- See my article “Expression and Metaphor,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XXIII, 1963, pp. 538–561.
- Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, tr. T. G. Rosenmeyer, Harper, New York, 1960, p. vi.
- Ibid., p. 2.
- The word “primitive” in this connection does not refer to history. It should not be necessary to remark that the search for the metaphors lying beneath the surface of words is not merely a question of historical etymology. The etymology of words may occasionally guide research but a word may be influenced by historical metaphors or carry a metaphorical sense which has nothing whatever to do with its etymology.
- Snell, op. cit., p. 4.
- Ibid., p. 13.
- Ibid., p. 18.
- The first modern philosopher of language, Giambattista Vico, developed a nonrationalistic theory of metaphor which, I believe, basically coincides with what I am saying here. Following his cardinal linguistic principle that “minds” are formed by language and not language by “minds”, Vico gives a surprisingly lucid account of the origin of metaphorical language. “The human mind,” he writes, “is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means of reflexion.” And he states his “universal principle of etymology in all languages” as follows: “words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and the spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.” Metaphorical language is a necessity of human expression and thought because man is naturally constrained to proceed from a few expressions that directly signify his most essential sensory life to the extension of this limited vocabulary to cover ever wider purposes of thought and communication. See: Giambattista Vico, The New Science, tr. Bergin and Fisch, Book II, “On Poetic Wisdom,” Ithaca, Cornell University Press, p. 70, italics mine.
- Bruno Snell, op. cit., pp. 198, 195.
- Ibid., pp. 230, 320.
- Ibid., pp. 198ff. Snell shows (p. 318) that even the word “to be” has a similar metaphorical origin. It is useful to point out here that Snell's analyses serve a wider purpose than that which interests us here. His purpose is to show how logical thinking arose from myth (after simile, and then how “extended simile” or “myth” has arisen from metaphor) and so to trace the great Greek invention of scientific explanation. The study of this Greek experience has a privileged place both in the history of philosophy and in the study of the philosophy of language for the following reason: “Greek is the only language which allows us to trace the true relation between speech and the rise of science; for in no other tongue did the concepts of science grow straight from the body of the language. In Greece, and only in Greece, did theoretic thought emerge without outside influence, and nowhere else was there an autochthonous formation of scientific terms. All other languages are derivative; they have borrowed or translated or got their terms by some other devious route from the Greeks. And it was only with the help of the unique achievement of the Greeks that the other societies were able to progress beyond their own pace of conceptual development” (Snell, p. 227). It is because we fully agree with Professor Snell that we have paid primary attention to the metaphorical vocabulary of the first Greek philosophers.
- Both Vico and Snell get very close to this position, as does Percy Bysshe Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry,” The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley, ed. H. Bloom, New York, 1966, pp. 415 ff., but the most extreme version known to me occurs in Jacques Derrida's “La mythologie blanche”, Marges, Paris, 1972, pp. 247–324, in which he reduces the whole history of Western philosophy to sequences of systems of dead metaphors.
- The author with whom I am most in agreement here is Paul Ricoeur. In his paper “La structure, le mot, l'evenement,” Man and World, I, 1968, p. 26, Ricoeur writes that “metaphor is the pivot of semantics” because it is in the historical acts of usage of la parole that the semiological system which we call la langue can come into play. In his paper “Le probleme du double sens,” Le conflit des interprétations, Paris, p. 71 he repeats this position and, on p. 78, states that metaphor (polysemy, equivocity) occurs only “dans le discours”.
- Ibid., “Le probleme du double-sens,” p. 65. This is the very definition of “allegory”: while signifying one thing at the same time to signify something else, while continuing to signify the first
- This is true of “ambiguity” as well. Metaphors are like ambiguities in that they have to be “disambiguated”, but the experience of ambiguity is far more general than that of metaphor. See the excellent study of the relations between ambiguity and metaphor by C. W. Dwiggins, “The Phenomenon of Ambiguity “ Man and World, Vol. 4, 1971, pp. 262–275.
- Two of the best recent taxonomies of theories of metaphor are (1) Monroe Beardsley's article on “Metaphor” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, New York, pp. 284–289, and George E. Yoos, “A Phenomenological Look at Metaphor,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1971, pp. 78–88. I came across Yoos' article only after this paper was written, and take a number of his conclusions as confirmation of my own orientation. He seems to me to be absolutely correct in pointing out that “when we use or apprehend a metaphor” we are not interpreting it; we are just using it. In any usage of words we rarely attend to the words we are using, but rather to that about which we are speaking. Any apprehension of a verbal opposition or a conflict between the literal and metaphorical senses of the words we are using at any given moment can arise only in later reflection. It is the actual thinking in metaphors which is primary and which gives rise, in later, critical reflection to the problems which theories of metaphor try to solve. But metaphors themselves occur in acts of usage, without any such awareness of problems, and it is these “acts” which most theories of metaphor neglect. As Yoos shows, most theorists read the theory of metaphor they happen to hold back into their description of the experience itself. As James would say they commit “The Psychologist's Fallacy.”
- Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1963, Chapter II, esp. pp. 61 ff. Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1962.
- Wheelwright, op. cit., p. 72.
- Paul Ricoeur, “Le Probleme du double-sens,” op. cit., p. 72.
- Wheelwright, op. cit., p. 72.
- Paul Ricoeur, Le conflit des interprétations, op. cit., passim, and in his most recent lectures on metaphor soon to be published by the University of Toronto Press.
- Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 37, and The Importance of Language, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1962, p. 236. Most of those who hold “tension” or “interaction” theories of metaphor seem to agree that metaphors create the similarities.
- Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, op. cit., p. 198. Cf. also Charles M. Myers, “Inexplicable Analogies,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1962, pp. 326–333. What, indeed, could be the tertium quid comparationis in speaking of a family, as William James did, that they had “blotting paper” voices? Myers gives many interesting examples, but they all seem to fall within the first species of metaphor (“epiphor”) we have distinguished even though they are certainly very difficult to explicate the way Aristotle would want us to.
- W. M. Urban, Language and Reality, New York, 1939, chapters 9–10.
- R. Herschberger, “The Structure of Metaphor,” Kenyon Review, Volume 5, 1943, pp. 433–443.
- Cf. Snell, op. cit., pp. 221–222.
- Aristotle, Rhetoric, III, iv. 1–3; x.
- Snell, op. cit., p. 205.
- Ibid., p. 220. See also: W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, The University of Kentucky Press, 1954, p. 127, where Wimsatt gives examples of metaphors which lead him to state that in order to understand metaphor we must consider not how A explains B but what new meanings are generated when A and B are brought together.
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
Volume 6, 1975 - Issue 1