**Metaphor** comes from the Greek _metaphorá_ — a "carrying across" — from _meta-_ ("across, beyond") and _pherein_ ("to carry, to bear"). The etymology is itself the definition: to make a metaphor is to carry a meaning from one thing and lay it on another. (In modern Greek, _metaphorá_ is still the word written on the side of removal vans.) At its plainest, a metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is described as if it were another — "the mind is a garden," "a flood of memories." It differs from [[Simile]], which keeps the words _like_ or _as_ and so admits that a comparison is being made. Metaphor asserts identity rather than likeness; it collapses the gap a simile holds open. That collapse is why metaphor does more cognitive work — and runs more risk. But the more interesting story is how Western thought slowly stopped treating metaphor as a thing words do and started treating it as the thing thought is made of. --- ### The classical view — metaphor as ornament For [[Aristotle]] (_Poetics_, _Rhetoric_), metaphor is the transference of a name that properly belongs to one thing onto another. He prized it: "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor … a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars." Yet he also framed it as a _deviation_ from proper, literal speech — a special effect belonging to poets and orators. This became the long-running default: literal language is the norm, metaphor the embellishment laid over it. ### The interaction turn — metaphor as thought In the twentieth century the embellishment view broke down. I. A. Richards (_The Philosophy of Rhetoric_, 1936) argued metaphor is "a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts," and gave us the still-useful pair **tenor** (the underlying subject) and **vehicle** (the image carrying it). Max Black (_Models and Metaphors_, 1962) sharpened this into the **interaction view**: a metaphor does not merely register a similarity that was already there — it _creates_ one, the vehicle acting as a filter that reorganises how we see the tenor. Metaphor had become epistemic, a way of knowing, not a cosmetic. ### The cognitive turn — the metaphors we live by The decisive move came from [[George Lakoff]] and [[Mark Johnson]] in _Metaphors We Live By_ (1980): metaphor is not primarily linguistic at all — it is **conceptual**. We do not merely speak in metaphors, we think in them. ARGUMENT IS WAR, TIME IS MONEY, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, IDEAS ARE FOOD: each is a systematic mapping that lets an abstract domain be reasoned about in the terms of a concrete one. The hundreds of everyday expressions ("defend a claim," "your position is indefensible," "shoot down an argument") are surface traces of a single underlying mapping. ### The embodied ground [[Mark Johnson]] then asked what the concrete domains themselves rest on, and answered: the body. Conceptual metaphors bottom out in **image schemas** — CONTAINER, PATH, BALANCE, FORCE — pre-conceptual structures laid down by infant bodily experience, and in **primary metaphors** (Affection is Warmth, More is Up, Important is Big) wired in by the recurring correlation of sensation and feeling. On this account, set out fully in _[[Philosophy in the Flesh]]_, metaphor is the hinge between the sensorimotor body and abstract reason. It is the mechanism of the [[Embodiment|embodied mind]]. ### Living metaphor — metaphor as redescription Paul Ricoeur (_The Rule of Metaphor_, 1975) located metaphor's real work not in the word but in the sentence. A _live_ metaphor stages a momentary clash of meanings — a small category mistake — that forces a new "seeing-as." "The metaphorical statement," he wrote, "is not reducible to a mere substitution of terms; it is a redescription of reality." Metaphor does not decorate the world; it discloses possibilities in it, producing what Ricoeur called a **surplus of meaning** — saying what literal speech cannot reach. ### Conceptual blending — beyond the one-way map Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (_The Way We Think_, 2002) pushed the cognitive theory further. Where conceptual metaphor describes a one-way mapping from source to target, **conceptual blending** posits several "mental spaces" projected together into a new _blended_ space that has **emergent structure** belonging to none of the inputs. "This surgeon is a butcher" is not just surgeon-understood-as-butcher; the blend generates a new meaning — incompetence — that exists in neither input alone. Blending reaches the parts of imagination, counterfactual reasoning and humour that a simple mapping cannot. --- ### Metaphor all the way down Push the idea to its limit and metaphor stops being a feature of language and becomes its foundation — and the foundation of thought, and possibly of "truth" itself. [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], in "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873), gave the most famous version: "What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms … truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions; metaphors that are worn out and drained of sensuous force; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal." Our literal concepts are simply **dead metaphors** — once-vivid transferences whose origin we have stopped noticing. [[Jacques Derrida]], in "White Mythology" (1971), turned this on philosophy itself: philosophy's claim to speak plainly and properly rests on a forgotten substrate of metaphor (the worn coin again). Even the opposition _literal / metaphorical_ is itself a metaphorically structured distinction. Centuries earlier, Giambattista Vico (_The New Science_, 1725) had argued that the earliest human thought was **poetic wisdom** — the first peoples thought in "imaginative universals," metaphors that _generated_ their world rather than reflected it. Civilisation, for Vico, is born metaphorical and only later forgets it. The sharpest counter-current is [[Arthur Owen Barfield|Owen Barfield]] (_Poetic Diction_, 1928). Barfield denies that language began literal and became metaphorical. He argues for an **ancient semantic unity**: a single early word named a physical _and_ a spiritual reality at once, with no felt gap between them — the Latin _spiritus_ meaning breath, wind and spirit together, not as a pun but as one undivided meaning. What we now call metaphor is, on this view, not a leap across a gap but the **memory of a lost unity**. This is a genuine challenge to Lakoff: where Lakoff builds the abstract _up_ out of the body, Barfield says the material and the immaterial were never separate to begin with, and metaphor is the trace of their original wholeness. Both are worth holding at once. ### Metaphor and consciousness [[Julian Jaynes]] argued that consciousness itself is metaphor-made: we introspect by building a "mind-space" on the model of physical space, and the "I" that "looks within" and "weighs" options is a metaphor we mistake for an organ. [[Iain McGilchrist]] makes metaphor the crux of his hemisphere account — it is the means by which the abstracted, re-presented world of the left hemisphere is carried back to the living, embodied world of the right. Far from a peripheral trick, metaphor is, for him, how language stays attached to reality at all. ### Metaphor in science Metaphor is not the enemy of literal knowledge but one of its chief instruments. The atom as a solar system, the brain as a computer, the gene as "selfish," the immune system's "defences," the genetic "code," natural "selection" — scientific models are systematic metaphors (Mary Hesse). They are productive precisely because they import inferential structure: assume X behaves like Y, and predictions follow. They also constrain, because every metaphor shows and hides at the same time. ### What metaphor hides That double action is the standing caution. Every mapping highlights some aspects of its target and suppresses others: ARGUMENT IS WAR makes the adversarial visible and the cooperative invisible. A metaphor is never neutral; it smuggles a stance. The contemplative traditions name the danger directly — the Zen image of the finger pointing at the moon, where mistaking the finger for the moon is the whole error — and writers like [[Rumi]] use metaphor deliberately to point _past_ metaphor toward what it cannot hold. --- ### In summary Metaphor is not a way of decorating thought. On the strongest reading of the last century's work, it is the way thought is built — the carrying-across by which a body comes to reason about justice, time and mind — and also the way thought forgets it was built, as live metaphors harden into the dead coinage we call the literal. To study a culture's metaphors is to study what it can think, and what it can no longer notice itself thinking. See also [[Simile]] · [[Language]] · [[Meaning]] · [[Perception]]. `Concepts:` [[Simile]] · [[Language]] · [[Meaning]] · [[Embodiment]] · [[Imagination]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Philosophy in the Flesh]] · [[George Lakoff]] · [[Mark Johnson]]