1 of 1- iwpoe
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A stupid question on analogy
Why isn't it plausible to think that the meaning of all normal analogies will cash out in univocities (pace Aquinas)? Some examples:
You’re as sweet as sugar.
If this phrase means anything it seems to be pointing to a common feature between the sweetness of sugar and the person. I submit that it's really a claim equivalent to 'both you and sugar have the property of inducing a certain kind of pleasure in others'. But that amounts to a simple univocity. 'Sweet' here means 'pleasure causing' and both sugar and you are the same in that respect.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.
(From the beginning to Beowulf)
This is a kenning: a metaphorical compound word. 'Whale-road' means 'sea' because the sea is like the road of whales. But this too seems to cash out in an univocity. Namely, roads have the property of being a place of travel and seas have the property of being a place of travel (for whales). They both have one and the same property but in different respects.
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.
(From Romeo and Juliet)
This is a complicated metaphor, but if I understand Romeo's meaning Juliet is up there on the balcony in front of the night's sky such that her beauty, visually, could be seen as a kind of enhancment to it much as a jewel is to the back skin of an Ethiopian woman's face when hanging off her ear. Again, this seems to cash out as a set of complex univocities: Both the woman's cheek and the night from the angle Romeo is standing appear as sheer black surfaces in front of which something beautiful could be placed.
I don't want to belabor the point with more analogies. But if I understand the idea behind the doctrine of analogy, the point seems to be that when we speak analogically (in general) we mean to relate things by means of a term that doesn't, in fact name one and the same aspect, even though it still, in some way, points out something true of both things. This seems mistaken. I think that if you analyze any analogy it's going to turn out to either be a disguised or roundabout way of simply saying that two things have one and the same property or it's going to turn out to be incoherent:
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
(From Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky)
Because these are empty words, it's not even clear whether these cases are meant to evoke analogy or direct attribution, but they cannot be said to ascribe meaning to the noun univocative or otherwise. The point is that if you have a case of a seeming analogy which you can't cash out in terms of common properties, it seems to me you've just got a meaningless expression (or perhaps a false one as in 'The paralyzed man runs like a gazelle.')
It might still be the case that we can't speak of God's attributes, but I don't think that this situation is well modeled on ordinary analogical speech, which doesn't seem to me to actually be a unique mode of speaking with respect to attribution. Analogy is simply an indirect mode of attributing properties to something, but the difference in meaning is in respect to the affective content of the speech act and the performative character of the subject interpreting the speech, not with respect to the relation of common properties between different objects- no more than 'Schnee ist weiß.' and 'Snow is white.' differ for me with respect to attribution of a property.to the same object. Phenomenologically, there certainly is a difference. The German connotes different personal associations and requires a different subjective linguistic interpretive act, but there is no difference with respect to the relation of the relevant contents.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- Greg
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Re: A stupid question on analogy
iwpoe wrote:
You’re as sweet as sugar.
If this phrase means anything it seems to be pointing to a common feature between the sweetness of sugar and the person. I submit that it's really a claim equivalent to 'both you and sugar have the property of inducing a certain kind of pleasure in others'. But that amounts to a simple univocity. 'Sweet' here means 'pleasure causing' and both sugar and you are the same in that respect.
It strikes me that something else is at work here. A metaphor like "You're as sweet as sugar" is, in my view, attempting to convey something about magnitude. Sugar is very sweet, and so are you. But what gives metaphors like this a twinge of irony is that "sweet" is not predicated univocally of sugar and of you; they flaunt the presupposition that you should only compare the magnitudes of like attributes.
I don't think it's true that people are sweet in the same way that sugar is sweet, and we shouldn't take the analogy to imply that. We know what it would mean for people to be sweet in the same way that sugar is sweet, but we could only verify that by becoming cannibals.
Leaving any analogy to the side, if I just claim "Strawberries are sweet," I am not merely saying that strawberries are pleasure-causing. So if "sweet" means "pleasure-causing" in analogies like "You're as sweet as sugar" but does not mean "pleasure-causing" in sentences like "Strawberries are sweet," then your account will still admit non-univocal uses of "sweet", and it's going to be precisely the existence of such non-univocal uses that makes "You're as sweet as sugar" an analogy rather than some direct form of expression, whatever we think "sweet" means in them.
Then the question that arises is whether those non-univocal uses are equivocal. The point of the doctrine of analogy is that, surely, they are not equivocal. Their meanings are distinct but not unrelated, in the way the meanings of "bank" in "He robbed the bank" and "The logged washed up on the bank" are unrelated.
Your account does, perhaps, suggest a different way of arguing that there must be some univocal feature at work in the making of analogies. Namely, it is not that "sweet" means the same thing when predicated of persons as it does when predicated of sugar, but rather that the analogy can only be made on the basis of those two distinct uses having a common implication (such as that both are pleasure-causing). That would require a more subtle response.
- iwpoe
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Re: A stupid question on analogy
Just so. I'm meaning to suggest that "that the analogy can only be made on the basis of those two distinct uses having a common implication (such as that both are pleasure-causing)".
I think an analogy is a creative way of naming common properties between things, and I think when we do it, through the interpretive act, the words used come to have a new meaning beyond their conventional one. So yes, sweet doesn't mean the same thing when we predicate it of a man as it does when we normally predicate it of sugar, but in the anologic act, if the analogy is to make any real sense and be true, a shift in meaning of the word is made such that you are drawn to find a common property which is what the analogy actually conveys. If I take Aquinas correctly- and mind that I might be misunderstanding the doctrine -then in an analogy in general (not just with God) there *is no proper common property* but yet, somehow, a relationship is present anyway. If that's the understanding of analogy in general, then I think he's wrong, and that the act of analogy is a bad model for the problem of "divine names" bequeathed to him by Dionysus the Areopigate. There's a fuller phenomenology possible here that I should probably perform, but this matter was so clear to me that it didn't occur to me to break it all the way down.
Often the anological act outright results in a new name for a predicate that entirely overshadows the original analogy. Over-shadow, which I just used, or under-stand. But you can still perform the original interpretive act and when you do so you realize that the words are really pointing out common singular properties by means of a glide off their usual meaning and onto a new one. If that glide isn't intelligible in terms of common properties between the analogues-'vorpal blade' 'the paralyzed man runs like a gazelle' -then you don't have a functional analogic act and the interpretation fails.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
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Thread Starter- Greg
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Re: A stupid question on analogy
So yes, sweet doesn't mean the same thing when we predicate it of a man as it does when we normally predicate it of sugar, but in the anologic act, if the analogy is to make any real sense and be true, a shift in meaning of the word is made such that you are drawn to find a common property which is what the analogy actually conveys.
Part of my point is that the shift in meaning reintroduces non-univocal but also non-equivocal uses of terms, namely the meaning of "sweet" typically and the meaning of "sweet" in the analogy. If this account is right, then what makes the analogy an analogy is still this presence of non-univocal but non-equivocal terms. Of course, again, if the two non-univocal terms ("sweet" when used of sugar normally, and "sweet when used of people normally) can be used in an analogy only when they share some univocal property, then one might hope to reduce analogies to univocal terms.
If I take Aquinas correctly- and mind that I might be misunderstanding the doctrine -then in an analogy in general (not just with God) there *is no proper common property* but yet, somehow, a relationship is present anyway. If that's the understanding of analogy in general, then I think he's wrong, and that the act of analogy is a bad model for the problem of "divine names" bequeathed to him by Dionysus the Areopigate.
One question that we will have to ask is whether theorizing about analogies you are looking at will tell us much about the analogies Aquinas is talking about. The standard Aristotelian-Thomistic example is "healthy": The man is healthy, his diet is healthy, and his urine is healthy. The first use is the focal case. A diet is healthy because it causes health in the focal sense, and urine is healthy when it is a sign of health in the focal sense. If your account undermines Aquinas's doctrine of analogy, we'll at least have to extend it to this example, but in this case, it is not as clear that there is a common property, nor do we have a proportion.
Similarly, we'll want to apply the account to the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of the predicate "being," which is analogical over the ten categories of predicables. It isn't clear entirely what is univocal to substance and to quality by which the latter is being by analogy.
Just so. I'm meaning to suggest that "that the analogy can only be made on the basis of those two distinct uses having a common implication (such as that both are pleasure-causing)".
I'm doubting that this is what your example indeed shows. "You're as sweet as sugar" is evidently just a nice way of saying "You're as sweet as sugar is sweet". This puts the sentence into the more familiar analogic form a:b::c:d, in the special case where b=d. But the case where b=d is indeed special. We also recognize as analogies sentences like "You're as sweet as your mother is stubborn". It isn't plausible that such an analogy requires a shift of the meaning of "stubborn" and "sweet" to the meaning of some common implication that they have; it's really just a way of emphasizing that you're really sweet, and your mother's really stubborn.
So I think we should hesitate to draw too much of a lesson about analogy generally from analogies of proportion.