Paradigms for a metaphorology.pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

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Introduction Let us try for a moment to imagine that modern philosophy had proceeded according to the methodological program set out for it by Descartes, and had arrived at that definitive conclusion that Descartes himself believed to be eminently attainable. This ‘end state’ of philosophy, which historical experience permits us to entertain only as a hypothesis, would be defined according to the criteria set out in the four rules of the Cartesian “Discours de la méthode,” in particular by the clarity and distinctness that the first rule requires of all matters apprehended in judgments. To this ideal of full objectification 1 would correspond the perfection of a terminology designed to capture the presence and precision of the matter at hand in well-defined concepts. In its terminal state, philosophical language would be purely and strictly ‘conceptual’: everything can be defined, therefore everything must be 1. Descartes defines the characteristics of clarity and distinctness as follows: Claram voco illam (sc. ideam) quae menti attendenti praesens et aperta est . . . (Oeuvres, ed. Adam-Tannery, VIII, 13) [I call a perception clear when it is present and accessible to an attentive mind . . . ]; Distinctam autem illam, quae, cum clara sit, ab omnibus aliis ita seiuncta est et praecisa, ut nihil plane aliud, quam quod clarum ist, in se contineat (VIII, 22) [I call a perception distinct if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear; René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1: 207– 8]. The debt to the Stoic doctrine of knowledge and its ideal of cataleptic presentation is unmistakable, although it has yet to be sufficiently clarified.
2 Paradigms for a Metaphorology defined; there is no longer anything logically ‘provisional’, just as there is no longer any morale provisoire. From this vantage point, all forms and elements of figurative speech, in the broadest sense of the term, prove to have been makeshifts destined to be superseded by logic. Their function was exhausted in their transitional significance; in them, the human mind rushed ahead of its responsible, step-by-step fulfillment; they were an expression of the same précipitation regarding which Descartes, likewise in the first rule, states that it ought carefully to be avoided. 2 Having arrived at its final conceptual state, however, philosophy would also have to relinquish any justifiable interest in researching the history of its concepts. Seen from the ideal of its definitive terminology, the value of a history of concepts can only be a critical and destructive one, a role it ceases to perform upon reaching its goal: that of demolishing the diverse and opaque burden of tradition, summarized by Descartes under the second of his fundamental critical concepts, prévention (corresponding to Francis Bacon’s ‘idols’). History is here nothing other than precipitancy (précipitation) and anticipation (prévention), a failing of that actual presence whose methodical recuperation renders historicity null and void. That the logic of the first rule eviscerates history was first recognized by Giambattista Vico, who set against it the idea of a “logic of fantasy.” Vico proceeded from the assumption that the clarity and distinctness called for by Descartes were reserved solely for the creator in his relationship of insight to his work: verum ipsum factum. What remains for us mortals? Not the ‘clarity’ of the given, but solely that of whatever we have made for ourselves: the world of our images and artifacts, our conjectures and projections—in short, the universe of our ‘imagination’, in the new, productive sense of the term unknown to antiquity. In the context of the task of a “logic of fantasy” there falls also, indeed in an exemplary fashion, a discussion of ‘transferred’ speech or metaphor, 3 a subject previously confined to the chapters on figures in handbooks of rhetoric. The traditional classification of metaphor among the ornaments of public speech is hardly fortuitous: for antiquity, the logos was fundamentally adequate to the totality of what exists. Cosmos and logos were correlates. Metaphor is here deemed incapable of enriching the capacity of expressive means; it contributes only to the effect of a statement, the ‘punchiness’ with which it gets through to its political and forensic addressees. The perfect congruence of cosmos and logos rules out the possibility that figurative language could achieve anything for which common speech (κύριον ὄνομα) could not furnish an equivalent. In principle, the orator and poet can say nothing that could not just as well be presented in a theoretical, conceptual way; only how they say it is specific to them, not what is said. The possibility and potency of persuasive 2. [René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 41.] 3. [The Greek verb from which the word metaphor is derived literally means “to translate,” “to transfer.”]
Page 2 and 3: Paradigms for a Metaphorology
Page 4 and 5: Paradigms for a Metaphorology Hans
Page 6: Contents A Note on the Translation
Page 12 and 13: Introduction 3 speech had been one
Page 14 and 15: Introduction 5 causality.” Immedi
Page 16 and 17: Metaphorics of the ‘Mighty’ Tru
Page 22 and 23: II Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmat
Page 24 and 25: Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmatics
Page 40 and 41: III A Terminological and Metaphorol
Page 42 and 43: A Terminological and Metaphorologic
Page 50 and 51: Metaphorics of the ‘Naked’ Trut
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Metaphorics of the ‘Naked’ Trut
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Terra Incognita and ‘Incomplete U
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Organic and Mechanical Background M
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VII Myth and Metaphorics If we atte
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Myth and Metaphorics 79 ignore the
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VIII Terminologization of a Metapho
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Terminologization of a Metaphor 83
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IX Metaphorized Cosmology The impre
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Metaphorized Cosmology 101 the diss
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Metaphorized Cosmology 103 not only
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Metaphorized Cosmology 105 again in
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Metaphorized Cosmology 107 pernicus
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Metaphorized Cosmology 109 on the o
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Metaphorized Cosmology 111 Galileo
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Metaphorized Cosmology 113 propriat
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X Geometric Symbolism and Metaphori
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Geometric Symbolism and Metaphorics
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Translator’s Afterword Metaphorol
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Translator’s Afterword 135 There
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Translator’s Afterword 137 Rothac
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Translator’s Afterword 139 its in
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Translator’s Afterword 141 in whi
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Translator’s Afterword 143 addres
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Translator’s Afterword 145 art of
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Alberti, 67 Albertus Magnus, 6 Alex
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Nicolaus of Oresme, 72 Nietzsche, 1
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152 Subject Index geometry, 20, 90,
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