METAPHOR.

Metaphor, traditionally defined as the transference of meaning from one word to another, is perhaps the most intensely and variously studied instance of figurative language. This is so because metaphor enjoys two distinct primary aspects, presenting itself as (1) a form (a discrete, replicable linguistic structure, conceivable as extrinsic to thought) and (2) a power (a cognitive operation issuing from an intrinsic and inherently creative mental faculty). Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), who begins the Western tradition's systematic investigation of metaphor, is the first to address the trope's double nature. On the one hand, he treats metaphor in the context of style (implicitly rendering it secondary to invention, the first of the five parts of rhetoric), as deviation from the ostensible clarity of everyday language that is subject to rules of propriety. On the other, he calls metaphor "a kind of enigma" and claims that for the verbal artist "the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor" because "this alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances" (1961, p. 104).

The dominant Aristotelian idea of metaphor is not, however, either a balanced opposition or mixture of metaphor's two primary aspects. Of the two, Aristotle chooses to emphasize the formal view—perhaps because it confirms the primacy of reason and cooperates with his systematic and pedagogical motives. The philosophical and cultural consequences of Aristotle's formal emphasis are substantial and lasting: along with cultural and intellectual traditionalism, this emphasis holds that the office of language is mimetic, that of representing the world. From such a notion of language follows the implication that the truth and value of verbal art is measured by its fidelity to an unchanging, external, and therefore communally explicable reality.

The Classical System

The Aristotelian privileging of metaphor's formal aspect and its attendant assumptions, emphases, and procedures are together amplified and reified by his classical inheritors. In this tradition, metaphor's creative aspect tends to be viewed with suspicion. For instance, in De oratore (55 b.c.e.; On oratory), through a fabular comparison between metaphor and clothing, Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) articulates a view of language as a form of ethical conduct that must not stoop to don the potentially corruptive finery of metaphor: "For just as clothes were first invented to protect us against cold and afterwards began to be used for the sake of adornment and dignity as well, so the metaphorical employment of words was begun because of poverty, but was brought into common use for the sake of entertainment." Cicero uses his comparison to caution us against "borrowing" fancy metaphors because they suggest "poverty" of thought and expression (p. 121–123). But it is largely through Cicero's precise, nuanced discussion of the proper and improper forms and uses of intentionally shaped language that his motive to civilize the power of metaphor is transmitted, inspiring the anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century b.c.e., Rhetoric to Herennius) and Quintilian (c. 35–95/6 c.e.), author of Institutio oratoria (first century c.e.; Institutes of oratory).

Quintilian's terminological and conceptual precision expands the formal context within which metaphor may be understood. Because his primary interest is pedagogically useful classification, Quintilian chooses to treat metaphor as a member of the tropes, which involve "the artistic alteration of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to another" (p. 301). Treating metaphor as a member of a class of similar forms allows Quintilian to note metaphor's uniqueness without committing himself to an equal exploration of both its aspects. For example, while he allows that metaphor is the "commonest and by far the most beautiful of tropes," and praises it for "accomplishing the supremely difficult task of providing a name for anything" (p. 303), he restricts an attribution of cognitive agency to the tropes as a class: "The changes involved [in the use of tropes] concern not merely individual words, but also our thoughts and the structure of our sentences" (p. 301–303). It is noteworthy that here, in the midst of explicating a system whose formal emphasis diminishes metaphor's creative aspect, Quintilian states that tropes in themselves can play a serious role in thinking. Though muted, this connection between figured language and cognition anticipates the ground from which springs the Middle Age's most important contribution to ideas about metaphor: the notion that, when interpreted correctly, the ambiguities and excesses of figured language involve human understanding with a superior order of knowledge and being.

The Middle Ages

The institutionalization of Christianity required the preservation of classical learning, including Greco-Roman ideas of metaphor. However as Erich Auerbach points out in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1968), the passage from classical to Christian civilization involved a radical change in the context within which figured language was understood. Because the classical system depended upon a precise delineation and separation of elements, Auerbach sums up its emphasis as "aesthetico-stylistic." In contrast, the Christian "ethico-theological" emphasis assumes the merging of hitherto distinct styles and foregrounds a decidedly un-Roman urgency concerning interpretation. To the early Christian fathers, figured language represented a formidable theological problem. The scriptures contain many figures and ambiguities, and Christ often chooses to teach through metaphor and parables—but the classical technology of eloquence (particularly how it defines and achieves the high style, language that moves the audience to action) is pagan and elite, neither holy nor humble.

In line with the classical tradition, which he resourcefully defends throughout De doctrina christiana (396–426; On Christian doctrine) as being essential for proper scriptural interpretation, Augustine (354–430) discusses metaphor as a trope. It is, however, how he defines a sign that clearly indicates the Christian break from the past: "A sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself" (p. 535). For Augustine, words (the most important human signs) have an intrinsic power that may exceed the limits erected by the classical doctrine of mimetic fidelity and enforced by the Greco-Roman insistence on decorum. Augustine's view of words as signs helps him to renew and meld the two aspects of metaphor that Aristotle delineated and his classical inheritors further isolated from each other.

The Renaissance

In step with sweeping material and social changes, including the Reformation and a gathering intellectual consensus that the universe and the mind similarly follow the laws of logic, a new context for understanding the relationship between thought and language was developing. Peter Ramus's (1515–1572) challenge to the Scholastic status quo represented this new context and prepared the way for the Enlightenment's cult of reason and pursuit of a language free from the excesses and ambiguities of figured language. Ramus replaces the transcendent Augustinian sign with stark syllogism and calls for a thorough reorganization of the rhetorical system. As pertains to metaphor, Ramism's most consequential features are the tightly related assumptions that (1) thought follows the rules of logic and (2) language, because of its vital role in thinking, must be plain and clear. From the Ramist perspective, metaphor has no place in serious discourse and, thus, the nature and tension between its two aspects is rendered moot. However, despite its antimetaphorical outlook, Ramism did not stifle either the flowering of Renaissance rhetoric or subsequent investigations of metaphor. Because the culture of early modern Europe was, in many respects, as medieval (traditional and collectively minded) as it was modern, oratory and poetry were highly respected and widely practiced. Thus Elizabethan and metaphysical metaphors, such as those invented by Shakespeare and Donne, tend to strike an organic balance among three elements: tradition, the age's increasing emphasis on logic as a basis for artistic invention, and its discovery of a new model of subjectivity distinguished by a personal struggle for self-knowledge and self-determination.

Similar to Ramus, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an enemy of Scholasticism and a champion of reason and an unadorned language capable of serving it. In contrast to Ramus, however, Bacon was skeptical of the syllogistic process because, as he writes in The New Organon (1620), "the syllogism consists of propositions, propositions consist of words, words are symbols of notions." "Our only hope" of knowing nature, the truth of things and ourselves, Bacon asserts, "lies in … true induction" (p. 41). The foundations of his method—which inspired the British Royal Society's call for a scientific plain style in language and influenced a range of later philosophers, including Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)—is rooted in the principle that true knowledge comes of what one has "observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything" (Bacon, p. 39). To Bacon, then, the knowledge that comes of metaphor and other figures of speech number among the "Idols" that confuse human kind, leading us into error. It is Bacon's dream of a scientific language, one enabling the direct perception and undistorted discussion of reality through the control and exclusion of tropes and figures, that predicts and helps lay the ground for the Enlightenment's general perspective of metaphor.

The Enlightenment

John Locke (1632–1704), one of the Enlightenment's most representative thinkers, born into a culture increasingly defined by a belief in the verity of empirical science and its procedures, solves the problem of metaphor by rejecting both of its aspects. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke holds that the foundations of thought are simple ideas, which are obtained through direct sense impressions. From this perspective, words should refer to things and the most that may be expected of language is that it further discursive "Order and Clearness." As for metaphor and "all the [other] artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, [these] are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment" (Locke, p. 508). In order to get at the "true ideas upon which the inference depends," Locke advises that from language one should "strip" the "superfluous ideas" evoked by tropes and figures, and then "lay the naked Ideas on which the force of the argumentation depends, in their due order." Thus confronted with "true ideas" in their natural order, the mind easily perceives the truth of things and their relations (Locke, p. 676).

To Locke, metaphor's enigmatic power to create images and ideas is so corrupting of thought that he entirely exiles it from his model of consciousness and (correct) philosophical process. Of course, neoclassical thinkers, such as Voltaire (1694–1778) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), continued to use and productively discuss figured language—but in a context whose emphases denied relativism and forestalled the exploration of categories such as the primitive and the irrational.

Giambattista Vico's (1668–1744) views are a notable exception to the late-Enlightenment outlook and its limited and generally dismissive idea of metaphor. Although not influential in his lifetime, Vico's ideas clearly anticipate aspects of the Romantics' intense interest in and philosophical linking of poetic language, primitivism, and psychological and historical relativism. Vico's thought thus demonstrates both the continuities and differences between Enlightenment and Romantic thinking about metaphor.

Romanticism

As reflected in La scienza nuova (1725; The new science), Vico sees language as a social construction intimately involved with cognitive development and epistemology. Because society has changed—moving from an original theological stage, through a heroic epoch, to a present-day civilized, humanistic order—so, too, have language and human nature altered. Articulating ideas similar to those espoused by later, Romantic philosophers, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Vico postulates that, during the theological epoch (which has its analog in individual cognitive development), humans shared a primitive, metaphorically rich language, which was later complicated and variegated through cultural pressures and the advance of rational thinking. Rather than the opposite or absence of thought, figurative language demonstrates an elemental mode of thinking that Vico calls "poetic logic."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) serves as a particularly influential specimen of Romantic thinking about metaphor. Neoplatonic in inclination and influenced by Vico, Rousseau, and the German Romantics, Coleridge famously distinguishes between imagination and what to him is the inferior mode of fancy, thereby clarifying his age's impatience with the limits of empirical knowledge. To Coleridge, imagination is a creative, connective power that unites nature and the poet, whose genius is realized through "organic," original form rather than "mechanic," derivative form. Coleridge defines poetry—and thus the exercise of its modes, such as metaphor—as a self-expressive activity whose object (pleasure) is opposed to that of science (truth).

Although Coleridge maintains that poetry enables a view of nature superior to that obtained through scientific inquiry, his system effectively treats poetry and science as complementary opposites: each (paradoxically) capable of discovering, through its specific symbolic activity, aspects of the reality that simultaneously undergirds and lies beyond symbols. Coleridge's Neoplatonic view of nature and its potential accessibility through human inquiry were not, however, shared by all Romantic thinkers. In particular, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) unequivocally states that human beings are "indifferent" and even hostile to "pure knowledge," to the "thing in itself." More important, Nietzsche denies that language—and by way of extension, any symbolic activity—is capable of revealing any meaning beyond that which it constructs. From this anti-essentialist perspective, the truths obtained through language are "illusions," members of a "worn out" "army of metaphors." Nietzsche is not, however, recycling a Ramist or Baconian position: To him a metaphor-free language is as impossible as a value-free science. In Nietzsche's opinion, metaphor and reality are so entwined as to be synonymous.

The Twentieth Century

With few exceptions, the twentieth century's consequential ideas of metaphor may be classified as Romantic because: (1) the trope is held to be cognitively and linguistically essential; and (2) its form and power are treated as an organically related unit. One crucial distinction between Romantic and twentieth-century ideas of metaphor, however, is that the latter summarily rejects transcendence, the notion that symbolic activity gives human beings access to supernatural knowledge and being. The origins of this rejection are manifold, but its primary engine and context is modern, disciplinary science. In this particular context, metaphor strongly tends to be viewed as an embedded phenomenon, as functioning within a cognitive, linguistic, or social system of such complexity that its elements and operations are generally accessible only to specialists—thus the contentious variety and intellectual weight of most contemporary ideas of metaphor.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) helped found and define structuralism, which, despite challenges mounted by poststructuralist thinkers beginning in the 1960s, continues to dominate contemporary theories of metaphor. Freud, best known as the founder of psychoanalysis, sees metaphor as a verbal elaboration and symptom of the elemental psychological process of condensation. Jakobson, drawing upon the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and through his work with persons suffering from aphasic disorders, proposes a functional synonymy between metaphor and the associative process, in his view one of the two basic operations used by the mind to construct language.

The structuralist approach to metaphor is not, however, exclusive to Freud, Jakobson, and their direct inheritors, thinkers as diverse in outlook as Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1980), and Julia Kristeva (b. 1941). An alternative current of structural attention to metaphor is represented by the work of Stephen C. Pepper (1891–1972) and a set of like-minded scholars who constitute what may be called the "Vicoian school." Rather than embedding metaphor in a psycholinguistic system, in World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942), Pepper projects metaphor onto the history of thought, which he views as a series of distinct "world hypothesis," each "determined by its root metaphor" (p. 96). The philosopher and historiographer Hayden White (b. 1928) similarly embeds metaphor in the social fabric, considering the metaphorical process as the ground for one of four modes of historical understanding. A related understanding of metaphor is offered by Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), who proposes the concepts of the "paradigm" and the "paradigm shift" as instruments for illuminating the relationship between changes in worldview and the process of scientific discovery.

Because structuralist argumentation, like that of traditional philosophy and science, generally presupposes a separation between the object of study and the dyad of investigator and method, it tends toward universalizing claims. Thus structuralism has helped stimulate the growth of a sophisticated alternative context for thinking about metaphor, one directly inspired by Nietzsche's militant rejection of objectivity, consistency, and unexamined systematic thinking. Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), the architect of deconstruction and a primary disseminator of poststructuralism, cautions against the abstractions produced by and upon which metaphysical systems are built. In the essay "White Mythology" (1972), Derrida holds that metaphor is a "metaphysical concept" created when "primitive" meanings are renamed and "circulated" in philosophical discourse. Hence his claims that "philosophy … is a … process of metaphorization" whose verity depends upon effacing its metaphorical roots (p. 210–211).

The formulation and widespread dissemination of poststructuralist ideas signals a broad and definite movement away from the traditional view of language as mimetic and the consequent treatment of intentional figuration as supplementary to thought and expression. For instance, through an interdisciplinary blend of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and intercultural comparison, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have moved the metaphorical function beyond language and, thus, beyond questions of representation. To these thinkers, "our ordinary conceptual system … is fundamentally metaphorical in nature" (p. 3), grounded in the universal and yet particular facts of the body.

Working within (and beyond) the discipline of anthropology, James W. Fernandez offers an approach to metaphor that, similar to Lakoff and Johnson's, assumes the trope's embedment and the intellectual obligation to foreground principles of cultural relativism. To Fernandez, metaphor is a "strategic predication" of identity that "leads to performance." Rather than identifying metaphor as either a cognitive, linguistic, or structural abstraction (classifications that similarly encourage metaphor's division into two aspects), Fernandez understands metaphor in much the same way that Henry Louis Gates Jr. (b. 1950) conceives the practice of "signifyin(g)" in African-American culture. Like "signifyin(g)," metaphor is a lived strategy, one that plays a key, mediating role in the mutual construction of identity, emotions, and the immediate social matrix. While it is impossible to predict the larger consequences of the ongoing shift in ideas of metaphor, the work of comparativists like Earl Miner (1927–2004) suggests that future understandings of metaphor will be all the richer because they will spring from and advance dialogue between heretofore intellectually separated traditions and cultures.

See also Genre ; Literature ; Narrative ; Rhetoric .

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Cristopher Hollingsworth