Metaphor In Philosophy

Think of "family resemblances" as another example from Wittgenstein and the useful picture (of a picture at that) that illustrates a rather difficult concept. I was always struck by his musing whether a philosophy could be constructed entirely of questions.

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" comes to mind. And of course Plato's extended metaphor of the myth of the cave.

Within our current paradigm, some metaphors are always rejected as mythical, while others are instintively embraced as scientific. But metaphors - like the poor - will always be with us....

A hundred and fifty years ago Dr. Hugh Blair wrote in his Lectures on Rhetoric:
'We are apt, upon a superficial view, to imagine that those modes of expression which are called Figures of Speech are among the chief refinements of Speech, not invented till after language had advanced to its late periods, and mankind were brought into a polished state; and that then they were devised by orators and rhetoricians. The contrary of this is the truth. Mankind never employed so many Figures of Speech, as when they had hardly any words for expressing their meaning.
'For, first, the want of proper names for every object, obliged them to use one name for many; and, of course, to express themselves by comparisons, metaphors, allusions and all those substituted forms of Speech, which render Language figurative. Next, as the objects with which they were most conversant, were the sensible, material objects around them, names would be given to these objects long before words were invented for signifying the dispositions of the mind, or any sort of moral and intellectual ideas. Hence, the early language of men being entirely made up of words descriptive of sensible objects, it became, of necessity, extremely metaphorical. . .'


Metaphor - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

The belief in meaning as a relationship of designation holding between an arbitrary sign and some aspect or constituent of reality given with absolute simplicity and perspicuity to the mind has, of course, been widely criticised in the present century, by Wittgenstein, Saussure, and Merleau-Ponty among others. But Derrida' s critique, while dependent to some extent and in differing degrees on the latter two, remains unique to him in its main outlines. One way of understanding it, at least in the form it takes in 'White Mythology', might be to see it as articulating an attack on 'the classical opposition of concept and metaphor' ('l'opposition classique . . . de la m?taphore et du concept') ('MB', p. 314; 'WM', p. 263). According to the terms of that opposition, a name used to designate a concept brings some aspect of reality, some part of the truth of things, before the mind; whereas a name used metaphorically merely establishes some link, based on some perceived similarity or analogy, between two names. The link established by metaphor, in other words, is a linkage between linguistic entities--a linkage forged entirely within the sphere of language. The name-concept link, on the other hand, is not ultimately a linguistic relationship at all. It is a link between Mind and World, which language merely represents or expresses. Metaphorical discourse may have some value nevertheless but only if it serves to put us on the track of a new concept (the final section of the essay offers a critique of this familiar story in Nietzsche and Gaston Bachelard; Max Black would furnish an equally good target). 19 Metaphor is thus admissible in philosophy, but only to the extent that it promises a return, with augmented resources, to the literality of the concept:
[INDENT]Metaphor . . . is determined by philosophy as a provisional loss of meaning, an economy of the proper without irreparable damage, a certainly inevitable detour, but also a history with its sights set on, and within the horizon of, the circular reappropriation of literal, proper meaning. ['WM', p. 270] 20[/INDENT] We are thus faced with an instance of the pattern of thought which characteristically invites Derridean deconstruction: a pair of concepts, in this case metaphor and concept, are opposed in a way which implicitly privileges one over the other by making the one appear central and the other marginal (hence 'The Margins of Philosophy'). The deconstruction of such a conceptual ordering, as Derrida understands the term, is not simply a matter of inverting the relationship of centre and margin. It is a matter of showing, rather, that the distinction between centre and margin in question can only be made, can only be rendered intelligible, via a covert dependence on its marginalised component. In the case of the concept/metaphor contrast, Derrida's aim is to show that the entire contrast is dependent on metaphor, in the second of the two senses distinguished earlier. For the contrast to be intelligible in terms of the vision of the relations between proper and metaphorical discourse which it incorporates, the terms concept and metaphor would themselves have to be terms in a proper language--a language, that is, whose terms acquire meaning independently of any relationship with one another, by standing in one-to-one correlation with constituents of extralinguistic reality. Derrida's argument is, in effect, that they are not, and could not be, terms drawn from such a language. This conclusion depends in part, of course, on the wider application of deconstruction involved in the more general claim that the very notion of such a language is flawed; it can only be made to carry conviction by deemphasising and marginalising certain features, elsewhere subsumed under the Derridean term diff?rance, which belong to language per se. But that wider claim is not the immediate centre of interest in 'White Mythology'. Derrida's central arguments in that essay might be summarised as follows: 1. The concept of metaphor is not a concept alien to metaphysics. It is a metaphysical concept.
A statement of this point opens the second section of the essay, 'Plus de M?taphore'21: 'Metaphor remains, in all its essential characteristics, a classic philosopheme, a metaphysical concept' ('la m?taphore reste, par tous ses traits essentiels, un philosoph?me classique, un concept m?taphysique' ['MB', p. 261; 'WM', p. 218]).
2. As such, like other metaphysical concepts, it emerges from a network of such concepts: a system of terms whose meanings, in their relationships to one another, are mutually explicating.
Thus the aim of Derrida's discussion of Aristotle, beginning in section 3 of the essay, is to show how the distinction between proper and elliptical discourse, central as that is to the claim of philosophy to constitute a discourse of the former kind, emerges from a network of distinctions--which 'seems to belong to the great immobile chain of Aristotelian ontology, with its theory of the analogy of Being, its logic, its epistemology, and more precisely its poetics and its rhetorics' (WM', p. 236).20
3. Hence any attempt to set up the contrast between the metaphorical and the literal (or proper) in a language which transcends that distinction, which distinguishes, from a standpoint outside language, between the direct relationship between a name and its bearer and the indirect relationship between name and name involved in metaphor and periphrasis, will fail because the terms in which it operates will prove to be themselves explicable only, at some point, by dint of metaphor and periphrasis.
This is, in effect, the move in the argument which dominates Derrida's discussion, in part 2 of the essay, of the failings of specific attempts to offer putatively nonmetaphorical classifications of Plato's metaphors. Later on, in 'The Ellipsis of the Sun', the same theme is taken up again in his discussion of Aristotle's derivation, in Poetics 1457b 25?30, of a name for the otherwise nameless act of the sun in 'cast[ing] forth its flame' from the verb 'to sow' [speirein] ('MB', p. 289; ['WM', p. 242). Here Derrida's point is that since the analogy between sunshine and sowing is not 'seen' [vu], not imposed on us irresistibly by nature, then if it strikes us as compelling it can do so only because it emerges from 'a long and hardly visible chain' ('une cha?ne longue et peu visible') ('MB', p. 290; 'WM', p. 243) of analogies whose first term it would be difficult for anyone, let alone Aristotle, to exhibit. Aristotle is, in other words, confronting the possibility, discounted and marginalised according to Derrida by his entire discussion of the name, that naming on the one hand, and periphrasis and analogy on the other, may in the end prove impossible to disentangle. Both these arguments recur to a central claim: that the metaphysician, to say what he wants to say, needs to view matters from a standpoint outside language, a standpoint in principle inaccessible to him. As Derrida puts it, 'it is impossible to dominate philosophical metaphorics as such, from the exterior, by using a concept of metaphor which remains a philosophical product' ('WM', p. 228). 23 It will be evident at this point that Derrida?s account of the dependence of metaphysics on metaphor cuts deeper than Anatole France's. The argument of 'Ariste et Polyphile' falls back on the familiar positivist contention that there is a basic, or primitive, use of words in which they derive their meaning, independently of one another, from association with simple, concrete aspects of experience; but it is precisely the possibility of any such primitive connection between language and the world arising in abstraction from the 'chain' of signs that Derrida is contesting.
4. Hence there is no such thing as 'an essence'--the meaning of a term, that is--'rigorously independent of that which transports it'. What an expression E signifies (le signifi?) is internal to the language to which E belongs. And hence,
5. The 'detour' of metaphor or periphrasis, that argosy which Western metaphysics traditionally pictures as returning freighted with new literal meaning, ceases to be conceivable as one following a closed curve. Ellipsis, as the term occurs in the title of the third section of the essay is, in rhetoric, among other things, the omission of one or more of the words necessary to express the full sense of a sentence. But--and this is Derrida's point--if the full sense of a sentence must be given not by relating its terms one by one to essences given externally to language, but by relating them to other terms within the 'chain' of language, then the notion of a fully expressed, non-elliptical sense evaporates into vacuity; for since the chain of such explications is potentially endless, the accretion of supplementary (another favourite term of Derrida's) layers of meaning is potentially endless also.
It follows, to conclude, that all discourse, including metaphysical discourse, is enmeshed in the web of contingency, temporality, and local convention from which Polyphile's metaphysical knife-grinders wish to free their abraded coins in the interests of bestowing upon them infinite value and unlimited currency. Metaphysical discourse is derivative from (rel?ve de) metaphor, not what is left over when--impossibly--language has been purged of all trace of metaphor, periphrasis, and ellipsis.

How important has metaphor, or figurative language in general, been in the history of philosophy? In the present and future of philosophy?

Do you have any favorite examples of figurative language in philosophy?


Some of mine:

Wittgenstein wants to show the fly the way out of the bottle. Also he offers us a ladder we throw away once we have climbed it.

Nietzsche compares the spirit to a stomach and also himself to dynamite.

How important has metaphor, or figurative language in general, been in the history of philosophy? In the present and future of philosophy?

Do you have any favorite examples of figurative language in philosophy?


Some of mine:

Wittgenstein wants to show the fly the way out of the bottle. Also he offers us a ladder we throw away once we have climbed it.

Nietzsche compares the spirit to a stomach and also himself to dynamite.

Metaphors are important in the history of philosophy in two ways. First, metaphors can help illustrate ideas, in order to make them more easily understood. Second, they can be used to hide the fact that one is speaking nonsense when one literally does not know what one is talking about. A metaphor is no substitute for a literal explanation of something. Generally speaking, one can tell the difference between these two sorts of cases by whether or not there is ever a literal explanation. If there is no literal explanation, it is prima facia nonsense.

A concept is not at all something that is a given. Moreover, a concept is not the same thing as thought: one can very well think without concepts, and everyone who does not do philosophy still thinks, I believe, but does not think through concepts. If you accept the idea of a concept as the product of an activity or an original creation?.

For me, there are as many creations in the invention of a concept as in the creation by a great painter or musician. One can also conceive of a continuous acoustic flow (perhaps that is only an idea, but it matters little if this idea is justified) that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow: notes? Aggregates of notes? No? What will we call the new sound from a musician? You sense then that it is not simply a question of the system of notes. It's the same thing for a philosopher, it is simply a question of creating concepts rather than sounds.

. The creation of new concepts has accompanied an historical opening-of-the-mind-into-reality (being-through-itself).

I would go so far to say that man lives in his concepts, that his own concepts are the intelligible structure of his reality. So a new concept is a new piece of the world, something (at best) truly new beneath the sun.

I like Deleuze when he talks of the invention of concept. I don't know if it's the translation, but I wonder if he really thinks we can think without concepts? From my understanding of the word concept, thinking and concepts are the same animal.

Would you care to elaborate on being-through-itself? Is this related to time penetrating time in the metaphorically Hegelian sense? A self-penetrating system of concepts?

Not only philosophy but discourse in general is rife with fresh or mummified metaphor. Else we could not invent so many new words. We just use an old word in a new way, until the new way is the only way we are using it. But then of course some uses this same word in yet a another way. Etc. Etc.

Of course, metaphor isn't a way of creating new words, but of attributing new meanings to existing words by demonstrating analogous relationships.

As is the case with many metaphors, as the usage became more common the existence of the analogy became less important in understanding that meaning of the term.

Plato's use of the word idea was itself a metaphor. He took a word that referred to the visible aspect of an object, it's appearance, to refer to something invisible to the eye. He used the term to refer to something perceptible only to the mind.

All philosophy is metaphor, insofar as the conceptualization is a creative action spurring from presence.

Do you have any favorite examples of figurative language in philosophy?