Page 182 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
Superstition' and calls for a new rhetoric which can clarify the confusion inherited from the Lockeian tra- dition. Richards identifies the confusion as lying in the distinction between the 'metaphorical' and the 'literal' meaning of expressions and demonstrates con- vincingly that the so-called literal meaning is not equi- valent to the meaning of the whole expression. Instead, he invents the terms 'tenor' and 'vehicle' for the two parts of a metaphor—which correspond, in empiricist language, to the 'literal' and the 'figurative' parts—e.g., in the 'moon is a sickle,' the tenor is the 'moon' and the vehicle is the 'sickle'—and he then shows how in complex metaphors the tenor and the vehicle can change places—for example he quotes the Sufi apothegm: 'I am the child whose father is his son and the vine whose wine is its jar' and asks his reader to entertain the deliberate chain of exchanges, designed, for the purposes of spiritual meditation, to defeat a 'literal' paraphrase.
Richards' theory is a modified, nonmystical version of the interaction view of metaphor which resists the tautology involved in supposing that there is such a thing as the 'literal meaning' which can replace the 'metaphorical meaning.' A development of this atti- tude can be found in William Empson's theory of Mutual Comparison elaborated in Some Versions of Pastoral (1936). Another effective analysis of meta- phor in this tradition is W. Nowottny's The Language Poets Use (1962).
7. Structuralism
The most persuasive and influential Structuralist account of metaphor is contained in Roman Jakob- son's classic essay, 'Two Types of Aphasia' (1956). In this essay, Jakobson examines the evidence from the records of the speech of aphasics, and from this evi- dence he classifies speech defects into two types— failures of vocabulary (lexis, paradigmatic axis of selection) and failures of grammar (syntagmatic axis of combination). From there he goes on to show that both types of patients make substitutions which cor- respond to metaphor and metonymy. He then maps this point on to the Saussurean binary distinctions between linguistic axes. The two tropes then become, in his classic 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' (1960), the master tropes governing different literary genres, and this can yield a complete definition of what poetry characteristically does.
This view of the relations between the tropes explic- itly changes again the center of gravity for the literary genres. Metaphor is firmly and explicitly consigned to the paradigmatic axis of discourse and associated with poetry, and opposed in a binary fashion to the trope of metonymy, which becomes syntagmatic, and which generatesprosenarrative.Theaccountisinsomeways reductive—metaphor is a form of substitution of in absentia particles of lexis from the paradigm (selection axis), and there is no way in this account for metaphor
to enter the syntagm and become a combinative factor. By definition it is held in a certain position by its mutual opposition with metonymy's chain of linear substitutions.
In some ways this idea ought to be merely a rela- tivistic instrument of analysis: both poetry and prose narrative may contain both metaphor and metonymy. On the macrolevel, genre and form are generated by the extent to which each text foregrounds metaphor or metonymy: a text which is all metaphor will be a lyric poem and one which is all metonymy will be a realistic novel. (However, Jakobson does suggest that metonymy, not metaphor, is the method of surrealism, which is sometimes conveniently forgotten.)
In Jakobson's own critical practice, however, the oppositional method works to minimize the cognitive content of metaphor and yield a formalist analysis of poetry. In general, the structuralist analysis of poetry, compared with its insights into prose narrative, has been disappointing—precisely because of the reductive account of metaphor which its taxonomic grid relies upon.
The structuralist account has the advantage of get- ting rid at a stroke of the old-fashioned and rather Cartesian confusion between 'figures of thought' and 'figures of speech'—metaphors can coexist on the linguistic and the conceptual levels without any prob- lem; but it does not add to the traditional under- standing of metaphor (as opposed to metonymy which becomes a more important concept than ever before), except in rearranging its relations with other tropes.
However, the very stabilizing of this taxonomic grid itself presents further difficult problems in relation to the concept of metaphor.
8. Poststructuralism
Nietzsche's remarks about metaphor in his 1873 essay
Vber Wahrheit und Ltige im auflermoralischen Sinn
('On truth and falsity in their ultramoral sense'), form an important reference point for the poststructuralist account of metaphor. Nietzsche argues, in a hostile, but also dependent, parody of Socrates, that we necessarily and often unknowingly use metaphors when we discuss the question of truth, taking them to be the original things themselves:
When we talk about trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we believe we know something about the things themselves, and yet we only possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors do not in the least correspond to the original essentials.
This is another version of the argument-from-origins, used to attack the worn-out humanist tradition. Nietzsche attacks our confidence in our own rep- resentations, arguing that language itself is meta- phorical and that when we seek definitions of things, we deceive ourselves unknowinglyand take for truths
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