relate or depend on certain other things. To take Kant’s own example: a hand mill can be shown to represent a despotic state in spite of the absence of any similarity between the two “items,” because both function only if manipulated by an individual absolute will. Thus, analogical presentation does two things, as Kant notes. First, it applies the concept (here the despotic state) to the object of a sensible intuition (the hand mill), and then it applies “the mere rule of the reflection made upon the intuition [on the type of causality it implies] to a quite different object of which the first is only the symbol.” (Gasché 212)
Hannah Arendt noted that Kant’s use of analogy in his logic of judgment was in fact the operation responsible for the formation of most philosophical concepts. The relay with our personification of prudence is explicit.
All philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve the term into the original context, which must have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it. When Plato introduced the everyday words “soul” and “idea” into philosophical language—connecting an invisible organ in man, the soul, with something invisible present in the world of invisibles, the ideas—he still must have heard the words as they were used in ordinary pre-philosophical language. . . . The underlying analogy of Plato’s doctrine of the soul runs as follows: As the breath of life relates to the body it leaves, that is, to the corpse, so the soul from now on will be supposed to relate to the living body. The analogy underlying his doctrine of ideas can be reconstructed in a similar manner; as the craftsman’s mental image directs his hand in fabrication and is the measurement of the objects’ success or failure, so all materially and sensorily given data in the world of appearances relate to and are evaluated according to an invisible pattern, localized in the sky of ideas. (Arendt 1:104)
Paul Ricoeur further elaborates on the philosophical productivity of the mathematical notion of analogy (A is to B as C is to D):
The closest application is provided by the definition of distributive justice in the Nicomachean Ethics 5:3. The definition rests on the idea that this virtue implies four terms, two persons (equal or unequal) and two shares (advantages and disadvantages in the realms of honor or wealth); and that it establishes proportional equality in distribution between these four terms. But the application here of the idea of number, proposed by Aristotle, concerns extension not of the idea of number to irrationals but of proportion to non-homogeneous terms, provided that they can be said to be equal or unequal in some particular relation. In biology, the same formal conception of proportion permits not only classification (by saying, for example, that flying is to wings as swimming is to fins), but also demonstration (e.g., if certain animals have lungs and others do not, the latter possess an organ that takes the place of a lung). By lending themselves to proportional relationship such as these, functions and organs provide the outline of a general biology. (Ricoeur 270–71)
Kant clarified that his four-part ratios were not mathematical (not quantitative) but qualitative. Kant’s analogical bridge, the commentators point out, retraces the path of ascent from physical love to love of wisdom mapped by Plato (for example, in The Symposium). In Plato’s story Eros is not beauty but seeks beauty (Fictioc 21). The search begins with a spontaneous experience of sexual attraction. The “disinterestedness” of the feeling is the sensus communis of the universality of physical attraction. Kant’s insistence on the disinterestedness of the reflective judgment is just to distinguish aesthetic feeling from other kinds of feelings. This foregrounding of aesthetic judgment as a power in its own right is important to flash reason, to establish in the larger context of the conflicts working in deliberative rhetoric the specific dimension of aesthetic pleasure-pain and the values associated with it, separated from the representations and values of knowledge and belief.
The immediate lesson for our allegory is the assumption that my experience of embodiment may be extended through a proportional ratio as a means for moving through information of any kind. One task of flash reason is the need to update the measure of “ratio” and “proportion” to reflect the discoveries of vanguard arts. Bloom finds this option already at work in the tradition of ratio in Hellenism: one branch favored analogy (equivalence in substitution); the other branch favored anomaly (disruption, the breaking of ratio in substitution) (“The Breaking of Form” 13). Hannah Arendt was convinced of the contemporary relevance of reflective judgment, which she called
the most political of man’s mental abilities. It is the faculty that judges particulars without subsuming them under general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules. The faculty of judging particulars (as brought to light by Kant), the ability to say “this is wrong,” “this is beautiful,” and so on, is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated, as are consciousness and conscience. (1: 193)
Bittersweet
The attraction to beauty in the beloved holds attention and stimulates reflection, revealing a harmony among the lover’s faculties (concinnitas) that gives pleasure distinct from sexual desire, motivating the lover to begin the journey of becoming human. The process begins in sensory judgment, and leads into belief through custom, the social forms ordering human relationships, revealing the larger guiding patterns at work in society (habitus, dharma). Attention shifts away from the self to the other, to beauty of character and of social order. The third stage is knowledge, learning the sciences of form, such as mathematics. The final stage is wisdom: an intution of Form as such (Fictioc 85–86). Philosophers from Pythagoras to Kant (and beyond) based their optimism about the educability of the multitude (and their enlistment in an enlightened politics) on proportional ratios (music of the spheres). It is worth dwelling on this point, since it is possible in one respect to reduce the shift from literacy to electracy to a mutation in the standard of ratio (proportion). This discussion of Alberti and architecture shows what is at stake.
The unlearned (or unskilled) person cannot do what the learned person can do, but he can judge the results of what the learned person does. Cicero speaks throughout of various arts, and he grounds this argument in a general principle of the relation of art and nature. . . . The “nature” from which art begins, and to which it must appeal to achieve anything, is our nature (which, of course, does not necessarily preclude its consonance with nature in a large sense, that is, it does not preclude the possibility that the same mean is in ourselves and in what we apprehend, and that this similarity is fact makes our apprehension of them possible). Just such an ambivalence runs through Alberti’s remarks about pulchritude and concinnitas, the latter of which is a principle of both human sense and nature at large. “Beauty is a certain consensus and unison of the parts of a thing with regard to definite number, finish and collocation, as demanded by concinnitas, the absolute and primary reason of nature” (Summers 134).
The project of concept avatar (a transition of conceptual thinking from literacy into electracy) may be seen relative to the use of “nature” in Summers’s observation. The literate concept remains responsible for “nature” proper, which it was invented to address as ontology. Concept avatar (electracy), extends the concept analogically into second nature (habitus, popular media), to attempt an image metaphysics. The fundamental analogy of the tradition is that between love and wisdom (philosophy), concerned with the desire to know. The relationship or ratio between love and knowledge has to be adjusted in each epoch, not to mention for each apparatus, with implications for individual experience and behavior. As love goes, so goes wisdom. Anne Carson identifies exactly the hinge of the ratio.
There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker. It has been an endeavour of philosophy from the time of Socrates to understand the nature and uses of that resemblance. But not only philosophers are intrigued to do so. I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like
