David Hills provides an in-depth study of metaphor. Below are excerpts from Mr. Hills’ detailed study. For the full composition use the link below.
Hills, David, “Metaphor”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/metaphor/>.
Naming of Parts:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
(Romeo and Juliet, 2. 2. 2–3)
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
(James Joyce, Ulysses, chap. 2)
A work is a death mask of its conception.
(Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße)
When we resort to metaphor, we contrive to talk about two things at once; two different and disparate subject matters are mingled to rich and unpredictable effect. One of these subject matters is already under discussion or at least already up for consideration when a speaker resorts to metaphor in the first place. This is the metaphor’s primary subject or tenor: the young girl Juliet in the case of Romeo’s metaphor; history, Ireland’s history or the world’s, in the case of Stephen’s; works, prose writings in general, in the case of Benjamin’s. The second subject matter is newly introduced with an eye to temporarily enriching our resources for thinking and talking about the first. This is the metaphor’s secondary subject or vehicle: the sun; nightmares from which one tries to awake; death masks, i.e., death masks in general. The primary subject of a metaphor may be a particular thing, or it may be a whole kind of thing, and likewise for the secondary subject—with the result that the metaphor itself may take the verbal form of an identity statement (X is Y) as with Romeo; a predication or membership statement (X is a G) as with Stephen Daedalus; or a statement of inclusion (Fs are Gs) as with Benjamin. (The primary/secondary terminology derives from Beardsley (1962), the tenor/vehicle terminology from I.A. Richards (1936).)
If we ask how primary and secondary subjects are brought into relation by being spoken of together in a metaphor, it seems natural to say that metaphor is a form of likening, comparing, or analogizing. The maker of a metaphor (or the metaphor itself) likens the primary subject to the secondary subject: Romeo (or Romeo’s speech) likens Juliet to the sun, Stephen likens history to nightmares, Benjamin likens works in prose to death masks. But it is unclear what we mean when we say this, to the point where some are reluctant to appeal to likeness or similarity in explaining what metaphor is or how it works. Much of the power and interest of many a good metaphor derives from how massively and conspicuously different its two subject matters are, to the point where metaphor is sometimes defined by those with no pretensions to originality as “a comparison of two unlike things.” The interpretation of a metaphor often turns not on properties the secondary subject actually has or even on ones it is believed to have but instead on ones we habitually pretend it to have: think of what happens when we call someone a gorilla.
Metaphor is but one of many techniques, named and unnamed, for likening one thing to another by means of words. We may employ an explicit comparison of one thing to another, built around like, as, or some other explicit comparative construction, in what’s known as simile:
One walking a fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen-Anne’s lace lying like lilies on water.
(Richard Wilbur, “The Beautiful Changes”)
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
(Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, chap. 1)
We may interweave parallel observations about two different subject matters by means of so and too and thus. We may liken a whole bunch of things to one another by making conspicuously parallel statements about each, inviting our listener to register the parallelism and ponder its significance. Or we may simply juxtapose mention of a first thing with mention of a second in a suitably conspicuous and suggestive manner:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Ezra Pound, In a Station of The Metro)
Part of what is distinctive about metaphorical likening in particular is that in resorting to it, we speak of one thing or kind (the primary subject) as and in terms of a second thing or kind (the secondary subject). Our deployment of language takes place as if primary subject and secondary subject (Juliet and the sun) were one and the same; or as if the primary subject (history) were an instance of the secondary subject (nightmares); or as if the primary subject (works) were included within the secondary subject (death masks). In this sense, the primary subject is spoken of as the secondary subject. Words, idioms, and other ways of talking customarily deployed in connection with the secondary subject (the sun, death masks) are appropriated and redeployed for use in thinking and talking about the primary subject (Juliet, prose works). In this sense, the primary subject is spoken of and thought about in terms of the secondary subject. It is easy to feel that in Romeo’s metaphor, familiar fragments of sun-talk come to be about Juliet without ceasing to be about the sun. If so, the double aboutness exhibited by metaphorical language is something philosophers must strive to understand.
A sentence metaphor typically likens many things or kinds to many other things or kinds at a single verbal stroke. Benjamin’s terse little aphorism manages to liken works to death masks, conceptions to living human beings, the changes a conception undergoes before being incorporated into a finished work to life, the stabilization and stultification it allegedly undergoes after such incorporation to death—and so on. In the context provided by the rest of his speech, Romeo’s exclamation manages to liken Juliet to the sun, her room and balcony to the east, Romeo himself to creatures dependent on the sun for warmth and light and nurturance, Romeo’s old love Rosaline to that lesser light the moon, the sight of Juliet to the light of the sun, Juliet’s appearance at her window as the sun’s rising in the east—and so on. Only some of a metaphor’s primary subjects and some of its secondary subjects are explicitly referred to by any verbal expression contained therein. Listeners must work the others out for themselves. In this respect, every metaphor leaves something implicit.
Nevertheless, some metaphors are explicit in the sense that they liken one or more named things or kinds to one or more other named things or kinds by means of locutions regularly found in overt literal statements of identity, membership, or inclusion:
I am a moth and you are a flame.
I, Ahab, am a speeding locomotive.
while other metaphors are implicit in that they eschew such simple alignments, mingling primary subject language and secondary subject language almost at random, yet in such a way as to leave listeners able to work out which is which and what’s being likened to what else:
I shall flutter helplessly closer and closer until you burn me to death at last.
The path of my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush. Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
—Ahab (Melville, Moby-Dick, chap. 38)
Within the confines of a given metaphor, we distinguish pretty readily between words and phrases that are to be taken metaphorically and others that are to be taken only literally. To take an expression metaphorically is one way to take it figuratively, and to take an expression figuratively is to reinterpret it, to construe it in a manner that departs from but remains informed by some relevant prior literal construal of it. Various other kinds of figurative reinterpretation are exhibited in various other recognized figures of speech: metonymy (This policy covers you from the cradle to the grave), irony (You’re a fine friend), hyperbole (loud enough to wake the dead), and so on.
In terminology introduced by Max Black (1954), the portion of a metaphor that undergoes figurative reinterpretation is its focus and the rest is its frame. The focus of a metaphor may be a single word drawn from almost any part of speech. It may be a multi-word phrase like the sun or death mask. It may consist of scattered parts of an extended sentence, the remainder of which is to be taken only literally:
If, baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top. (Cole Porter)
The path of my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
Or it may be an extended phrase, rich in internal syntactic structure:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick …
(W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”)
Philosophers need to elucidate (a) the nature of the difference between taking language literally and taking it metaphorically, the nature, if you will, of the reinterpretation language undergoes when we take it metaphorically, and (b) the nature of the division of expressive labor between a metaphor’s focus and its frame.
Literary theorists regularly acknowledge the existence of extended metaphors, unitary metaphorical likenings that sprawl over multiple successive sentences. There are also contracted metaphors, metaphors that run their course within the narrow confines of a single clause or phrase or word. They reveal themselves most readily when distinct metaphors are mixed to powerful, controlled, anything but hilarious effect:
Philosophy is the battle against [the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language]. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109)
Not all sentence metaphors take the form of declarative sentences by any means: there are metaphorical questions, metaphorical commands, metaphorical optatives, etc.:
Is it all going in one ear and out the other? (Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, “Hey There”, from the musical Pajama Game)
Be an angel.
O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
(Hamlet 1. 2. 129–30)
Despite these complications, modern metaphor theory tends to treat the freestanding declarative metaphorical sentence as the fundamental unit of metaphorical action.
The Ancient Accounts:
For Aristotle, writing in the middle of the fourth century BCE, the figurative redeployment of term counts as a metaphor regardless of precisely how the term’s usual referent and its special temporary referent are related (Poetics 21 1457b ff. See also Rhetoric 3.2 1404b-1505b, 3.4 1406b–1407a, 3.10–11 1410b–1413b). By the time Quintilian and Cicero come along, metaphor is one of many distinct recognized figures of speech, and a self-explanatory terminological transfer counts as metaphorical only if it is based on a real or supposed analogy or likeness between the regular referent and the special temporary one. This matters less than one might expect, since although Aristotle recognized four different kinds of metaphor, he regarded the analogy-based kind as far and away the most interesting and devoted the bulk of his discussion to it.
Sometimes we resort to metaphor because there’s no established term for the thing we want to talk about and no need to contrive a new term that will refer to it once and for all. More often and more interestingly, we resort to metaphor for the sake of the pleasure our audience will take in puzzling it out, the persona it allows us to adopt in addressing our audience, and the quasi-sensory vividness it brings to the audience’s apprehension of whatever we say with its help.
… Even with things that have a copious supply of words belonging to them, people still take much more delight in words drawn from elsewhere, at least if some discrimination is employed in using them metaphorically. I suppose this is the case either because it is a sign of natural talent to leap over what is lying before one’s feet and instead take up something brought from afar; or because the hearer is led somewhere else in his thoughts, but without going astray, which is a great delight; or because each individual word evokes the thing itself as well as a complete simile of it; or because all metaphors, at least those that have been chosen with discrimination, appeal directly to the senses, especially to the sense of sight, which is the keenest. (Cicero, De Oratore, 55 BCE, 3.159–60)
Aristotle portrays the understanding of a simple metaphor as a stimulating exercise in analogical equation solving. Suppose Empedocles employs the term ‘old age’ under circumstances where it looks for all the world as if what is really being discussed is the course of a single day. Old age itself lacks any immediate bearing on efforts to understand the course of a single day, so we conjecture that on this special occasion, the term “old age” stands for something with the kind of immediate bearing on efforts to understand the course of a single day that old age itself has on efforts to understand some other subject matter readily called to mind by invoking old age—namely, the course of a single human life. Just as old age constitutes the final stage of the course of a single life, what constitutes the final stage of the course of a single day is evening. Old age is to a life as evening is to a day. We thus infer that on this special occasion, “old age” is being employed to refer to evening, and we interpret the sentence in which it figures accordingly (Poetics 10 1457b).
In working this out, we activate and begin to explore a complex and potentially fruitful analogy between the way a person’s physical and intellectual powers wax and wane over the course of a single human life and the way the sun’s powers wax and wane over the course of a single day, between the way individual human lives repeat each other with variations in the course of an extended human lineage and the way individual days do so over the course of a year, and so on. The effort to recover a simple metaphorical meaning (evening) for the term “old age” calls forth a beneficial, pleasurable, complex intellectual effort from us. The sentence we thereby come to understand may say something simple and unambitious that could easily be said without resorting to metaphor, but the effort to recover this meaning has a cognitive value transcending that of the meaning itself. Something happens to the terms on which we access our own thoughts about days and how they run: evening is set before our eyes in the suggestive and instructive guise of an elderly human being. For discussion see Ricoeur (1997, 9–43), Moran (1996), Halliwell (2003, 189–191). On ancient rhetoric and poetics more generally
Paraphrase:
Sometimes the effort to render a given original in a given medium requires approximation and elaboration of various sorts, so that any rendering of the given original in the given medium will be correct only up to a point and incorrect thereafter (such is approximation) and more complex or longwinded than the thing rendered (such is elaboration). When this is the case we often call our renderings paraphrases of their originals. Sometimes originals and paraphrases are both verbal, and the aim of the paraphrase is to explain or exposit the original: think of a lawyer’s paraphrase of an obscure statute or a preacher’s paraphrase of a cryptic Bible passage. Sometimes neither original nor paraphrase is verbal and the aim is to adapt the original in some sense or other: think of a polyphonic paraphrase by Palestrina of a snatch of medieval plainsong or the paraphrase of an acanthus leaf in the design of a Corinthian capital.
The effort to translate a literary work from one language to another, to render the original work in a language not its own, involves a complex mixture of exposition and adaptation. Translational rendering is especially likely to resort to approximation and elaboration—paraphrase—when confronted by metaphors and other figures of speech.
Nevertheless, there is a familiar way of registering how one takes or understands a given metaphor, naturally called paraphrase, such that dispensing with it entirely would condemn articulate consumers of metaphor to an unproductive silence. It is hard not to sympathize with Stanley Cavell when he writes in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” (1969):
Now suppose I am asked what someone means who says, “Juliet is the sun.” … I may say something like: Romeo means that Juliet is the warmth of his world; that his day begins with her; that only in her nourishment can he grow. And his declaration suggests that the moon, which other lovers use as an emblem of their love, is merely her reflected light, and dead in comparison; and so on. In a word, I paraphrase it. Moreover, if I could not provide an explanation of this form, that is a very good reason, a perfect reason, for supposing that I do not know what it means. Metaphors are paraphrasable.
He adds:
The “and so on” which ends my example of paraphrase is significant. It registers what William Empson called the “pregnancy” of metaphors, the burgeoning of meaning in them… The over-reading of metaphors so often complained of, no doubt justly, is a hazard they must run for their high interest.
Perhaps we can agree that explications of the sort Cavell has in mind exist and have some legitimate role to play in the understanding and appreciation of metaphor—and agree to call such explications paraphrases—while agreeing to disagree about how they relate to the language they purport to explain. For more on these matters see Hills (2008).
Comparativist Accounts
Ancient Greek poetry was rich in extended explicit comparisons—similes—of the sort we now call epic or Homeric. At Iliad 20.164–73, Aeneas is bearing down on Achilles when the roles of attacker and attacked are abruptly reversed; this is a literal rendering from (Stott, 2006):
… He [Achilles] rushed against him [Aeneas] like a rapacious lion
that men are eager to kill, the whole town,
once they have gathered. He ignores them
going his own way, but when one of the young men, swift in battle,
strikes him with a spear, then he crouches down with open mouth,
foam appears around his teeth, and his brave spirit groans in his heart,
and he lashes his ribs and flanks with his tail
on both sides, urging himself to fight.
With glowing eyes he charges forcefully forward
to see if he will kill one of the men or himself be slain in the crowd.
Ancient rhetoricians would maintain that Homer’s simile and a metaphor employing the epithet “the lion” so as to manifestly refer to the man Achilles are alike in that they make or present one and the same comparison, each in its own way: both bits of language compare Achilles to a lion. Aristotle goes on to contend that “similes are metaphors needing an explanatory word” (Poetics 1407a)—as if the difference between the “The lion [Achilles] rushed” (metaphor) and “He [Achilles] rushed as a lion” (simile) came down to the presence in the latter of a stage direction indicating that Achilles went on the attack in the guise of a lion. A simile is thus a lengthened metaphor. Quintilian turns things round, speaking of metaphors as shortened similes:
In general terms, Metaphor is a shortened form of Simile; the difference is that in Simile something is [overtly] compared with the thing we wish to describe, while in metaphor one thing is substituted for the other.—Institutio Oratoria, ca. 95 AD, 8.6, 8–9.
Like his fellow ancients, Quintilian conceived metaphor as an affair of terms rather than as an affair of sentences. A metaphorical employment of the term “lion” to refer to the man Achilles doesn’t say that Achilles is like a lion, since it doesn’t say anything at all.
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