Ruminations

But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a7-10, tr. by S.H. Butcher.

One of the things I have been most perplexed by is the metaphor. What is the metaphor? Is it only, as Aristotle writes, a simple comparison? A way of understanding one thing in terms of another? Common sense would say that the metaphor is an issue of language. Instead, linguists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson see it as structuring our conceptual system entirely. The way a person relates to the world, how they understand it and act in it, they say, is metaphorical.

The metaphor, as a linguistic object, was first systematically treated by Aristotle, who largely saw it as a helpful though possibly excessive rhetorical device. His is a textual understanding. The Rhetoric is every bit a work of literary criticism and analysis. But he shows wariness on the issue: “the metaphors must not be too far-fetched, or they will be difficult to grasp, nor obvious, or they will have no effect” (1410b30). This wariness is adopted and even magnified in later philosophers such as Hobbes, who see the metaphor as nothing less than an absurdity in rational thinking. Hobbes, for example, ascribes one of the causes of absurdity in reason

to the use of Metaphors, Tropes, and other Rhetoricall figures, instead of words proper. For though it be lawfull to say, (for example) in common speech, the way goeth, or leadeth hither, or thither, The Proverb says this or that (whereas wayes cannot go, nor Proverbs speak;) yet in reckoning, and seeking of truth, such speeches are not to be admitted

Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt 1, Ch. 5

Later, he says,

[S]ometimes the understanding have need to be opened by some apt similitude; and then there is so much use of Fancy. But for Metaphors, they are in this case utterly excluded. For seeing they openly profess deceipt; to admit them into Councell, or Reasoning, were manifest folly.

Pt. 1, ch 8

Hobbes has minimized the possibility that a metaphor could illuminate or provide insight. He separates it from “apt similitude” though this was what Aristotle thought was the mark of genius. Interestingly enough, however, he does demonstrate (almost presaging Lakoff and Johnson) how metaphorical language operates innocuously in our speech.

Indeed, there seem to be two types of metaphor: this innocuous embedded-within-speech metaphor and the excessive one that appears in poetic discourse. This latter one is the one that Aristotle and Hobbes warn us not to include in persuasive speech. And yet isn’t it this one which Hegel relies on when he writes, “the being of Spirit is a bone“? (§343)

Here is Hegel’s most significant single one-word key concept, Spirit—Geist—a word whose connotations reverberate through the entirety of the Western religious, mystical, philosophical, and even medical canon. The being of Spirit is a bone. What could that mean? The work of Hegel is already conceptually difficult and here is now a statement that, to quote Aristotle, seems “far-fetched.”

When in other respects it is said of Spirit that it is that it has being, is a Thing, a single, separate reality, this is not intended to mean that it is something we can see or take in our hands or touch, and so on, but that is what is said; and what really is said is expressed by saying that the being of Spirit is a bone.

The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by A.V. Miller §343, p. 207

The metaphor comes in the middle of a deeply important and hazy passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology. He is discussing a movement of self-consciousness, in which consciousness sees its object as both a dead Thing and as externalized Spirit. For Hegel, the dead Thing in front of me is an actualization of Spirit; Spirit is not the thing itself but rather its being. Spirit doesn’t manifest as a Thing, but it is there at work solely in the dumb existence and being of the object perceived by consciousness.

This is the crucial moment when consciousness becomes self-consciousness. Consciousness as the Unhappy Consciousness of the cynic and skeptic, which sees its objects only as dead Things, Things that just are, will struggle to turn its gaze inward and see itself as a Thing. But in self-consciousness, the consciousness that dares look at itself, consciousness sees itself as both a Thing, as something that is, that has being; and as itself. Thus, in this reflexive attitude wherein self-consciousness is the consciousness taking hold of itself and its (dead) being as Thing, you have what Hegel calls Reason. Here is where Hegel writes something astounding:

This consciousness, in its result, enunciates as a proposition that of which it is the unconscious certainty—the proposition that is the implicit Notion of Reason. This proposition is the infinite judgment that the self is a Thing, a judgment that suspends itself.

(§344)

In other words, self-consciousness enunciates (and we have to stress Hegel’s choice of a discursive term to describe an action of consciousness) as a proposition, as a judgment, as a statement that the “self is a Thing.” Furthermore, this consciousness is itself an unconscious certainty; in an almost Freudian way, it has to verbalize what it is the Truth of. Hegel calls this proposition an infinite judgment because it “suspends itself” in its infinite circularity, in the ramifications it opens up if, to follow Hegel, we believe that the real is rational and the rational is real. It opens, as Žižek says, a gap of incomprehensibility. The infinite judgment, which is the product of consciousness turning into self-consciousness, is thus also “the transition of immediacy into mediation, or negativity” (§344). It is the moment when Things stop being their dumb selves, the moment Reason is seen as splitting itself and coursing through their multiplicity. The dead, objective being of the Thing is now a “being-for-self”; it now is “mine”; it is now meaningful to me. This transition, which occurs when self-consciousness recognizes the coursing of Spirit in both itself and the Thing, is made possible, I’d argue, by the metaphor, by precisely that which Aristotle was timid about and Hobbes despised. Hegel even realizes that this recognition owes something to language since he says that when we take the truth of the infinite judgment at face value, the way a logical positivist would take it, then the idea is absurd. In his words,

the purer the Notion itself is, the sillier an idea it becomes when its content is in the form, not of the Notion, but of picture-thinking, i.e. if the self-suspending judgment is not taken with the consciousness of this its infinitude, but as a fixed proposition the subject and predicate of which are valid each on its own account, the self fixed as self, the thing fixed as thing, and yet each is supposed to be the other.

(§346)

Could this criticism not equally apply to a metaphor such as we would in a poem? Isn’t the potency and novelty of two unlike things somehow in how they unlock their similarity by being equated with each other?

Žižek says that this gap opened up by the infinite judgment, by the consciousness which enunciates that the self is a Thing or that spirit is a bone is subject. It is the moment the subject is called upon into being. It is a gap in the symbolic texture, the very moment of true freedom (and Hegel has already linked the infinite judgment with negativity). Notice how a comfortably prosaic narrative, a popular crime fiction novel, or even Tolstoy at his most mundane, requires only that the reader read, that they follow. What reigns in the novel is semantic order. Indeed, the purpose of the crime fiction novel is to exhaust logical possibility, to trick you, yes, into believing that one character was the real culprit when in reality it was another. And yet, when it is realized that it was this second individual who committed the crime, the truth of the matter cannot be challenged. A different logical route was simply taken.

But how do we process a line, for example, from Seamus Heaney:

that blind-from-birth, sweet voiced, withdrawn musician

Was like a silver vein in heavy clay

“At the Wellhead,” New Yorker, March 3, 1994, p. 74

No longer do we simply read. A comparison has been made. The text has produced a metaphor, which, though domesticated in this case by the form of the simile, requires us nevertheless to stop and step in, to come to terms with its truth. For a truth has been signified here. A spark, as Lacan pointed out, has flown from the friction of two signifiers: the musician and the vein. The poet will not tell us what he means. He has imply produced the comparison. It is the reader who has to interpret, who has to mediate, to negate. The meaning of the text is not this dumb meaning in front of me. It is a moment of negativity precisely because the subject has to enter, the subject has to put a stop to the easy slide of meaning; they have to stitch over the chasm between the two terms themselves. To take this further, the metaphor is freedom.