Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics and the Discourse of Mark 13 by de Vries Peter C.;

Author:de Vries, Peter C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 5

Ricoeur’s Description of Metaphor

The previous chapter demonstrates that the meaning of a text can be something other than or different from the author’s intention. Therefore, while the first section of Chapter 3 concludes that the author of Mark 13 intended for the discourse to be a prediction of literal historical events, this is not the only meaning available for today’s reader. In addition to the literal meaning intended by the author, today’s reader is also able to appropriate Mark 13 metaphorically. To do so, I provide a Ricoeurian description of metaphor and discuss how metaphor expresses truth. The following chapter explains how Mark 13 functions as this sort of metaphor.

As Ricoeur describes it, metaphor is a non-conventional discursive act that makes creativity possible in language. It offers multiplicity of meaning through the violation of pre-existing conceptualizations and categories of language and world. It does so by equating concepts that are not normally associated with each other, and in the process it creates an evocative dialectic tension, either by applying a literally false predicate to a subject or by giving the same name to two or more different things. When metaphor forms this relationship between two ideas or subjects, it has the capacity to manifest new truth. It does so through the use of conventional or literal reference and of extended or innovative orders of reference. Ricoeur’s description of metaphor depends upon an explanation that multiple but not infinite possibilities for meaning do not necessarily create ambiguity. He also claims that metaphor creates new truth which had previously been unrecognizable or non-existent. This chapter elaborates upon and supports this description of metaphor by drawing upon Ricoeur’s work.

Rejection of Metaphor as a Rhetorical Ornament

Ricoeur quotes Aristotle’s definition of a metaphor thus: “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.”1 However, Ricoeur points out that Aristotle considers metaphor to be the borrowing of a term to fill a semantic void by removing the term from its original meaning in order for it to substitute for the missing word.2 Ricoeur rejects the classical rhetorical understanding of metaphor as a figure which can be reduced to its original terms. Instead, metaphor on the sentence level presents through predication a kinship of concepts which normally are not brought together, and which may in fact be considered to be absurd. In so doing, metaphor creates new truth: “A metaphor, in short, tells us something new about reality.”3

Ricoeur rejects substitutionary descriptions of metaphor. Such descriptions consider metaphor as the presentation of “one idea under the sign of another,” or as a “borrowed idea” to express an “original idea” and “the borrowed idea.” Ricoeur explains that each of these descriptions depends upon the notion of an appropriate, correct, or “literal” meaning for a word, from which the metaphor borrows to form a different meaning. Such descriptions are a “return to

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