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Conceptual Personae in Ontology

  • Carlos A. Segovia EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 17, 2022
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Open Philosophy
From the journal Open Philosophy Volume 5 Issue 1

In May 8, 1874, Leibniz wrote to Sophie-Charlotte of Hannover:

[M]y philosophy … is based on two sayings as common as this one from the Italian theatre: that it is elsewhere just as here, and this one from Tasso: che per variar natura è bella, which seem to contradict each other, but are reconciled by understanding that one concerns the foundation of things, the other manners and appearances.[1]

In addition to summarising his own philosophy, Leibniz’s assertion can be said to elegantly solve a common problem of interpretation regarding the coherence of Parmenides’ thought – namely, the integration of opinative discourse side by side with the truthful thinking of being. But there is more to it. Leibniz’s allusion to the Italian theatre or Commedia dell’arte echoes another reference to it found at the outset of that same letter, where Leibniz says that his “great principle of natural things is that of Harlequin, Emperor of the Moon – that it is always and everywhere in all things just as it is here,” and hence that “nature is fundamentally uniform, although there is variety in the greater and the lesser and in the degrees of perfection” – like in Harlequin’s checkered costume, one may deduce. Harlequin functions here as a special type of metaphor that can be labelled a conceptual persona.

Through conceptual personae “concepts are not only thought but also perceived and felt,” writes Deleuze – that is to say, they are “philosophical sensibilia.”[2] Their history is as old as that of philosophy, if not even older, as their roots descend into the fertile waters of mythical thought, of which philosophy – as Schelling intuited – can be adduced to be the continuation by other means. Hesiod invented several ones of perdurable success, including “Chaos,” who brings forth his own children. Anaximander built the core of his thought around a theoretical problem – the correlation between presence and absence – which Homer had formerly approached by means of different conceptual personae (Achilles, Agamemnon, Thetis, Zeus, Hector, and so on). In Heraclitus ἀιών is a “child” that plays innocently. In Parmenides a goddess discloses being’s truth to an auriga-philosopher. Plato presents his philosophy mostly through the lips of Socrates. Hölderlin reimagined Empedocles to think afresh the Subject/Object distinction. And Nietzsche famously employed the names of Dionysus and Apollo to designate two opposed existential and cultural drives.

Conceptual personae are pervasive throughout the history of philosophy. Furthermore, they often play a part in the production and the definition of new concepts. Mythical figures, science-fiction motifs, and landscape impersonations have, too, supplied numerous conceptual personae to contemporary philosophy and, more generally, to contemporary thought. Consider, for instance, Ihab Hassan’s reuse of the myth of Orpheus’s dismemberment to define postmodernism, Donna Haraway’s reuse of the Lovecraftian Cthulhu to mark the return of the chthonic in the limes of the Anthropocene, or Elizabeth Povinelli’s triangulation of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus to map the open renegotiation of what is life and non-life today. In short, conceptual personae can function, to put it into Peircean terms, as icons, indexes, or symbols for thinking, and can also play a significant part in the making of an ontology of the present and its margins – that is, they can contribute to figure out what the present is and what it can eventually become under the sign of the Otherwise.

But is metaphor truly pertinent in philosophy? Philosophers sometimes think that literal speech is the default when it comes to name conventional things that can be uttered in simple denotative terms within the repertoire of a closed linguistic system. Thus, they often forget to ask themselves about non-immediate denotation, connotation, and the emergent or ontologically disclosing qualities of language. In this manner, they tacitly reinforce the supposition that the ordinary (Goethe would have said flavourless) use of words provides its norm to language. Besides, who can say what the ordinary is in each case, i.e. within the different “language games” (Wittgenstein) of different speakers?

Unlike R. Fogelin, who views metaphor as a mere figurative comparison based on a thing’s salient features, and thus turns metaphor, it can be argued, into metonymy; unlike Davidson, who thinks a metaphor’s meaning to be literal whatever the intent of the speaker, thus dissolving any metaphor into a trick; unlike K. Walton, who claims that metaphors are best understood by reference to games of make-believe, which once more amounts to turn metaphors into tricks; and unlike Searle, who breaks down the interpretation of a metaphor’s meaning into so many troublesome steps (including the determination of the strategies for generating a range of possible meanings for it) that thereby makes the apprehension of any metaphor as infinitely differed in time as Zeno’s attempt to have Achilles catch his turtle – unlike them J. F. Ross[3] and E. F. Kittay[4] rightly underline that we use words metaphorically and that we do so even when we do not think we do. Philosophy is not an exception to this rule, even if the study of the role of metaphor, and trope in general, in the production of meaning tends to be an anthropological rather than philosophical subject.

I am thinking here mostly of the works of Roy Wagner, who claims that metaphor can ultimately be said to be the mirror of meaning and vice versa.[5] Thus, for example, when a male Bororo metaphorises his identity as that of a “parakeet,” he employs metaphor that stresses his distinctiveness from other men (those who, belonging in a different tribe, call themselves “toucans”) and his similarity to other men (those who are “parakeets” like him because they belong in his own tribe) to satisfy notions of totemism and tribal classification; when he metaphorises his identity as that of a “man,” he employs a metaphor that stresses his distinctiveness from other people (the elders, women, and children of his family) and his similarity to other men (those who, beyond his family but within his tribe, call themselves “men” in contrast to their own elder, women, and children) to satisfy notions of progeny, kinship role, and social status; and when he metaphorises his identity as that of a “jaguar,” he employs a metaphor that stresses his distinctiveness from other men (those who, among the people of his tribe but in contrast to him, are not shamans) and his similarity to other men (those who, despite belonging in a different tribe, may be shamans like him) to satisfy notions of shamanic theriomorphism and perspectival shift.

But again, philosophy is not alien to these doings. In his Philosophy of Mythology, Schelling divides the ontological process that brings about the morphogenesis of all things into three successive stages: (i) Hades, or the pure possibility of being which lacks determination; (ii) Poseidon, i.e. its self-determination to be or self-affirmation, which lacks, in turn, form and intelligence; and (iii) Zeus, or being’s qua fully achieved and conscious determination, which contains the two previous moments and brings all things to ontological fulfilment. For his part, Michel Serres uses in his works, inter alia, two conceptual figures – one positive: Hermes, the other one negative: Hermaphrodite – to stress the view that identity can only be attained beyond and against redundancy. In both Schelling and Serres, therefore, sameness and otherness exchange their roles and perspectives according to the requirements of a Janus-like conceptual imagination that aims at synthesising the notional and the figural.[6]

Oftentimes, though, philosophy’s conceptual persona prove enigmatic, unsettling, or both. Who or what is Heidegger’s “last god?” Why does the last Guattari write about Ananke, Dike, and Moira? What do Negarestani’s Xeno-agents prompt us to conceptually think on and dream or un-dream with? These and other metaphors, one suspects, serve to make analogies and distinctions that would otherwise remain too mild, too inoffensive, or perhaps unthinkable.

The essays gathered in this topical issue venture themselves into this somewhat exotic territory with an eye put on matters relevant in one way or another to ontological discernment. They explore the possibilities and the difficulties inherent in the production and circulation of conceptual personae in contemporary thought, examine through them the relation between ontology and physicality, inquire into the contrasting ways of thinking being that different conceptual personae epitomise, scrutinise and unravel the secrets of some rather notable ones around which contemporary ontology gravitates whether consciously or unconsciously, signal the limits of mythical thinking as such, or attempt at redrawing today’s philosophical board with recourse to the latter.

References

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York and Chichester, UK: Columbia University Press, 1994.Search in Google Scholar

Kittay, Eva Feder. Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.Search in Google Scholar

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Leibniz and the Two Sophies: Philosophical Correspondence, edited by and translated by Lloyd Strickland. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011.Search in Google Scholar

Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure, translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, with an Introduction by John Mowitt. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.Search in Google Scholar

Ross, J. F. Portraying Analogy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.Search in Google Scholar

Wanger, Roy. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.Search in Google Scholar
Received: 2022-09-30
Published Online: 2022-11-17

© 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Topical issue: Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation, edited by Michael Lewin and Rudolf Meer
  2. Introduction to the Topical Issue “Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation”
  3. Between Old and New Teleology. Kant on Maupertuis’ Principle of Least Action
  4. The Faculty of Ideas. Kant’s Concept of Reason in the Narrower Sense
  5. For a Dialectic-First Approach to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
  6. On the Concept of Real Use of Reason
  7. Where Do All These Ideas Come From? Kant on the Formation of Concepts Under the Guidance of Pure Reason
  8. Kant on the Status of Ideas and Principles of Reason
  9. The Collective Unity of Reason in the First Critique
  10. Determining and Grounding: The Twofold Function of the Transcendental Dialectic
  11. Towards a Unity of Theoretical and Practical Reason: On the Constitutive Significance of the Transcendental Dialectic
  12. Meillassoux’s Reinterpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic
  13. Semantic Anti-Realism in Kant’s Antinomy Chapter
  14. Reason, Its Real Use, and the Status of Its Ideas and Principles: Response to Caimi, Gava, and Lewin
  15. Topical issue: Conceptual Personae in Ontology, edited by Carlos A. Segovia
  16. Conceptual Personae in Ontology
  17. Socratic and Cartesian Personae: Undismembering and Liquidation
  18. Nietzsche’s Ariadne: On Asses’s Ears in Botticelli/Dürer – and Poussin’s Bacchanale
  19. The Mythical Absolute: The Fiction of Being
  20. Rivalry and Philosophy after Deleuze’s Reversal of Platonic Participation
  21. Rethinking Dionysus and Apollo: Redrawing Today’s Philosophical Chessboard
  22. The Witching Body: Ontology and Physicality of the Witch
  23. Topical issue: Ethics and Politics of TV Series, edited by Sandra Laugier
  24. Taking TV Series Seriously
  25. 1. Moral Education and the Limits of Ethics
  26. Fleabag’s Pedagogy of the Gimmick
  27. The Feelings We Feel: Care and Community in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
  28. Violence, Wars, and the Possibility of Ethical Life in an Apocalypse: A Kantian Reading of The Walking Dead
  29. On the Fear of the Void and Killing Babies in Pascal, Nabokov, and Game of Thrones
  30. 2. Technological Imagination
  31. Posthumanist Solidarity: The Political and Ethical Imaginations of Artificial Intelligence from Battlestar Galactica to Raised by Wolves
  32. The Dialogic Expansion of Garcia’s We: Chronotopes, Ethics, and Politics in The Expanse Series
  33. Ethics and Technology: An Analysis of Rick and Morty
  34. 3. Ontology and Genres
  35. Rewatching, Film, and New Television
  36. From Episodic Novel to Serial TV: The Handmaid’s Tale, Adaptation and Politics
  37. Series Under Threat
  38. New Screen Economies and Viewing Paradigms: The Ethics of Representation in Delhi Crime
  39. 4. TV Series as Political Weapons
  40. Television Series as Critical Theories: From Current Identitarianism to Levinas. American Crime, The Sinner, Sharp Objects, Unorthodox
  41. Black Earth Rising and Queen Sono: A Critical Decolonial Analysis
  42. Diversity, Identity, Oppression: The Construction of “Blackness” in Dear White People
  43. The Handmaid’s Tale: Reproductive Labour and the Social Embeddedness of Markets
  44. 5. Security Series
  45. The Bureau and the Realism of Spy Fiction
  46. The Veteran Reintegrated in You’re the Worst and One Day at a Time
  47. Topical issue: Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach, edited by Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten - Part II
  48. A Bite of the Forbidden Fruit: The Abject of Food and Affirmative Environmental Ethics
  49. A Phenomenological Look at the Orgasm Gap
  50. Home and Exile – Dancing in the Mess of Contradictions
  51. Selfhood in Question: The Ontogenealogies of Bear Encounters
  52. Epistemology, Political Perils and the Ethnocentrism Problem in Feminism
  53. Regular Articles
  54. Attentional Structure and Phenomenal Unity
  55. Divergences and Convergences of Perspective: Amerindian Perspectivism, Phenomenology, and Speculative Realism
  56. Second-Order Recursions of First-Order Cybernetics: An “Experimental Epistemology”
  57. On Truth and Lie in the Object-Oriented Sense
  58. “It’s Time for a Rent Strike”: COVID-19 Rent Strikes and the Absence of State Care
  59. Adversarial Democracy and the Flattening of Choice: A Marcusian Analysis of Sen’s Capability Theory’s Reliance Upon Universal Democracy as a Means for Overcoming Inequality
  60. The “Slicing Problem” for Computational Theories of Consciousness
https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2022-0227
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Articles in the same Issue

  1. Topical issue: Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation, edited by Michael Lewin and Rudolf Meer
  2. Introduction to the Topical Issue “Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation”
  3. Between Old and New Teleology. Kant on Maupertuis’ Principle of Least Action
  4. The Faculty of Ideas. Kant’s Concept of Reason in the Narrower Sense
  5. For a Dialectic-First Approach to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
  6. On the Concept of Real Use of Reason
  7. Where Do All These Ideas Come From? Kant on the Formation of Concepts Under the Guidance of Pure Reason
  8. Kant on the Status of Ideas and Principles of Reason
  9. The Collective Unity of Reason in the First Critique
  10. Determining and Grounding: The Twofold Function of the Transcendental Dialectic
  11. Towards a Unity of Theoretical and Practical Reason: On the Constitutive Significance of the Transcendental Dialectic
  12. Meillassoux’s Reinterpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic
  13. Semantic Anti-Realism in Kant’s Antinomy Chapter
  14. Reason, Its Real Use, and the Status of Its Ideas and Principles: Response to Caimi, Gava, and Lewin
  15. Topical issue: Conceptual Personae in Ontology, edited by Carlos A. Segovia
  16. Conceptual Personae in Ontology
  17. Socratic and Cartesian Personae: Undismembering and Liquidation
  18. Nietzsche’s Ariadne: On Asses’s Ears in Botticelli/Dürer – and Poussin’s Bacchanale
  19. The Mythical Absolute: The Fiction of Being
  20. Rivalry and Philosophy after Deleuze’s Reversal of Platonic Participation
  21. Rethinking Dionysus and Apollo: Redrawing Today’s Philosophical Chessboard
  22. The Witching Body: Ontology and Physicality of the Witch
  23. Topical issue: Ethics and Politics of TV Series, edited by Sandra Laugier
  24. Taking TV Series Seriously
  25. 1. Moral Education and the Limits of Ethics
  26. Fleabag’s Pedagogy of the Gimmick
  27. The Feelings We Feel: Care and Community in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
  28. Violence, Wars, and the Possibility of Ethical Life in an Apocalypse: A Kantian Reading of The Walking Dead
  29. On the Fear of the Void and Killing Babies in Pascal, Nabokov, and Game of Thrones
  30. 2. Technological Imagination
  31. Posthumanist Solidarity: The Political and Ethical Imaginations of Artificial Intelligence from Battlestar Galactica to Raised by Wolves
  32. The Dialogic Expansion of Garcia’s We: Chronotopes, Ethics, and Politics in The Expanse Series
  33. Ethics and Technology: An Analysis of Rick and Morty
  34. 3. Ontology and Genres
  35. Rewatching, Film, and New Television
  36. From Episodic Novel to Serial TV: The Handmaid’s Tale, Adaptation and Politics
  37. Series Under Threat
  38. New Screen Economies and Viewing Paradigms: The Ethics of Representation in Delhi Crime
  39. 4. TV Series as Political Weapons
  40. Television Series as Critical Theories: From Current Identitarianism to Levinas. American Crime, The Sinner, Sharp Objects, Unorthodox
  41. Black Earth Rising and Queen Sono: A Critical Decolonial Analysis
  42. Diversity, Identity, Oppression: The Construction of “Blackness” in Dear White People
  43. The Handmaid’s Tale: Reproductive Labour and the Social Embeddedness of Markets
  44. 5. Security Series
  45. The Bureau and the Realism of Spy Fiction
  46. The Veteran Reintegrated in You’re the Worst and One Day at a Time
  47. Topical issue: Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach, edited by Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten - Part II
  48. A Bite of the Forbidden Fruit: The Abject of Food and Affirmative Environmental Ethics
  49. A Phenomenological Look at the Orgasm Gap
  50. Home and Exile – Dancing in the Mess of Contradictions
  51. Selfhood in Question: The Ontogenealogies of Bear Encounters
  52. Epistemology, Political Perils and the Ethnocentrism Problem in Feminism
  53. Regular Articles
  54. Attentional Structure and Phenomenal Unity
  55. Divergences and Convergences of Perspective: Amerindian Perspectivism, Phenomenology, and Speculative Realism
  56. Second-Order Recursions of First-Order Cybernetics: An “Experimental Epistemology”
  57. On Truth and Lie in the Object-Oriented Sense
  58. “It’s Time for a Rent Strike”: COVID-19 Rent Strikes and the Absence of State Care
  59. Adversarial Democracy and the Flattening of Choice: A Marcusian Analysis of Sen’s Capability Theory’s Reliance Upon Universal Democracy as a Means for Overcoming Inequality
  60. The “Slicing Problem” for Computational Theories of Consciousness
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