A Metaphorical Approach To The Conceptualization Of The Virtue Of Good (Shan)

Traditional rhetoric thinks that metaphor is a rhetorical phenomenon, but the modern cognitive linguists argue that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, basically, metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon. Conceptual metaphor theory was firstly put forward by Lakoff and Johnson. Conceptual metaphor theory refers to a system of mapping from a specific concept domain to an abstract concept domain. According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is pervasive in language and thought, and human conceptual systems are inevitably structured by metaphor.Since ancient Greece. Western philosophers’and ethicists’ definition of the concept Good and their thought of pursuit of Good have made a great significance for people to distinguish between Good and evil or evaluate Good and evil. In Marx’s opinion, only the behaviors that conform to the direction of development of social history, it will be conductive to social progress, and then have Good meaning or value and meaning, otherwise, they will hinder the social development. The concept of Good is one of the most basic concepts in the history of Western ethics. And in the process of the development of Chinese society, the concept of Good affects formation of people’s world outlook, the outlook on life and values. However, different people can make different meanings about Good. Therefore, this paper will make a study of Good in the light of conceptual metaphors so that people better can understand Good.This paper is divided into five parts:The first part mainly introduces the origin of Good, make people have a preliminary understanding of Good. In this part, the author also puts forward the reason why study Good and the problems. Good has a broad and profound culture in China; large numbers of scholars have made studies on Good metaphor. However, up to now, no one has systematically studied conceptual metaphors of Good, thus this paper will make a complete study of it. It includes the following questions:1.How do people know the concept of Good; 2. It whether has differences between at home and abroad for the metaphorical cognition of Good. The second part is literature review. This part describes Good in three aspects. The first part is from the perspective of ethics to describe Good. The second part is from the angle of philosophy to describe Good, finally is from the perspective of politics to describe Good.Because it is a study of conceptual metaphors about Good, in the third part is about the theoretical framework. It contains the origin of conceptual metaphor and its classification and characteristics, and then describes briefly the cognitive function of metaphor and work mechanism.The next section is the most important and the most difficult part, namely the main body part. It is divided into two parts:one is the understanding of Good of Chinese main scholars, including Laozi, Confucius, Mencius, Zhuang zi and xun zi; other part is conceptualization of Good. And the last part is summary.To sum up, Good is extremely complex, sometimes its surface meaning is straightforward, but from the perspective of metaphor, it contains a lot of thought-provoking implication. This is the purpose of this study, to find out more about Good from the perspective of cognitive metaphor.