More on metaphor

Foster:

I've made use of Ricoeur in my research and I'm also gonna get my hands on the work by Sokolowski which you reviewed. I read his intro to phenomenology recently and really enjoyed it. He also had a little something to say about metaphor in that work. Moreover, I learned what a dative of manifestation or disclosure is, by reading his intro.

Blosser:

His works are consistently substantial. Check out his numerous other titles as well.

Foster:

I like that nomenclature--ambiguous identity synthesis! If I decide to employ it in my dissertation, I'll give you due credit for introducing me to the expression. :-)

Blosser:

I need all the credit I can get!

Foster:

Concerning "meaning creation," if you have not done so already, you might enjoy perusing what Max Black has written, here and there, regarding the Tenor and Vehicle of a metaphorical construction creating meaning through Tenor-Vehicle interaction.

Black contends that metaphors such as 'man is a wolf' do not create meaning by means of the lexical definitions for "man" or "wolf." Meaning is primarily created via the qualities that those hearing the metaphor associate with a wolf, in this case. The
soi-di-sant "associated commonplaces" that metaphors evoke do not have to be true, only capable of being readily evoked (according to Black).

Blosser:

Sounds interesting and promising. Thanks for the tip on Mr. Black.

Foster:

Walter Kasper also writes that metaphors and similes "offer a new and creative description of reality" by combining "a dialectic of the familiar and the strange." I agree with what you also observe regarding "God the Father." The literature I've been reading calls these constructions "dead metaphors."

Blosser:

Yes, dead metaphors, as in the "foot of the mountain," or the "leg of the table." We don't even think of them as metaphors anymore.

Foster:

Have I hugged my "teddy bear" today? No, cause I don't think I still got one.

Seriously, [on the metaphor issue ...] What made Jesus suggest there was something similar between Herod and a fox? What made Bill Shakespeare perceive some type of similarity between the world and a stage? These are questions that metaphorologists seem to tackle often and they usually come up with sundry and disparate answers to such queries.

Blosser:

Fascinating business. Thomas Howard's book, Chance, or the Dance? is wonderful on the metaphor issue, particularly with examples, though not in a typical "scholarly" context--for the better, in my opinion!

Foster:

I love Hannah Arendt's treatment of this topic in The Life of the Mind. Based on her reading of Aristotle and Kant, Arendt prefers to define "metaphor" as "the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances." That is, metaphors make concealed thought exposed, bringing it out into the open to be
observed. One uttering a metaphor thus putatively makes the existential transition from the notional state to the empirical state by positing analogies in relation to one another, such that A is to B as C is to D ("e.g. Juliet is the sun").