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Original Thinking: what does have to do with it?

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimi- lars. (, Poetics: 1459a5)4

As a rule he [ 1859-1941] does not give reasons for his opin- ions, but relies on their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an ex- cellent style. Like advertisers, he relies upon picturesque and varied state- ment, and on apparent explanation of many obscure facts. Analogies and similes, especially, form a very large part of the whole process by which he recommends his views to the reader. The number of similes for life to be found in his works exceeds the number in any poet known to me . . . His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life’s but a walk- ing shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many-coloured glass, Bergson says it is a shell which bursts into parts that are again shells. If you like Bergson’s image better, it is just as legitimate’. (Russell History of Western , 761, 764)

Are metaphors the work of philosophical geniuses or advertising fraudsters? There is no doubt that metaphors play a constant role in human , including in philosophy and ; but the question is whether that presence is trivial or profound. What we understand by the term, metaphor, is not simple or straightforward. Philosopher Ina Loewenberg, influenced by Austin, suggested in 1975 that “it is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for an utterance to be a metaphor that, if taken as an assertion and in- terpreted literally, it is false” (Loewenberg 1975: 315-8). But ques- tions of truth and falsity in a literal sense miss the point of metaphors.

4 See also the same passage translated by Malcolm Heath: ‘But the most important thing is to be good at using metaphor. This is a sign of natural talent; for the success- ful use of metaphor is a matter of perceiving similarities’ (Aristotle 1996: 37). 162 Patterns of Creativity

No man is an island and it rains on the just and unjust alike are of course literally true, but that is not the point of these slightly strange sayings that at metaphor. Is a metaphor an elliptical simile? When the poet Marianne Moore wrote of the literary critic “twitching his skin like a horse” we have a simile, and we understand we are not to mistake critics for horses, but to make a comparison, though exactly what kind of comparison is mysterious here and certainly not logical, not even analogical. Do metaphors nevertheless work like similes, even such a surprising one as Moore’s? They would seem to be more volatile, various, creative, open-ended, and more complex than this (cf. Black 1962: 46ff). In the same poem where she so strangely de- scribed critics, Moore wrote that poets must present for inspection “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” if we are to have poetry of consequence put before us (Moore 1919: 438-9). There would seem to be no way of reducing this metaphor to a simile. Adopting his own daring and instructive metaphor, philosopher Daniel Cohen has ob- served, “. . . the elliptical simile translation of metaphors does not fully capture what it is that metaphors do. Metaphors invite us to see the world in a certain way. They challenge our ways of thinking by giving the conceptual kaleidoscope a good shake to bring disparate semantic clusters . . . into contact” (Cohen 2004: 123). The view that metaphors can be reduced to similes implies that has a natural bias towards literal meaning, that metaphors are a stylistic flourish not central to meaning, that a completely literal language would be possible but that a completely metaphoric lan- guage is impossible, that metaphors could be eliminated from dis- course because whatever can be said, can be said literally (cf. Cohen 2004: 124). Metaphors are in this view properly part of poetic dis- course, and as Russell points out above, they are inappropriate for sci- entific, logical, rigorous language because they are dangerously se- ductive (to put the case perhaps too metaphorically). In this view metaphors cannot be central to rigorous thought, nor form the basis of what makes thought human. Given that metaphors are not always simply short-hand simi- les, for among other complications they offer connections that surprise and sometimes even baffle us. Paul Mitchell’s poem, “Baggage” be- gins, “You don’t need to see a suitcase on the veranda/to know a suit- case is there” (Mitchell 2007: 55). Metaphors don’t explain them- selves but, as Cohen has pointed out, rather invite the reader to ex-