Thinking in Metaphors: Transcendentalist Prose from the Perspectives of Stylistics, Cognitive Linguistics, and Philosophy
Dieter Schulz
Докладчик
профессор
Heidelberg University
Heidelberg University
ауд. 6, Административный корпус
2014-03-13
11:00 -
11:30
Ключевые слова, аннотация
Traditionally
relegated to the realm of stylistics, figurative language has recently come to
be recognized as an integral feature of thought. Drawing on the work of
cognitive linguists (notably Lakoff/Johnson and Kövecses) and philosophers
(notably Blumenberg and Konersmann), I wish to show how key metaphors of
Transcendentalist prose carry considerable conceptual weight. In fact, the very
notion of 'transcendence' combines a sensory image – walking across a boundary – with a concept usually taken to be highly abstract.
Тезисы
Thanks
to the work of philosophers and cognitive linguists – notably Hans Blumenberg
in Germany (Blumenberg 1960) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the United
States (Lacoff, Johnson 1980) – we now appreciate the degree to which even the
most abstract concepts rely on metaphors derived from sensory experience. As
Ralf Konersmann, a former student of Blumenberg’s, explains in the Introduction
to his handbook of philosophical metaphors (Konersmann 2007), concepts and
metaphors serve different functions, but there is no need to play the former
against the latter as they possess equal value in constituting our ideas. Along
the same lines, in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) Lakoff and Johnson
have proposed an intellectual approach that forgoes the traditional privileging
of abstract concepts and instead tries to do justice to the “corporeal”
dimension of language and the physical grounding of thought, with metaphor advancing
from an ornamental position to the fore of linguistic and philosophical
analysis.
Given these developments, Emerson’s reflections on the importance of the
imagination and figural language appear a good deal more pertinent today than
they may have seemed in his time. In Nature (1836) he claims that “words
are signs of natural facts”, and that “every word which is used to express a
moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from
some material appearance”. If in an early Journal entry he still sounds a bit
diffident and apologetic about his “strong imagination” as hopefully offsetting
a deficiency in his “reasoning faculty”, the later Emerson unabashedly claims
equal if not superior authority for the former; not only do they possess equal
value, but they also need each other. As he explains in the late essay Poetry and Imagination (1876), Athe term
genius, when used with emphasis, implies imagination; use of symbols,
figurative speech. A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its
thought in a thing.