Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Chapter 1: The Place of Metaphor

21 The Place of Metaphor 1 Then what are images? What has been, what can be perceived again and again, and only here, only now. Hence the poem is the place where all tropes and images want to be led. Paul Celan 1. Old Wine in New Bottles Metaphor, that old, anarchical alchemist, transmutes belief into truth, illusion into reality, ignorance into knowledge—only then to turn around and do the opposite. How? She lets unsociable differences cross over to dwell with and interpret one another in order to reveal unsuspected identities—fictional, real, and virtual.1 Water is one thing, electricity is another; but when Faraday crossed them and saw electricity through hydraulics, a new science was born. Electricity isn’t a fluid and does not flow, yet its dynamics are formally the same as those of water. Sometimes what is seen is an artifact of the metaphor. Waves require a medium. Therefore waves of light require the luminiferous ether—that is, until Morley and Michelson put it to the test. Metaphor can make known what is otherwise unknown or sedimented in custom or everydayness, or create the illusion of knowledge. It even tells us what it is to know. Is it to see? To hear? To read? Is it a carnal union? Metaphor is the demiourgos of science, art, society, theology, and the enabling visions of common life. How? Like the logos whose creature it is, metaphor gathers differences into 01_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 4:56 pm Page 21 presumed identities to make the unknown believable or known. The secret of its powers lies in its bonds to Plato’s space and time granting hypodoche/chora matrix and the Good.2 Though metaphor is participation’s window onto a world in the making and being made, these Platonic roots and metaphor itself are no longer in favor with philosophers. For example, in The White Mythology, Jacques Derrida calls attention to the paradoxical situation in which metaphysics, the science of being, must eliminate metaphor, itself a metaphor, upon which its scientific ideal was founded. If there is no way of speaking of metaphor except in metaphor, the contrast with the proper or literal is obliterated. Unless metaphor can be saved from such doubts, our literary, theological and philosophical traditions are in dire straits. In Plato’s image of the divided line, dianoia (understanding) is on the level of the exact, mathematical sciences; but this is incompatible with its founding conditions in images and shadows.3 The univocal demands of metaphysics that are pursued in forgetfulness of the sensory derivation of its terms are even more evident in Aristotle, even though he made important contributions to the study of metaphor. The imaginative use of metaphor, for Aristotle a mark of genius, leads to the discovery of resemblances in otherwise dissimilar things. It gave metaphysics access to various realms or meanings of being and established ontological and epistemological bonds to entities of every kind and type, transcendent and immanent, intelligible and sensible, heavenly and earthly. Nevertheless, metaphor failed to meet the univocal test of science and metaphysics (Meta., 1006a 34–1006b 13). Of course, this dismissal of metaphor’s constitutive role in metaphysics is not universal; an earlier generation of distinguished American philosophers (Richard McKeon, Stephen Pepper, and Richard Brumbaugh come readily to mind) recognized that root metaphors determine the form of metaphysical systems . Among the greatest of these was Parmenides’ to gar auto noein estin kai einai (Frag., III), “there is a same for knowing and being,” where this “same” is established by an ocular metaphor. In noein, a “thoughtful seeing ,” one has “visual” access to the being of beings by prescinding them from the flux of becoming and fixing them, thanks to the nominalizing power of einai (“to be”), in the amber of eternity. Though the analogia entis was sometimes denied, as in Duns Scotus (“God is grasped in a concept univocal to Himself and creatures”) and Spinoza, metaphor continued to provide philosophy with its controlling vision. Theologians could never abandon metaphor and retain the goal of making sense of Revelation. “All that may be known of God,” 22 ■ Between Chora and the Good 01_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 4:56 pm Page 22 Saint Paul says, “lies plain before their eyes; indeed God himself has disclosed it to them. His invisible attributes, that is to say, his everlasting power and deity, have been visible, ever...