Philosophy for Passengers by Michael Marder

Author:Michael Marder [Marder, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

Stop no. 6: Metaphor

Metaphor is a unique means of transport. As a matter of fact, the word metaphor says, precisely, transport—only in Greek, instead of Latin. Metaphors are the vessels of meaning that let it swiftly glide on the waters of sense. More often than not, they stand in sharp contrast to literalness, which allegedly denotes the fixity of meaning, its inability to travel anywhere beyond the site of its enunciation or inscription. The literal sticks to the bareness of what is expressed, to the self-proclaimed basic and original truth of expression; the metaphoric passes from a certain kind of object or idea to ideas and objects of a different kind, from one order of meaning to another.

I’ve always had strong doubts about the wisdom and the plausibility of hard and fast distinctions between literalness and metaphoricity. Would these distinctions themselves be literal or metaphoric? Further, to arrest meaning in its literal straitjacket is to interfere with its vital operations that depend on its instability and motility. Meaning-making only works if, addressed to others, the message travels, changing hands, mutating, inviting fresh interpretations and modes of reception at each stop along its itinerary. Metaphoric drift may be inseparable from this dynamism, which I earlier called “our sense of sense, the paradigm of meaning in perpetual motion.” For its part, a strict opposition between the literal and the metaphoric rehashes the philosophical mind/body split, with the proviso that, in this instance, one’s preference goes to the embodied and the concrete at the expense of metaphor taken as mere whim, a caprice of the imagination.

Are the passengers we have been musing about metaphorical? Yes and no. The figure of the passenger includes you and me in our daily routines of moving about and relating to the world. But, in so doing, this figure reaches beyond the actual instances of train rides or commercial flights to an existential predicament, in which we are accustomed to perceive reality, to experience time, places, and ourselves as though we have never gotten off the train nor deplaned. The transfer of a passenger mindset to other situations in life that, on the face of things, have nothing in common with means of transport slots it between literal and metaphoric significations. If, from time to time, we are all passengers, and if we unconsciously play the role of passengers both before and after we get on or off the proverbial bus, then the register of such thinking is mixed: literal-metaphorical or metaphorico-literal.

Much of my work has occupied the gray (what a misnomer! anything but gray, it is vibrant and multicolored) area between literalness and metaphoricity. From dust to fire, from plants to the dump, I have sought figures of thought and existence, through which the categories of the old metaphysical philosophy could be sifted and transformed beyond recognition. Figuration is what abstract modes of cogitation are allergic to; the thrust of abstraction may be defined as that of a generalized un- or disfiguration. As far as the philosophy

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