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Ricoeur's Metaphor and Narrative Theories as a Foundation for a Theory of Symbol

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Douglas R. McGaughey
Douglas R. McGaughey
Affiliation:
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon 97301
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Extract

The Issues at Issue: (1) Heidegger declares metaphor to be a function of metaphysics. Ricoeur's tension theory of metaphor takes the understanding of metaphor beyond metaphysics. (2) Ricoeur's theory of metaphor is a theory of metaphorical statement not of naming. The classical, lexical theory of metaphor focuses on a primary meaning of each metaphor (grounding metaphor in what Aristotle calls pros hen equivocity). As such metaphor is merely ornamentation in language. What it names could more appropriately be accomplished in literal language. In contrast, metaphor is understood by Ricoeur to be a semantic event made possible by three kinds of tensions. (3) One may understand symbols to function with the same metaphorical tensions. In the case of symbols, however, these tensions function not at the level of the sentence but rather of the narrative. Metaphor and symbol both have an ‘ontological priority’ over other elements of discourse and experience. They ‘work’ because of the event character of both understanding and experience. Understanding (made possible by the dialectic of belonging and distanciation according to Ricoeur) and experience (made possible by temporality, dynamis) have event as their condition of possibility. (4) Metaphor and symbol both have a ‘temporal priority’, as well, for they serve as the shock to think ‘more’. This can occur, however, because they are part of a circularity that is non-metaphysical, that is, the circularity of the event character of the Being-of beings. Hence, just as metaphors are always ‘larger’ than the sentence, so are symbols always ‘larger’ than the narrative.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 415 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

page 415 note 1 See Heidegger, Martin, Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’, ed. Ochwadt, Curd (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982), pp. 39–40;Google ScholarHölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’, ed. Biemel, Walter (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984), pp. 17–23;Google ScholarDer Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), pp. 77–90; Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), pp. 199–216; English translation by Hertz, Peter d., On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 93–108.Google Scholar

page 415 note 2 It is Aristotle who defines metaphor as a form of naming (see the Poetics, 1457b7–10), and naming rests upon Aristotle's understanding of pros hen equivocity – reference to one see Owens, Joseph, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963), pp. 116–123)Google Scholar. Pros hen equivocity characterizes the Aristotelian metaphysics. ‘Through its function…will universal, form, cause, Being and Entity ultimately coalesce in their absolutely primary instances’. (Ibid. p. 287).

page 416 note 1 See, for example, Heidegger, , Der Satz vom Grund, p. 89.Google Scholar

page 416 note 2 See Brunzina, Ronald, ‘Heidegger on the Metaphor in Philosophy’, in Cultural Hermeneutics, I (1973), 305–24;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDerrida, Jacques, ‘Le retrait de la métaphore’ in Poesie, VII (1978), 121–3;Google ScholarGreisch, Jean, ‘Les mots et les roses. La métaphore chez Martin Heidegger’ in Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, LVII (1973), 433–55;Google Scholar and Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’ in The New Literary History, VI (1974), 95–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 416 note 3 See Heidegger, Martin, ‘Phänomenologie und Theologie’ in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster mann, 1978), pp. 45–77.Google Scholar

page 416 note 4 Kockelmans, Joseph J., ‘Heidegger on Metaphor and Metaphysics’ in Tijdscrift voor Filosofie, XLVII (1985), 415–50.Google Scholar

page 416 note 5 Ibid. p. 427. This is Kockelmans' conclusion from Heidegger, , Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 160Google Scholar (English, p. 58)

page 416 note 6 Kockelmans, Joseph J., ‘Heidegger on Metaphor and Metaphysics’, p. 436.Google Scholar

page 417 note 1 Ibid. p. 439.

page 417 note 2 Ibid. p. 444.

page 417 note 3 Ibid. p. 446.

page 417 note 4 See Aristotle, , Poetics 1457b7–10.Google Scholar

page 417 note 5 See Ricoeur, , The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language, trans. by Czerny, Robert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 66:Google Scholar ‘The working hypothesis underlying the notion of metaphorical statement is that the semantics of discourse is not reducible to the semiotics of lexical entities’.

page 417 note 6 I have argued in my dissertation (unpublished dissertation, University of Chicago, 1983), pp. 87–97, that Heidegger's discussion of ‘sign’ in Being and Time, trans. by Macquarrie, John & Robinson, Edward (New York: Harper & Row, 1962)Google Scholar paragraph 17: ‘Reference and Signs’, is where one must look to find a treatment of tensions that presents the sign not as semiotic but as metaphoric.

page 418 note 1 Derrida, Jacques, ‘White Mythology’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Bass, Alan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 270.Google Scholar

page 418 note 2 Ibid. p. 270.

page 418 note 3 Ibid. p. 271.

page 418 note 4 Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Double Session’ in Dissemination, trans. by Johnson, Barbara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 258.Google Scholar

page 418 note 5 Ricoeur, , Rule, pp. 290–291.Google Scholar See in addition, Ricoeur, , ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, p. 99:Google Scholar ‘ … the metaphorical meaning of a word is nothing which may be found in a dictionary (in that sense we may continue to oppose the metaphorical sense to the literal sense, if we call literal sense whatever sense may occur among the partial meanings enumerated in the dictionary, and not a so-called original, or fundamental, or primitive, or proper meaning).’

page 419 note 1 Ricoeur, , Rule, p. 65.Google Scholar

page 419 note 2 See, for example, Ibid., pp. 66–76.

page 419 note 3 Ricoeur writes: ‘Benveniste gave these two forms of linguistics the names ‘semiotics’ [see Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Baskin, Wade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 16–17]Google Scholar and ‘semantics’. The sign is the unit of semiotics while the sentence is the unit of semantics. As these units belong to different orders, semiotics and semantics hold sway over different arenas and take on restricted meanings. To say with de Saussure that language is a system of signs is to characterize language in just one of its aspects [as merely self-referential and internal] and not in its total reality [including reference to a life-world]’. Rule, p. 69. Later Ricoeur writes: ‘It becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to give an account of the denotative function of language within the framework of a theory of the sign that acknowledges only the internal difference between signifier and the signified. This denotative function, on the other hand, presents no problem in a conception of language that distinguishes from the start between signs and discourse and defines discourse, as opposed to the sign, by its relation to extra-linguistic reality’. Rule, p. 124. See to the contrary the claim of Saussure, de, op. cit., p. 23:Google Scholar ‘…everything that changes the [linguistic] system in any way is internal’. Hence, for de Saussure both ‘internal linguistics’ (static or synchronic linguistics) and ‘external linguistics’ (dynamic or diachronic linguistics) are concerned with the system of linguistic signs as an internal closed self-referential system. See Ibid., pp. 81, 99–100, and 140f.

page 419 note 4 Ricoeur, , Rule, p. 247.Google Scholar

page 419 note 5 See Ibid. p. 239: ‘The “appropriateness” of metaphorical as well as literal application of a predicate is not fully justified within a purely nominalist conception of language. Although such a conception has no trouble explaining the choreography of labels, since there is no essence to block re-labelling, it has greater difficulty accounting for the air of rightness that certain more fortunate instances of language and art seem to exude. To my mind, this is the place to part ways with … nominalism. Does not the fittingness, the appropriateness of certain verbal and non-verbal predicates, indicate that language not only has organized reality in a different way, but also made manifest a way of being of things, which is brought to language thanks to semantic innovation? It would seem that the enigma of metaphorical discourse is that it ‘invents’ in both senses of the word: what it creates, it discovers; and what it finds, it invents’.

page 420 note 1 Ibid. p. 297.

page 420 note 2 Ibid. pp. 299–300.

page 420 note 3 Ibid. p. 303.

page 420 note 4 Ibid. p. 304.

page 420 note 5 Ibid. p. 304.

page 421 note 1 Ibid., pp. 22–23. See Cassirer's, Ernst discussion of Max Müller's ‘radical metaphor’ in ‘Sprache and Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, in Wesen and Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), pp. 146–148, particularly, p. 148.Google Scholar

page 421 note 2 Ricoeur, , Rule, p. 24.Google Scholar Ricoeur repeats this suggestion later, see p. 197: ‘Can one not say that the strategy of language at work in metaphor consists in obliterating the logical and established frontiers of language, in order to bring to light new resemblances the previous classification kept us from seeing? In other words, the power of metaphor would be to break an old categorization, in order to establish new logical frontiers on the ruins of their forerunners’. Ernst Cassirer spoke of metaphor in this role, as well. See ‘Sprache and Mythos’, pp. 148 and 154.

page 421 note 3 Ricoeur, , Rule, pp. 121–2;Google Scholar see also p. 131.

page 421 note 4 Ibid. p. 295.

page 421 note 5 Ibid. p. 295.

page 421 note 6 See Ibid. pp. 288, 290–1, 294

page 422 note 1 Ibid. p. 306.

page 422 note 2 Ibid. p. 297.

page 422 note 3 Ibid. p. 313.

page 422 note 4 See Ricoeur, Paul, Semeia 4: Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Hermeneutics (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 36 and 139.Google Scholar

page 422 note 5 Ibid. p. 87.

page 423 note 1 See Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, pp. 194–5.Google Scholar

page 423 note 2 Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Erzählung, Metapher and Interpretationstheorie’ in Zeitschrift für Theologie and Kirche, 84/2 (1987), p. 248.Google Scholar

page 423 note 3 The ‘double-meaning’ definition of symbol is rooted in the Greek where a symbol is understood as ‘a sign or mark to infer a thing by’, and consisted of two pieces of a coin or ring shared by friends or contracting parties. The fitting together of the two pieces confirmed the relationship. See A Lexicon: Abridged from Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 663, and Pape, W., Griechisch-Detusches Handwörterbuch, 3. Auflage, Band II (Graz-Austria: Akademische Drucku. Verlagsanstalt, 1954), pp. 979–980.Google Scholar This ‘double-meaning’ definition also echoes the neo-Platonic understanding of the ‘double rationale for the biblical and liturgical use of symbolism, i.e., secrecy and accommodation [‘perceptible tokens of conceptual things’, p. 205],… also presented in C(elestial) H(ierarchy) 2 140AB 7–18, 145A 8–10, Ep(istle/Letter) 9 1105C 36–45 and 1108AB 7–20’. From ‘The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’ in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. by Luibheid, Calm (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 199, n. 15.Google Scholar

page 423 note 4 Ricoeur, , ‘Erzählung’, p. 249.Google Scholar

page 423 note 5 Ibid. p. 249.

page 424 note 1 Ricoeur, Paul, ‘The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection’ in International Philosophical Quarterly, II/2 (May, 1962), p. 194.Google Scholar

page 424 note 2 Ibid. p.214. This theme of the meaning of myth proceeding backwards becomes in Time and Narrative a methodological principle for understanding all narrative. See the discussion of ‘questioning back’ in Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans, by McLaughlin, Kathleen and Pellauer, David (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 179, 193, 206, and 228Google Scholar. Ricoeur draws on W. B. Gallie's concept of 'followability' for support in this understanding of narrative. See, Ibid.. pp. 244, n. 1 7; 67; and I49f. In addition, see Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, trans, by McLaughlin, Kathleen and Pellauer, David (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 157Google Scholar.

page 424 note 3 Sec ‘The Hermeneutics of Symbols’, pp. 204–205, 212–3, 215.

page 424 note 4 See Ricoeur, Paul, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. by Ihde, Don (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 289:Google Scholar ‘ … [B]efore all theology and all speculation, even before any mythical elaboration, we…still encounter symbols‘. See also, p. 299: ‘I am convinced that we must think, not behind the symbols… they constitute the revealing substrate of speech which lives among men’.

page 424 note 5 See Ricoeur, , ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, pp. 100, 108–109.Google Scholar

page 424 note 6 See Ibid. p. 100.

page 424 note 7 See Ibid. p. 100, 108–109.

page 424 note 8 See the discussion above and Ricoeur, Rule, pp. 73–74.

page 424 note 9 See Ibid. p. 297, 299, 302.

page 424 note 10 Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 69.Google Scholar

page 425 note 1 Ibid. p. 65.

page 425 note 2 Ibid. p. 59.

page 425 note 3 Ricoeur, , Rule, p. 65.Google Scholar

page 425 note 4 See Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, pp. 54 and 57.Google Scholar

page 425 note 5 See Cassirer's discussion of the ‘common root’ of myth and language in the metaphorical in ‘Sprache und Mythos’, pp. 144–158.

page 425 note 6 Ibid. p. 79.

page 426 note 1 See Cassirer, Ernst, Philosophie der symbolischen FormenGoogle Scholar, Teil, Erster: Die Sprache (1923) Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), pp. V, 26–7, 47–8, 149, 155 and 212.Google Scholar

page 426 note 2 See, ‘Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs’ (1938) in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, p. 210, 219–220, 223. This theme is repeated almost incessantly in Cassirer's writings. See, for example, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, pp. VIII, 19, 41, 107, 179, 183, 185, 186, 280, 286–87, 299; ‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften’ in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, p. 200; ‘Sprache und Mythos’, p. 79. He attributes this thesis of dynamic interchange between being and becoming (what Cassirer calls ‘synthetic logic’ as opposed to ‘analytic logic’) to Plato in the late dialog of The Sophist, 259e (but see, also, 249d-e). ‘Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs’, pp. 206, also 207; Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, pp. 28 and 296.

page 426 note 3 See ‘Sprache und Mythos’, p. 149.

page 426 note 4 Cassirer, , Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, p. 27.Google Scholar

page 426 note 5 Cassirer, , ‘Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften’, pp. 175–6.Google Scholar See, as well, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, p. 9.Google Scholar

page 427 note 1 See Cassirer, Ibid. pp. 7–8.

page 427 note 2 See Husserl, Edmund, ‘Part III. A. The Way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy by Inquiring back from the Pregiven Life-World’ in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Pkilosophy, trans. by Carr, David (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).Google Scholar Cassirer used the term ‘phenomenology’ to describe his project in so many words as a philosophy of the life-world. See ‘Zur Logik des Symbolbegriffs’, pp. 208–9.

page 428 note 1 Ricoeur, , ‘Erzählung, Metapher und Interpretationstheorie’, p. 233.Google Scholar See Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, p. 98.Google Scholar

page 428 note 2 ‘ …I am calling narrative exactly what Aristotle calls muthos, the organization of the events’. Ricoeur, , Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, p. 36.Google Scholar See Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, p. 153.

page 428 note 3 Ricoeur, , Time and Narrative, Vol. I, pp. 45–46.Google Scholar

page 428 note 4 See, Ibid. pp. 54, 64, 80, and 181.

page 428 note 5 Ibid. p. 46.

page 428 note 6 Ibid. p. 48. See Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, p. 38: ‘No segmenting operation, no placing of functions in a sequence can do without some reference to the plot as a dynamic unity and to emplotment as a structuring operation’.

page 428 note 7 Ibid. p. 48.

page 429 note 1 Ibid. p. 70. See Gadamer, H.-G., Truth and Method (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 274–5, 289.Google Scholar In addition, Gadamer, H.-G., ‘On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection’ in Continuum, 8/1 (1970), 77–133.Google Scholar

page 429 note 2 Ricoeur, , Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, p. 77.Google Scholar See Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, p. 5: ‘To open up the notion of emplotment – and the notion of time that corresponds to it – to the outside is to follow the movement of transcendence by which every work of fiction … projects a world outside of itself, one that can be called the ‘world of the work’. In this way, epics, dramas, and novels project, in the mode of fiction, ways of inhabiting the world that lie waiting to be taken up by reading, which in turn is capable of providing a space for a confrontation between the world of the text and the world of the reader’.

page 429 note 3 The text's role of projecting a world, that is, of projecting new possibilities of being in the life-world is a theme occurring throughout Ricoeur's analysis of narrative. See Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, pp. 78–91; Vol. 2, pp. 5–6, 20, 76, and 160.

page 429 note 4 Ricoeur, , Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, p. 79.Google Scholar

page 429 note 5 Ibid. p. 78.

page 429 note 6 Ibid. p. 54.

page 429 note 7 For Ricoeur's important discussion of referentiality and the world of the text, see Ibid. 77–82.

page 430 note 1 Ibid. p. 18.

page 430 note 2 Ibid. p. 52.

page 430 note 3 Ibid. p. 53.

page 430 note 4 Ibid. p. 67. See footnote 2, p. 10, above.

page 431 note 1 See, Ibid. pp. 41 and 49. This theme of emplotment involving a ‘grasping together’ as a temporal event is at issue in Ricoeur's distinguishing between the ‘paradigmatic order’, that is synchronic, and the ‘syntagmatic order’, that is diachronic. The latter characterizes emplotment more adequately than the mere concern with the paradigmatic order by the structuralists. See, ibid., p. 56, and Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, pp. 31, 42, 44, 46, 57, and 62.

page 431 note 2 For Ricoeur's discussion of ‘teleological unity’ in emplotment, see, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, p. 150, and Vol. 2, pp. 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 56.

page 433 note 1 Ricoeur, , Interpretation Theory, p. 64.Google Scholar

page 433 note 2 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 239.Google Scholar

page 435 note 1 Ricoeur, , Rule, p. 22.Google Scholar Ricoeur describes this process later, p. 198, where he writes: ‘ …if it is true that one learns what one does not yet know, then to make the similar visible is to produce the genus within the differences, and not elevated beyond differences, in the transcendence of the concept… Methapor allows us to intercept the formation of the genus at this preparatory stage because, in the metaphorical process, the movement towards the genus, which is checked by the resistance of difference, is captured somehow by the rhetorical figure… A family resemblance first brings individuals together before the rule of a logical class dominates them. Metaphor, a figure of speech, presents in an open fashion, by means of a conflict between identity and difference, the process that, in a covert manner, generates semantic grids by fusion of differences into identity’. Ernst Cassirer has a similar understanding of metaphor. See ‘Sprache and Mythos’, pp. 148 and 154.

page 435 note 2 Ricoeur, , Conflict of Interpretations, p. 289.Google Scholar

page 435 note 3 Ibid. p. 299.

page 435 note 4 Ricoeur, , Rule, pp. 214–215.Google Scholar