The Philosophical Dimension Of Metaphor

The purpose of this paper is to explore the internal structure and the nature of the metaphor,as well as explore the metaphor from the philosophical dimension.The metaphor is regarded as a complex puzzle in the area of human conscious from all the time.It has been the part of the research object in rhetoric and poetics since the Ancient Greek dynasty.The traditional researchers generally agree that the most important role of metaphor is to assist expressions.In the field of philosophy,however,after Plato expelled poets from the Country,the metaphor has been in a position of exclusion.In the book "Philosophy of Language" philosopher William Lacon admits that in philosophy,the metaphor is in the dark side.As a form of rhetoric,the metaphor has been attributed to the scope of the study of rhetoric.Occasionally,philosophers may mention metaphors,but at most of the casees,they just accused that the ambiguous meaning of meatphors hampered the inquiry of truth in philosophy.If we consider the question from poetics and rhetoric,then the metaphor is a modification of the literary talent;however,from the standpoint of philosophy,the exact literary talent for modification has become an obstacle of correct understanding.Such traditional view of metaphor has had a profound influence,it continued until the mid-20th century.With the rise of the Linguistic Turn trend in the field of analytic philosophy in the mid-20th century,the analytic philosophers began to try to re-understanding metaphors from conveying the structure of language and its significance.That means,for a metaphor,whether people can understand it or not,the metaphor itself conveys the content,and the key of the research is to analysis those contents.After that,linguistic philosophers dicussed the metaphor from the standpoint of semantics and pragmatics.It is ture that linguistic philosophers largely expand the scope of the study of metaphor compared with traditional research metaphor,however,it is still unable to understand the mechanism of the metaphor.It is clear that we can not separate metaphors from our daily life.Thus,for such an important human social phenomena,it will be particularly important to make more comprehensive,more convincing research of the metaphor.After the second half of the 20th century,the relationship between languages and conscious has been revealed into the public horizon.As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur said,"Today's various philosophical studies involve a common area of research in this field is the language." Such a turn spawned more comprehensive studies of the metaphor,such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explored the cognitive function of metaphors.And Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur criticized the traditional view of metaphor for the understanding of the issues respectively in the perspective of deconstruction and hermeneutics angles.However,today there are still many issues of the metaphor remaining to be explored.The prejudice of the metaphor has not been fully digested in philosophy.there are still blurred distinction between philosophy and literature about the metaphor.It needs more studies in-depth to analysis and discussion.This paper aims to make a comprehensive study of the philosophical dimension of the metaphor.As a special language phenomenon,the metaphor plays indelible role of the foundation of the concept,and after a concept created,the metaphor does not stop working,it will continue to have an impact on the concept,and constantly generate new creation.In this regard,the main part of the paper will analysis the philosophical issues of the metaphor from two levels.Firstly,for the systematic study of the metaphor itself.Secondly,arrange and analyze the historical researches of metaphor.And discuss the relationship between the metaphor,the language and the conscious.The first chapter is an introduction,mainly divided into three parts.The first section presents the research purpose and significance.Firstly,define the object of the study,and then argue that despite the fact that human beings had already realized metaphor as a phenomenon in early ages,it is not until the mid-twentieth century that the researches about metaphor get rid of rhetorical studies.Today,as the frontier researches in various disciplines are rapidly progressing,it is necessary that to conduct a comprehensive study.The second part is the arrangement of the research history.After making a comprehensive sort,four stages of metaphor study was divided.The third part describes the research methods and ideas,as well as the overall framework of this paper.The second chapter make a systematic study of the metaphor itself.Through the analysis of the basic type,structures,and the compare objects as well as similarity,conclude there is experience of twofoldness in the cognitive process of metaphor,which are the cognition of comparing progress and the cognition of the presentation of the metaphor.And the core of metaphor——similarity is asymmetry and different level of strengthness between the vehicle and the body.Vehicles attributes more robust,and such strong attributes will change with the changes of circumastances and always in the process of movement.The above two features bring the irreversible characteristics to the similarity.About metaphor object problem,this chapter arranges the various theories of this point of view.Generally,they can be divided into four categories:the comparison between objects;the comparison between meanings;the comparison between graphical symbols and the comparison between mental images.After analysis it can be drawn that through an appropriate amendment,the comparison of mental image is more suitable to explain the relationship between the comparison objects.The third chapter to the fifth chapter focus on philosophical features of die metaphor.The third chapter explore the metaphor in the rhetorical level.Proposed that in the earlier period,human has already attempted to explain the phenomenon of the metaphor.As early as in ancient Greece,philosophers have already recognized the phenomenon of metaphors.Aristotle did the first systematic study of metaphors.Unlike Plato,Aristotle did not focus on whether metaphors can present reality.In his work "Poetics" and"Rhetoric",Aristotle pointed out that the metaphor can promote the association,as well as form a conversational style.And after Aristotle,metaphor study has become a rhetorician issue,Cicero and Quintilian considered metaphor as a rhetorical device.By the 16-17 century,the empiricists followed Plato,they considered that metaphor is a"wrong" way of the useage the language,and said that philosophers should stay away from metaphors.While the 18th century German enlightners inherited the tradition of rationalism.And their views on metaphors began to differentiate.In the early period,they considerd metaphor as a misuse of language,or an excess of ornament;while the latter's position is gradually changed,they start to consider the metaphor as a special form of cognition.Nevertheless,in the traditional way,the metaphor was still considered to be external things in addition to the internal "content".However,during this period,still it emphasizes the metaphor provides a path from non-propositional to the propositional conversion.The traditional mainstream philosophy is standing at the rhetorical angle,make a certain level of interpretation.Chapter four discusses the meaning of metaphor.I.A.Richards and Max Blake presented the interaction theory.Since then,the researches of meaning of metaphor can be roughly divided into two directions,the semantics researches and the pragmatics research.Black considered that the tenor and the vehicle belong to different themes,depending on the social and cultural circumstance of the themes based on the speaker's and hearer's experience.While Goodman took a more powerful position of semantics,he suggested that metaphor is not the interaction between words,but the role of the body and the occurrence of mutual vehicles meaning behind the group.Eva Kitty absorbed the previous metaphor semantic researches and proposed the semantic field theory,Donald Davidson took pragmatic's position.He suggested that there is no"metaphorical meaning",the principle mechanism of metaphor is in language useage.The representative of the speech act theory Grice believes that there are two meanings:what was said and what was meant.In his view,the meaning of metaphor is obvious belongs to what was meant.Therefore,to explore the metaphor of what is said does not make sense.Metaphorical meaning is not necessarily reflected in the literal,it must be said between the lines.Grice's analysis is still under Aristotle's theory.Searle's position is between Davidson and Grice,he considered metaphor as a pragmatic issue while he can not ignore the problem of meaning.It is clear that metaphors convey meaning other than the literal sense.Nevertheless,he still think metaphor belongs to pragmatic issues.He believes that,as a requirement,an apology,and other verbal behavior itself can not determine the true and false,metaphor itself alos has no true value,but it has a richer meaning than the translation of sense,because,metaphor and literal speech speech are two different speech acts,they have different roles.Searle believes that metaphor is an indirect speech act,the speaker's intention and metaphors literal sense are two different speech acts.Semantics and Pragmatics analyzes the mechanism of metaphors respectively by the meaning and useage of language.Such analysis makes the metaphor research expand from the traditional research level——from words to statements.Chapter five discusses the relationship between the metaphor and conscious.As a language phenomenon,metaphors' scope goes beyond the statement itself,had a fundamental impact to the human conscious.In fact,back in ancient Greece,Xenophanes had already said that the myth and metaphor has a close relationship.He believes that myth narrative is full of metaphors,it is a wise man with something to explain the truth,the expression of ideas of language tools.And Cassirer had put forward that metaphorical thinking is the human being's first fundamental way of thinking.This means that all the knowledge and all human culture is fundamentally not based on logic or concept,but on top of this metaphorical conscious.That means researches on metaphors have to focus on the nature of language,and thus on the nature of human conscious.Mythology raises the question about the relationship between language and conscious.Metaphors plays an extremely important role in the formation process of conscious.And on the basis of mythology,philosophers Lakoff and Turner continued their researches from another perspective.They point out the cognitive metaphor theory suggest that metaphors plays an complex and importmant role in the formation of the conceptual structure of conscious.And Derrida suggests that the metaphor refers to a movement,which forced the generation of all the elements in philosophy,such as truth,meaning,sound,and other similarities by the way of mis-analogy.He also pointed out that metaphor is no longer a rhetorical form,it is also the content.As a way of explanation,it has its legitimacy and universality.Metaphor is a meta-code,with the universality of all mankind.The metaphor also realizes human communication through the exchanges of meanings.Finally,the metaphor has a first and second order which have two different kinds of attributes.The first-order metaphor played a decisive role in the formation of concepts,while the second order metaphor achieves the exchanges on human conscious through the exchanges of meanings with self-renewal.Metaphor is not a mystery,but the answer to the mystery.