Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor

382 Pages·2015·2.13 MB·English

Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor

Matthew Stephen Wood

Thesis submitted to the
Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Doctorate in Philosophy in Philosophy

Department of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts
University of Ottawa

© Matthew Stephen Wood, Ottawa, Canada, 2015
Abstract

This doctoral dissertation aims to give a comprehensive and contextual account of
Aristotle’s theory of metaphor. The dissertation is organized around the central claim that
Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in Chapter 22 of the Poetics, as well as his discussion
of it in Book III of the Rhetoric, commit him to what I call a vertical theory of metaphor,
rather than to a horizontal one. Horizontal theories of metaphor assert that ‘metaphor’ is
a word that has been transferred from a literal to a figurative sense; vertical theories of
metaphor, on the other hand, assert that ‘metaphor’ is the transference of a word from
one thing to another thing.
In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the dissertation itself has five
chapters. The first chapter sketches out the historical context within which the vertical
character of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor becomes meaningful, both by (a) giving a
rough outline of Plato’s critical appraisal of rhetoric and poetry in the Gorgias,
Phaedrus, Ion, and Republic, and then (b) showing how Aristotle’s own Rhetoric and
Poetics should be read as a faithful attempt to reform both activities in accordance with
the criteria laid down by Plato in these dialogues. The second and third chapters
elaborate the main thesis and show how Aristotle’s texts support it, by painstakingly
reconstructing the relevant passages of the Poetics, Rhetoric, On Interpretation,
Categories and On Sophistical Refutations, and resolving a number of interpretive
disputes that these passages raise in the secondary literature. Finally, the fourth and fifth
chapters together pursue the philosophical implications of the thesis that I elaborate in
the first three, and resolve some perceived contradictions between Aristotle’s theory of
metaphor in the Poetics and Rhetoric, his prohibition against the use of metaphors in the
Posterior Analytics, and his own use of similes and analogical comparisons in the
dialectical discussions found in the former text, the De Anima and the later stages of his
argument in the Metaphysics.
In many ways, the most philosophically noteworthy insight uncovered by my
dissertation is the basic consideration that, for Aristotle, all metaphors involve a
statement of similarity between two or more things – specifically, they involve a
statement of what I call secondary resemblance, which inheres to different degrees of
imperfection among things that are presumed to be substantially different, as opposed to
the primary and perfect similarities that inhere among things of the same kind. The
major, hitherto unnoticed consequence I draw from this insight is that it is ultimately the
philosopher, as the one who best knows these secondary similarities, who is implicitly
singled out in Aristotle’s treatises on rhetoric and poetry as being both the ideal poet and
the ideal orator, at least to the extent that Aristotle holds the use of metaphor to be a
necessary condition for the mastery of both pursuits. This further underscores what I
argue in the first chapter is the inherently philosophical character of the Poetics and the
Rhetoric, and shows the extent to which they demand to be read in connection with,
rather than in isolation from, the more ‘central’ themes of Aristotle’s philosophical
system.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ii
Acknowledgements v

1. Introduction: Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor
1.1 General Introduction 1
1.2 Metaphor as a Contemporary Philosophical Question: Interaction or Similarity? 4
1.3 Metaphor as an Aristotelian Question: The Status of Rhetoric and Poetry 19

2. Chapter 1: Aristotle’s Theories of Rhetoric and Poetry as Responses to Plato
2.1 Introduction 36
2.2 Plato’s Criticism of Rhetoric as an Art: Gorgias and Phaedrus 40
2.3 Plato’s Criticism of Poetry as an Art: Ion and Republic 51
2.4 Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a Response to Plato 63
2.5 Aristotle’s Poetics as a Response to Plato 77
2.6 Conclusion 100

3. Chapter 2: Aristotle’s Definition of Metaphor and its Philosophical Implications
3.1 Introduction 104
3.2 Aristotle’s Definition of Metaphor, and his Theories of Signification and Style 107
3.3 Metaphor as the Most Important Element of Poetic and Rhetorical Style 120
3.4 Metaphor, Simile, and the Perception of Similarities 141
3.5 Review of Some Recent Literature: Aristotle and the Cognitive View 158
3.6 Conclusion 176

4. Chapter 3: Metaphor, pro_ o)mma/twn and e0ne/rgeia
4.1 Introduction 178
4.2 Textual Issues: ki/nhsij or mi/mhsij? 183
4.3 ki/nhsij, e0ne/rgeia, and the Difference Between Them 185
4.4 Animating Representation, prosopopoii5a, and Personification 199
4.5 Aristotle’s Examples of pro\ o0mma/twn and e0ne/rgeia in Rhetoric III.10-11 211
4.6 Conclusion 234

5. Chapter 4: Metaphor and Science
5.1 Introduction 237
5.2 Definition, Metaphor and Homonymy 240
5.3 Demonstration and the Syllogism 259
5.4 Induction and Intuition 269
5.5 Conclusion 286

6. Chapter 5: Metaphor and Metaphysics
6.1 Introduction 296
6.2 First Philosophy as the Most Accurate Domain of Knowledge 300
6.3 Aristotle’s Dialectical Examination of Presocratic Theories in Metaphysics I 305
6.4 Aristotle’s Criticism of Platonic Participation in Metaphysics I.6-9 318
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6.5 Metaphor in the Text of Metaphysics VII-XII 333
6.6 Conclusion 347

7. Closing Remarks 354

8. Bibliography
8.1 Primary Sources: Ancient Texts, Translations, and Commentaries 367
8.2 Secondary Sources 371

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Acknowledgements

It is not possible to list all the people who have contributed in a substantial way to the
completion of this thesis. Yet I would like to express my gratitude to some of the
institutions and individuals, without whose generous help it would neither have been
conceived nor written. Firstly, the financial assistance provided by both the Ontario
Graduate Scholarship, and the University of Ottawa, was indispensable. In addition to
this, the thesis was facilitated immeasurably by Professor Gonzalez’s criticisms and
encouragement, and by his unflagging sense of when to employ one instead of the other.
I also was inspired and instructed in equal measure by the seminars on ancient
philosophy offered at the University of Ottawa by both Professor Gonzalez and Professor
Collobert over the last four and a half years. The thoughtful comments and objections
that I received from Professors Collobert, Thomas-Fogiel and Côté, at the defense of my
thesis proposal in February 2013, were also extremely helpful, and contributed in no
small part to the form of the thesis as it now stands. Moreover, apart from the feedback I
received at the proposal defense, Professor Collobert in particular offered generous
support throughout the entire writing period. Outside the University of Ottawa’s
philosophy department, I would furthermore like to thank two other teachers: Professors
Eli Diamond and Wayne Hankey, both from the Classics Department at Dalhousie
University. In many ways, the thesis as a whole would not have been possible without
Professor Diamond, as it was thanks (among many other things) to an off-handed
comment of his, in a seminar on Aristotle’s De Anima in 2008, that I initially became
interested in Aristotle’s theory of metaphor in the first place. I am thankful to Professor
Hankey as well for inspiring me with the desire and the confidence to pursue doctoral
studies in philosophy, after completing an MA in classics in 2005. Last, but most
certainly not least, I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends and family for their support
and companionship. My mother, father, brother and sister all offered crucial emotional
support, as did my close friends, Drew Desai and Matthew Furlong, who were invaluable
interlocutors in the informal discussions, sometimes by long-distance phone call, out of
which this thesis grew. Most importantly, I would like sincerely to thank my wife, Yuna,
for making this dissertation possible in more ways than I can say in the space allotted
here.

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Introduction: Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor
1.1 General Introduction
This doctoral thesis argues that Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in Poetics 22 commits
him to a vertical theory of metaphor, which concerns the relationship between words and
things, rather than to a horizontal theory, which concerns the literal and figurative senses
of individual words.
In arguing that Aristotle’s theory of metaphor is a vertical rather than a horizontal
one, this thesis aims to fulfill three primary objectives.
(1) The first objective is to highlight the continuity of presuppositions underlying
Aristotle’s views regarding poetry and rhetoric, on the one hand, and those that underlie
his teacher Plato’s on the other. As we shall see, Aristotle’s discussions of metaphor are
mostly concentrated in the Poetics and the Rhetoric, and they offer a unique perspective
from which to consider the Platonic heritage of his teachings about what each pursuit is
in general, what its essential function is, and what kind of knowledge is requisite to its
mastery. If, as I argue, Aristotle’s general treatment of rhetoric and poetry must be seen
as a faithful response to the views expressed in a number of Platonic dialogues (Ion,
Republic, Gorgias, and Phaedrus), then the vertical character of his theory of metaphor
in particular must also be placed in the context of this response in order to become fully
intelligible. This is because, on my account, the vertical character of Aristotle’s theory of
metaphor is inherently connected to his effort to Platonize the fields of rhetoric and
poetry by yoking them to the philosophical pursuit of goodness and truth, in accordance
with the guidelines laid down by Plato in the aforementioned dialogues.
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(2) The second objective is to resolve the apparent contradictions that exist
between (a) Aristotle’s rhetorical and poetic theories, (b) his philosophy of science, and
(c) his own discursive practice vis-à-vis the use of metaphors. To be precise, one of these
apparent contradictions is propositional in character, while the other is performative. In
the former case, there seems to be a lack of consistency between the different statements
Aristotle makes in different texts about the theoretical value of metaphorical expressions:
on the one hand he extolls their use in the Poetics and the Rhetoric, yet on the other he
prohibits it in the Topics and Posterior Analytics. In the latter case, too, there is evidently
a discrepancy between the aforementioned prohibition against the use of metaphors in
scientific argumentation, and the liberal use Aristotle himself makes of similes and
comparisons, which according to his definition in Poetics 22 are in fact metaphors.
Ultimately, I argue that Aristotle’s theory of metaphor is consistent, and that both of
these contradictions are therefore only apparent ones, even if they do underscore a
genuine complexity in his overall position regarding metaphors and their place in various
kinds of theoretical discussion. For reasons that will only become apparent in what
follows, the distinction between vertical and horizontal theories of metaphor is crucial to
the resolution of this dilemma.
(3) The third and final objective is to determine what place, if any, Aristotle’s
theory of metaphor has in the contemporary philosophical debate concerning metaphors
and their importance to human knowledge and its genesis. The first thing to be noted
here is that the long history of this debate properly begins with Aristotle, who is the first
thinker in the western tradition to advance an explicit account of what a metaphor is and
how it functions. As will be shown, some recent commentators have mischaracterized
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this account as being identical to those subsequently elaborated by classical rhetorical
theorists such as Cicero and Quintilian, and partly on the basis of this premise have
concluded that Aristotle’s theory of metaphor is incompatible with most modern theories
of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet as I will show, the theories of Cicero, Quintilian and
other classical rhetorical theorists are horizontal theories à la lettre, in that they consider
metaphor to be a word that has been transferred from a literal to a figurative meaning.
Based on the subtle but crucial distinction between horizontal and vertical theories of
metaphor, I thus differentiate these classical positions from that of Aristotle, and thereby
show that the aforementioned conclusion, according to which Aristotle’s theory of
metaphor is incompatible with contemporary theories, is based on at least one inaccurate
premise.
Of the three aforementioned goals, the first two are short-term ones that will be
fulfilled in the course of what follows. The third, however, is a more long-term goal for
which this dissertation as a whole is a preparatory step. As will soon become apparent,
simply arriving at a clear understanding of Aristotle’s own theory of metaphor, its
historical context, and its philosophical implications is no mean task; attempting in
addition to this to compare it to its modern counterparts would be a massive undertaking,
too large for a single dissertation. To the extent that a meaningful comparison of
contemporary theories and that of the Stagirite is not a feasible goal for this dissertation,
I will permit myself in what follows merely to outline the contours of the modern
philosophical debate concerning metaphor, and then return to this general outline in the
conclusion, once I have placed Aristotle’s views in context and pursued their
implications in detail. In so doing, I will offer some preliminary indications of what is at
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stake in determining whether and to what extent Aristotle’s theory has any insight to
contribute to current philosophical discussions on the topic, but the work of verifying
these preliminary indications will have to be deferred for future research.
1.2 Metaphor as a Contemporary Philosophical Question: Interaction or
Similarity?
Perhaps the most direct way of showing what is at stake in determining Aristotle’s place
in contemporary debates about metaphor is to begin by outlining the presuppositions of
those who claim, either explicitly or implicitly, that Aristotle’s theory has no place in this
debate. Doing so requires an account of what since the 1960’s has been called the
interaction theory of metaphor, for it is subsequent to the development of this theory that
some commentators and theorists have deemed Aristotle’s original views to be outdated.
The notion of the interaction metaphor was first suggested indirectly by I.A.
Richards in 1936, then taken up and developed in an explicit theory by Max Black in the
1960’s, after which time research in what is now called metaphor studies began growing
precipitously to its present state.1 Most generally, as we shall see, proponents of the
interaction theory of metaphor hold that it is the only kind of metaphor that can be of any
interest to philosophical discussions, because it is impossible to translate by means of
literal paraphrase. In order to explain the significance of this position and its context, it

1 Currently, metaphor is a widely debated topic in many fields of contemporary philosophy, and is
therefore considered to be quite fashionable. Yet, as noted by literary critic Wayne Booth, there was hardly
any mention of it in mainstream philosophical debate before the latter half of the 20th century. According
to Booth, although ‘[t]here were no conferences on metaphor, ever, in any culture, until [i.e., the 20th
century] was already middle-aged’, ‘[e]xplicit discussions of something called metaphor have multiplied
astronomically in the past fifty years [...].’ "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation", Critical
Inquiry 5 (1978), p. 49. In what follows, all references will appear in footnotes with a complete
bibliographical entry on the first citation, and subsequently will be given by means of the author’s last
name, the title (in some cases, a shortened title) and page number only. The works of Aristotle in particular
will be referred to throughout according to the traditional Bekker pagination; in the case of the Rhetoric in
particular, the Bekker pagination is divided into numbered sections rather than numbered lines, as in most
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will be helpful to dig a little deeper into the history of ideas before looking at the views
of Richards and Black in detail.
Writing in 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche affirms that ‘when we talk about trees, colors,
snow, and flowers, we believe we know something about the things themselves, and yet
we only possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors do not in the least
correspond to the original essentials.’2 Speculation on the essential natures of things, in
other words, seems for Nietzsche to be a matter of mere metaphors, which suggests the
possibility that the philosophical search for the ultimate, underlying principles of things
is driven primarily by linguistic confusion arising from the improper use of words. In the
continental philosophical tradition, a similar suggestion emerges more recently in the
thought of of Jacques Derrida (1971), who likewise contends that metaphysical thinking
is dominated a tergo by metaphorical language, and in particular by a special kind of
metaphor called the catechresis.3 Derrida’s thesis, elaborated with respect to the
philosophical theorization of metaphor in “White Mythology,” points to the inherently
circular character of the concept of metaphor in particular, insofar as this concept itself is
the product of metaphysical assumptions about language and its relation to the world.
This latter point is also made more cryptically by Martin Heidegger (1957), who asserts
that ‘[t]he metaphorical exists only within metaphysics.’4 Thus if the distinction between

2
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in Their Extramoral Sense (1873)”, trans. Maximillian A.
Mügge, in eds. R. Grimm & C. Molina y Vedia, Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosophical Writings (New York:
Continuum, 1995), p. 91.
3 Derrida develops this theme in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” arguing that
traditional philosophical concepts may be properly characterized as what 19th century rhetorical theorist
Pierre Fontannier calls catechreses: that is, metaphors whose status as metaphors has been effaced or
forgotten in time. See J. Derrida, “White Mythology”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 250-55. Cf. P. Fontannier, Les Figures du Discourse
(Paris: Flammarion, 1977) p 213.
4 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. R. Lilly (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991),
“Lecture Six”, p. 48. Silvana Borutti enlarges on Heidegger’s remark by noting that ‘la métaphore est une
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