On Human Nature "ss1.54"

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I

I shall start with a most difficult matter, a report of five dogs.

First, there is the "primal" dog, the dog that one usually encounters in a "primal scene" of childhood. He has a strong, unmistakably Freudian strain in his makeup. And he is crossed with what Malinowski would call "context of situation." That is, he merges into the background (benign or malign) of which he was an integral part when the child originally learned to distinguish him. Though both he and his context may have been forgotten in their particulars, the quality of the experiences associated with him may stay with us throughout our lives, figuring subtly ("subliminally" would be the word now) in our attitude towards dogs. And under the influence of drugs, hypnosis, or psychoanalytic couch-work many particular details about him and his context of situation may be recovered. The main point for our purposes is that he is not properly defined in terms of his own peculiar nature alone. He is "symbolic"in the sense that anessential part of his "meaning"(both forgotten and unerringly remembered from out of the recesses of our past) resides in his role among a complex of conditions not specifically dog like.

Next, there is the "jingle" dog. Whereas the "primal" dog would be associated with many nonverbal circumstances, the "jingle" dog would involve his relation to the particulars of speech (such as the fact that in English the word "dog" rhymes with words that the corresponding Hund or chien would not rhyme with; and by a tonal accident that engaged the poet e.e. cummings, he is "God" spelled backwards). Here also would belong his proper name, plus the punlike relationship to identical or similar names, including those of people or places. One might even extend the range of the "jingle" dog to cover the logically dissociated linguistic situation that unites dog and tree (since each, in its way, has an association with the word "bark").

But though the "primal" dog and the "jingle" dog can tug dangerously at the leash of reason, all is quite different with the "lexical" dog, the kind defined in the dictionary per genus et differentiam. Viewed by the tests of either poetry or neurosis, he is an exceptionally uninteresting dog. But without him and his kind, the world of wholesome common sense as we know it would collapse into gibberish. In our civilization, to indicate what the word "means," you wouldn't even need a verbal definition, or the corresponding word in some other language. A mere picture of the "lexical" dog would suffice to indicate what was meant, even in a language that we did not know. Yet note, for later reference in this chapter: It's impossible

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to make a picture just of "dog," in the specifically lexical sense. For there are all sorts of dogs, dogs of many sizes, breeds, shapes, colors, postures, and so on. But your picture would require you to draw some particular kind of dog, while at the same time your illustration must be interpreted as indicating what is meant by the word "dog" in general. And as a matter of fact, the picture in an alien dictionary might have been not of "dog" in general, but of a fox terrier. Also, within this narrower orbit, the same sort of problem would prevail. For even the picture of a fox terrier requires you to use specific traits for general purposes, since all fox terriers differ from one another. Here's a problem to which we must certainly revert, as regards questions that have to do with a Theory of Terms.

Fourth, adapting from Aristotle, we'd distinguish an "entelechial" dog, the "complete" dog towards which all doggery variously aspires, to the extent that dogs fulfill their nature as dogs. We here confront the terministic principle involved in an expression such as "perfect" dog, to designate the natural fulfillment of dog qua dog. Obviously it's much easier for a dog to be wholly a dog (to exemplify the very dogginess of dog) than it is for a human being to exemplify in all fullness the humanity of his nature as a human being. I hope later to make clear how this formalistic principle figures in our thoughts on the functions of terms. But for the present, we must merely introduce the notion.

Finally, there is the "tautological" dog. You get him by crossing the "primal" dog with the "lexical" dog, though this experiment works only if you continue to select among the offspring, not all of which breed true. He should reveal the "primal" strain only in the sense that, like the primal dog, he merges with his context. But he does so in a way typically "lexical." For instance, it would be a "tautological" step if we went from "dog" to "kennel," or to "dog food," or to "dog license," or to "master," or to "cats," "hunt," "game," "subservience," "loyalty," "running in packs," "doggedness." When approached thus, from "dog" as point of departure, all such related details become "tautological" in the sense that they are all infused with the "spirit" of the term in terms of which they are mutually related (somewhat as though "dog" were at the center of a circle, and all the other terms were distributed along the circumference, as radii generated from this center).

In some early pages entitled "Examination of a Case Described by Rivers,"^[1] I first ran into a simpler form of the distinction I am trying to make here. It involved a speculation of this sort: A child who had been frightened by a dog in a passageway from which that child could not escape might be traumatically affected by the situation of being confined

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in a passageway without an exit at a time when a danger sign was present, thus responding to this whole gestalt as fearsome motive, rather than more specifically to the dog in particular as danger sign. And if the child's attention had been formed along those lines, the resultant "affect" in an adult might show up rather as claustrophobia (fear of closed places) than as fear of dogs. The situational aspect of the case could manifest itself particularly (as with the war phobias that W.H.R. Rivers was treating) when the sufferer had to enter a dugout under circumstances marked by the nearness of the enemy. For he "unreasoningly" feared the only part of the situation that might bring him some comfort: namely, the opportunity to "dig in" and thus to be less of a target for the enemy's bullets.

But note that, as regards either the "tautological" dog, or the "primal" dog, their definition involves their contextual or situational nature, their meaning as part of a scene. This is the important consideration for our next step. But before we move on, let's briefly review our list:

Primal dog. Associated with submerged memories of a "first" dog, in case the experience was in some way formative, or "traumatic." Inseparable from his context of situation.
Jingle dog. Involves sheerly tonal associations, most of which are accidental to one particular tribal idiom.
Lexical dog. The wholesome, common-sense, dictionary meaning—and if the world had only that, we'd all die of boredom, or perhaps fare forth imperialistically to interest ourselves by making other people suffer for our fear of boredom.
Entelechial dog. Becomes of major importance in works of art. For instance: ideally, a character who is to be sacrificed must be the perfect victim for the given situation. The person who is to exact the sacrifice must be, in his way, a perfect fit for his role as victimizer, and so on—at least insofar as classical norms of artistic excellence are concerned. And perhaps those who spoke in tongues (we read about them in various passages of the New Testament) were intermingling jingle utterance with entelechial meaning. If a situation in adult life were capable of being summed up by some analogy (as with the relationship between an anecdote and its moral in a fable by Aesop) the representation would be "entelechial" by reason of its summarizing nature. However, it might be translated into terms of a merely imaginary incident falsely "remembered" from one's infantile past. The entelechial principle
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is a purely formal, nontemporal kind of fulfillment. But it can be represented in narrative terms, that is, terms for temporal priority. One can confront a situation now by entelechially imagining the kind of "primal scene" that would "account for" things as they now seem to be. In this sense, the imagined scene would be entelechial, a condensed, formal way of fulfilling in principle what is to be "unfolded." Freud's concept of a "repetition-compulsion" would also fit in here. For such a motive contains "entelechial" ingredients insofar as the sufferer, or subject, almost as though by deliberate design, "perfects" different situations by imposing upon them the same essential relationships.^[2]
Tautological dog. Such associations as one might build up by inert answers to a questionnaire. You'd ask people what they thought of when you said "dog," and you'd weed out the meanings that seemed idiosyncratic. For your main interest would involve the most representative associations of ideas. Even brilliant stylistic innovators build their figures of speech by not venturing far from such standard channels of affinity, though often (as I tried to show in Permanence and Change (1935) when discussing "perspective by incongruity") underlying properties of correlation may be contrived by perspectival leaps, as in Friedrich Nietzsche's style, with its modes of abrupt reclassification, basically a method he could have learned from Spengler or Ezra Pound, had he had the opportunity.^[3]