Aesthetics after Metaphysics by Beistegui Miguel;

Author:Beistegui, Miguel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

II Metaphorology

Recent analytical philosophy of art and literature too has seen a resurgence of interest in the question of metaphor, and has produced a series of articles and debates that have extended from language to the visual arts, and even music.36 This extension of the problematic of metaphor, from the verbal to the pictorial, is one that I find entirely justifiable, and which I will try and defend in connection with Proust and Chillida. It seems to me, however, that much of the philosophy in question continues to operate within the framework of metaphysics as I have tried to define it. In his “Metaphor and Cognition,” for example, Danto is unambiguous about the logic of identity and essence that drives the metaphorical process. Taking the example of a famous caricature by Charles Philipon of Louis Philippe as a pear, printed in his magazine, La Caricature, in 1831, Danto claims that “a metaphor involves an implicit demonstrative—a that—and a representation, so that Philipon in effect is displaying a pear and saying: Louis Philippe is that.”37 Similarly, when Romeo compares Juliet with the sun, he is not saying that Juliet and the sun are synonyms, but that, under a certain representation, Juliet and the sun are the same. Danto can thus conlude:

Metaphors are in this sense reductive of the individuals they designate: they reduce them to those features of themselves which the metaphors displayed make salient . . . In effect, the metaphor is an injunction to see the individual as consisting merely of the attributes made salient by the image, or as consisting of them essentially or fundamentally, or as being nothing but them. It confers upon the individual a limited identity . . . 38

In other words, metaphors perform something like an eidetic redution through which the essence or identity of a thing or person is brought out. This, Danto goes on to claim, is what distinguishes similes from metaphors: whereas “a simile remarks upon likenesses,” “metaphor, with its tacit demonstrative, identifies the essence of the thing.”39 The reduction in question, however, is made possible by the detour through an outside, and the representation of another thing. What Danto doesn’t seem to realise, or at least acknowledge, are the remarkable consequences of such a claim: for if the essence in question is one that can be accessed independently of the operation of metaphor, then metaphor—and, possibly, art itself—will only ever be secondary, in every sense of the word. One could imagine an access to the identity in question through cognitive means other than metaphorical. This was precisely the Aristotelian line, and the reason why, given its influence, metaphor was generally perceived as a purely aesthetic, if not merely ornamental, operation. For every metaphor, Aristotle claims, there exists an adequate paraphrase.40 But if, as Danto himself seems to suggest, the essence in question is one that is given only in and through the operation of metaphor––then we need to ask about the sense of essence that is implicit in the thing or person in question.

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