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10. Geometric Symbolism and Metaphorics
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X Geometric Symbolism and Metaphorics The Fontenelle text from which I have just quoted implies a distinction, germane to our typology of metaphor histories, which confronts us with a final ‘transitional’ phenomenon, that of metaphorics and symbolism. Here we must be wary of formulating all too subtle definitions, tailored to the specifications of some system or other, that risk narrowing the basis of fulfilling intuitions in advance. The concept of symbol, richly shaded by its application to everything from aesthetics to formal logic (at the very least!), has already done much to obscure the expressive phenomena it was called on to illuminate. With its help, we will attempt here solely to elaborate an elementary distinction that we find very nicely exemplified in Fontenelle’s text. The expressive function ascribed by Fontenelle to the image of the geocentric cosmos is not that of ‘absolute metaphor’. For Fontenelle, that is to say, the image does not provide the theoretically unanswerable question of man’s place in the universe , and his relationship to everything else that exists, with a point of orientation. The critical mind of this early Enlightenment thinker aims instead to show that this metaphysical question no longer needs, and indeed has never needed, a cosmological metaphor to help it find an answer, since it has always already given itself such an answer through the will to preeminence that prevails in man. This preliminary decision cuts off the question before it can even be asked; it seeks only a fitting 116 Paradigms for a Metaphorology image, a manifestation attesting to the self-evidence vouchsafed it by Being, a sign unsullied by any suspicion of egocentric manipulation and given for all to see. At issue here is not the idle question of whether there is any substance to Fontenelle’s account of the origin of the geocentric worldview. But the interpretation he gives geocentrism turns the long-antiquated image of the cosmos into a symbol, the projection into a cosmic dimension of man’s overweening sense of his own importance. At most, this projection can heighten the emotional impact of a preexisting belief; it cannot, considered objectively, confirm and legitimate that belief. Seen in this light, Copernicus’s theoretical reform takes on features of a political, indeed revolutionary kind: it destroyed a symbol invented for the purpose of sanctioning and perpetuating a universal inequality. And the destruction of that symbol implies the will to demolish its real basis. The process we have described as a metaphorization of geocentrism among the Stoics is quite different: here a preexisting, theoretically validated image of the cosmos is ‘given voice’, as it were, through a supplementary hypothesis, namely through the teleological interpretation of man as a being created to contemplate and take pleasure in the universe that offers itself to his gaze. The Stoics not only read off a ‘code’ from their cosmology; they gleaned from it a comprehensive, internally consistent metaphysical framework in which existence and task, rank and duty, were correlates. Fontenelle presupposes that the cosmocentric position had from the outset been viewed and evaluated, even ‘invented’, in the sense of courtly ceremonial or social convention, and he assumes these to be purely factual assignations without any relation to Being. Just as the drive for status within society first had to create a scaffold of forms by means of which different status positions could be marked and ‘expressed’, in order then to comply with this factual ‘code’ without having to answer to any substantive criteria, so man initially concocted the fiction that nature was ready to instruct him through the architecture of the cosmos about his place in the totality of beings, in order then to posit in geocentrism the symbol of his presumed ontological preeminence. The symbol need only capture the identity of a relationship: what matters is not where in a seating arrangement the top-ranking dignitary has been placed, but that he is sitting in the spot to which the prevailing code stipulates that he ought always to be assigned. The symbol operates by subserving an identification, but it is meaningless to inquire about its content . Where that nonetheless proves possible, symbolic and metaphorical functional elements have come together. Such cases will be examined more closely in what follows. A case in point is the employment of mathematical signs and figures in philosophical contexts. We are fortunate enough to possess, in Dietrich Mahnke’s exemplary monograph “Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt: Beiträge zur Genealogie der mathematischen Mystik” [Infinite Sphere and...