THE MEANING OF METAPHORS PART II

…There are all sorts of highly stimulating questions arising from the philosophical inquiry into the subject of metaphors. Considering the necessary quality of novelty and originality, associated with the metaphors, can we count as metaphors those of them which are habitually reproduced (leaving aside those that are freshly produced), but have not yet lost their proof-like mint shine? In other words, once we realize that our specific metaphor can no longer count as original fiction, can we still count it as a metaphor, or perhaps we ought to treat all our reproduced metaphors exactly like Grigori Permyakov has treated proverbs, that is, as signs, or simply, as clichés?

This is to say that in an ideal situation we will count as metaphors only our own personal creations, but none of those bona fide metaphors created before us, and considered as metaphors only in the strictest correlation to their creative source, that is, to their actual author.

There is a lot to be said for counting only the original, newly-minted linguistic coins as metaphors. But it may not be very practical, as the metaphoric prototype may not be all that easily distinguished from the early mint by anyone who is unfamiliar with the exact parameters and copyright characteristics of the prototype, and will undoubtedly treat much later specimens as prototypes. Even better, most people, consciously using an existing colorful expression, will undoubtedly refer to it as a metaphor, even if it has been in circulation as long as a century, or even much longer than that!

Incidentally this splendidly insightful comparison of a metaphor to a coin belongs yet again to the genius of Nietzsche, in the following quotation from his unpublished Über Warheit Und Lüge Im Außermoralischen Sinn (1873):

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to people: truths are illusions, about which one has forgotten that this is what they are, metaphors which are worn out, and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins…”

Ironically, thirty-seven years prior to Nietzsche, a very similar thought was expressed by the Scottish Sage of Chelsea Thomas Carlyle, in his autobiographical masterpiece Sartor Resartus:

“Examine language-- what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sounds), what is it all but metaphors, whether recognized as such or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless?” (Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, I, 1836.)

Could Nietzsche have been influenced by this? Doubly ironically, he could well have been, as he was very familiar with Carlyle, whom he most unkindly called “the insipid muddlehead, semi-actor and rhetorician, and even a counterfeiter.” (I suspect, however, that Nietzsche’s prejudice against Carlyle, shared by quite a few others, can be traced to the latter’s angry Reminiscences, written in a state of deep mental depression, and rather recklessly published posthumously in 1881 by his friend and literary executor James Froude. [It is a good example of how sometimes the “Kafka disobedience approach,” commendably undertaken by his executor Max Brod, serves no positive purpose when used indiscriminately just to preserve a great author’s unauthorized legacy.])

My personal opinion of Carlyle is positive (perhaps, because I have not read his Reminiscences?!). I believe that his analysis of metaphors--- as the starting point of language--- is a stroke of genius, and a writer who can boast of a single paragraph, or even a single sentence of such profundity, deserves an undying respect of the grateful posterity, in all eternity. As a matter of fact, I will be paying him a proper tribute in my Significant Others section.

Incidentally, it has also been my view that metaphors are the productive building bricks of language, while speech turns them into reproductive blocks, “signs,” if you like. On this basis, I have assigned an aesthetic value to language, in so far as its constituent former metaphors had at some earlier time possessed a distinct literary and aesthetic quality. I also find a solid connection between the intrinsic importance of a language and its etymological historical development. The higher the quality of its metaphoric genius, the better the said language serves to express abstract concepts and subtlest shades of meaning. After all, philosophy and poetry have a lot in common: metaphors are the engines of thought.