CORRELATING COGITATIONS PT 2

Of all the concepts I correlated in Part 1, I have not previously shown reasons to bring together William James' two forms of knowledge (even when seen purely through the lens of my literary formulations) with Kant's two forms of sublimity, which I altered more extensively to meld with literary considerations. So what if any links can be found between James and Kant?

Everything I wrote about the Kantian sublimities derives from his CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, and in his first chapter, long before he broaches the subject of sublimity, Kant announces that he will discuss two sets of concepts:

Now there are only two kinds of concepts, and these admit as many distinct principles of the possibility of their objects, viz. natural concepts and the concept of freedom... Thus Philosophy is correctly divided into two parts, quite distinct in their principles; the theoretical part or Natural Philosophy, and the practical part or Moral Philosophy (for that is the name given to the practical legislation of Reason in accordance with the concept of freedom). 

When Kant set forth his project in 1790, I assume that he took some influence from previous philosophers in one way or another, and I similarly assume that most of the great philosophers who followed Kant were at least aware of this assertion. I do not know if Schopenhauer, reputed to have been a major interpreter of Kant, had this theme statement from JUDGMENT in mind when he distinguished between "perceptual knowledge" and "conceptual knowledge," or whether James or anyone else who discoursed on "knowledge-by-acquaintance" and "knowledge-about" and their congeners. Those matters of philosophical history don't matter; only the fact that all of Kant's JUDGMENT meditations spring from his division between natural concepts and moral concepts. In my mind the literary aspects of "knowledge-by-acquaintance" translate as the lateral meaning of any text, which is the unmediated, literal account of what happens in the narrative, while the aspects of "knowledge-about" translate as the text's vertical meaning, which is mediated by the interpretations made by the characters in the narrative, the author's observations independent of the characters, and the responses of the audience.

So even though Kant has a specific orientation in his "moral philosophy" toward his particular concept of "freedom"-- which I believe he considers essentially "a priori," as against the "a posteriori" concepts of nature-- his system is roughly in line with the later terms for the two forms of knowledge as advanced by James, Grote and others.

Now, Kant's uses examples taken from nature to explicate his twin concepts of sublimity. Here's Kant on what he terms "the mathematical-sublime:"

Examples of the mathematically Sublime of nature in mere intuition are all the cases in which we are given, not so much a larger numerical concept as a large unit for the measure of the Imagination (for shortening the numerical series). A tree, [the height of] which we estimate with reference to the height of a man, at all events gives a standard for a mountain; and if this were a mile high, it would serve as unit for the number expressive of the earth’s diameter, so that the latter might be made intuitible. The earth’s diameter [would supply a unit] for the known planetary system; this again for the Milky Way; and the immeasurable number of milky way systems called nebulae,—which presumably constitute a system of the same kind among themselves—lets us expect no bounds here. Now the Sublime in the aesthetical judging of an immeasurable whole like this lies not so much in the greatness of the number [of units], as in the fact that in our progress we ever arrive at yet greater units.

And here's some of his examples of "the dynamic-sublime:" 

Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.

Probably Kant would consider all of hie examples to be "natural concepts." However, the examples of the dynamic-sublime have to do with discrete physical phenomena, which are things of which we know "by acquaintance." The perception of seemingly infinite phenomena, though, are mediated in MY opinion through the knowledge-faculty termed "knowledge-about," because the infinite-seeming phenomena come into conflict with the human desire to suss out proportions in an analytical manner.

The chances that some Kant scholar will dispute my interpretation of the "mathematical-sublime" are the opposite of infinite-- "infinitesimal." But such objections would not matter, because in this essay I translated Kant's formulation into one dealing exclusively with literary experiences of a different form of "infinity:"

it has occured to me that in literature, there are ways to express "infinity" that are not ineluctably entangled with the idea of might, and which will prove consequential for my attempt to formulate the foundations of the three worlds of artistic phenomenality.  This kind of "infinity" may have some "overwhelming" characteristics, but it is not really related to "might" as such.

It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.
 

 The "infinity" of which Yeats speaks here-- like the "richness and profusion of images" I found in Edmund Burke-- suggests another form of the sublime with a different nature than the "dynamically sublime."  It is one that overwhelms in a manner roughly analogous to the "mathematically sublime," but the "magnitude" is one that stems not from physical size, but from the magnitude of how many conceivable connections can be made within a given phenomenality.

Hence the name I coin for this exclusively artistic property--

The COMBINATORY-sublime.

In 2013 I had not extrapolated the four potentialities from Jung's four functions; that took place the next year, in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR. Thus my word "connections" is vague at best. Still, the context, that of Yeats' "infinity of truths," aligns far more with the "knowledge-about" epistemologies characteristic of mythic narrative than with "knowledge-by-acquaintance." 

Or so it seems to me now, eleven years later. If I come across any posts of the combinatory-sublime that seem to contradict this current formulation, I reject them in advance, just for the satisfaction of having a sense of symmetry in my system.          

          

SYMBOLS, SEX AND SELECTION

 While going through books I hadn't read yet, I encountered a 1997 item by evolutionary biologist Terrence W. Deacon, THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES. This time I decided to sample a chapter out of order, to get a general idea of Deacon's approach to symbols in the context of evolution with the standard priority of organisms maximizing species survival through sexual selection. The random chapter I chose, "Symbolic Origins," happens to concretize one of Deacon's most interesting takes on the evolution of symbols in culture.

What was the spark that kindled the evolution of symbolic communication? If symbolic communication did not arise due to a "hopeful monster" mutation of the brain, it must have been selected for. But by what factors of hominid life? How can we discover the context of this initial push into such a novel form of communication?

One of the first ideas Deacon dismisses is the notion that language must have come about to optimize many of the standard societal interactions between prehistoric hominids of the Pleistocene. he points out that at a time when most animals, including hominids, communicated many day-to-day interactions with nonsymbolic strategies such as gestures and call-and-response vocal exchanges.    

 A generally less efficient form of communication could only have gained a foothold if it provided something different, a communicative function that was not available even in a much-elaborated system of vocal and gestural indices. Given these disadvantages, what other possible selective advantage of symbolizing could possibly have led a group of hominids to incur such costs? 

Deacon then points out that "intense sexual selection" is usually the factor that causes "significant evolutionary changes in communication in other species." He references the evolutionary use of the term "ritualization" to describe lower animals taking on patterns to optimize sexual selection, whether the patterns are gestural (male and female grebes dancing together on a lake's surface or visual (the familiar example of the peacock's tail, a distinct individual disadvantage for the sake of gene transmission). These examples initially suggested to me that Deacon meant to argue that symbolic language might have evolved to facilitate sexual liaisons, but it turned out that Deacon pursued a more roundabout conclusion.

After some general comparisons to other animal species' habits of both mating and provisioning for the young, Deacon focuses on one of the distinctive provisioning strategies of hominids: the regular seeking of meat as fodder, even in times when there are not shortages of edible plant-life. Again, all or most of the hominid strategies for mating and provisioning can be handled by nonsymbolic communications.

Although there is a vast universe of objects and relationships susceptible to nonsymbolic representation, indeed, anything that can be present to the senses, this does not include abstract or otherwise intangible objects of reference. This categorical limitation is the link between the anomalous form of communication that evolved in humans and the anomalous context of human social behavior. 

The thing that hominids do, that other animals do not do (and yes, Deacon addresses so-called "pair bonding"), is the abstract system of marriage.      

Marriage, in all its incredible variety, is the regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means, and it is essentially universal in human societies. It is preeminently a symbolic relationship, and owing to the lack of symbolic abilities, it is totally absent in the rest of the animal kingdom. What I am suggesting here is that a related form of regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means was essential for early hominids to take advantage of a hunting-provisioning subsistence strategy.

In this chapter at least, Deacon does not address the social evolution of religion in detail. But he seems to imply broadly that the pressure to negotiate a non-Rousseauan "social marriage contract" came first, and therefore all other forms of ritualization utilizing symbolic constructions came later.

Deacon concludes his argument by stressing "co-evolution:"

The argument I have presented is only an argument for the conditions which required symbolic reference in the first place, and which selected for it despite the great difficulties and costs of collectively producing and maintaining it. Much of the story of this intermediate evolutionary history, extending for over 2 million years from language origins to the present, has yet to be even imagined in any clarity. But putting evolutionary causes and effects in appropriate order and precisely identifying the anatomical correlates of this transition are a prerequisite for providing anything beyond "just so" versions of the process. The key to this is the co-evolutionary perspective which recognizes that the evolution of language took place neither inside nor outside brains, but at the interface where cultural evolutionary processes affect biological evolutionary processes.  

And I conclude my argument, for now, by adding that though I agree with the basic concept of co-evolution, I don't necessarily think that marital customs alone, with their emphasis upon "social altruism," necessarily preceded religious customs, which certainly carry much of the same valence. Since according to the index Deacon does not address prehistoric religion in the rest of the book either, it would be stimulating to compare Deacon's hypothesis with those of an "evolutionary biologist" who had studied the historical manifestations of prehistoric religiosity.      

MYTHCOMICS: "ANYFACE" (LI'L ABNER, April 19-May 31, 1947)

 Rather than wasting time summing up how Al Capp's "comic-within-a-comic" FEARLESS FOSDICK evolved within Al Capp's LI'L ABNER feature, here's the Wiki writeup on the subject. 

The most interesting things about the 1942 introduction of Fosdick within the continuity of the ABNER strip are (1) the fact that what one can see of Fosdick looks almost indistinguishable from Tracy, without the pencil mustache seen on later versions, and (2) the short spoof concentrates only upon the idea that Fosdick's real-world creator "Lester Gooch" puts the fictional detective into death-traps without knowing how to extricate said hero. Jay Maeder's superlative survey of Gould's groundbreaking strip, DICK TRACY: THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY, attests that on occasion Chester Gould did have to scramble to find some way to save Tracy from his final curtain. However, in retrospect the critique seems petty, given that Al Capp shared Gould's penchant for placing characters in cliffhanger situations and then getting them out with ridiculous contrivances-- probably more so than Gould ever resorted to.

Over the next four years Capp continued to develop new elements of the Fosdick character. He was just as much a moral ramrod as Tracy, but Fosdick had no brains whatever and so was incapable of anything like detection. He was sexually abstemious, telling one female pursuer that no woman's lips but his mother's would ever touch his (which would lead to some Freudian conclusions Capp might not have intended). And in one adventure, cartoonish Gooch learns that his new villain for Fosdick, a rock-headed crook named "Stone Face," actually exists in Gooch's world. The criminal wants to force Gooch to destroy the fictional Fosdick's reputation with adoring kids by forcing him to get married, a fate which particularly horrifies Fosdick's number one fan, Li'l Abner Yokum. After various contrivances, Stone Face encounters Abner and tries to kill the youth by hitting Abner with his rocky noggin-- and the hard-headed hillbilly wins the contest.

The first truly ambitious Fosdick story ran through May 1947, though it includes some setup in April within the "Abner universe." Gooch's publishers harangue the artist to create yet more grotesque villains to enthrall FOSDICK's readers, "the kiddies." (Two years later, Gershon Legman would republish some of his anti-violence essays in the book LOVE AND DEATH, saying in all seriousness the same thing Capp said for a joke.) Gooch's artistic insanity gets him put into an asylum. Further, when a rival publisher threatens Gooch's life, a certain hulking hillbilly is hired to guard the artist's welfare-- and to make sure that the strips keep coming out on time. This provided Capp with the excuse to have Abner periodically interrupt the FOSDICK continuity to remind readers, "it's only a comic strip about another comic strip."

"Anyface" seems to be the first arc in which Capp steps up the ultraviolence to epic levels, to parody DICK TRACYs legendary levels of mayhem. The detective, informed that a villain named Anyface can make himself look like anyone, comes to the random conclusion that the fiend would logically make himself look like the city's most beneficent philanthropist, so Fosdick immediately shoots the innocent man through the head. Further, the real Anyface was masquerading as the official who gave Fosdick the assignment-- though, contrary to his boast, Anyface doesn't do or say anything to the klutz-cop to suggest offing the victim. (BTW, nowhere in the narrative does Capp explain how Anyface duplicates the clothes of the people he imitates, since he can only change his physical form.)

             

Unlike the majority of ABNER villains, Anyface never seems to have any specific aim in mind. He seems to exist merely to torment Fosdick, as Mr. Mxyzptlk does Superman. Anyface hits on the idea that the best way to utterly humiliate the idiot officer is to pretend to be his long-suffering girlfriend (here named "Bess Backache" in emulation of Dick Tracy's girl Tess Trueheart) and inveigle Fosdick into marrying "her," his worst enemy. Capp does not drop even the slightest hint as to how Anyface presses his suit when the real girlfriend couldn't get Fosdick to the altar over the course of twelve years. The logical conclusion that modern audiences would make, that of premarital sex, might or might not have been an idea Capp toyed with. Still, he would have known he could not have even implied the subject in a family comic strip. So, he passed over the matter. In the "real world," Abner is deeply distressed by his "ideel" being turned into a pathetic fool. Daisy Mae and Mammy become concerned that Abner might "kill himself in grief." Mammy deduces that Gooch has come up with this "worse-than-death trap" because he's gone crazy, so Mammy lays plans to go straighten the artist out.

Unfortunately for Abner, Insane Gooch finishes one more insane set of strips before Mammy makes the scene and scrambles his brains back into normalcy. Abner is initially exultant to see that Fosdick, his brain possibly prompted into something like thought by his mortification, lay a trap for Anyface, though of course it's one that shows the super-cop's utter disregard for collateral damage. Fosdick forces 69 persons suspected of being Anyface (why?) into a single room and cranks up the heat to 500 degrees, believing that the heat will melt the fiend's taffy-like features. But in the last strip produced by Insane Gooch, Fosdick's features begin melting, revealing that he, the incorruptible lawman, is actually Anyface. Abner confronts Gooch and demands a rational explanation. But Gooch has had his brains "normalized," and now he has no idea what he was thinking while insane. Capp leaves his hillbilly star on the horns of an insoluble dilemma, implying the complete identity between good and evil--

--Well, for roughly two months. Capp probably never devised an escape-hatch at all but instead exploited the situation by encouraging his readers to invent some solution that would "save" Fearless Fosdick. Capp chose a suggestion that he printed in a single strip on June 28, 1947, and that was technically the end of the "Anyface" arc. Said solution was worse than anything either Gould or Capp had ever devised. While Anyface-Fosdick's face is melting, the real Fosdick walks into the hotbox-room and captures the felon. So-- if Anyface was just masquerading as Fosdick, why did he participate in Fosdick's trap, knowing that his face would melt in front of all those witnesses? It might've made a little sense if Anyface had caught and tied up the klutz-cop, planning to kill all of the suspects in the hotbox and blame the deed on Fosdick. But I doubt that Capp cared about anything but keeping Fosdick in play, and most of the readers who liked Fosdick probably held the same opinion.

Since Capp didn't really provide the lame solution, I'd argue that the Anyface arc really does end with the revelation that hero and villain are one, even though throughout the story they've been repeatedly seen as separate beings. These fourth-wall shenanigans remind me of the overpraised Berthold Brecht, but Capp was no Brechtian ironist, just a joke-teller who felt like taking shots at any target. If I had to choose which artist, Capp or Gould, devised the greater number of lame cliffhanger resolutions, I'd choose Capp. So it's puzzling that he would jab Gould over the practice of improbable death-traps. Capp was actually more on target in his implication that the world of DICK TRACY was one in which innocents were getting killed as Tracy pursued his crusade for justice, and thus all the gags about hecatombs of dead citizens make a much better spoof on Chester Gould. Finally, when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

ADDENDUM: Though Capp wasn't shy about dealing out dire fates to his villains-- at least, no more so than Gould-- Anyface is still alive by the end of the story. Not only did Capp continue to use him in comic-book ads for a hair cream Fosdick shilled for, in the 1960s the villain somehow showed up in the LI'L ABNER strip, without even the piddling explanation given in the "Stone Face" arc. That arc had not been reprinted, but I recall that Anyface pops up in Dogpatch and impersonates Daisy Mae Yokum. I don't recall what becomes of the villain in that story.   

 

 

    

EMINENCE AND STATURE

Technically, "eminence" and "stature" are the same words with which I characterize the significant value of centricity in literature, but each one was reached by a different path, so I'll probably keep using both in their respective contexts.

Though I wrote four essays here in which "charisma" was the term I applied to superordinate icons and "stature" to all subordinate icons, I reversed this terminological use in the 2020 essay EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2. That formulation of both "stature" and "charisma," then, was tied to my effort to finding a broad terminology for all the icons in a given narrative.

"Eminence," though, was an attempt to find a structural metaphor that described how centricity looks when one focuses only upon a given centric icon, in comparison to everything else in the narrative. As my most recent essay on the topic specifies, "eminence" is more explicitly linked to what sort of "master-trope" dominates the author's propositional conceptions. Thus, for example, no individual character dominates either Pierre Boulle's PLANET OF THE APRES novel or any of the film versions, for the icon of the environment is the star of the show. Wells' TIME MACHINE depicts a similar situation, though the nameless time-traveler visits two distinct time-periods. I tend to think both of them share eminence because they share a common purpose in Wells' proposition: to show the complete irrelevance of human ambitions and priorities in the face of a universal principle of entropy.   

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GREAT OXYGEN THEFT" (THE MARVEL FAMILY #41, 1949)

 For a change, here's a Golden Age story in which the name of its artist is lost to time, but GCD attests that the writer was Otto Binder, known to Fawcett fans as having been responsible for a great quantity of stories about Captain Marvel and his kindred. "The Great Oxygen Theft" is not one of Binder's more celebrated stories, but it merits a little notoriety for rendering elementary-school environmental science into a decent cosmological myth.

  

THEFT wastes no time in setting up the action of this 10-page tale. A radio summons from the evil Doctor Sivana lures the Marvel Family to an unnamed, inhabited world in the star-system of Sirius. Sivana gives the heroes a story about his having reformed and directs their attention to the fact that the world's plant life is almost gone thanks to a plant-killing blight. The inhabitants haven't noticed this mass extinction, but they start paying attention when they start finding it hard to breathe, due to the lack of plants generating oxygen. Sivana then leaves the good guys to sort things out while he jets back to Earth, revealing that he created the blight just to keep the Marvels out of his non-existent hair.

   The Marvels' first task is to save the populace. Mary Marvel purifies the soil of Sivana's poison, Captain Marvel Jr disperses the excess carbon dioxide that has built up in the absence of plant life, and Captain Marvel brings in a glacier of frozen oxygen to give the air-breathers temporary relief.

The Marvels then play Johnny Appleseed, transporting Earth-plants to the Sirius-world. Naturally, Binder doesn't trouble with ALL the scientific niceties regarding the practicality of one world's vegetation adapting to a totally different environment. However, on one of the heroes' trips to Earth, they find that certain areas of their own world have been hit with the plant-blight. Before they even have to wonder if the blight might have travelled back to Earth on their boots or capes, Sivana announced that he's responsible, and that he wants supreme power to keep Earth's plants healthy.

  Since THEFT is as I said just a ten-page story, Binder needed a quick wrap-up, so he cheats a little. Captain Marvel gets the bright idea that just as miners had used canaries to test for bad air inside mines, he and the other Marvels can just pick up a random potted plant and use it to "detect" the presence of plant-poison in Sivana's ship. It would probably made just as much sense for the Marvels to race all around the world until they made a visual sighting of the ship-- which, after all, they all got a look at, back on the unnamed planet. But Binder also knew his audience would like a little ironic touch at the end, in which a villain who poisoned a world's plants gets defeated by the use of another plant. The unknown artist even shows, in the penultimate panel, Sivana "wearing" the potted plant atop his bald head, leading one to assume that some hero "crowned" him with it. THEFT probably violates as many scientific principles as those that it gets right, but the payoff at the end, with the Marvels expressing their appreciation for plants and the order of nature, is not diminished by said violations.    
  

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 

So if centric icons within a narrative are "organizational matrices," is there a better term to assign to the organizing principle? Astute readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) will guess that the previously unused term of "eminence" will now assume that position...-- EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS.

Looking over this essay and its companion from last July, I don't think I adequately defined the organizational interactions of icons and propositions, which takes place through the agency of a master trope, rather than just tropes in general, as I said here.

I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. --MY SHORTEST POST YET. 

The one thing I left out in the above formulation is that any professional author decides in advance what sort of proposition will govern his narrative, and this means becoming more specific as to what sort of icons will work best for his master trope. Charles Dickens can't just put "orphan must learn the secret of his birth" out there; he must decide who the orphan is-- Oliver Twist-- and what the secret is; that Oliver still has a living relative from whom he and his mother got separated. 

Thus, there's an operative difference between a "generalized trope," which can be applied to many works, and a "specialized trope," which applies only to a particular work, or a particular linked set of works. Other aspects of the work will include "bachelor tropes" that are not nearly as important as the master trope. Oliver must meet some opposition so that his discovery of his secret heritage doesn't seem to be too easy. That opposition doesn't have to be Fagin and his faux-family of thieves, so that part of the proposition comprises a bachelor trope in relation to the master trope.  

OLIVER TWIST is a monadic work with no further iterations, so its proposition is unitary. Serial works are cumulative, given that even the most stereotypical serial-- I might cite my earlier example of the Golden Age BLUE BEETLE from a related essay-- may have a specialized trope (Blue Beetle protects his city from crime) that is barely distinguishable from a generalized trope ("hero protects his city from crime.") 

However, in cases where the cumulative narratives of the series are not broadly stereotypical, the specialized trope must be refined. Will Eisner's SPIRIT varies between direct confrontations with evildoers and indirect encounters with either human error or simple fallibility. In the cover Will Eisner prepared for a Kitchen Sink reprint of the 1940s SPIRIT stories, the artist depicts a scene that doesn't literally transpire in the story "Gerhard Shnobble," but one which symbolizes a key moment in the tale. The Spirit's crimefighting activities take second place in "Shnobble" to the tragic end of the title character, which the Spirit doesn't even personally witness. Nevertheless, even in stories where the dominant action takes place in the life of a one-shot character, the Spirit still provides a moral compass for Eisner's implied reader, even when he has no impact upon the one-shot character's life. So even though the SPIRIT series started out with a specialized trope like "The Spirit protects his city from crime," that master trope became in time inaccurate because of changes in the propositional priorities. Thus a more appropriate specialized trope, capable of taking in all of the propositions Eisner offered to readers, would be something more like, "The Spirit bears witness to the many manifestations of human fallibility."  

 

CORRELATING COGITATIONS

I formulated the literary "word pair" of the ontocosm and the epicosm back in this May essay, and so far it's lasted. I have overturned a few neologisms in the space of a few days, while other formulations have lasted a few years before I abandoned them. So I may or may not keep these two terms in the distant future. However, for now I'm moved to correlate various past dichotomous cogitations under the aegis of each category, if only to keep them all straight in my head.

THE ONTOCOSM of a literary work includes:

All LATERAL meaning, relating to both the KINETIC and DRAMATIC elements of a narrative. These are the elements that tell the reader, "WHAT THINGS HAPPEN."

All FUNCTIONALITY, which appeals to the reader's need for a fictional analogue to real PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE.  

All PRE-EPISTEMIC ways of knowing, which are known through the process of "knowledge-by-acquaintance."

All modalities of THE DYNAMIC-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MIGHT.

THE EPICOSM of a literary work includes:

All VERTICAL meaning, relating to both the MYTHOPOEIC and DIDACTIC elements of a narrative. These are the elements that tell the reader, "HOW THINGS HAPPEN."

All SUPER-FUNCTIONALITY, which appeals to the reader's need for a fictional analogue to real CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

All EPISTEMIC ways of knowing, which are known through the process of "knowledge-about."

All modalities of THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MYTH.

 

I may develop some or none of these correlations in future. But for the time being, I'll content myself with noting the essays in which each paired cogitation appeared.

I first mentioned "lateral meaning" in RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT, which contains one of those word pairs I abandoned ("underthought and overthought"). And later I perfected the application of both lateral and vertical meaning in THE LATERAL AND VERTICAL MEANINGS OF LIFE.    

The duality of "what things happen" and "how things happen" is discussed in WHAT VS. HOW.

"Functionality" and "super-functionality" are first discussed in the 2014 essay A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY.

Perceptual knowledge and conceptual knowledge appear in the works of both Arthur Schopenhauer and William James.   

Assorted essays on William James discuss the Two Forms of Knowledge, while Alfred North Whitehead is my source of the terms "epistemic" and "pre-epistemic."

The terms "might and myth," a slight play on the standard phrase "might and main," appears in MIGHT AND MYTH. The somewhat more involved cogitations concerning the "dynamicity mode" and the "combinatory mode" of sublimity are explored in the series TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I, beginning here.