What medieval Neoplatonists knew was that, in order to decide whether the lion must be seen as afigura Christi or as a figure of the Antichrist, a co-text is necessary. The tradition provides a typology of possible co-texts, so that the best interpretation is always the one re-corded by some (intertextual) auctoritas. That the question is merely one of cultural networks, and not of ontological realities, Thomas Aquinas was well aware, and he disposes of the problem in two ways. On the one hand, he admits that there is only one portion of reality in which things and events themselves acquire metaphorical and allegorical value, inasmuch as they have been created and disposed thus by God himself: sacred history, and for this reason the Bible in itself is literal (it is the , things of which it speaks literally that are figures).
There remains as well the figure of the parable, as it is used in poetry (but in this sense one need not leave the bounds of classical rhetoric). But, on the other hand, insofar as it is necessary to speak of God in accordance with the dictates of reason, and given that God is at an immense distance from the created world, with which He is not in a Neoplatonic identity, but which He keeps alive through an act of participation, Aquinas turns to the principle of the analogia entis. Inasmuch as God’s perfection transcends that of His creations, it is impossible to speak of Him univocally, nor can one limit oneself to speaking of Him equivocally; He must be spoken of, then,through analogy or, in other words, by means of a proportion between cause and effect. Through a kind of metonymy, therefore, which is held up, however, by a proportion of metaphorical type.
What is the foundation of the analogy? Is this a case of a logical-linguistic artifice, or of an actual ontological network? The interpreters are discordant. Among the modern exegetes, Gilson admits that «what Saint Thomas calls our knowledge of God consists in our aptitude for forming affirmative propositions about Him» (1947:157). We only have to push a bit further to affirm, with no threat to Thomist orthodoxy, that the analogy speaks only of the knowledge men have of reality, of their way of naming concepts, and not of reality itself. The metaphor derived from that knowledge is a suppositio impropria based on a proportion be-tween intentiones secundae, where, in other words, the expression /dog/ (whether verbal or visual) does not mean the real dog, but rather the word dog or the concept of «dog» (McInemy 1961). In a universe com-prehensible by means of the proportion between God and things, the fundamental mechanism is actually found in an identity between names, even if for Thomas (unlike the nominalists) those names reflect the properties of things.
3.9.2. Tesauro’s categorical index
An interesting return tô the Stagyrite’s model is found in the Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Binocular) of Emanuele Tesauro (1655), writ-ten at the very height of the Baroque period. From Aristotle, Tesauro inherits the tendency to call every trope and figure a metaphor. I shall not speak here of the detail and enthusiasm with which the author of the treatise studies puns both in single words and in actual microtexts, and of how he extends the metaphorical mechanism to visual puns, painting, sculpture, actions, inscriptions, proverbs, truncated phrases, laconic messages, mysterious characters, hierograms, logogriphs, cryptograms, gestures, medallions, columns, ships, garters, chimeric bodies. I shall not speak of those sections in which Tesauro borders on modern speech-acts theory, showing how language states, narrates, affirms, de-nies, swears, corrects, holds back, exclaims, doubts, approves, ad-monishes, orders, praises, derides, invokes, questions, thanks, vows, and so on. (With regard to all these aspects and to the others of which I will speak, I direct the reader to Speciale’s reconstruction, 1978.) Tesauro knows that metaphors are not created out of a pure joy of in-vention, but that they impose on one a labor, to master which takes practice.
The first exercise is the reading of catalogues, anthologies, hiero-glyphic collections, medallions (and their reverse sides), emblems — in a way, a pure invitation to intertextuality, to the imitation of the ‘already said’. But the second stage of the exercise presupposes learning a combinatory mechanism.
Tesauro invites his reader to draft a categorical index, that is, a model of an organized semantic universe. Such a model begins with Aristotle’s categories (Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Posi-tion, Possession, Activity, Passivity; see Categories 1b25-2a8) and then organizes under each of these categories the various members that are inclusive of everything susceptible to such categorization. Suppose we have to make a metaphor on a dwarf.
We leaf through the categorical index until we find the entry Quantity; we then identify the concept ‘little things’, and all such microscopic things as may be found under that rubric may be divided still further according to contextual selections (as we would say now): astronomy, human organism, animal, plant, and so on. But an index organized by substances would have to be integrated with a second index in which each substance were analyzed according to the particles that define how the object in question manifests itself. (For example, under the category of Quantity we would then have to find what measurements it has, what weight it has, how many parts it has; and under Quality there would be the specificiations whether it is visi-ble, whether it is hot, and so on.) As can be seen, this is essentially a system of content organized as an encyclopedia. At this point, we will find that the smallest measure is the Geometric Thumb, and we will say that in order to measure a dwarf’s body, a geometric thumb would be too gross a measure.
While he is a careless structuralist, Tesauro knows nevertheless that it is no longer ontological relations but the structure itself of language that guarantees the metaphorical transfers. Look, for example, at the Aris-totelian metaphor of old age as the sunset of life (or of youth as spring). Tesauro still proceeds by analogy, but the relation is one of contiguity in the index. The transfer is structured as in Figure 3.6.
Analogous genus .. . Duration of time
Subordinate genus
Analogous species
Human age
Youth
Season of the year
Spring
FIGURE3.6
The higher nodes become classemes or contextual selections of the lower nodes. One can see that the analogy Aristotle perceived between draw off and cut functions when the act of drawing off is considered under the category of Passivity; but, if it is considered under the cate-gory of Possession, drawing off becomes analogous to other processes of acquisition and not to processes of deprivation (take away). Henceforth, there is the possibility of searching through the categorical index ad in-finitum, and of uncovering a reserve of untapped metaphors, and of metaphorical propositions and arguments.
Tesauro’s model still represents the framework of medieval Neo-platonism — which it has deliberately resolved, though, into a network of units of purely cultural content. It is, however, announcing the model of an unlimited semiosis. While being a still too hierarchical system of semes, it produces a web of interpretants.
3.9.3. Vico and the cultural conditions of invention
An overview of the history of metaphorology and of its epistemic breaks, however brief, must not leave out Vico, not least because of the fact that la Scienza Nuova (and its chapter «Delia logica poetica») seems to put into question the existence of a cultural network, of semantic fields and universes, and of a preestablished process of semiosis, which should pre-cede (on the basis of the foregoing observations) the production and in-terpretation of metaphors.
Certainly, Vico discusses the «first tropes,» and the phenomenon of speaking by means of animate substances, whereby natural objects and phenomena are named by reference to parts of the body (1744; Eng. tr., p. 129), for example, the eyes of needles, the lips of a vase, and so on. Now, much too much has been said about this ‘auroral’ moment of lan-guage; in the view of some interpreters, Vico argues that the creating of metaphors is an inborn ability in beings who are at the dawn or awaken-ing of their own intelligence; metaphorical speech, furthermore, would be iconic, insofar as it instituted a kind of native onomatopoeic relation between words and things. But the fact is, Vico knows and says that, outside the Utopia of an Adamic language (an idea already in Dante and later elaborated in seventeenth-century England, as well as in Vico’s own time), what is indisputable is the diversity of languages.
In fact, as the people have certainly by diversity of climates acquired different na-tures, from which have sprung as many different customs, so from their different natures and customs as many different languages have arisen. For by virtue of the aforesaid diversity of their natures they have regarded the same utilities or necessities of human life from different points of view, and there have thus arisen so many national customs, for the most part differing from one another and at times contrary to one another; so and not otherwise there have arisen as many different languages as there are nations. (Ibid., p. 148)
Given which, evidently, Vico makes the following fundamental observa-tions: languages, like customs, are born as the response of groups of human beings to the material environment in which they live; even if the disposition toward language functions and develops in all human societies according to the same
