Ricoeur traces the evolution of the metaphor from Hellenic Greece. He mentions Aristotle as the founding father of the metaphor. In Greece, the metaphor was used in poetry, especially tragic poetry. The metaphor was a general part of the rhetoric. The metaphor according to Ricoeur functioned as an adornment of language. The metaphor went through many changes during various historical eras.
In the Hellenic period, the metaphor was a vehicle for paying libations to the gods. This is evident in Homeric hymns like the Iliad and the Odyssey. The metaphor was pure poetry. The aesthetic of the metaphor was religious and allegorical. Thus we have Plato’s famous metaphor of the cave that explains the theory of forms. The people were in a dark cave that was surrounded by a wall and they could see the light outside. For Plato it meant that there was an ideal world beyond the physical world. The forms formed the ideality of the world
During the Renaissance: the metaphor underwent a transition. The metaphor was associated with the philosophy of romance. Thus we have the courteous love of the troubadours. Poets used metaphors to sanctify romantic love. The metaphor became a sensual earthly vehicle of lust. Thus we have a famous verse that says: abundant current flows in my entrails and saturates me to a cathartic ecstasy.
In the modern and postmodern period, the metaphor underwent drastic changes. The metaphor became a discourse of ideology. The metaphor took root in disciplines such as semantics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and psychiatry.
In Sociology we have the famous work by Alvin Toffler: The Third Wave, where he characterizes civilization as a metaphor for waves. The first wave was agricultural civilization. The second wave was industrial civilization and the third wave was technological society. For Toffler, these waves are still evolving.
Let’s look at the role of metaphor in postmodern philosophy. Postmodern philosophy is characterized by the writing of metaphors. Texts are centers of privilege and marginalization. Postmodernism dissects texts and opens centers to the play of meanings. Being is a metaphor of becoming. The white theology of the world became a metaphor for nihilism and nullification. Speech is Adam and Eve in innocence, writing is the fleshy tree of good and evil; writing is sin. Being is contextualized in an ontological structure of consciousness. For postmodernism, the diaspora of the mind is left in exile in the desert. Values are fragmented in a nihilism of chaotic anarchy.
In psychoanalysis, dream symbols are metaphorical. Jacques Lacan said that all dreams are manifested in language. We have Roman Jacobson who analyzed metaphor and metonymy. According to Freud, a dream can mean condensation or displacement. A condensed dream is the manifestation of reality in front of the dream. Displacement in dreams is an escapism from reality. For Jacques Lacan the psychoanalyst: the metaphor was condensation and is on the paradigmatic axis. The metonymy on the other hand was displacement and in the syntagmatic axis.
