• Streetlight
    9.1k
    I’ve been planing to do some reading on metaphor soon, but I figured that in the meantime, I might jot down some notes to track what changes, if any, there might be at the end of my study. Anyway, one interesting way to approach metaphor is with respect to both speed and novelty. Traditionally, metaphor is distinguished from the literal insofar as it is what might be called ‘figural’. The literal is ‘the thing itself’, while the metaphor is rhetorical figure that doubles and extends the literal. It’s clear however, that the metaphor is not merely a double of the literal, but in fact ‘adds' something new, something novel, to the sense of the literal. With respect to learning, metaphors are used precisely for their ability to shed new light on a concept that might otherwise be hard to grasp (not to mention their inherence at the heart of using words themselves - note, in the previous sentence the notions of ‘shedding light’ and ‘grasping’).

    This notion of 'extending sense’ in fact puts metaphor on a continuum, a line (another metaphor!) with the literal at one end, and the unintelligible on the other, with metaphor perched precariously in the middle of both. Unintelligible because if the metaphor ‘strays’ too far from the literal, if I speak in figures and nothing but figures - images, things - it becomes almost impossible to make sense of what I am saying. Indeed, most prose, if not language, deploys itself as a sort of sew-sawing between the literal and the metaphorical, sometimes extending into the unintelligible in the case of some poetry. From the point of view of metaphor however, the literal - which here differs from the figural simply by degree - is in fact something like a ‘sedimented figure’, figures whose power to invoke what is novel or new is greatly diminished due to ubiquity and common use.

    One way to think about this is in terms of speed: to use metaphor is to be able to rapidly deploy language so that - to utilise another distinction - the ‘spirit’, rather than just the ‘letter’ of a point is grasped at stroke. To remain at the level of the literal - strictly speaking, something impossible to do - is to use language in a ‘slow’ way, to move at a reduced pace in comparison to the speed at which metaphor works. The danger however, is the attempt to move too rapidly, to eschew the literal altogether in order to bound right over language and hit 'the point’ directly, as it were, a move which would result in sheer nonsense or the play of unbounded word-association.

    An upshot of the above is that all language - whether metaphorical or literal - in fact brings something new to the table of making-sense. While the words we speak always harken back to a relatively stable set of pre-understood meanings, the ways in which we use words in concrete situations always inflects our words with a sheen of novelty that cannot be reduced to those pre-established meanings. We construct anew, in our manner of speaking, 'the world’, the horizon according to which our words makes sense and become co-coordinated to each other at the time of their utterance.

    Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ways in which books, while they ‘begin’ with a stock of ‘well-worn and ready made significations’, end up ‘imperceptibly varying the ordinary meaning of signs, and like a whirlwind they sweep me along toward the other meaning with which I am to connect’. All language involves this kind of sweeping (a metaphor no one would get had I not established the parameters of it’s use by writing the words above). Just some thoughts to throw out.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    Interesting. Lakoff and Johnson wrote a book called Philosophy in the Flesh in which they see the bewitchment of language for philosophers as one of taking metaphor literally, or failing to recognize how much of our thinking is based on metaphor.

    They probably go a bit overboard with that, but it does make me wonder what it really means to understand. Do we primarily understand the world by creating all sorts of metaphors? If so, then the majority of our understanding is non-literal. It's more noticing similarities between different domains and using that to 'grasp' concepts in a new way.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    Yeah L&J's 'Metaphors We Live By' is one of the books I'm planning to pick up. That said, part of what's at stake in the OP is the idea that there is no clear dividing line between the literal and the figural -'understanding' is a sort of evolving capacity that is never established once and for all but shifts relative to both the inherited background of understanding that we have, and to the novelty that every encounter with something new affords. The entire structure of understanding is mobile, as it were: language, which always involves a degree of novelty through metaphor, slips back into literality which in turn retrojects the illusion that literality came first.

    This is where one must be careful with language: it's not just that we notice similarities between pre-established domains and draw connections - by way of metaphor - across them. One must instead think of metaphor as helping to establish the sense of those very domains to begin with. So perhaps a rejigging of the OP's imagery is in order: metaphors don't simply 'extend' sense (as if from a pre-constituted 'core' of sense), but also involve a certain involution or ingression of sense which reworks what counts as the 'boundaries' of the literal.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.4k
    Yes, it seems plausible to me too that, while we distinguish, in some contexts, the literal meaning of an expression from the metaphorical uses that can be made of it in this context, the notions of the literal and of the metaphorical don't mark a dichotomy. In order to explain the literal use of an expression (e.g. a concept name) one has to convey a practical understanding of its proper use. But in order to convey this to someone else, one must rely on an already shared background of tendencies to demarcate the domain (circumstances) in which the expression, and other expressions used to explain it, can be sensibly used to say or convey how thing are.

    When the expression is used in a way such that there is a high degree of context sensitivity to its understanding, then we way that it is used in a metaphorical way. When it is used in a way such that the features of the context that are relevant to its understanding aren't salient anymore, because we have become habituated to adjust to them in a conventional way, then the contribution that those features make to the meaning of the expression tend to be ignored and we say that the expression is used literally. (If we are reminded of the genealogy of this use, we then may recognize the expression as a "dead metaphor".) And then, in such cases, we forget that what delimits the range of circumstances (including the nature of the communicative intentions) in which the use of the expression is literal from the circumstances where it is creative and fuzzy. But since it is precisely the location of this boundary that define the concepts referred to by our expressions (because this boundary demarcates what the concept applies to from what it doesn't apply to), and since this boundary can't be sharp, then the literal meaning can't be explicated without making reference to the potential metaphorical uses that lie at the periphery. But since this is inexhaustible, the literal meaning can never be fully explicated.
  • Janus
    16.2k
    Since you posted this in the 'other place' also, where I responded to it, I am reproducing that response here as well.

    StreetlightX wrote:


    Anyway, one interesting way to approach metaphor is with respect to both speed and novelty. Traditionally, metaphor is distinguished from the literal insofar as it is what might be called ‘figural’. The literal is ‘the thing itself’, while the metaphor is rhetorical figure that doubles and extends the literal. It’s clear however, that the metaphor is not merely a double of the literal, but in fact ‘adds' something new, something novel, to the sense of the literal. With respect to learning, metaphors are used precisely for their ability to shed new light on a concept that might otherwise be hard to grasp (not to mention their inherence at the heart of using words themselves - note, in the previous sentence the notions of ‘shedding light’, ‘grasping’ and 'heart').



    In saying the literal is "the thing itself" I take it you mean something like that a literal description of a thing will confine itself to the manifest properties of the thing as observed and analyzed. It's not clear to me what you envisage in thinking a metaphor as a "double" of the literal; do you want to suggest something like a 'mirroring' of sets of qualities by sets of associations? Something of the kind that is manifested in the 'magical correspondences' of alchemy?

    I view the literal as the descriptive, the analytic. Metaphor then, might be thought as the synthetic, that which associates things with one another beyond the scope of literally descriptive generality. Metaphor is not analytically deconstructive then, as mere description is, but synthetically constructive; it 'brings together' in an act of making or poeisis.

    This notion of 'extending sense’ in fact puts metaphor on a continuum, a line (another metaphor!) with the literal at one end, and the unintelligible on the other, with metaphor perched precariously in the middle of both. Unintelligible because if the metaphor ‘strays’ too far from the literal, if I speak in figures and nothing but figures - images, things - it becomes almost impossible to make sense of what I am saying. Indeed, most prose, if not language, deploys itself as a sort of sew-sawing between the literal and the metaphorical, sometimes extending into the unintelligible in the case of some poetry. From the point of view of metaphor however, the literal - which here differs from the figural simply by degree - is in fact something like a ‘sedimented figure’, figures whose power to invoke what is novel or new is greatly diminished due to ubiquity and common use.


    Yes, the act of synthetic association may be as 'subjective' as you like; it may speak in ciphers known only to the speaker and far removed from any conventionally entrenched metaphor. To linger with your ‘continuum’ metaphor, metaphorical usages closer to the ‘literal’ end of the spectrum gain intersubjective currency by virtue of their being readily accessible and within the ambit of more or less easy or natural association. So, I would say that it is not only the literal that becomes "sedimented"; in fact. the preponderantly literal is in no need of the establishing force of sedimentation, it makes sense because of its transparently descriptive character; it does not so much become established as simply stand out by virtue of being noticeable.

    One way to think about this is in terms of speed: to use metaphor is to be able to rapidly deploy language so that - to utilise another distinction - the ‘spirit’, rather than just the ‘letter’ of a point is grasped at stroke. To remain at the level of the literal - strictly speaking, something impossible to do - is to use language in a ‘slow’ way, to move at a reduced pace in comparison to the speed at which metaphor works. The danger however, is the attempt to move too rapidly, to eschew the literal altogether in order to bound right over language and hit 'the point’ directly, as it were, a move which would result in sheer nonsense or the play of unbounded word-association.

    I am not feeling your point about "speed" here. I see metaphorical speech as the slower, in the sense that it is never 'to the point'. The "spirit" takes longer to sink in, we must tarry with it. I am not getting any connection between "bounding right over language" and "the play of unbounded word-association", the move away from sense would seem to be more like a ‘bounding into language’ in the sense of a ‘bounding right over sense’. I don't see metaphor as "mere word-association" at all but as a poetic synthesis of sensible qualities, perhaps expressed linguistically, or alternatively in a visual medium, for example.

    An upshot of the above is that all language - whether metaphorical or literal - in fact brings something new to the table of making-sense. While the words we speak always harken back to a relatively stable set of pre-understood meanings, the ways in which we use words in concrete situations always inflects our words with a sheen of novelty that cannot be reduced to those pre-established meanings. We construct anew, in our manner of speaking, 'the world’, the horizon according to which our words makes sense and become co-coordinated to each other at the time of their utterance.


    Yes, I am resonating more with what you seem to be suggesting here. "Making sense" may be thought as merely consisting in being understood in the terms of conventional sense. A greater ambit is encompassed in the notion of making novel syntheses of sensible qualities, producing enrichments of imagination.

    Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ways in which books, while they ‘begin’ with a stock of ‘well-worn and ready made significations’, end up ‘imperceptibly varying the ordinary meaning of signs, and like a whirlwind they sweep me along toward the other meaning with which I am to connect’. All language involves this kind of sweeping (a metaphor no one would get had I not established the parameters of it’s use by writing the words above).

    I feel I am getting your metaphor of "speed" more now, as it is expressed in the idea 'whirlwinds' and 'sweeping'. However, I would be more inclined to present this idea in terms of a contrast between the instant (rapidly overtaking) but insipid stasis of the literal, and the slow moving but richly enveloping dynamis of (novel, unfamiliar) metaphor. The paradox of the hare and the tortoise indeed!
  • wuliheron
    440
    Nice to see you here Streetlight. :)

    The language centers of the brain are currently being mapped out by neurologists, but the evidence all indicates language is based upon pattern matching which is metaphorical and that grammar is derived from the proximity of syntax. In other words, its the opposite of what I think you are suggesting and we derive more concrete meanings for words from metaphors. This also makes sense of the revelation that different languages use different parts of the brain and these are always parts that evolved for different purposes such as motor control or whatever. It means language is an emergent phenomenon and to better understand our use of more concrete definitions for terms we must first embrace our use of metaphors.
  • Barry Etheridge
    349
    Indeed, most prose, if not language, deploys itself as a sort of see-sawing between the literal and the metaphorical, sometimes extending into the unintelligible in the case of some poetry.StreetlightX

    So where does irony, the use of literal language to express the literally opposite meaning, fit in this analysis? It is neither literal nor metaphorical. And can we really call fiction literal when it is literally a history of things which never actually took place? What about the contents of this forum which is filled with abstract terms like mind, thought, belief, and a thousand others that are not literal because they have no concrete reality to refer to but are not metaphors either?
  • mcdoodle
    1.1k
    What about the contents of this forum which is filled with abstract terms like mind, thought, belief, and a thousand others that are not literal because they have no concrete reality to refer to but are not metaphors either?Barry Etheridge

    Trump that, I say :)

    Perhaps the Derrida readers could subsequently move on to 'White Mythology', on the wearing away of coinage into metaphor, which, says Derrida, is itself a metaphor...and after all, what is 'literal' but a metaphor itself, if a somewhat worn one?

    http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/derridawhitemyth.pdf
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