Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer

      2 Concept

      Hypotyposis

      The metaphysics of digital imaging dates from the Industrial Revolution, but its genealogy draws upon the traditions of image invention. The Prudence exercise introduces you to electracy as a particular kind of experience, and as a practice that foregrounds individual capacity for experience as such. Titian’s Allegory references his family, which is to say his manner of undergoing love and death. This context is a good one for our relay, since the tradition has counted on the shared undergoing of Eros (want) as an introduction to wisdom. Immanuel Kant is considered to be the last philosopher in the tradition of particular intellect that begins in Classical Greece and runs through Leonardo DaVinci. In this tradition thought is fundamentally sign-based, a showing of images to the mind’s eye, which is what recommends it as a resource for the invention of an image metaphysics. Kant received the tradition as posing the problem of a fundamental gap or chasm dividing human faculties between pure and practical reason (science and morality, knowledge and belief, the sensible and supersensible, phenomenal and noumenal). In his project of the three Critiques to determine the limits of philosophy, Kant introduced “judgment” as a faculty in its own right, grounded in aesthetic experience, functioning as a bridge crossing the chasm and connecting the other faculties of mind. Flash reason is this bridge.

      A feature of special relevance to electracy of Kant’s Third Critique is his description of reflective judgment in which a person spontaneously recognizes some form in nature, a body, or art, and judges it to be “beautiful,” without benefit of a concept or rule guiding the judgment. This process of thinking without concepts provides a transition from the literate to an electrate apparatus (from conceptual categories to a new image category). The judgment of “beauty” assumes the existence of “common sense,” forming a community of persons sharing not any specific “taste,” but the capacity to experience beauty. The phrase refers not to our modern meaning of “good sense” or shared opinion, or even the “straight talk” of Thomas Paine, but to the inner or “sixth” sense that unified and synthesized the perceptions gathered from each of the five bodily senses. To convey the immediate and spontaneous certainty of reflective feeling, Kant associated it with the sense of taste. The Latin languages indicate a relationship between taste and knowledge with the near pun, sapore and sapere, relaying the flash of awareness between mouth and intellect measuring the range between sweet and bitter.

      Concept avatar takes after reflective judgment, which works in the middle voice (auto-affection). “Beauty” is not a property of an object or thing, but a feeling by which subjects become aware of a harmony among their own faculties (auto-perception). A concept or rule is lacking for the feeling. The judgment operates formally, rather, by means of the proportional analogy “hypotyposis.” The bridge between the empirical causal world of sensible things and the moral realm of desire is accomplished analogically, with “beauty” (some sensible example) constituting a “symbol” of the supersensible “good.”

      Knowledge by analogy, Kant explains, “means not, as the word is commonly taken, an imperfect similarity of two things, but a perfect similarity of two relations between quite dissimilar things.” This definition, supported by examples that Kant gives of analogy in the Critique of Judgment, a definition that neither abolishes the heterogeneity of the things to be related nor affirms their complete separation, shows these dissimilar things to be similar merely in the way they themselves 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