Elementals as image schemas

Michael started a FB IPS thread on dualistic metaphysics here. It got around to Sallis' definition of elementals. Some of my comments follow.

In the Chorology review Sallis talks about elementals as imaginative spatio-temporal determinations that correspond to various logical categories. That's pretty much what image schema are. Another way of looking at elementals is Edwards' different lenses, e.g. holarchical, bi-polor, cyclical, standpoint, relational (24 in all). In part 8 of his ILR interview he says of them:

"These lens categories tap into some basic relationships that exist in the human experience of reality. Consequently, they show up within every attempt to understand, explain, or get some handle on the complexity that exists within and around us and between us and through us. I see them as coming out of some kind of morphological fault line in the Kosmos, windows that we create and which we are drawn to look through, proclivities that we innately possess as sentient beings who act and imagine."

It is no coincidence that his different lenses are strikingly similar, if not identical, to the various pre-conscious image schema (IS). IS literally ground our theories in the body/mind through its interactions with culture and nature. And they also maintain duality but are not metaphysically dualistic. Or as LP implies, quadality. But given Edwards' 24 lenses, and the innumerable image schema, it might be more appropriate to call it Mutual MultiAlity. Aka Multipli City as my neologistic kosmos address for this.

Bruce's work on parts of speech (as another type of elemental) and their connection to philosophical inclinations within plural meta-frameworks. I (and Lakoff et al) claim that parts of speech are themselves grounded in the multifarious, elemental, pre-conscious and pre-linguistic image schema.

Image schema give rise to basic categories of thought. And these basic categories are not found at the bottom of classical hierarchies but rather in the middle of them. Classical hierarchies tend toward the metaphysical dualistic frame, given that both the bottom and top of the hierarchy are viewed as metaphysical generators. The bottom feeders so to speak, the empiricists, see the most basic, relative elements as generative of the cosmos. The top feeders see the absolute, most general realm as the generator, e.g., Plato's ideal forms or mystical satori adherents. But the actual, immanent generator of the most specific and the most general of such hierarchies are the image schema in the middle of them. This turns classical hierarchies inside out (aka hier(an)archy), another story for another day.