FIVE

Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Metaphor

Paul Ricoeur’s latest book, La Métaphore vive (Éditions du Seuil, 1975; published as The Rule of Metaphor, University of Toronto Press, 1977) is without a doubt one of the most important studies on metaphor to date. It is a very thorough study, dealing both with the history of the subject and with various contemporary theories of metaphor. Accordingly, rather than summarize Ricoeur’s very detailed and masterful analyses, I propose to take a different approach by setting down a few of the questions which its reading provoked in me.

One of Ricoeur’s principal goals in this book is to justify, in opposition to positivism, the notion of metaphorical truth. What is interesting to note is that in order to do this he feels that it is necessary to rehabilitate, with regard to metaphor, the notion of reference, as formulated by the German logician Gottlob Frege, a notion which has had an enormous influence on English-language philosophy in particular. Not only do metaphors and poetic texts say something, but they say something about reality; they have not only sense but also meaning, i.e., reference. In saying this Ricoeur appears to accept at the outset as valid the Fregean—as well as positivistic—distinction betweeen sense and reference and agrees that metaphorical discourse can lay claim to truth only if there is a reality which it can be said to describe or denote. This is why he objects to what he calls the “conventionalistic nominalism” (MV, p. 294; RM, p. 233) of a writer such as Nelson Goodman (Languages of Art). Ricoeur argues that if one holds to a kind of nominalism, such as Goodman’s, for which the literal application or meaning of terms is determined solely by usage and convention and for which metaphor is but the unusual usage of terms which conflicts with their customary usage, then one cannot account for the “appropriate” character of metaphorical discourse or, for that matter, for the literal application of terms (MV, p. 301; RM, p. 239). How, Ricoeur asks, can one account in this way for the sort of “fitness” which certain linguistic innovations seem to have? Does not the “seemliness,” the “appropriate” character, of certain terms indicate that the function of language is referential, that language reveals “a way of being of things which is brought to language, thanks to semantic innovation?” (MV, p. 301; KM, p. 233). Metaphorical discourse is indeed creative and inventive, and yet, this creation is a discovery. Ricoeur seems to be saying that there are, in some sense or other, certain objective “essences” which language articulates—although it may only be able to do so in certain cases when it is used creatively, innovatively.

Having in me something of a nominalist and pragmatic strain, I must admit that I am not nearly as concerned as is Ricoeur to object to the nominalist view of meaning present in Goodman or, for that matter, to the conventionalism of the later Wittgenstein. In fact, it seems to me that conventionalism is a perfectly adequate way of describing the way in which both literal and metaphorical languages function. If one is merely describing the use of language, how language in fact functions, does one need to appeal to extralinguistic reality, to essences? I wonder if Ricoeur would not agree that, for purely descriptive purposes, such an appeal is indeed superfluous.

However, I would wish to maintain with Ricoeur that meaning cannot be reduced to mere use—as Wittgenstein tends to do. With Ricoeur I firmly believe that there is a meaning-intention which, in some sense, transcends language. But for my part I do not believe that this “intended meaning” is the extralinguistic reality to which language is said by the positivists to refer. Thus I do not know if what I have just called the “meaning-intention” is the same as what Ricoeur calls the “intended.” In fact, I am not altogether clear as to what exactly he means by this provocative term. Is the “intended” of discourse nothing more or nothing other than the extralinguistic reality to which a text is said to refer? What is the relation between Ricoeur’s “intended” and Frege’s “referent”? At one point (MV, p. 273; RM, p. 216), Ricoeur compares the intended with what Ferdinand de Saussure called the “signified.” He seems to be saying that just as the signified is the counterpart (the “correlate”) of the signifier, so the intended is the counterpart of the entire sentence. But this would make of the intended an intralinguistic thing, for Saussure’s signified is an internal element of the semiotic unit (of the linguistic sign)—in which case the intended could not correspond to Frege’s referent, i.e., it could not be the extralinguistic reality which Ricoeur says language intends or refers to. Perhaps I have failed to understand properly the meaning that Ricoeur attaches to the notion of the “intended,” but in any event I feel that this is one question which calls for further clarification.

To return to the notion of reference, I must confess that at times I feel a bit uneasy when Ricoeur, like an English philosopher, speaks of an extralinguistic reality which language refers to or denotes. Is there such a reality? Phenomenology tells us that the way the world appears to us—what the world is for us, its meaning—is in fact a function of the way in which consciousness intends it; it is what it is only as an object of and for belief. “The world,” as Husserl says, “is a meaning, an accepted sense.” Now I’m wondering if we could not extend what Husserl says about the relation between consciousness and reality (this being a relation within consciousness) to the relation between language and reality. If we could, we would then have to say something like this: The world referred to by language is what it is only because of the way it is linguistically referred to. The world, in short, is a function of language. But were we to say this, we could no longer accept the traditional, Fregean distinction between sense and reference (no more than in phenomenology we can accept the natural distinction between consciousness and reality). Strictly speaking, there would no longer be any extralinguistic reality to which language could be said to refer; reality would be constituted differently in accordance with the different ways we use to speak about it, and, in the final analysis, there would be as many “realities” as there are languages.

It will be recognized that this view pretty much coincides with the “theory of linguistic relativity” put forward by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. And this is enough, I suspect, for Ricoeur to express reservation in going along with it (in MV, p. 385, n.1; RM, p. 364, n.85, Ricoeur hints at an opposition to Whorf). He would no doubt see in it a ruinous relativism which is incompatible with the ontological pretensions of language, its built-in claim to say something meaningful and true about reality itself as it is apart from language. Now while I would agree with Ricoeur that relativism, as a philosophical position, is unacceptable, I do not think that if we reject the traditional sense-reference distinction we need fall into relativism, and I shall suggest why in a moment. What I want to point out now is the grounds I find within Ricoeur himself for revising radically the traditional sense-reference distinction (or for abandoning it altogether).

The notion of an extralinguistic “referent” makes genuine sense only if we suppose that this referent is what it is independently of language, only, that is, if we suppose that the structure of reality—and we must assume, in this case, that reality does have an objective, essential structure—is itself independent of language. But what if it were actually the case that the categorial structures reality is said to have were in the first instance engendered by language itself? Ricoeur actually seems to suggest as much when he speaks of his “most extreme hypothesis: namely that the ‘metaphorical’ which transgresses the categorial order also begets it” (MV, p. 34; RM, p. 24)

I am quite ready to entertain this hypothesis of Ricoeur’s in all seriousness. But if one does entertain it, it would seem to me that one can no longer maintain that language refers to an extralinguistic reality (in the strict sense in which Frege maintains this). From a purely descriptive point of view and with regard to literal usage, one must say with Gilbert Ryle that a metaphor is a “category mistake,” since it violates established categories. But it must be realized that this is actually an improper way of characterizing metaphor, since the established categories that a new metaphor violates are themselves products of previous metaphorical discourse. What one normally takes to be the objective referent of language is in actuality the correlate of a dead metaphor! Reality is nothing other than a metaphor which is taken literally and is believed in. As Wallace Stevens says: “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” Metaphors are not so much the means for allowing us to perceive new resemblances which previous classifications prevented us from seeing, therefore, as they are the means whereby these new resemblances are created in the first place. If, as Ricoeur remarks, everything is in a sense like everything else, then there can be no antecedent reason why in a metaphor we should compare any one particular thing with any other. And thus to be able to coin a good metaphor does not require, as Aristotle would say, that one have the eye for discerning resemblances so much as the imaginative talent for inventing them.

Thus when Ricoeur argues that “suspension of real reference is the condition of access to the virtual [poetic, literary] mode of reference” (MV, p. 288; RM, p. 229), it would seem that he is really describing the way in which, as a matter of fact, we happen to encounter and come to understand literary texts—starting as we do with the ingrained prejudice of a literal understanding of things—rather than the actual relation that holds between literal and metaphorical language. In actuality, the relation between the two would be just the opposite. Thus I wonder whether the validity of an attempt to defend the truth-value of metaphorical discourse by arguing that this mode of discourse has a higherlevel referent than has literal, scientific discourse is not limited to a treatment of metaphor from the point of view of our reaction to it rather than to what it is, so to speak, in itself. To employ a traditional distinction, does it not have to do with the ordo cognoscendi rather than the ordo essendi? This, then, is another question I would like to address to Ricoeur.

Although I am very wary when it comes to the Fregean notion of reference—since it seems to me to be basically a positivistic and rationalist notion—I am in full agreement with Ricoeur as regards the truth-value of metaphor. Metaphors, I believe, can tell us something about the really important things human beings are concerned with, “things” such as the self or the soul, human freedom, Being, God, and so on. Not only does metaphorical discourse have something to say about these “things,” it is, I further believe (though here I go beyond Ricoeur), the only means for talking about them meaningfully and truthfully and in a direct and straightforward fashion. And the reason, I think, is this: Only metaphorical discourse can say something about something without hypostatizing that about which it speaks. When, for instance, in religious discourse we call God a “father,” it is understood that he is not really a father in the usual, literal sense of the term. And yet in another sense he is. Metaphorical assertions are truthful, yet qualified assertions.

I wonder if Ricoeur would not agree with this, at least in part. For does it not correspond to that unique feature of metaphorical predication which he has himself emphasized: the fact that every metaphorical assertion is a qualified one and that the metaphorical “is” always includes an “is-not”? (see MV, pp. 11, 272, 282, 312, 321, 376, 388; and RM, pp. 6-7, 214-15, 223-34, 248, 255-56, 296-97, 306)? Metaphorical truth, as Ricoeur says, is a “tensional” truth. Shouldn’t we say, therefore, that metaphors don’t “really” mean what they say, that they are ironic and paradoxical?

But if this is the case, don’t we have to go further and say—and wouldn’t Ricoeur have to agree—that what a metaphor apparently refers to does not really exist? If, for instance, we are doing ontology and are speaking about Being, don’t we have to admit that the “referent” of our discourse doesn’t really exist, that Being both is and is not? Interestingly enough, this is exactly what Heidegger says (“Being is not”).

This leads me to two final points (which I put forward tentatively and as, so to speak, hypotheses). If the referent of a metaphor doesn’t really exist, then metaphors can’t really be said to refer to anything. They still mean something, though, and this meaning is more than the mere sense of the utterance; it is the “intended”, by which I mean our preverbal, lived experience, the experience we all have of what can only be called the basic “meaningfulness” of existence. That is, the “intended” is not the extralinguistic and extraexperiential reality to which language is so often said to refer. It lies, so to speak, on this side, the inner side of language, not on the other, the outer, side. Instead of speaking of the relation between language and an extralinguistic reality, I would prefer to speak, as Ricoeur himself does in another work, of the relation “between language and lived experience.” That is, I would indeed say, with Ricoeur, that there is an “overture of language towards the otherthan-itself,” and I would also speak of the “nonlinguistic,” but it seems to me that a distinction should be made between two kinds of “other.” There is the preverbal meaning-intention which is the source of the meaning of language, and there is the extralinguistic “referent,” but this latter is a product of language and a function of its “sense.”

Unlike language when it is viewed from a merely linguistic or semiotic viewpoint, human discourse is overdetermined; it contains, so to speak, an excess or surplus of meaning. As the literary critic George Steiner remarks: “language generates—grammar permitting, one would want to say ‘language is’—a surplus of meaning (meaning is the surplus-value of the labor performed by language).” Now my hypothesis is that it is precisely this overdetermination of living language (in a discourse or a text), this intentional excess, which is what, in philosophy, we mean by “reality.” To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, I would say that the dimension of reality that language does not so much “refer” to as express is “l’excès de ce que nous vivons sur ce qui a été déjà dit.”

This is to say that reality in the ordinary sense, the so-called extralinguistic referent of language, is thoroughly relative to language itself and is its “product,” but reality in the deepest sense (what we might call “being”) is not determinate (has no essence) and is not the product of language but is its creative source. And this source is to be located in the lived experience which all humans share in, in one form or another. It is the “intention” which motivates all discourse. It is not so much what language refers to as what it makes manifest in the very fact that it is creative and is constantly throwing off categories, essences, and “real entities.” It seems to me that this view has the merit of being able to assimilate nominalism and conventionalism while not succumbing for all that to relativism, for when ultimate reality or true being is viewed, not as the fixed referent of language, but as its creative source, it can be said to be what is analogically common to all the creative or metaphorical, i.e., “analogical,” uses of language. In this way we could arrive at a genuine analogia entis (Ricoeur discusses at length this latter notion in Study VIII).

But, I admit, and this is my final point, such a view does have as its ultimate consequence the rendering impossible of a specifically philosophical, by which I mean here metaphysical, mode of discourse over and above the poetic and mythic. Now this is a conclusion which I’m afraid Ricoeur would not wish to accept, for the entire last study of his book is a plea “for the discontinuity between speculative [philosophical] and poetic discourse” (MV, p. 324; RM, p. 258). I really don’t see, though, how it can be avoided if, with Ricoeur, we recognize that metaphorical truth is a creative, “tensional” sort of truth. Truth, it would seem, is either literal or metaphorical. If metaphorical, it is again of two kinds: mythic and poetic. What characterizes both literal, including scientific, truth and metaphorical truth in the mode of myth is that what is said and what in this saying is posited as real (as the referent of discourse) is an object of belief. As Ricoeur says: “The myth, in fact, is ‘believed poetry (poetry plus belief)—metaphor taken literally, I would put it. Now, there is something in the use of metaphor that inclines it towards abuse, and so towards myth” (MV, p. 316; RМ, p. 251). Could it not be said that literal truths are simply metaphorical truths which are taken literally, i.e., believed in? Can we not say in fact that all literal truths, including scientific truths, are myth? The peculiar feature of poetry is that here belief is suspended and the reality talked about is not actually posited as real; the poetic object is a quasi object, an irreal object, as Husserl would say. Its mode of existence is that of the as if.

Now it is hard to see where traditional, systematic metaphysics, which claims to say something definite about being—namely, what it is—fits in here, between what Ricoeur calls “poetic metaphor and transcendental equivocity” (MV, p. 324; RM, p. 258). If systematic metaphysics is something more or something other than poetry, something more than the pure imaginative use of metaphorical language, as Ricoeur wants to say, it would seem that it would have to be the abuse of metaphor, in which case it would be a form of myth, and the truths of metaphysics would be believed-in, dead metaphors. But this, too, Ricoeur refuses to accept (see Study VIII, sec. 3). Conceptual truth is not “tensional” truth, he says (MV, p. 375; RM, p. 296). I take this to mean that conceptual, speculative truths are not qualified assertions where the “is” includes an “is-not.” Conceptual vision, if it is not then a “stereoscopic,” metaphorical double vision, must be the straightforward intuition of an unequivocal essence; here one sees not “likeness” but “identity” (see MV, p. 376; RM, pp. 296-97). But this would be tantamount to saying that philosophical, speculative truths are literal (univocal) ones and that philosophical understanding is of the same sort, basically, as scientific understanding. I find this hard to accept, since it carries along with it the traditional rationalist prejudice that philosophy is or can be a science, a kind of superknowledge of the basic structure of reality.

I can see only one way out of the dilemma which, while not identifying philosophy with science, respects nonetheless the specificity of philosophical discourse vis-à-vis both literal and metaphorical (poetic) discourse. The only form of metaphysics possible would be an indirect or negative ontology which does not claim to say anything directly about reality or being but which instead points to a creative reality which is the always presupposed but never directly known or intuited source of all creative, human discourse. It seems to me that at times Ricoeur is actually tending toward such a position, as when in his previous book, Le conflit des interprétations, he says: “ontology is indeed the promised land for a philosophy that begins with language and with reflection; but, like Moses, the speaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse this land before dying.” And yet here in this book Ricoeur does not fully follow up on all the implications of such an assertion. For he says here that ontological discourse is an independent mode of discourse which has its specific, conceptual autonomy vis-à-vis poetic metaphor and, so to speak, its own specific field of application and validity. He insists that an abstract, conceptual, i.e., philosophical, meaning can be produced through the very weakening or wearing out (usure) of metaphor and that the conceptual meaning thus engendered cannot be reduced to metaphorical meaning. The semantic aims of ontology are quite different from those of poetry; there is a structure of reality which is the proper referent of ontology. Ricoeur appears to want to say that philosophical discourse would not be possible if there were not a rigorously independent essence which is its “meaning” (see MV, p. 372; and RM, p. 293). But is it really the case, I wonder, that a philosophical “concept” is something quite independent of the metaphorical, analogical process of thinking whereby it is engendered in the first place? This brings us back to Ricoeur’s own “most extreme hypothesis,” namely, that the categories of reality that metaphor violates are themselves products of metaphor. A concept expresses the essence of something, but what is it, really, to state the essence of something—what it is—if it is not to draw a creative analogy and say what it is like? What is the essence of something, if not a metaphor taken literally?

Thus it seems to me that this book concludes on what might be called a hesitant or ambiguous note and betrays something like a nostalgia for the great but bygone era of speculative, systematic metaphysics. This is not meant as a criticism, simply as a reminder—by one devoted, but incorrigibly antirationalist, admirer of Ricoeur.

Note

This text was originally composed for presentation at a symposium sponsored by the Institute of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, April 29—May 1, 1976, honoring the work of Paul Ricoeur and entitled “On the Interpretation of a Text.” It was subsequently published by Robert Lechner in Philosophy Today, supplement to vol. XXI, no. 4/4 (Winter 1977). In addition to other pieces on Ricoeur, this special supplement contains two of the responses that were made to my paper in Santa Barbara: Mary Gerhart, “The Extent and Limits of Metaphor: Reply to Gary Madison”; and David Pellauer, “A Response to Gary Madison’s ‘Reflections on Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Metaphor.’ ” The particular format of my text was dictated by the fact that the organizers of the symposium specifically requested that I write something “critical” and by the fact, as well, that Ricoeur was slated to be present for the reading of the text. A fuller development of the position underlying this critique can be found in G. B. Madison, Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), on which I was working at the time.