Volume 27, Issue 1, 1979
Metafizyka, Logika, Historia, Filozofii
Hanna Rosnerowa
Pages 61-75
About the Notion of Metaphor
The present considerations aim at formulating the philosophical question about the nature of metaphor and at a certain proposal of an answer to this question. The extended denotation of the term "metaphor” often used in the literary and artistic criticism is ignored here. The narrow, initial notion of metaphor understood as a language phenomenon consisting in transferring terms from one branch of life, knowledge or art, to another is considered. Theres is an every day conviction that whenever we use the same words to describe e.g. physical and psychic states, we transfer the terms concerning-the former to the sphere of spiritual life. It seems that three types of situations and respectively three types of metaphors can be differentiated. The first group would compryse these metaphors, which do not raise serious doubts: everything seems to prove that when e.g. we say that someone "carries a burden of troubles”, we indeed transfer the notion of burden from the sphere of physical experiences to the sphere of spiritual ones. The second type of metaphor — connected e.g. with the notion of steering — raises more doubts as to the question, in which field the notion was originally created, and in relation to which sphere of life it was primarily used. The direction of "the pointer of transfer” is then uncertain. It is difficult to imagine a man who has never steered anything, but history knows epochs, in which people could not construct boats with a rudder.
From the philosophical point of view the third type of metaphors is really interesting. These metaphors become so much suspected as their nature, that the question arises, if they still can be called by this term. The answer suggested here is negative and it is illustrated by two examples: light metaphors ("light of the sun”, "light of reason”, ”to see the tree”, ”to see the truth”, etc.), and metaphors consisting in wanderings of the same terms between ethics and aesthetics ("bad music”, "noble gas”, "good painting”, "beautiful deed”, etc.). An analysis done here leads to the hypothesis that actually the phenomenon of metaphor does not occur here. In many cases we adequately denote with the same word one and the only in its kind quality actualizing itself in two spheres of life, really present in two orders which in a part of their ranges are simply identical.