Absolute metaphor
The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg coined the term absolute metaphor as part of his collaboration on Joachim Ritter's project on a conceptual history . He uses it to describe the special case of a metaphor that has become independent from the facts it illustrates.
meaning
In the context of the rhetorical tropics , an absolute metaphor is, strictly speaking, a contradictio in adiecto - a contradiction in terms . For Blumenberg metaphors are “absolute” if they prove to be resistant to the terminological claim, cannot be resolved in terms of the terminology. ”According to traditional understanding, however, this (re) translation is in principle possible, as the metaphors are used here only the decoration of a speech; That means, especially as far as scientific facts are concerned: the explanatory clarification and the illustration. They are thus related figures of a representation.
Sometimes it happens, however, that such a metaphor, beyond the immediate point of comparison for which it was used, influences , if not dominates , the entire theorization of the subject matter it illustrates . If such a failure to the seductive suggestive power of the linguistic image could still be explained psychologically in the case of minor authors, a general element asserts itself in it at the same time. Blumenberg seeks to prove that the metaphor of "light" has been of paradigmatic significance for theories of truth since antiquity: both in the form of the "naive", metaphysical contrast between being (light) and non-being (darkness), as (since Augustine ) In the form of a self-confident, methodically reflected (and thus recognized as a metaphor ) illustration of the question of the conditions and possibilities of subjective truth ( lumen naturale ), the occidental light metaphor has a dualistic, essentially “ logical ” and “technical” relationship shaped to the immediately existing nature.
As the example shows, absolute metaphors nestle primarily in the semantic environment of terms that do not correspond to any direct, sensual perception - such as "truth", "freedom", "state" or "history". Following Kant , Blumenberg calls such terms ideas . The actually exemplary case of an absolute metaphor would therefore be a vivid picture for an object that is fundamentally beyond any visualization.
Metaphor and concept
Absolute metaphors are therefore (makeshift) views for (principally non-illustrative) ideas . As such, they are subject to rational criticism in individual cases. At the same time, however, Blumenberg emphasizes - and this is the real punch line - that any speech about such ideas includes the possibility and the (at least anthropological) necessity of a "metaphorical external determination ": the metaphor functions as the objective placeholder for the idea which is in Kantian Understanding, to the "totality of possible experience", but no longer relates to any particular "object of experience". In this function, it can therefore no longer be caught up discursively, i.e. it can never be completely “brought up to the concept”. According to Blumenberg, such attempts at metaphorical illustration within the framework of human world orientation are as indispensable as they are precarious. On the one hand, there is a “vacancy of the term that can only be fulfilled by the imagination”. These primordial images, which are sometimes in the relationship of a “superficial incompatibility” to one another, in the original sense only reveal the actual power of thought, the source of which Blumenberg (with Hegel, Freud and Heidegger) sees in the negation : “It is the palpation of the Possibilities that drive the generation of negation. ”But while the abstraction of this cognitive (a) leading function of perception leads to a mystification of the concept, indulging in the associative flood of images of metaphors leads to a naive and uncritical indulgence pre-rational mindset. Blumenberg sees the danger of a double hyperbolic here: “The term ends in mysticism, the metaphor in myth”.
literature
- Hans Blumenberg : Paradigms for a Metaphorology , Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 1997, ISBN 3-518-28901-2 .
- - Theory of Non-Conceptuality , ed. Anselm Haverkamp , Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-58480-4
- Karlfried founder , Joachim Ritter (Ed.), Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Basel 1971–2007, Vol. 5, Col. 1179 ff., Keyword metaphor .
- Anselm Haverkamp , Dirk Mende (Eds.), Metaphorology. On the practice of theory , Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-29528-1
- Harun Maye : Metaphorology, in: Harun Maye, Leander Scholz (Ed.), Introduction to Cultural Studies , Munich: UTB 2011, pp. 119–144, ISBN 978-3-825-23176-7
- Bernhard HF Taureck : Metaphors and parables in philosophy. Attempt at a critical iconology of philosophy , Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 2004, ISBN 3-518-29266-8 .