We have already remarked how, in seeking various explanations for the eclipse, Aristotle tried out various “ontologies” (and we are not going too far in using the term in the quintessentially modern sense we just recognized). Similarly, when, in On the Parts of Animals, he must decide, on the basis of empirical observations, which of the various biological phenomena are causes and which effects, Aristotle finds himself faced with the fact that ruminants (animals, that is, with four stomachs) have horns and lack upper incisors—with the embarrassing exception of the camel, which is a ruminant lacking upper incisors, but without horns.
Aristotle first proposes a definition whereby horned animals are animals which, since they have four stomachs—which makes internal rumination possible—have redirected the hard matter of the teeth into the formation of horns. In order to make the camel fit into this categorical organization, Aristotle must suppose that it did not need to redirect the hard matter into horns (because, being large, it had no need for further protection), but instead it deflected it to the gums and palate (Figure 1.19).
Figure 1.19
But why are ruminants the way they are? The fact that they are ruminants explains why they have horns, but having horns does not explain why they are ruminants. Faced with the need to define the category of ruminants, Aristotle puts forward the hypothesis that ruminants have deviated the hard matter from the mouth to the head for reasons of defense and have developed four stomachs as a consequence (Figure 1.20).
Figure 1.20
As we can readily see, these two definitions presuppose two different categorical organizations, in the first of which it is the fact of being a ruminant that determines the deviation of the incisors and makes possible the development of horns, in the other it is the deviation of the incisors for the purposes of defense that produced the four stomachs. The truth is that Aristotle, in suggesting a number of hypotheses regarding causes and effects, in no way attempts to construct pseudo-Porphyrian trees. He merely shows extreme flexibility in selecting as a genus what was previously a species and vice versa. In other words, he never tells us that the definition is based on an underlying ontological structure, rather what he does is to propose a methodology of division that makes an adequate definition possible. It is not the underlying tree that makes the definition possible, it is the definition that imposes an underlying tree, frequently ad hoc. But in his theory of metaphor Aristotle goes still further: he suggests that a creative and original use of language obliges us to invent a new ontology—and therefore, we might add, to enrich to some degree our encyclopedia.
Naturally, the new ontology is only valid as far as the comprehension of the creative text that imposes it is concerned. But we are entitled to suppose that, once the creative text has imposed a new ontology, however local, somehow or other it leaves a trace in our encyclopedia.
1.8.2. Joycean Ontologies
In my essay “The Semantics of Metaphor” (in Eco 1984c), a kind of reduced ontology was constructed, made up of all the expressions that appear in a certain section of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and an attempt was made to justify the various puns as passages among a series of phonetic, synecdochic, metonymic, or metaphoric associations.
The experiment was intended to demonstrate how, starting from whatever point of the textual universe one might chose as a sample, one could attain, by multiple and continuous pathways, as in a garden of forking paths, any other point.
In the schema presented in Figure 1.21,36 we may observe how the term Neanderthal evokes by phonetic association three other terms: meander, Tal (German for “valley”) and tale (“story,” in English), which combine to form the punning coinage cited in the book, meandertale. In the associative trajectory, however, intermediate nodes are created, provided by terms all of which appear in the text of Finnegans Wake and only there. At this point the associations may be phonetic or semantic in nature.
These interconnections demonstrate, moreover, how each term may become in its turn the archetype of an associative series that would lead us to identify, sooner or later, other associative chains. The whole diagram has a purely orientative value, in the sense that it reduces the associations numerically and dimensionally, but if we proceed from this ontology to Joyce’s text, we observe that all the associations registered by the network have been developed (in other words, we see how that ontology had its origin in the need to render explicit the associations that that text intended to provoke). Indeed, every association produces a pun that defines the book. The book is a slipping beauty (and hence a sleeping beauty who as she sleeps generates a series of lapsus through semantic slips, mindful of an error, etc.), a jungfraud’s messonge-book (where, to the associations already cited, that of message is added), a labyrinth (or meandertale) in which we find a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons (the expression that gave rise to the schema, which naturally would have been clearer had the various circuits been colored differently). As a final synthesis, in the pages of the book the neologism meanderthalltale becomes the metaphorical stand-in for all that can be said about the book itself and which is said by the associative chains identified in the network.
Figure 1.21
In the associative sequences, semantic rather than phonetic in nature, the terms are associated through identity or similarity of properties (not real, but culturally imputed). If we reread the associative sequences we see that each of them could be constructed by referring to a “notional field” accepted in a given culture or to one of those typical linguistic carrefours or crossroads theorized by Trier, Matoré, and others. A survey of the notional fields acquired by a given culture would explain not only why Freud and Fraud may be connected, by phonetic similarity, but also Freud-dream and Freud-Jung.
Let us consider, for example, the sequence generated by Taclass="underline" on the one hand it refers us to space and place, genera of which Tal is, so to speak, the species. But space in turn refers to time since the relationship between space and time is a typical relationship of complementarity. The relationship between time and the past and between time and the cycles (corsi e ricorsi) of Giambattista Vico arises from a more or less textbook contiguity.