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2. Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmatics of Knowledge
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II Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmatics of Knowledge In the treatise on Alexander Pope he wrote in collaboration with Mendelssohn, Lessing speaks of the philosophical use of what in rhetoric are called ‘figures’, a category that includes metaphor: “And wherein consists the essence of the same?—In their never sticking strictly to the truth; they say now too much, now too little— only a metaphysician of Böhme’s ilk can be forgiven them.”1 What Lessing raises here is the question of the truth of metaphor itself. It is self-evident that metaphors like that of the power or impotence of truth do not admit of verification, and that the alternative already decided in them one way or the other is theoretically undecidable. Metaphors are unable to satisfy the requirement that truth, by definition, be the result of a methodologically secure procedure 1. Und worin bestehet das Wesen derselben?—Darin, daß sie nie bei der strengen Wahrheit blieben; daß sie bald zu viel, und bald zu wenig sagen— —Nur einem Metaphysiker, von der Gattung eines Böhmens, kann man sie verzeihen. Pope ein Metaphysiker!—Werke, ed. P. Rilla, VII, 233. The paragraph I have just cited was undoubtedly written by Lessing. Compare this statement, published in 1755, with what Bouhours had already written about metaphors in his 1687 text “La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit”: Le figure n’est pas faux et la métaphore a sa vérité aussi bien que la fiction [Figurative language is not false, and metaphor has its truth just as much as fiction]. On Bouhours’s aesthetics, see E. Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen, 1932), 400 ff. 14 Paradigms for a Metaphorology of verification. They therefore not only fail to say ‘nothing but the truth’, they do not say anything truthful at all. Absolute metaphors ‘answer’ the supposedly naïve, in principle unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence. We must bear in mind here that a metaphorology cannot result in any method for using metaphors, or for addressing the questions that announce themselves in them. On the contrary: as students of metaphorology, we have already deprived ourselves of the possibility of finding ‘answers’ in metaphors to those unanswerable questions. Metaphor, as the theme of a metaphorology in the sense that will concern us here, is an essentially historical object whose testimonial value presupposes that the witnesses did not possess, and could not have possessed, a metaphorology of their own. Our situation is therefore characterized by the positivistic program of a resolute critique of language in its ‘guiding function’ for our thinking, whereby an expression like ‘true’ becomes immediately superfluous (Ayer), or (or rather and) our situation is characterized by the ‘transference’ of the operation formerly deposited in metaphors to art2 —the latter taken to persist in unhistorical and unmediated productivity—whereby the urgency of those questions proves to be ungainsayable. The task and method of metaphorology may therefore take us beyond the historical sphere of objects to a selective interpretation of expressive elements in art. Having voiced these reservations, we ask once again about the relevance of absolute metaphors, their historical truth. This truth is pragmatic in a very broad sense. By providing a point of orientation, the content of absolute metaphors determines a particular attitude or conduct [Verhalten]; they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. To the historically trained eye, they therefore indicate the fundamental certainties, conjectures, and judgments in relation to which the attitudes and expectations, actions and inactions, longings and disappointments, interests and indifferences, of an epoch are regulated . “What genuine guidance does it give?”3 This form of the “truth question,” formulated by pragmatism, is pertinent here in a sense that has nothing to do with biology. A question like “What is the world?”, with its demand as imprecise as it is hypertrophic, cannot serve as a point of departure for theoretical discourse; but it 2. Incidentally—but not irrelevantly—these considerations shed light on the contemporary importance of art as the real metaphysical activity of this life (Nietzsche), pertaining to an age that, in its omnivorous will to historical understanding and self-understanding, has almost everywhere destroyed its freedom of genuine expression, and that has created in its art something like a sanctuary, maintained...