Inventio and the Unsurpassable Metaphor

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur begins Volume 1 of his Time and Narrative with an investigation of time meditation Book XI of Augustine's Confessions. In Ricoeur's general characterization of Augustine's time meditation, he calls attention to aporetical character of pure reflection on time.1 Because of this intimate intertwining of argument and description, Ricoeur concludes that there is pure phenomenology of time Augustine; from that point he moves on to declare Time and Narrative's thesis, namely, that speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination to which narrative activity alone can respond. Such resolution, Ricoeur continues, is a poetical and not theoretical of word. Finally, Ricoeur allows that Augustine might be said in one sense to move toward poetic, narrative resolution fusion of argument and hymn.2 Later this first chapter, Ricoeur calls attention to Augustine's return to experience, articulated by language and enlightened by intellect3 to solve aporias he evokes. Ricoeur also claims that Augustine's meditation language is thus simply reformulated manner.4 However, Ricoeur does not show what he means by more rigorous either his own, or Augustine's, terms. Later, Ricoeur will claim that Augustine uses quasi-spatial terms, and that the metaphor of transit of events through present seems unsurpassable (indepassable). It is good metaphor, . Ricoeur then claims, surprising evocation of Hegel: There seems to be no concept that 'surpasses' (aufhebt) this metaphor.5 This essay will show that these statements of Ricoeur do not do justice to Augustine's attempt Book XI of Confessions to ground statements about time metaphysics that reveals being of time. Augustine's intention Book XI of Confessions is not to allow everyday expressions about measurement of time to stand as metaphors, nor to resolve them kind of poetic narrative fusion, but to ground them metaphysical order revealed God's light. I will argue that Augustine does indeed think he has theoretically resolved aporias he has evoked. He writes Chapter 26 of Eleventh Book, with definite tone of conclusion: From this [preceding argument] it is visible to me, that time is nothing else but distention [inde mihi visum est nihil esse aliud tempus quam distentionem] (XI 26).6 The light which being of time is visible is God's light, so I will argue that Augustine intends that we recognize that distentio animi has been grounded, that is, that it has indeed, although Augustine would not recognize Ricoeur's anachronism, become concept capable of an Aufhebung of its predecessors course of time meditation by having its place metaphysical order discovered. To enable us to see Augustine's intention this regard, I will examine his writings on metaphor, which place him squarely Aristotelian tradition that sees metaphor as transfer of sign from its proper signification to another. Working within such tradition, Augustine aims, process he calls inventio, to reduce signs he uses from metaphoric to proper (signa translata to signa propria), that is, precisely to reduce those expressions to what Ricoeur would call dead metaphors, that is, concepts. As such, Augustine's inventio is radically incompatible with Ricoeur's notion of living metaphor. I. Ricoeur on Metaphor In this section I will briefly sketch Ricoeur's theory of metaphor, as it is developed The Rule of Metaphor.7 In eight Studies that make up this work, Ricoeur moves discussion of metaphor from use of word as the unit of reference, where it was consigned by classical rhetoric, to discussing it on hermeneutic level, where discourse is under consideration. In this movement, we move from substitution theory of metaphor to theory, which tension develops between two conflicting interpretations, literal one, which is nonsensical, and figurative one, that refigures nonsensical, and figurative one, that refigures world, creating second-level reference. …