Jupiter's Eagle and the Despot's Hand Mill: Two Views on Metaphor in Kant

Abstract

Metaphor-makers wrench concepts from their customary uses in order to propose affinities that our habits of conceptual sorting overlook. They defy conceptual rules by applying terms beyond their accepted domains, as in the claim love is war, war illumines a world of romance beyond its ken. But however much a metaphor tests a concept's purview, it remains a conceptual practice through and through. It gets nowhere without the concepts that it puts to uncanny use, though it misapplies them to produce literally false statements (typically). Yet in the very moment of falsehood we think our metaphors contribute to understanding, broadly construed, even as we toy with the concepts on whose legitimate application our knowledge is based. Metaphors have historically been conceived as the products of a creative imagination. It has long been a badge of philosophical honor to warn against metaphor, and the playful imagination that speaks in it, as dangerous distractions from the noble labor of knowing. Thus did Hobbes claim that metaphors violate good judgment because they openly professe deceipt; to admit them into Councell, or Reasoning, he warned, manifest folly.l Similarly did Locke, courting danger by resorting to a metaphor, condemn all figurative uses of language as perfect cheats to be avoided where truth and knowledge are concerned.2 If metaphors were but flights of fancy, their status in relation to cognition would be as lowly as Hobbes and Locke thought. That status has remained perennially contested, however, precisely because metaphors do contribute something to understanding, and in virtue of their conceptual mischief. Metaphors extend understanding even as the products of an aesthetic imagination, and they thus make their cognitive contribution from the wrong side of the tracks, as it were. If modern thought has endeavored to separate aesthetic experience from cognition and its knowledge, metaphor should be seen as a key instance an imagination engaged in aesthetic play leaps the divide to make claims for an understanding of things unsayable in literal conceptual discourse. Immanuel Kant certainly did his part to establish our modern separation of aesthetic and cognitive experience. I want to explore Kant's views on metaphor in order to attempt a better understanding of it as an imaginative product and of its status as such in relation to cognition. Such an aim would be hindered by the fact that Kant does not actually discuss metaphor explicitly in his Critique of Judgment aesthetic theory, were it not for the fact that several scholars have discerned a nascent theory of metaphor in that work. Exploring Kant's views on metaphor will reveal not only that he is one of the few modern philosophers for whom metaphors are philosophically honorable; we will also find that his thinking prefigures the most successful current perspective on metaphor, known broadly as interactionism. I will argue, in fact, that Kant forwards no less than two conceptions of metaphor; they must be carefully distinguished, for they have quite different implications. Determining how in Kant's case metaphor navigates the gap between imaginative play and