Metaphor in philosophy
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Metaphor, the description of one thing as something else, has become of interest in recent decades to both
analytic philosophy Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United Sta ...
and
continental philosophy Continental philosophy is a term used to describe some philosophers and philosophical traditions that do not fall under the umbrella of analytic philosophy. However, there is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Pri ...
, but for different reasons.


Metaphor in analytic philosophy

In the Anglo-American tradition of
analytic philosophy Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United Sta ...
(in particular, in the philosophy of language), metaphor has attracted interest because it does not conform to accepted truth-conditional semantics, the conditions which determine whether or not a statement is true. Taken literally, the statement "Juliet is the sun" (from ''
Romeo and Juliet ''Romeo and Juliet'' is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetim ...
'') is false, if not nonsensical, yet, taken metaphorically, it is meaningful and may be true, but in a sense which is far from clear. The comparison theory of metaphor asserts that one can express the truth value of a metaphor by listing all the respects in which the two terms are alike or similar; for example: Juliet is ''like'' the sun because she shares with it qualities such as radiance, brilliance, the fact that she makes the day and that she gets up every morning. However, this results in re-casting metaphor as simile. Because it can only explain the truth of metaphor by in effect losing metaphor, the comparison theory is rarely defended. In contrast, two leading theorists emphasize the fact that truth conditions cannot be specified for a metaphor. Max Black maintains that metaphors are too open-ended to be able to function as
referring expression In linguistics, a referring expression (RE) is any noun phrase, or surrogate for a noun phrase, whose function in discourse is to identify some individual object. The technical terminology for ''identify'' differs a great deal from one school of ...
s, and so cannot be expressions which have truth conditions . If metaphors are used in contexts where precise terminology is expected (for example, in a scientific theory), then their role, Black argues, is purely heuristic, that is, they are means to an end or ways of assisting understanding, rather than being terms which can be tested for truth or falsity . Donald Davidson also thinks it a mistake to look for the truth conditions of a metaphor, since, in his words, "much of what we are caused to notice n a metaphoris not propositional in character", that is to say, metaphor is a prompt to thought which cannot be reduced to or contained by a series of truth conditions . What metaphor does, Davidson maintains, is make us see one thing as something else by "making literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight" . Seeing one thing as something else is not the recognition of some truth or fact, and so "the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided" . Max Black develops the idea that metaphor actually creates insight or new meaning . His interactionist theory asserts that at the heart of a metaphor is the interaction between its two subject terms, where the interaction provides the condition for a meaning which neither of the subject terms possesses independently of the metaphorical context. The primary
subject Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
in a metaphor, he claims, is coloured by a set of "associated implications" normally predicated of the secondary
subject Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
. From the number of possible meanings which could result, the primary subject sieves the qualities predicable of the secondary subject, letting through only those that fit. The interaction, as a process, brings into being what Black terms an " implication-complex", a system of associated implications shared by the linguistic community as well as an impulse of free meaning, free in that it is meaning which was unavailable prior to the metaphor's introduction . In a different, naturalist, approach, some English-speaking philosophers close to cognitive science, such as
Lakoff Lakoff is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * George Lakoff (born 1941), American linguist and cognitive scientist *Robin Lakoff Robin Tolmach Lakoff (; born November 27, 1942) is a professor emerita of linguistics at the Univ ...
, have made metaphor the central aspect of human rationality.


Metaphor in continental philosophy

Whereas analytic philosophy examines metaphor within the philosophy of language,
continental philosophy Continental philosophy is a term used to describe some philosophers and philosophical traditions that do not fall under the umbrella of analytic philosophy. However, there is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Pri ...
assigns much wider significance to metaphor. This is because the climate within continental thought has been more favourable to the propagation of new branches of enquiry from nineteenth century German philosophy. Although Kant and
Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...
sit quite happily on both analytic and continental curricula, it is only the latter which has seriously addressed the need to rethink how the world appears to us and how it is made manifest to us in the light of their metaphysics. Metaphor has proven to be extremely important for this rethinking because it is the process of conceptual borrowing or reassignment which revises our perception of the world. The major shift which occurs in Kantian continental philosophy, according to Cazeaux, is the departure 'from dualistic thought, i.e. thinking which remains within the boundaries created by oppositions, such as mind—body and subjective—objective' . The turn away from dualistic thought is made by Kant on account of his representing experience as the subjective determination of an objective world, thereby placing in a relationship terms which normally stand as opposites in a dualism. As a result of this shift, without conventional dualisms to fall back upon, the process of conceptual borrowing and cross-referral presented by metaphor becomes central as the means by which the textures and complexities of experience can be articulated. Theses to this effect, but with significant differences, can be found in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur, and Derrida. To give two examples. According to Nietzsche, we are in metaphor or we are metaphor: our being is not derived from a Platonic, eternal essence or from a
Cartesian Cartesian means of or relating to the French philosopher René Descartes—from his Latinized name ''Cartesius''. It may refer to: Mathematics *Cartesian closed category, a closed category in category theory *Cartesian coordinate system, modern ...
thinking substance but (in as much as there is a way of being we can call ours) is emergent from tensional interactions between competing drives or perspectives . We customarily hold truth to be a relation of correspondence between knowledge and reality but, Nietzsche declares, it is in fact ‘a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’ due to the fundamentally metaphorical nature of concept-formation, a series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus to retinal image (first metaphor) to sound as signifier (second metaphor) . Our categories, and the judgments we form with them, can never correspond to things in themselves because they are formed through a series of transformations which ensures that ‘there is no
causality Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...
, no correctness, and no expression’ connecting the first stage (the stimulus) with the last (the concept) . For Ricoeur, metaphor is also ‘living’ – hence the title of his book, ''La Métaphore vive'' (translated into English as ''The Rule of Metaphor'' ) – but in a different sense from Nietzsche. Metaphor is living, Ricoeur claims, in that it is the principle which revives our perception of the world and through which we become aware of our creative capacity for seeing the world anew. This process, he thinks, is both paradoxical and Kantian in nature: paradoxical in that the creative combination of terms in a metaphor nevertheless produces meaning which has the character of a discovery (how can something be both a creation and a discovery?), and Kantian because the paradox mirrors Kant's theory of experience in which the subjective application of concepts nevertheless yields perception of an objective world. The tension between the subjective, creative and the objective, discovery aspects of a metaphor, Ricoeur argues, proceeds ‘from the very structures of the mind, which it is the task of ant’stranscendental philosophy to articulate’ . Unfortunately, the part of Kant's philosophy which Ricoeur appeals to is highly problematic: the
schema The word schema comes from the Greek word ('), which means ''shape'', or more generally, ''plan''. The plural is ('). In English, both ''schemas'' and ''schemata'' are used as plural forms. Schema may refer to: Science and technology * SCHEMA ...
or schematism, the operation which Kant dismisses as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul' . Ricoeur’s Kantianism is considered at length by Cazeaux and Stellardi , with the former providing an account of how the schematism might afford a coherent explanation of metaphor. Another reason for the attention paid by continental philosophy to metaphor is the questioning of boundaries – between subject areas and between the wider concepts of ethics, epistemology and aesthetics – which has occurred within
postmodernism Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
. Principal concerns in these debates are the status of knowledge and the way in which the concepts of truth and objectivity are understood. Philosophy has been under attack on this score with its history of ‘universal truths’, e.g. Descartes’s cogito, Kant’s table of categories, and
Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...
’s Absolute Consciousness. The main arguments against this universalism invoke metaphor on two related accounts: (1) the fact that key epistemological concepts have metaphors at their root, for example, “mirroring”, “ correspondence”, “ sense data”, is taken as evidence of the contingent, communal, subjective basis of knowledge, and (2) because metaphor (as a form of dislocated or dislocating predication) works by testing the appropriate with the inappropriate, it is seen as a means of challenging the boundaries whereby one subject defines itself in relation to another.


References

* . * . * . * . * . * . * . * . * {{ Citation , last=Stellardi , first=G. , year=2000 , title =Heidegger and Derrida on Philosophy and Metaphor , publisher=Humanity Books , place=Amherst, New York .


Further reading

* Max Black (1954). “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55, pp. 273–294. *David E. Cooper. (1989) ''Metaphor.'' Oxford: Blackwell. *
Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida; See also . 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed t ...
. (1982). "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." In ''Margins of Philosophy''. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. *Eva Feder Kittay. (1987) ''Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure.'' Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original work published 1974 *
George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain comple ...
. (1987). ''Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press. *
George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain comple ...
and Mark Turner (1989). ''More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press. *
George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain comple ...
and Mark Johnson. (1999) ''Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.'' New York: Basic Books.


External links


On metaphor. Article by Gabriel Furmuzachi.


* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20080102114725/http://www.poetry-portal.com/styles13.html Poetry Portal, with an account of philosophical questions arising from metaphor in poetry. Concepts in aesthetics
Philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
Concepts in the philosophy of language