others. These versions might constitute an objective self. So, there can be an objective self—one stable enough to offer rational systems—which may be observed by others with stable rational systems. I do not want to disparage the usefulness of what others can see about a character, like E. A. Robinson’s Richard Cory—whose manner and action others agree upon; whose inner feelings, no-one knows. This observable figure is an objective self. It consists not only of different schematic pictures, which follow a rational causal sequence of events in layers of representation of physical space, but also of different symbol systems, in a manifold of different categorial perspectives, which you and I can picture within logical space. Thus, those, who observed Kant on his fabled walks and at his clock-setting behavioral appearances, were also able to type him characterologically. Schemata and categories are pictures—and by and with each, we can picture the objective self.
However, how do you generate not a legacy, but a child of thought? The difference is that a legacy is something like dead text; while a child is a living and growing being. We're back to Vico's idea of the metaphor as an originating act. Let me say it now in one gulp. By the metaphorizing of the subjective self, the objective self is transformed from the vagaries of the present, as a continuity of diachronic time frames, to the synchronic perspectives of categories and set structure. I'm saying that the objective self is something you observe after the fact. Therefore, it's temporal mode is like a series of snapshots--frames, which fit together; but the action, when you view it is past and dead. But with the act of metaphorizing, we seize the moment.
Thus, the causal arrow moves from the subjective to the objective self. It’s important to point out that the OP and the PP are dynamic points within the subjective self; while the objective self is a product with transformative operations capabilities. For any rebirth of the self, the transformation proceeds inward again, back to the subjective. From a point (PP), you look closely at your clock-setting and at Richard Cory type displays. All objects of the self, including the objective self, are its own products—your creations. Even your objective self has products. But operational transformations as cognitive objects are mere "virtual" children of the objective self. They live within its domain, but they do not have uniqueness; their components can be assembled and disassembled; and they can be re-identified as different assemblages or groupings.10
The Three Selves and the Two Pictures of Space.
I describe a subjective self, an objective self, and I also use the term self. I should explain the use of these terms in relation to what I propose to depict for each--a logical and a visual space. From a logical point of view, the self is the inclusive superset. Thus, the self includes a subjective self, which in turn includes as its projections and products, an objective self, shown in Diagram 1 as the inner most circle. (Diagrams 1 through 3 are drawn especially for the Gallery. They do not appear in the book.)
From a visual point of view of growth and movement in an ecological context, the subjective self is in a dialectical play, which is something like a perceptual switch from one superordinating point of inclusion to another. If you want, you can look at this as a case of switching from upward to downward causation. Karl Popper (Popper and Eccles, 1981) describes the upward and downward switches of causal direction as accounts of the effects of one level of creativity of structure on another. Upward causation refers to the effects of a particle, which, by its orbiting movement, builds toward and determines the "whole structure"—something you might label a system. Downward causation, on the other hand, refers to the effects of the whole structure on an elemental "particle" level. Thus, the genus-species relations of "self as point of origin" and "self" as particle point can switch as depicted in Diagram 2.
In the Diagram (2) where OP is the genus, we see the internal structure of the subjective self; whereas, where PP is the genus, we see the external structure. As described above, the internal structure of the subjective self is composed of categories—in visual terms, ellipses and circles that enclose groupings and tend toward groups or logical sets. The ellipsoid forms show the resolution of the spiraling lines of growth and adaptation. Lines move toward closing as circles, and ultimately circles depict the stable objectification of subspaces in which the features, objects, actions and their relations are represented by symbols, which are reversible and transportable.
An unobtainable object—the impossible visualization of the subjective self—is the driving force for this book. But, I believe that a portrait of this impossible object is possible, if I depict the self as a logical space. The argument for the self as a logical space is this. The self is a logical superset, in virtue of it being the limiting category of itself as an individual biological life. As a logical superset, the self is limited and biologically embodying. Therefore, the self is non-replicable and non-reversible.
(The null case for the self, since it is unique, and there is none other, is zero, rather than an antipodal logical complement. A product of the self, like its display to others, is a logical subcategory of the self and can be viewed as an object. Subcategories can be in opposition to each other; so, an alternate form can logically oppose a display of the self. If you show yourself to others as an extrovert; then I might well see your objective self as "extrovert." Yet, I still know that it's you. There's only one case for you; and its null is zero. However, the null case for an extrovert is not zero; since this null includes an "introvert." In the book, I try to align this way of looking at the logic of the self with some version of Piaget's concepts of the grouping and the group. In brief, the self is a grouping; whereas, its product, the objective self, is a group.)
From the self as set, non-reversible goal selections are projected as icons. The self as particle point (PP) constructs diagrams, metaphors, and their analogy structures. I picture these as objects in the growth path, cordoned off and "pulled along" by the self as PP. These PP constructed structures of metaphor and analogy are funneled into the self as (OP). There, they are represented as reversible logical objects (subsets)--which paradoxically, are situated within the irreversible logical space of self. To bring this about, the self has to be both set and its own subset, and reflexively depict its subjective and objective features and functions. So, I depict the subsets in an inner rung of the logical space of self. Operations within this inner rung are reversible, because logical complements are negations rather than subtractions; hence do not equal zero.11
As you know, these descriptions are sketches. You might begin to fill in some of the picture yourself, but at some point you should read my book on the subjective self. My sketches here should prepare both you and me for the portrait, showing the self in the terms of this kind of logical space. With this idea in place within the portrait, my next objective in the book is to describe the process by which the self originates and articulates reflexively, moving from set status to subset status and back again in its logical space. To include both the originating and resultant object structure of a logical space of self requires showing how the inclusion relations can be seen from the two different perspectives of the self. Therefore, within the superset of the self, the OP and the PP genus-species relations can be reversed; yet, there is an experiential point of view, from which inclusion relations can be stable, as if seen from a single perspective. Here’s where a visual portrayal of space helps us.
An icon can be a depiction of a visual space. Whether that's a diagram, or a map, or a portrait's bounds, the icon is a sign that is a representation. But, as Peirce points out, the representation, itself, is "seen" as a thing or object or phenomenon. Hence, an icon—like one of visual space—can serve two functions here, where the inner portrait is of the relations of the two perspectives of self. In serving the self, the icon performs two functions; it represents and it originates. In a concrete image of a space and its bounds, the icon represents the process of origination, as the self experiences it. And, in virtue of its functioning as an object to be seen, the icon serves a conscious self, who does the seeing—and, of course, the originating.
Movements, Orbiting, Encircling.
So, the visual space I depict shows the representations of the self in a way that relates them to its active growth, adaptation, and learning. Moving about in its own space, the self as particle point creates forms and objects. It also moves around in logical space to different positions, from which to view time and movement.12 I call these movements of the self processes, by which to structure viewing points or construct pictures. There are three. To complement this sketch, I’ll introduce an outline of the three processes, framing, bracketing and negation.
These processes are set in motion by the orbiting of the PP. The result is the structuring of pictures from various viewing positions. This is easy to see, if you regard the movements of the self to be the orbitings that look like spiral forms, and if you consider that the concentric circlings are categorial. Within a given rung would be the meanings constructed by the self and included within its categories. The processing by framing, bracketing, and negation, which I'll describe briefly, is a matter of logical structuring. But, it's a sort that has semantic outcomes, as if, establishing a first circle for each definition in a series applied to basic meanings. These are means by which to set in place the identities, which can resonate from rung to rung. With growth and new experiences, the self's challenge is to maintain structure and equilibrium. Thus, as Plato says about the orbiting movements of the soul, they struggle against tensions to achieve harmony.
In Emily Dickinson’s poetic defining, particularly in her metaphoric conceptualizations, Cynthia Hallen (1998) finds the echoes of Webster’s idea that definition is "to circumscribe." Hallen points out that "The linear lines of poetry are not just flat and two-dimensional lines on a page; they are verses or "turned" lines. . . Words curve into meaning like the lines of a circle." (p. 7). So does the orbiting of definition begin with first circles. They spin outward to make more and more harmonious contact and interplay with the contexts they touch—from within the circumscription of inner bounds, on one side, to the contiguities of the external meanings that are complementary and on the outside of the bounds. In this way concentric circles represent the logic and the movement of definitions. They appear visually as Escher-like inner and outer forms, which are transformed by exchanges of their bounds and their inner embodiment. Whichever form is in focus--the inner or the outer--is counterposed by its outer complementary forms in the negation of forms in space. Escher’s (1938) Day and Night is a good example, because the logic of form complementarity is illustrated along with the various transformations of semantic implicatures associated with the oppositions of "day" and "night."
A logician would say that all this picturing merely portrays the connotative and denotative aspects of a class. But I mean to say here that a logical class is a portrait in that it’s a work in progress, and in that the continuing movement of orbiting does this work. This section is written as if my sketches introduce definitions. The definitions move in orbits; so that I’ve now introduced my first orbitings around my ideas of the logic of the visual space of self. I will now move to the next rung, where the first circle for all three processes I just named will be made. The book is written this way too; you'll see the terms and icons moving in ways congruent with the portrait's structure.
After reading this next picture of the three processes, I'd say that you should have a good night’s sleep. Then begin reading the book, if you have not already done so. If you have; then begin the next chapter, right after that night's sleep. But first, just before opening the book, let the circles of thought begin to move. When you get up in the morning, you’ll have an unconscious harmony between the groove you’ll be in and the orbiting of the next chapters you face.
A Triptych: Sketch in Three Planes.
Framing. It’s a process of PP-OP oscillation. This is " . . . a flow periodically changing direction" (Webster, 1973), and I picture this taking place along vectors conjoined in a triangular route. This route triangulates a segment of the objective self in its ecological space. The segment is a selection of a bound spatio-temporal unit. The self at PP can see the segment at a particular present moment, from which, the self can funnel it into itself at OP. This is all depicted below in Diagram 3, which I explain in a moment. The general idea is that you can become conscious or otherwise sentient by way of an immediate sense of your contact with what you are viewing (That's at PP). Call that immediate sense a sense of the now or the present.
Arnheim (1988), in his gestalt inspired view of art and its viewing vantage points, describes such particular present perspectives as vectors that relate eccentrically. Interestingly, Peacocke, whose view is schematically related to the structure of propositions, comes to picture a similar idea. (To see the similarity, I ask that you assume that movement along the vectors can be seen diachronically from a point A to a point B; even though, it can also be seen from B to A, and then both sequences can appear, synchronically.) Recall that Peacocke posits a proto-proposition to account for the first person—we can call such a person or entity, "the viewer." Schemata are spatial; so, proto-propositions are tied to events in space. Peacocke proposes the idea of the "positioned scenario"—"a spatial type . . . tied down to a particular location, orientation, and time." (p. 67). I relate this to what I am trying to portray about the PP of the self and the point of present perspective. The self’s viewpoint at PP "positions" events, so that the self’s propositions about them can be organized in frameworks like episodes, scenarios, and generally, situations.
Now I’d like you to look at Diagram 3. Its purpose is to explain how present perspectives move toward an organization of the self within a space. I want to work with the diagram to advance these matters in order to include the logic and visualization of the self.
The subjective self as PP looks to the past and to the future (represented in the Diagram as line AB with the PP in the center of the line). The time coordinates, Apast and Bfuture, relate to the events depicted in a layer (L) of the spiral. Lines A and B, like vectors running inward toward a center © demarcate the events in (L) as triangle ABC, which funnels into the circling structures within OP. These internal structures are the abstract (symbolic) representations in OP.
So, in logical terms framing is a process of constructing inclusion relations. However, we are talking about a natural logic issuing from the proto-categorizing of the sentient self and developing by outwardly spiraling points of perspective from which to see/create spatio-temporal forms. These schematically represent existential and sociological events. Scenarios?
If you agree to the idea of scenarios, you're making a picture of a series of events, as it were, pre-written, to conform to a premise, like that of a plot, which unfolds in the direction of a solution to various problems or contradictions or predicaments. This idea introduces the dramatic as a pre-viewability and an immediate viewability of the schematic in front of you. Thus, the dramatic is a temporal mode, permitting a synchonic view of time. You can try to take out the dramatic, and instead, describe the patterns of action of a situation. That might produce a comfortable diachronicity of time and events. However, since the self at PP moves on to a future orbiting, drama would be re-introduced in the first person time mode.
Anyway, even if you would like to stay away from the terminology of "plot predicaments," within the schema’s constraints, contraries co-exist. We do not need the plot contradictions in Gertrude's character to appear as a function of her behavior toward Hamlet's father at a point prior to the start of the action, and her behavior toward Hamlet, at a point somewhat after the action started. We can easily find Hamlet in the course of the action displaying contrary tendencies of sensitivity and cruelty, and this can be shown in simple diachronic sequences of the contraries of cruel action toward someone acting innocently. So, we can find the self, in its role as active and passive viewer, engaged in what I can call its logicwork. This may certainly look like Piaget's description of the compensations of cognitive organization, whereby logical ordering resolves contraries. But, put into my own terms, the logicwork of the self is an interaction of its views of dynamic situations and its categorial creativity. Thus, we are dealing with the self, as point of potential, as well as the self, described inside its schematicized dynamics! The potential for set-subset classification and contradiction is a source for new possible inclusions (transcendences). Accordingly, framing, as one of the three processes by which to structure viewing points, is a creative and originating process advancing logical form causally in art and in science.
Bracketing. It’s a process of recursive structuring of the Cogito (Descartes’ "I think; therefore, I am") as a statement. The recursively unfolding structure shows the reflexive levels of the self. In fact, the Cogito is most often related to the questions of mind, instead of issues of the self. The Latin translates, "I think," but the English separates the subject from the verb (And so does the French). Anyway, in focusing the verb, thinking is easy to see as an action, and the mind is then nominalized. Thus, many thinkers inveighing against Cartesian dualism set up a "strawman;" and try to argue against separating a mind and its consciousness (thinking). This maneuvering permits schematization, all the way. The I, which is the thematic subject of Descartes' conclusion, is lost in a scurrying to schematize. If the I were not separated from the verb, as in the Latin; then, the I would still emerge as the subject of Descartes' proposal. It is the subject of the question asked, namely, what is certain knowledge. The answer concerns how something is known, but what's known, is in the concluding phrase.
Well, lots of good things come from parsing. So, let's continue to unfold. Where is the action of thought, if we continue with the parsing, by which the I is separated from the verb? Just as the whole phrase, "I think" can be seen as an unfolding of the context of the "I am"; the I of "I think" folds out as its context. Thus, I imagine that Descartes, himself, must have unfolded the Cogito, itself, and, in that the I is thereby revealed, he had the thought,
I think [that] (I think; therefore I am.)
This expansion could go on forever. At least, as long as whoever is thinking is alive to pursue it! While one way to see this recursion is as a matter of repeatable steps, and this can be set forth in linear terms, like the terms of a sentence; the I terms of the Cogito may also be seen as semantic units that include each other.
Let's take the Cogito's two I terms and look at them as semantic units. Call them I packs. The first is "I think," and the second, "I am." Depending on what "I think" means, it implies or includes "I am"—depending on what it means. If "I think" means, "I generate propositions", and if "I am" means "I generate"; then, you can have circles of inclusion, but it's not clear which I pack subsumes the other. The "I am" unit can run a wide circle of meaning around the I, cast here as the generator of all propositions, including "I think." Thus, the second I pack includes the first. However, if the semantic units are both folded in to a semantic context, encircled by the category of "propositions;" then each I pack is a proposition. Now, the picture is that the first I pack is more generic than the second.
(So, some would work with semantic units by converting them to propositional forms, and then, make the case that propositions are at a higher level of generativity than an I, as actor, who is acting within its form. This I pack would merely be a sub unit of a proposition. And to keep the inclusion patterns complicated, remember that there are those poets, who could argue that particular acts include the more abstract ones.) Anyway, let me now come away from merely listing these complications of meaning and logic. I return to my outlines of the movement of the self. Cynthia Hallen reminds us that defining semantic units means creating circuits. Therefore, when we either project a meaning or view a meaning, it's circumscribed. But also, we've seen that in either of these endeavors, from our viewing points, we can move circles and objects, and watch circuit traffic go in different directions. Therefore, even though the inclusion relations we construct are subject to dynamic change, they are still circles of logic. And further, these logical relations are implied when we are talking about bracketing as I’ve defined it—namely, as related to the circuits (or the reflexive levels) of the self.
Within the process of bracketing are its product, logical propositions, which represent the logical relations of terms. These appear as "sentences" with subject predicate relations; they are forms, constructed by a syntactic set of rules. From this aspect, which, if you like, you can call "linguistic," I refer to an agent in relation to its syntactic slot as subject and to the object of a predication as a grammatical "patient." In all, my assumption is these descriptive schemes—logical and syntactic—are depictions, and by them one can describe narratively (make a schematic picture of) the psychology of the self.
We looked at framing as somewhat akin to defining or setting boundaries for inclusion relations. We looked at bracketing as an organization of propositions via their linguistic extensions. Tentatively, we can characterize framing as a categorial matter and bracketing as a schematization consideration. For the self, there are logical and linguistic aspects to the portrait we're making.
I propose that to account for the reflexive navigations of the self from superset to subset requires a picture of movement of the terms of logical propositions of causal relations, particularly, those in which the self or the ‘I’ can appear as agent and/or patient syntactically. We might make a convincing account of this by describing bracketing. But also, the categorial picture changes, when the set subset patterns expand. Therefore, interplay between bracketing of linear processes and terms and framing of inclusion relations is necessary.
What remains open is the third order of reference of the ‘I’—at a psychologically subjective level included within the logic of the self; yet, if pictured, it's somewhere beyond the frame within which the brackets and its operators or functions are depicted. Maybe this is the I "understood" that my grammar teachers kept telling us about—whatever is functioning as the "unseen" I, irrespective of whether by today’s attempt to portray it, it becomes tomorrow’s penultimate referent within the frame.
Negation. It’s a process of setting, re-setting, and exchanging bounds and moving toward logical identity by closing off subsystems. I characterize negation as an operator, too, and my purpose is to have it both ways. As a process, it can be compared to the movement patterns of bracketing and framing. As an "operator" of the self, it can be used to affect both bracketing and framing. What I mean by "operator" is similar to Lockwood’s (1989/1992) description of a "function." Is the operator inside or outside the process? Does negation, as an operator, govern the process, or is it governed within the rules of the process, itself?
Negation sets out its own circles—as it were, passively. The very act of circumscribing a meaning cuts two ways, demarcating what is and is not circumscribed. What is, is penultimately a matter of identity; what is not, is a matter of negation of identity—however, that's penultimate too. The negation of what is, sets off what is not the case; thereby closing off what is the case from what's different from it. So, insofar as an identity becomes possible, negation is also an act of conception. The soul according to Plato moves in circles for the Same and for the Different. This is a constant motion, and it's something of what I mean by saying, negation is a process of the self. But the self can also actively engage this process, and employ it as a function or operator on its products or expressions.
What is bundled and related in sentential formats is subject to bracketing—a process that varies the boundaries and extensions of terms and phrases.13 Negation, as an operator outside bracketed syntactic complexes, can be variously distributed within the brackets and among the various components of a proposition. In relation to framing, negation, as an operator directed by the self, provides a common boundary—on one side, the self’s projected categories; on the other, their complements.14 Negation thus imposes set boundaries and juxtaposes contexts, resulting in complements and null cases. Within these you can find pictures that can express the conscious ‘I,’ who can escape frames and their bracketed sentences and propositions.
A Play within the Play: Hamlet’s Conscience as Mobius Twist
The Logic of the Play: Plot and Category
A plot is a perspective that may be viewed as a structuring of the happenings within a schema. The plot, as perspective, extends to a whole series of ancillary connections between the events and the agents of the schema. Extended this way, the schema can be seen to fold out a meaningful and logical development and/or construction of events. The agents, actions, outcomes, and courses of events may appear something like happenings in a story. From the plot perspective, these happenings are related to a central proposition, which is in an inferential format.1
The agency of the self plays out in the form of the proposition. This role and its denouement can be displayed as syntactically articulated in a schematic space. This space includes tree-like structuring and organizing events within scenarios. Thus, when the plot is unfolded, the perspective it provides may be used to view and pre-view how the story either would or should unfold--as matters consistent with the logic of the perspective. Since I view these matters as accessible to scenario structuring and viewing, the dramatic example I want to share with you (in conjunction with Chapter 10 of the book) is of a proposition from a play. I'd recommend that for this section of the Portrait Gallery, you do read at least Chapter 10 of the book first.
Hamlet is the play—in which to capture the conscience of the King! I admit, this "conscience" focus may not be a scholar's choice for the play’s most central proposition. Shakespeare and playwrighting scholar B. D. N. Grebanier’s (1979) analysis is that the play is set to answer the question, "Will Hamlet kill the King?" However, from where I view things, a value—a should—is set into the plot’s central proposition. So, the plot is a perspective; and what that perspective is, depends on the angle from which the viewer makes constructions.
From my point of view, the story fits within a central proposition that makes a moral outcome the pre-viewing scenario that you look at to organize the happenings within the play. That proposition is this. "If Claudius killed the King; the King’s son (Hamlet) should seek revenge or resolution." Hamlet, of course, would remain the central character. If, however, you also assume that Hamlet accepts the central proposition as a moral imperative, and if this proposition, in fact, represented the plot, Hamlet’s agency—the central character’s free will, as drama critic W. T. Price (1892) puts it, --would be the focus. This is because acceptance of the moral imperative does not preclude its evaluation. Thus, the more primary question, which governs whether Hamlet will kill the King, is "Should Hamlet kill the King, even if it is his honor-bound duty to do so?"
Since I am primarily concerned with the self, the issue of agency looms large, and this way of pre-viewing the Hamlet scenario is apt for what I want to explore with you. So, my point concerns the workings of logic, its syntactic implementations, and the capacities they enable.
However, please read and view my reflections about Hamlet, as if you are perched in a way, so that you can simultaneously see the workings on two different planes. One is a plane of the relations within a schematic in art; the other is a plane on which the workings relate to the various explorations made by the self, as an agent.
Price (1892; p. 74) writes,
Plot is similar to composition in painting. . . Action—with all tending to one point, as in a spider’s web—will produce a plot.
The plot has a proposition, but it’s also filled with story-line events that may be related in tree-like structures ancillary to the proposition’s elements. So, here we have the schematic structuring of the vectors we talked about. Hamlet’s attitudes can be variously directed--toward clouds, toward killing, toward the King, toward the "should" of the proposition. But suppose they are offshoots of branches of the plot proposition. Branching off the terms of the plot proposition are the meanings of its terms. So, one branch leads toward the idea of "revenge," and perhaps, another toward the idea of "resolution." Another, by the way, leads toward more than one idea of the should. Therefore, thematic collections of various sorts—with a variety of syntactical forms—are branch tributaries to the central casual direction of the central proposition—or to one like it. A branch meaning like "revenge" can have an offshoot attitude like "Revenge is a wrong to right a wrong." So, in short, collecting the happenings of the characters' motives, actions, and the details of the story, and the meanings of the outcomes, is structured relative to the central proposition.
As I say, that proposition then functions as a perspective on these collections of themes, meanings, and happenings. But there are multiple points of time to consider, too. The proposition before, during, and after the actions of the drama is pre-viewed. While we can say that a study that's in full bloom would pre-view and view both the plot proposition and all its branches and tributaries; it might be economical to focus just the plot proposition in terms of fundamentals of its assertion. Remember, my view is that what's fundamental in this proposition is the should issue. So, before (and during and after) collecting the happenings and placing them in the scenario by which you look at the play's unfoldings and outcomes, there has to be an evaluation of what marks the should.
With all these concerns about drama and the play plot and perspective, let me bring you back, for a moment, to the book, in which, I make a portrait of the subjective self. To do this, I should make explicit a corollary of the point I made, a moment ago, concerning the two planes you should be viewing simultaneously. The description of scenario making and plot perspective is meant here not merely as an example of how to look at a play like Hamlet. More to the point, it's meant as a perspective on how to examine and visualize the action and happenings, with which a self and its agency shuttle back and forth from making the action for viewing and viewing that action. The self appears in propositions that represent its pre-viewing, and the self's agency plays a role in the unfolding of the outcomes produced.
Here is a very general description, in which the logic and the syntax are unfolded in a schematic, so as to structure the action in a proposition, and also so as to place its fundamentals in position for evaluation. Icons of particulars—events, objects, agents (like the "x’s" I describe in Chapter 10 of the book)—have features, such as a . . . n. Any icon designating an event or token with those features goes into the "x" slot in a proposition. Like this. An x a day keeps the y away. A branch in the tree diagram connected with the site for the x pile is another pile of items with features a . . . n. Maybe the items are pears. Maybe, rotten apples. The nature of the relationship of the branch with the site has different syntactic possibilities. Pears relate to apples by way of a different sort of verb compared to the relation of rotten apples to apples. The first relation is some sort of copulative verb denoting an equivalence relation, the second, a verb denoting a transformation process. Correspondingly, a complex story about seeking out apples, or a primeval drama about coveting one, can be diagramed as a set of propositions. These propositions are perhaps superordinated by thematic categories. A major branch of the diagram of such a complex story can involve a grouping of ways of collecting and assessing a . . . n features. This grouping may be an evaluative category that can function to separate rotten from good apples or even righteous from lascivious attitudes toward apples.
Now let's re-focus the agency issue, but do so in terms of the questions about what Hamlet should do. In Hamlet, there's an evaluative category governing Hamlet’s attitude toward resolution by action. It involves agency, but it directs this agency toward issues that branch off from conscience. So, to be an actor, who resolves wrong things by his own action involves Hamlet's right to be the instrument of resolving the wrong done by another. Remember I structured a basic question for the plot as follows: "Should Hamlet kill the King, even if it is his honor-bound duty to do so?" In this part of the discussion, I'm supposing that there are governing categories that are offshoots of conscience. So there is a category of action to resolve wrongs, which, itself, splits into two directions for answers to the question, "Where does the positive evaluation of what should be a resolution belong?" In the direction of resolution by action toward others? In the direction of resolution by action toward the self? By the way, that this question is the perspective by which the main character moves in relation to the plot proposition, attests both to the moral imperative and to the free will to be engaged.
The category, action to resolve wrongs, twists into a Mobius band.2 At the band's ends, there are linguistic transformations of the two different directions such action can take. "To be or not to be" may be a penultimate prototype of the opposing directions symbolizing the core meaning of such transformations. The opposing possible directions face each other as reciprocals of nobility. "To be" is take arms and resolve wrong by way of action toward others. "Not to be" is to move against oneself. The category, itself, is one of propositions, each of which is like those of a plot or a story. However, the category spins on an axis that moves it round and round, so that it can stop at viewing points of each of the reciprocal possibilities and their values. When you pre-view the propositions of this category, your aim is to set a plot in motion. So, when, the self, as viewer, pre-views; it's with the hope of finding a suitable schema. Once the schema, or its linear layout in a sentential format, is available to routinize the pile up of x’s; a proposition like that of the plot can be set forth.
Here, in this case, the x’s are the particulars of Hamlet’s evaluations of his experiences, and these evaluated particulars determine the weightings of the propositions of the category. For central propositions like that for the Hamlet plot, as a viewer of the play, I have a major category. Roger Brown, the psycholinguist, might say that I have a name or label for the category. It’s "conscience."
The category, ©, may be conscience and its series of member propositions. But © is an "x" too. ©, itself, fits into the sentence slot of a plot proposition, and, as an "x," it can be at various case positions. Now, please act as the viewer, looking at your own viewing and pre-viewing. We can continue to direct this sort of query to the play, Hamlet, but keep right toward the front of your consciousness, that this discussion is meant to relate to the subjective self as viewer and as creator of plots and plays. As I've asked many times, please look at your pre-viewing and at its viewpoint from the vantage of a schematic, but also look at this category, as it may exist on one or more planes different from that on which Hamlet struggles with his evaluation.
Thus, I ask you to look at the play, as I’ve asked you look at the portrait I sketch here in the different sections of the Portrait Gallery and that I depict in the book. When you do, the nature of conscience is a function as seen by you the viewer—of the day. To put all this relating of self, viewing, and conscience in perspective, I cannot do more here than to refer to the scholar and critic C. S. Lewis’s Cambridge Lectures (1959). In them, he traces the development of meanings of the concept of conscience, and related the transformations to Shakespeare’s time and textual contexts. This mini-journey of his and ours gives us an opportunity to link the artist’s awareness of the viewer with the scientist’s proposal that awareness evolves from exploration and adaptation, emerges as sentience, and transforms into self-reflectiveness.
Agents and Action: Plot, Category, Conscience, Awareness, and Self-Reflection
In brief, in his analysis of literature from ancients through modern times, Lewis follows the development of the term, "conscience," in relation to the awareness of the individual person as a reflexive being. You can view conscience evolving from denoting an external witness, to an internal witness, and to an internal lawgiver.
The "witness"pictures are proto-categories, maintaining a unity between the person and others, even though the general direction is toward the conscience as an internal schematic. In the spirit of Lewis's argument, how much this internal schematic is seen and scrutinized by the individual is also a function of the development of conscience over the transitions of time and culture.
Another step in the movement of the term "conscience" relative to the two poles (or ends of the Mobius band) is the picture of "internal lawgiver"—one who is specifically relating the laws to the context of her other beliefs. The category, conscience, becomes more stable, having, as a cognitive object, the status of a body of moral laws or propositions, which are a subset of mind. This kind of "x" is something like a portable constitution the individual can take from one scene to the next.
Remember "x" in this case is the category, "conscience." But the "x" is not a mere paradigmatic entity; it also has syntagmatic interconnections with cognitive functions like the individual’s acts of reflection and the experiences of emotions like fear. Therefore, as an ancillary of the plot proposition, "x" itself, although a category, can have shifts of structure, so that it appears in different slots in the plot proposition. Thus, the individual (Hamlet; you; me) can be in the agent slot, and conscience can appear with a verb or object function, when conscience is something the person is reflecting on. But, conscience itself can also be cast as the agent of the action.
Instruments of the Irretrievable Past
How would Peirce look at this category of conscience? In his terms, the "x", once it achieves the status of a symbol, has the stability and autonomy of a transportable linguistic object. It’s no longer caught in the dynamics of assigning origin and destination (goal); it's now dead as a word or an icon. Like the shell our friendly sea creature left behind, the dead icon has the recorded tracings of an algorithm within, and of, its closed system of relations and its instrumentality as a form and as a remnant material. (Of course the algorithm can have—like automatic reflex values—all sorts of preferences, probability ratings and adjustments, and corresponding movement instructions within it.)
Thus, conscience, as a symbol, is relegated to a zero point of consciousness; and it has its manifestations—its appearance can make "cowards of us all." Embodied within a person, it can operate as automatically as a Freudian mechanism. However, it’s not only that it operates on us; we can operate it. It’s not only that after acts of origination, our basic categories recede to a time behind us, and move inexorably toward entropy—while also exerting dynamic, shall we say, gravitation-like pull—it’s also that our cognitive operations can reproduce it.
It’s like the play Shakespeare wrote; it fades from the live unique experience of his writing to the deadness of a metaphor he leaves behind. The seashell again. The replicability of the metaphor, the play, the cognitive product, and the character of Hamlet, are all predicated on the acceptance of simulation of life. At the least, the acceptance of it as usable. "Hamlet" is an algorithm that celebrates, but replicates neither Shakespeare, nor a once living Hamlet. Similarly, conscience allows us to let go of the teachers, who nobly affected us with values, and to hold the values themselves; perhaps with feelings toward the teachers, like our parents. But, we do ultimately leave their individuality and uniqueness behind in the passing of their history. And so, the question now is, "Whose pre-viewing of symbols and metaphors legitimizes those values and propositions in categories we'd like to use to guide ourselves?
German philosopher, Wilhelm Windelband (1900/1998) asserted
. . . how horrifying the thought that I as identity have already lived and suffered, strived and struggled, loved and hated, thought and intended, and that, when that Great Year of the World has run out and the time comes again, I should have to play the same role in the same theater over and over again. And what holds for the individual human life holds especially for the entirety of the historical process; it has value only if it is unique. (p. 19).
A work of art like Hamlet has Hamlet, the dead character. The job of the actor, who plays Hamlet, is to bring a version of the character to seem like a new life. A portrait, like that of Mona Lisa, no longer evokes who she was really. The job of the viewer of the portrait is to see a life in the surface. And, it is to let the movement Rudolph Arnheim describes as "toward the center," take her back—automatically—to the great values focused at point zero. There, unconsciously, the viewer can experience what the real Mona Lisa had shared and what it was that empowered Leonardo to express beauty.
Incidental Music for Chapter 10
The Third Man Theme
You should now have read Chapter 10. Think about it as a concerto, its two movements now played. Wander out of the main halls from which to view the developing portrait; come back to the studio, thinking about the two movements of the concerto. I'll now show you a few sketches I'll make. They are for the concerto's third movement. Now you might look at Chapter 10 as a concerto with these few sketches as its third movement. The experience you have with this is meant to prepare for the next two chapters. So, one more request. Play or hum The Third Man Theme as I present the sketches. (Yes, that's the one played on the zither by Anton Karas.) You'll be the one who rounds out the third movement.
Process as Internal Structure: Framing Categories,
Bracketing Movement in Time, and Negating as Categorizing
Causes and Causes of Causes
In the final two chapters, I’ll show, in the spatial and logical structure of the self, its processes of framing, bracketing, and negation. But first I need to view with you how the categories of self that I proposed—OP, PP, and IS—spatially relate to each other. So, the sketches you'll see now are foreshadowings. Look for the unfolding of the drama of the dynamics and structures, which I introduced as thematic forms of the portrait.
Point of origin have a oneness and a unity--just as a center spot in what is not yet, but would become, a portrait. The One becomes the Many, and in the course of the projections of space from a given point, there are partitions into subspaces. Like time. Or like the beginnings, middles, and ends of a life or a drama. What are the are the sub-spatial partitions that emanate from or unfold out of points of origin? Are the partitions structures? Dynamics?
Here is my sketch of the self as point of origin and the projection of itself and shaping of its own subspaces of self--which I see as frames.
From the PP, when we select the features of experience and relay them to OP, the resultant subspaces are in fact metaphors, relating aspects of the self. When we call these aspects "terms," then it's easy to see that they can be fit into term slots of a metaphor. There, they relate selected features (the tenor of the metaphor) to the OP (the vehicle). Thereby, the ‘I’ invents new icons, almost as gerrymandered divisions of its own space, now cut into newly marked subspaces. The heavy sketch lines I make here show the ‘I’ structuring the frame, which is to be the dynamics of invention.
Sometimes today, as in the times myths prevailed, an icon can relate a person to an animal. You might say that three thousand years ago, the icon, "I, as a bull," would be conceived as more of an identity than a resemblance. Still, the form of the metaphor accommodates either the identity or the resemblance. (This is perhaps something we can disagree about, if you want to say that the mythic icon is syncretic. However, I don't want to get into that exposition here, and will settle to say that from the point of view of our time, I'm talking about metaphor.)
So, "I, as a bull" is the comparison,
I : Bull.
For this metaphoric comparison, I can frame off a scenario space. In it, ‘I’ can run around, as if "some order of the penultimate ‘I’" were "in a china shop." The gerrymandering, which cuts this subspace away from other subspaces of the self, its meanings of "I" and its meanings of "bull," creates an odd shape to the ‘I,’ (now a projection of the self) giving it a framed domain. This domain is a space accommodating all sorts of extensions of the metaphor.
A wonderful portrayal of such a subspace with not only a mythic quality to the space, itself, but also with the feel of the movement of the very agency of the imaginative thought making the myth is William Blake’s painting, Whirlwind of Lovers (Gerten, 1996-1998). The transaction depicted is from a self, projecting its agency, and thereby, framing its dynamic of invention. Look for yourself, and you'll see, in the actions of the figures and in their relation to time and space, a playing out of the "whirlwind" metaphor.
The transaction from the self to its framed dynamic is brokered by the structure of metaphor. The frame sets the bounds of subspaces, and it functions as a superordinating category--in fact, accommodating terms and their exchanges, from the point of view of categorial ordering.
Let me give an example. A frame might set out the space in which a self reaches out to love another person. The frame is a dynamic space, in which icons can be processed in specific action patterns, and the icons can be exchanged in their categorial relations within metaphoric slots. So, if the specific space represents A's reaching out to love B; the action might be to remember birthdays with apt cards. On birthday (1) A sends an apt card. On birthday (2) A does not. In the dynamics of the space, there's room to put terms in categorial positions that can be reversed. Take these two ways of structuring the situation.
"I was near a card store; so I sent a card."
"I should make it my business to send a card; whether or not it is convenient."
Well, the idea is that the prototype for showing love may relate agency to convenience, and either of these can become categories to serve as the metaphoric vehicle for love. Thus, there can be various exchanges of what subsumes what, and therefore, the values within a dynamic space can be re-invented. Love can trump birthday cards, if inconvenient; or love can trump convenience.
My sketch here requires that you look at the frame as a prototype for the action of a given situation. Also, I'd like you to see the terms of the metaphor as a categorially organized. Now, it should emerge clearly that the frame, itself, has a superordinating function. How important it is to take the reversals of Escher's Night and Day seriously! My sketch of the frame as a superordinating structure is a switch from the usual way of seeing a category and an icon. For Escher, the issue is that you should see that the organization of an object and its outside space could be exchanged. My sketch is to show how the objects of category and icon each occupy spaces that can be exchanged in terms of their reciprocal roles of superordination.
Looking at my sketch of the frame this way, we can see a version of the reversal of the classic genus-species relations of a prototype (as an icon) and a category (as a more abstract symbolization). In the reversal, the prototype symbolizes an abstraction, like love, which can be considered a category. I'll refer to this kind of category as a proto-category. In this sort of category of love, we can include expressions of feelings toward another, for instance. This kind of superordination, which I'm attributing to the frame, can be seen structurally—like a musical theme capturing abstract relations as its subsets—and dynamically. Dynamically, it's as a matter of agency that the ‘I’ creates the superordination by its conscious sentient construction of metaphors.
(Yes, I'm aware that not only is there a subspace, in which you can talk about agency within a frame; but that also, to begin with, agency functions to determine and project the frame. There are either contraries here, or there are transformations of order in relation to the self and its determinative powers. Well, I now make some more sketches here, as I promised. But you'll have to read the book to see how I try to portray a unified self, who can project agency, and to see what I think about whether that "agency-projected" can remain both a psychological and a logical vehicle for determinative acts of the self. In the book, I argue more fully to show that "So it goes," and I try to make clear the portrait lines, by which you can see the transformations of order.)
Walk over to the next sketch. While the conscious living act of the self is fundamentally categorial, the nature of the category of self is that of a proto-category. As we've seen it, this proto-categorial form is the metaphor. This form is reproduced in the self's reflective comparison of PP : OP. And this metaphor is expanded into analogies with metaphors about objects and events. Thus, Hamlet at PP may soliloquize about who he is and what he should think. His comparison is with Hamlet at OP. But in the soliloquy, he also makes a metaphoric comparsion of slings and arrows (SA) and fortune (F). Thus, F : SA. I've pointed out that the reflectiveness of the subjective self may be likened to the analogy (like a folded out proto-category), which in this case would be,
PP : OP :: SA : F.
The result of the metaphoric exchanges are not only considerations of ordering and of structure. There are also causal functions of the framing of the categories of self, when the bounds of the metaphoric comparisons define or invent a subspace. What emerges is a logical ordering, even if the categorial relations are not fixed. In fact, precisely because of the exchangeability of the terms of metaphors and their expansions, framing is a dynamic production of bounds. Yet, the added effect I want to describe is that new bounds make for new closed or semi-closed systems and their effects on whatever is within them. These new bounds, as if enclosing a subspace, rope off its field of dynamic action and promote movement toward internal articulation. The metaphors are made more logically subject to set-subset structures, for two reasons. One, they’re now part of a closed schematization; therefore the terms and categories within tend toward logical identity. Two, the PP carves its way back to the OP and the relay routes carry the categorial rules of OP.
So, while I could look at frames as super-categories, the problem is that frames issue from an agency outside of the objective subspace, within which I’ve presented categories as representations. Moreover, the frame, itself, can become the subspace of a schema—like the schema of the bull in the china shop that can subsume a framing of the self as a bull. Aha, here's one of those exchanges. Look carefully. The "self as bull," which was our proto-category, is now swept into a slot within the schema. It has been transformed into a term, which functions as a category, within the schematization. Therefore, what begins as an act of framing yields a frame, thus setting the bounds of a subspace. However, that frame can be categorized as a term within a schematization; therefore the fate of the frame as a subspace, is that it can become a smaller subspace within another. (If you are listening now to the Third Man Theme on Anton Karas' zither; you can visualize the disappearing and appearing of the man in the hallway. Maybe watch the video a bit, too. But listening is what I have in mind for this section. If you can, save the video for the next Portrait Gallery section.)
You can see in this sketch that the objects of a closed system can tend toward a death--as dead metaphors, for example; and that this may be a sign of the entropy of a closed system. Yet, as the shells of former thought get to be artifacts, the archeological work goes on; and there is more reconstruction and new framings. So, in this gallery off from the main hall, it's fitting that we now hang some preliminary sketches of the subspace with the dynamic power to superordinate the categories serving it.
Metaphor, Agency, and the OP [R] PP Relation
I’m not worrying about what happens in the course of the self’s products feeding back into the values and inventions of the self, or straining to find the pressure point at which the ‘I’ can assume an order of observation relative to itself. Instead, armed with my Diagram 3, I see the mystery of what subsumes what as a dialectical synthesis of the OP [R] PP relation. (Diagram 3, which appears in section SO, shows the development of a frame and its perspective.)
In terms of agency, the synthesis by and within the self can be at various points of logical inclusion of OP and PP. The question of genus-species order is subject to the fortunes and fate of live metaphorizing and dead metaphors. This struggle to make new metaphors and to resuscitate dead ones brings up a tension issue—as Freud saw it, it's a battle of life and death. Recall Windelband's lament over the tiring prospects of recycling the self and its guides and parts. How long do you want to prop up your dead metaphors?
The growth and flourishing of the subjective self advances the agency of the self as PP. Still, this subjective self has its identity in virtue of the categorial constraints of OP—the entropy inherent in the gift of origins in deeper self as OP. So, as in the Vichian thesis, metaphor originates—both in the deep past and in the ontogenetic present. Hence, there’s a constant figure-ground shifting of what subsumes what; frames restructuring objective subspaces; and the deeper self moving inevitably toward what Plato (Timaeus) pictures as the "Harmonies and Circuits of the All."
Playing out a metaphor unfolds it into syntactic patterns; hence a schematic. The rules of syntactic format structure representations of actions and objects seen at different positions. Within the compass of the experiencing self (PP) the role of syntax is thus expanded in schemata to reflect the different perspectives of the PP. I think it’s easier to show the interaction of logical categories with the syntactical structures of propositions, if that interaction takes place within a framed subspace, which as in Diagram 3, reflects both the mental structures and the representations of the individual’s action and movements. Look at the Diagram again.
The frame as a pictorial subspace includes the syntactic structures, their rules—having root in the OP. But the act of framing subsumes the various schemata, within which syntactic rules are assimilated to particular frames of experience. I want to avoid the danger of excluding how the self works as the ‘I,’ exploring new territory and determining meaning in the expanding world of adaptation by new adventures and ideas.
The ‘I’ "all alone and feelin’ blue," steps out of its frame, and out of its schematizations. Picture the orchestra conductor. He's stepped outside the orchestra. But he's committed himself to a role in the production of an icon. It's from within his orchestra's playing and productions that he tries to lead out the sound picture, which will either reach sense and harmony, or not. How you see the agency of the conductor is something I'd like to show here as levels of reference to the self. Look back at my analysis of the I "understood," placed in front of the Cogito. You should see three levels of reference, thus.
3rd 2nd 1st
I think (that) [I think; therefore I am].
When the 'I' steps out of its frame, it's to observe and to function on its third level of reference to direct veridicality from within the syntax afforded by schemata. The brackets denote the schema for the Cogito.
Thus, I sketch bracketing—a way of syntactically organizing the framed subspace so that representations of the self as agent can be related to actions and objects of the self. In tandem with bracketing within a framed subspace of the self, the frame governs denouements of the attitudes of self in belief structures—unfoldings, projections, of subject-predicate schematizations.
Now, here’s a sketch of the frame and the bracketing in relation to each other! It's only a sketch, so you'll probably want to look at the last two chapters of the book to see how I place its ideas and relations within the total portrait.
The frame is the ‘I"s selection of a "governing metaphor," within which values, object choices, and situations that fit can be schematized in terms of self as agent, action, and outcome. Bracketing accommodates the ‘I’ as agent—linguistically and psychologically—and helps to refer to and articulate with the sentient ‘I,’ which I’ll define here as the PP and the OP operating dialectically.
That accommodation of agency is complex. The situation is one in which the agent is shuttled into different appearances, and yet, reconstituted in the self, as it can navigate different time warps! Since the frame extends from the movements of PP, the self's agency is tied to the present. It’s like the consciousness of the third level reference of your own ‘I’ in relation to some statement you might want to make about yourself. Consciousness, as a source of agency, is in the present. But, the "statement" format puts the agent in a sequence. As seen trapped within the frame, agency has to be in the past at any moment of the conscious ‘I’'s review. So, if bracketing demarcates that which is within the frame; it thereby places the ‘I’ in the frame’s present. The ‘I’ is then closed off from the past and future sequences outside the frame. Yet, it is within the logical space of the subjective self. The 'I' has a synchrony, since, when it is an operator relative to the contents of a frame, the I's position in time is relative to the frame.
In general, what I’m trying to sketch here is a contrariety of the sort that might excite the QM theorists. The bracketing out of the ‘I’—insofar as it is bound by the framing—falls outside of the logical boundaries of the sentient self. Therefore, bracketing can never really account for a past and future subjective self. Bracketing—with its syntactic products—and framing—with its location of goals and scenarios—is incomplete without a picture of the ‘I’ outside its own representations. You see I’ve put all sorts of partitions around subspaces and seem to have imprisoned the ‘I’ who can claim synchrony, integrity, and responsibility. But if walls can be put up; they can be taken down.
Picture instead a framed window. For it to be open to the ‘I’, so that it can "enter," as a reflexive representation, into the bracketing and into the frames, a third process is necessary—one of negation applied to the duration of self. Next sketch. (To follow the Third Man, himself, the music leads on to the next doorway, through which, we might run into the portal to the portrait!)
Negating the Partitions of the Subjective Self in its Time Zone
This next sketch deals with opening and closing boundaries of the self and its relation to the different zones of time. Logically, I want to show how negation marks the bounds of a category and opens the context of what it is not. So, yes, in relation to the logic and to the ontology of self, there are all sorts of themes that arise. One is how the role of negation affects reversibility of the identity of a term or symbol. Another is how negation plays out in relation to the self, as a term or symbol. And yet another is the role of negation, relative to the self as someone's one and only subjective experience. In regard to the self, negation and spatial partitioning are relatively straightforward when we deal with the representations of self, its products, and, in brief, the objective self. Thus, the self, as a product, say, the way you stroll down the street, or the way you project attitudes, is observable by others; hence when you did the walk and where you did it is a matter of straightforward spatial and temporal partitioning. Moreover, with the rules of intersubjective agreement worked out as best as possible, where and when you display this or that is subject to relatively easy to track negations. It's your usual way of walking--or not. It's you at that time and place with that attitude--or not. Whether we have a Sidney Carton exception or an O. J. Simpson one is a matter of the discussion of the limits of empiricism, and that's not the topic here.
The products of negation are both logical and linguistic. Logically, they’re categories with rules of identity and contradiction. Linguistically, they’re boundaries for the extensions of semantic meanings.1 Well, this should be the case for the objective self, but there are different issues for the subjective self.
When the subjective self is introduced into logical space, then logical identity is related to time as a zone of sentience. These zones are a function of sentience in its various degrees. Let me give an example at either end of sentience; so that you can see the determinants of the zones I propose. There's the dumb irritability of a simple reflex, on one end. On the other is this sort of complicated reflection. You are conscious of your awareness that you are you, and that, further, it is you, deciding on an attitude, related to a feeling, of which, you were formerly unaware. This is complicated, all right; but you could begin to disentangle it, if you think about it as involving yourself at different moments of time.
So, sentience ranges over various zones of consciousness and unconsciousness. But what I'm after here is from the point of view of the subjective self. Thus, the experience of the 'I' is in a time zone; but the nature of the zone is a function of sentience--as I say, in its various degrees. Therefore, the problem is unification of the 'I' and preservation of its identity from state to state, or time zone to time zone.
As I reasoned about Descartes' thinking about the Cogito statement, if the zone of sentience is focused at conscious time, I can think that I think—but only in the present. Therefore, in relation to a conscious—or unconscious—zone of time, ‘I’ is always in the same temporal zone of sentience, and logical identity is preserved.
In regard to the functions of negation, what transformations are possible when a time zone is necessary for the preservation of logical identity? William James (1892) describes the self as an experience outside of time, and as a category of being that is negated by time. Surprisingly, despite what I just argued, there are elements of James’s view, which are fairly close to those I focus. The self, as a totality of its subjective nature and of its products, is ultimately bounded; and therefore, it is categorizable within a
