Page 178 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
Johnson M (ed.) 1981 Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Kittay E F 1987 Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure. Oxford University Press, New York
Lakoff G, Johnson M 1980 Metaphors We Live By. Uni- versity of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
Levin S R 1977 The Semantics of Metaphor. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
MacCormac E R 1985 A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Miller G A 1979 Images and models, similes and metaphors. In: Ortony A (ed.)
Ortony A (ed.) 1979 Metaphor and Thought.Cambridge Uni- versity Press, New York
Richards I A 1936 The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford Uni- versity Press, Oxford
Searle J 1979 Metaphor. In: Ortony A (ed.)
Stern J 1985 Metaphor as demonstrative. Journal of Phil-
osophy 82: 667-710
Tirrell L 1991 Reductive and nonreductive simile theories of
metaphor. Journal of Philosophy 88: 337-58
Metaphor (from the ancient Greek verb metapherein, to 'carry over, transfer') means 'to speak about X in terms of Y'—e.g., 'The moon is a sickle.' Aristotle (384-322 BC)defines it in his Poetics (ca. 339 BC) thus:
Metaphor consists in applying to a thing a word that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species or from species to genus or from species to species or on grounds of analogy.
(1965:61)
Aristotle's distinction between 'simple replacement' and 'analogy' governs, effectively, the difference between simple and complex 'metaphor.' Discussion of metaphor varies along an axis of assumptions about what Aristotle terms here 'analogy' as to whether it is conceived of as includingthe mental act ofperceiving analogy—the idea-content—or whether it is a strictly and exclusively linguistic operation—the language level. Writers vary significantly, but most—though certainly not all—lie between these two extremes. Thus puzzles about metaphor may, at the one end of the scale, raise problems in psychology and phil- osophy and, at the other, problems in the study of language. In between these extremes lie the problems the subject raises for literary criticism, both traditional and modern. Metaphor is also an index of the power relations between literary genres and what is said about metaphor often indicates what the assumptions of a period or a critic are about these matters: what is sayable microcosmically about metaphor is often sayable macrocosmically about literature.
1. The Classical View: Aristotle
Metaphor is treated by Classical writers as a desirable rhetorical means, not an end in itself. This does not
mean, however, as is often assumed, that it is treated as a simpleornament.
Most rhetorics of the ancient world contain an account of metaphor which places it firmly as a figure of speech (trope, paradigmatic) rather than a figure of thought (schema, syntagmatic). The strongest version of this distinction is Quintilian's in the Institutio Ora- torio (ca. 75 AD)but he derives it from Greek sources. However, most rhetorical treatises are written not about poetry and poetics, but about speaking and prose writing. They are a set of written instructions, to train the reader in the art of persuasion, either forensically—as was first the case with Corax of Syr- acuse (467AD)—or epideictically (decoratively, pub- licly in a more general sense than simply advocacy). Aristotle's is the only Poetics surviving from the ancient world, even including Longinus' treatise On The Sublime of the second century AD,which is a general rhetorical manual. It is characteristic of this split between the genres that Aristotle should separate his remarks about poetry from his other discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric (337BC). Thus the use of metaphor in poetry and in prose is formally separated, though it is noticeable that Aristotle and Quintilian both choose their examples of metaphor from poetry—the former from Hesiod, Homer, and the dramatists, and the latter from Virgil and Ovid.
The development from fifth-century Greece to Augustan Rome seems to be that of a progressive pragmatism. Aristotle always takes an empirical approach, but he believes rhetoric to be an art of the possible whereas for Quintilian it is a set of exercises to commit to memory. For Aristotle in the Rhetoric, metaphor is a part of the larger topic of the enthy- meme (from Greek en themon 'in the mind'), a kind
156
Metaphor in Literature
V. R. L. Sage