The metaphorical exists only within metaphysics.
—Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason
In this chapter, I argue that the appearance of substantia as a technical term in the language of the Romans between the first century bc and the fourth century ad testifies to an understanding of being that is distinct from the one in Classical Greece and in early Christian thought, and that what makes possible the appearance of substantia in that sense is the play of a pair of metaphors.
In the next section, I review the standard hypothesis on the genesis of the concept of substance in Roman thought. In section 3, I briefly examine the emergence of the concept of essentia in early Christian thought. In section 4, I turn to Seneca and Cicero in order to show that it is in the context of the use of the metaphorical pair solidity/likeness that substantia enters the written discourse of the Romans as a philosophical term.
In section 5, I describe the context of experience that governs the use of that metaphorical pair. In section 6, I consider what should be understood by the expression metaphor in this instance. That provides me with the opportunity to return to an issue that was left inexplicit in Chapter 3. That is the meaning of the use of the word figure in the expression figuration of being.
Few concepts have enjoyed a greater destiny in Western philosophical discourse than that of substance. Proclaimed by some as the most pregnant of terms for metaphysics and physics (Leibniz), decried by others as the emptiest of terms (Locke), the concept of substance has functioned throughout modern times as a pole of attraction and hostility, of inspiration and criticism.
No doubt, it is no longer charged today with the exorbitant value it once possessed during the period between Descartes and Hegel. Even so, its central importance for the early moderns and for the scholastics suffices to make us wonder about its first appearance in philosophical discourse.
Moreover, the term is the cause of some difficulty in the secondary literature on Aristotle. Commentators are well aware of the fact that substance is not a satisfying term for rendering the Greek ousia, even as they follow their medieval predecessors in using it for making sense of that term in Aristotle.1 It is rarely asked why substance is a misleading term for ousia. It is even more rarely asked what that term originally meant, in what kind of contexts it arose and was first used, and what matters pressing to human concern it was meant to address and articulate.
This chapter intends to broach these questions. I argue that the appearance of the notion of substance as a technical term in the discourse of the Romans in the period between the first century bc and the fourth century ad bears witness to an understanding of being that is markedly distinct from that of the Classical Greeks and from that of early Christian thought.
The OED confirms the analyses conducted by some of the authors on the topic.2 It is said that the first known use of substantia in Seneca translates a Greek term, although it has not always been clear what that term is.
Curt Arpe (1941: 67, 65) proposed long ago that substantia translates the Stoic upostasis. That term, he tells us, signifies ‘actual, corporeal being’, ‘reality’. René Braun (1977: 172) suggests that Seneca often uses substantia to render the Stoic verb uphestekenai. That term has the same meaning as the former, but with a more emphatic accent on the idea of ‘a substrate persisting as the basis and ground of particular things’.
A brief glance at the non-philosophical use of substantia that appears in works written in the post-Republican period shows that such claims are not accurate. The standard hypothesis is that substantia is the product of a technical invention and that it was invented to translate a Greek term from which it derives its meaning. The evidence, however, suggests the contrary.
Forged from the verb substare, the construction of substantia probably followed the same pattern as constantia, distantia, instantia, circumstantia – terms composed with the suffix -antia from stare, which means stability, firmness, immovable presence. Substantia is found in diverse authors without any philosophical or technical sense from ad 50 onwards.
In Frontinus’s (1925: I.26) De Aquis, for instance, the term signifies ‘the basis of an evaluation’. Tacitus (2001: 8.3) stresses its etymological value in Dialogus de oratoribus, ‘that which supports’. And Quintilian (1924: VI, prooem. 7) uses it sometimes to designate ‘wealth’.
Or take as witness the juridical language that constitutes itself around the first and second centuries ad where the semantic range of the term includes ‘goods’, ‘patrimony’, ‘matter’ and ‘content’ (see Gaius, 1988: II.79 and Pseudo-Quintilian, 1982: XIV).
Substantia is from the start a semantically rich and flexible notion. It is unlikely that its meaning derives solely from the Greek upostasis. That is doubly confirmed by the appearance of the term in the Antehieronymian translations of the Bible, in the oldest versions of the New Testament. Joseph de Ghellinck (1941: 88–95) has shown that substantia renders upostasis as well as ta uparchonta, ta schemata, ousia and even bios. Since all of these Greek terms resonate with substantia, its meaning cannot have been derived from one of them.
It is only with Boethius that, driven by the need to establish correspondences in Latin with Greek theological notions, substantia is reduced to a univocal sense. In Contra Eutychen, a letter on the theological controversy on the double nature of Christ, human and divine, Boethius (1997: III.42–101) fixes the equation substantia = upostasis, which will remain in force throughout the Middle Ages.
The ordinary senses of substantia, its semantic wealth, and the derivatives constructed from the same root all point to its having an indigenous character. It is likely that it was used in oral discourse prior to Seneca. It is possible, too, that the entry of substantia in the written language of the Romans is prompted by its encounter with Greek thought and language. But it is evident from its first philosophical use in Seneca that the term has a distinct Latin ring.
Courtine (2003: 59) argues in Les catégories de l’être that the philosophical use of substantia from Seneca to Boethius is semantically uniform. He writes:
It is as if the word substantia ... had for aim the thematic development of an immediate understanding of being as corporeality, solidity, ground.
Courtine is right that, in the period between Seneca and Boethius, substantia expresses the idea that to be is to be corporeal (although the development of that understanding is doubtless less thematic, that is, less conscious or reflective, than he seems to suggest). The analyses that he conducts, however, do not tell us how substantia becomes an ontological term. On what ground does the meaning of substantia as body express what counts as a being in contrast with a non-being? More generally, what makes it possible for being to say itself in a particular historical language?
As I argue in section 5, one of the constitutive elements of the factical life of the Romans is the enduring presence of conflicts between agents in the forum, in public assemblies, at law courts and in the senate. The experience of that agon in their daily life necessitated a reflection on the practice of politics, rhetoric and the judiciary. It produced a multiplicity of discourses on how to speak about what is just and unjust, good and bad, right and wrong. In that discursive field, we can detect a nascent articulation of the difference between being and non-being through a play of metaphors. It is within that context that substantia first emerges as an ontological term.
No doubt, the significance of Epicureanism and, above all, of Stoicism in the language and thought of the Romans cannot be underestimated. But its importance for the appearance of the ontological use of substantia in Rome should also not be overestimated.
Greek thought from Parmenides to the Stoics takes root in an entirely different kind of problematic than that in which Roman thought forges its vocabulary of being. Nothing animated Greek thought so much as the question What is nature? It involved, among other things, the question of motion or becoming, its principles, whether they are one or many, the paradoxes of becoming, the question of whether a science or discourse of becoming is possible, and so on. Greek thinking is a thinking of phusis in the manifold senses of that term (origin, principle, essence, cause, nature, being, movement, world, etc.).
Roman thought awakens before an entirely different kind of problematic. It is not the perplexities experienced before phusis that initiates Roman thinking. Accordingly, an examination of Epicurean or Stoic notions will tell us little about the horizon to which the ontological use of substantia immediately responds.
Heidegger writes in The Origin of the Work of Art that Roman–Latin thought takes over Greek words without a corresponding, equally genuine experience of what they say (PLT 23). My aim in what follows is to demarcate the horizon of experience in which substantia appears as an ontological term in the writings of the Romans.
Or again, Cicero says in De finibus (1994: III.I.3–4) that we have to create a vocabulary, invent new words, to convey new things. The question is what ‘new things’ the Romans had to convey when they introduced substantia as a central word in their vocabulary of being.
Seneca’s Letter 58 is particularly interesting in that regard. In his preamble on the poverty of the Latin language, Seneca (1925: 58.6) introduces essentia as a translation for ousia. He says that this Greek term designates the nature that contains the foundation of all things. But in the course of his discussion, he uses substantia instead. Why?
Essentia is a word formed from ens (a being), the present participle of the infinitive esse (to be). That link was probably modelled on the derivation of ousia from ousa, the feminine present participle of the infinitive einai (to be). A word designed strictly to match the construction of a Greek term, essentia has no colloquial resonances when it first appears in written discourse. Hesitant about that term, Seneca (1925: 58.6) hopes to obtain a ‘favourable hearing’ about it from Lucilius. Quintilian regards it as ‘unduly harsh’. Conscious of the fact that essentia is the correct translation of ousia, Apuleius (1997: I.VI, 326–8) nevertheless uses substantia in his discourse on Plato.
Essentia remains a floating signifier up until the time of the Gallo-Roman poet Sidonius Apollinaris (ad 430–89). He uses it at Carmen XV.102–17 in his Neoplatonic account of the generation of the world but reverts back to the more customary use of substantia in the rest of his poem.
The establishment of essentia as a central ontological term takes place in the fifth century ad in a theological context. Under pressure to specify, against their Greek counterparts, the idea that God is one ousia and three upostaseis, Latin theologians use essentia for God and substantia for the Three Persons.3 In Boethius, Augustine and others, essentia designates the incorporeal activity of the divine cause. Pierre Hadot (1968: 490–3) has shown that this understanding of essentia, and thus of being (esse) in Augustine and Boethius, is the direct result of the Porphyrian–Neoplatonic understanding of being (einai) as the incorporeal cause of corporeal things.
On the other hand, what the Romans of the period that we are studying immediately hear in the word ousia is the semantic content that vibrates first and foremost in some of the colloquial resonances of substantia: body, solidity, matter. Such different authors as Cicero, Lucan, Tertullian and Calcidius bear witness to that mundane understanding of being, as does Seneca in Letter 58.4
Seneca introduces essentia in Letter 58 to render the Platonic notion of ousia. He tells Lucilius that he wants to examine the different meanings of Plato’s expression for ‘being’ (to on). Before doing so, he opens two parentheses. In the first parenthesis (1925: 58.8–14), he gives an exposition of Aristotle’s method of division, the classification of universals into genera and species. In the second parenthesis (15), he turns to the Stoic doctrine of the supreme genus, the something (ti) beyond being.
No doubt, Seneca’s interpretation of Aristotle’s method is heterodox. He says that being is the supreme genus because there is no term superior to it.
It is the beginning of all things (initium rerum est); and all things fall under it (omnia sub illo sunt). (12)
Seneca is probably relying on a confused Middle Platonist manual since neither Plato nor Aristotle speaks of being as a supreme genus.5 He illustrates the Aristotelian method of division by proceeding first from the indivisible species to the highest genus and then by moving back in reverse order. In both cases, he divides being into the corporeal and the incorporeal (11, 14).6
The second parenthesis opens with the claim that the Stoics set above being another, even higher genus. There is a genus beyond being which they call quid = ti, something. And he explains their reasoning,
In the order of nature some things exist (quadam sunt) and other things do not exist (quae non sunt). And even the things that do not exist are really part of the order of nature. What these are will readily occur to the mind, for example centaurs, giants, and all other figments of unsound reasoning (falsa cogitatione), which have begun to have a definite shape (habere aliquam imaginem), although non habeat substantiam. (15)
The translator of Seneca’s Epistles renders the last expression as follows: ‘although they have no bodily consistency’ (15).
Beings and non-beings for the Stoics fall under the genus something. Non-beings like centaurs or giants are not nothing. They are something because they are conceived by the mind: they are its intentional objects. Now when Seneca refers to non-beings in this passage, to the sort of things that have no ousia, we would expect him to say, non habeat essentiam, ‘they have no essence’. Instead, he says, non habeat substantiam. Why this sudden shift in terminology when a few paragraphs earlier he had stressed that essentia is the correct word for ousia?
Presumably, that has to do with the fact that substantia allows him to say something in this context that the usage of essentia would not have readily conveyed to his reader, namely, that things like centaurs and giants, which have no bodily existence, have also no being. This means that substantia signifies at once and irreducibly both being (esse) and body (corpus), and a fortiori being as body.7
That passage is interesting in another respect as well. It uses the opposition between having substance (habere substantiam) and having the likeness of one (habere imaginem). Imaginem is the accusative case of imago. In Seneca’s language, it is associated with similitudo. It means image, likeness, seeming or appearance. That opposition is Stoic in appearance.8 In truth, however, it is adapted to cover the much more specifically Roman contrast between solidity and likeness (res/similitudo, solidum/imago). The latter is found in a number of different contexts in both Cicero and Seneca.
There is, first of all, Seneca’s De vita beata. Following the Greek dogma that the happy life is the good life, Seneca asks whether pleasure or virtue – the Epicurean or Stoic end – constitutes the good life.
Let us seek something that is a good more than in appearance (non in speciem bonum) – something that is constant (sed solidum) and more beautiful in its more hidden part. (Seneca, 1935: III.1)
He deploys a number of arguments in this essay to prove that pleasure is inconstant. He notes at one point that pleasure subsides at the moment when it is most enjoyed. The desire for pleasure is instantaneously gratified and its recurrence is incessantly demanded. It comes and goes like the rhythm of a Heraclitean flux.
Nor is anything certain (certum) whose nature consists in movement. So it is not even possible that there should be any substantia in that which comes and goes most swiftly and will perish in the very exercise of its power. (Seneca, 1935: VII. 4)
Pleasure has no substance because it is inconstant. It provides no certainty and firmness (inconstantiam: VIII. 6). Virtue has substance because it is constant, solid, stable. Pleasure enslaves because it places us at the mercy of fortune, of whatever comes to gratify the body. Virtue liberates because it is concerned with the harmony of the soul and with its tranquillity. It furnishes an immovable foundation (fundamentum grave, immobile: XV.4) in life because it frees the soul from the hazards of chance and draws it back to reason and to the rationality of the universe.
There is, in the second place, Cicero’s use of this opposition in at least three different texts:
i.Cicero (2001: III.I.3) criticises the best of the Romans for following public opinion at the start of Book III of Tusculan Disputations. They strain to win not the superior image of virtue but a shadowy phantom of glory (imaginem gloriae) when true glory (gloria solida) is a thing of real worth (res) and clearly wrought, no shadowy phantom.
ii.He criticizes Epicurus’s doctrine of the formation of the notion of god in De natura deorum. He tells us that according to Epicurus, we envisage god’s appearance by thought rather than with the senses. His form has no solidity (soliditatem), and our perception of it is such that it is discerned in a sequence of similar images (similitudine). These images emerge from a limitless number of atoms acting on our thought and, as a result, our minds see the divine nature as blessed and eternal. Cicero (1935: I.105) wonders:
‘If the gods make their impact only on our thoughts and have no solidity (soliditatem) ... what difference does it make whether we visualize a hippocentaur or a god?’
Cicero’s reference to the centaur is interesting. It is regularly cited as an example of what does not exist, as in Seneca’s Letter 58. It means that the opposition between solidum and similitudo, which governs here the contrast between what is known through the senses and what is known through thought, is immediately ontological. Anything that is sensible is solid. It is certain and reliable. It exists in the genuine and proper sense of the term. It cannot be other than how it shows itself to the eyes or the touch. It manifests itself just as it is without delay.
It is otherwise with images and other phantoms of the brain. Epicurus claims that we have images of the gods as living a blessed and eternal life and that those images result from the action of their atoms on our mind. But those atoms are insensible. Accordingly, we cannot be certain that what acts on our thought are the atoms of the gods rather than of centaurs. What is insensible has a shadowy existence, a being in appearance only. It can be other than how it shows itself through the images it produces on our mind.
iii. Cicero (2003: 27) distinguishes between two kinds of definition in the Topica on the basis of the ontological content of that contrast. There are definitions of things that exist, and there are definitions of things that are thought:
The things which I say exist (esse) are those which can be seen and touched, like a piece of land, a house, a wall, a gutter, a slave, food and so on ... Those things I say have no being (non esse) which cannot be touched and pointed out but which nevertheless can be understood and grasped by the soul, for example, if you define acquiring ownership, guardianship, family, agnation; these things have no underlying body (subest ... corpus), as it were, but a pattern and a concept stamped and imprinted on the mind which I call a notion.
It is likely that this type of expression – habens subesse corpus – played an important role in the emergence of the concept of substantia in philosophical circles, as Courtine (2003: 58) and Braun (1977) remark. Seneca’s expression in Letter 58, habere substantiam, testifies to that.
But the opposition between solidum and imago also played a significant role in that regard. Tobias Reinhardt (in Cicero, 2003: 259) suggests that Cicero’s three-tiered distinction in this passage has its origin not in any particular philosophical school – whether in the Epicurean, Stoic or Platonic school – but in Roman rhetoric and legal thought itself. There is, firstly, the distinction between being and non-being. Corresponding to this, there is the distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Lastly and correspondingly, there is the distinction between two types of definition. As I have shown, the first of these two distinctions is governed by the play of a pair of metaphors, solidum/imago.
Seneca uses this pair in the peroration of Letter 58, which specifies his use of the distinction between ‘having substance’ and ‘having the likeness of one’ in the passage cited above. He wonders how Plato’s theory of Forms contributes to our moral improvement. What can we draw from them that will put a check on our appetites?
Perhaps the very thought, that all these things which minister to our senses, which arouse and excite us, are by Plato denied a place among the things that truly exist (esse quae vere sint). Such things are therefore likenesses (imaginaria), and though they for the moment present a certain external appearance, yet they are in no case stable or solid (stabile nec solidum est). (Seneca, 1925: 58.26–7)
That passage is interesting. It shows that the pair solidum/imago can be employed to express the ontological pre-eminence of the incorporeal over the corporeal, as it is here, or, conversely, of the corporeal over the incorporeal, as in the earlier passage on the Stoic doctrine of the supreme genus and in Cicero. What that pair achieves, in both cases, is an articulation of the difference between being and non-being. It is the linguistic node that makes possible the Roman understanding of being.
Substantia becomes an ontological term not because it translates the Greek or Stoic upostasis, but on condition that it enters the play of that turn of phrase, that’s solid, it’s solid in appearance only.
The question now is what the context of experience is that gives meaning to the Roman understanding of being as matter, body, solidity. That context of experience, I argue, is the Roman reflection on the practice of rhetoric.
It is well known that rhetoric establishes itself as first philosophy in Rome during the late Republican and early Imperial period.9 That is evident from the fact that the hierarchy among the various disciplines and sciences is determined from the standpoint of rhetoric, which is concerned with the political sphere, rather than from that of the knowledge of first principles and causes, as in Aristotle. Philosophical problems generally (physical, ethical, theological) now fall within the purview of rhetoric, and philosophy itself is made subordinate to its cares and concerns.10 Cicero (1960, 15.56–19.73) famously reclaims the ancient title of ‘wisdom’ for rhetoric in Book III of De oratore prior to its Socratic–Platonic division into philosophy and oratory.11
Renato Barilli (1989: 26) insists that this notion of rhetoric is not a peculiarity of Cicero’s. It belongs to the entire way of life of the Roman Republic. That way of life is marked by the continuous presence of conflicts in the public sphere, which at times even extended beyond the grave.12
The matter brought before the orator is a conflict, whether in a lawsuit (controversia) or in a political debate (contentio). The function of rhetoric is to spell out the different types of questions that may arise in a conflict. The aim of rhetoric is not to resolve them. It is to equip the orator with strategies and lines of approach so that he can defeat his opponent and win glory and fame.
Plato’s condemnation of rhetoric in the Gorgias (it’s a knack used to gratify the soul with pleasure: 462C) and the Phaedrus (it has no method with which to arrive at the truth: 269D) had no influence on the Romans. It was otherwise with Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
Rhetoric for Aristotle shares the same discursive space as philosophy (or dialectic). Neither of them is concerned with the true and the false but with the apparent and the probable, phainomena and doxa (Aristotle, 2000: 1404a1). That is because both rhetoric and dialectic have to do with matters that are within the cognizance of all humans and are not confined to any special science. Rhetoric has a non-specialized field, and its universality is co-extensive with that of dialectic (354a1–4).
Quintilian (1924) agrees with Aristotle in his Institutiones oratoriae. He remains faithful to the Aristotelian tradition in distinguishing between three kinds of discourse – deliberative, forensic and epideictic – in relation to the audience they address and the end the speaker has in view. One of the elements he adds to this tradition is Hermagoras’s stasis theory, which is significant for my purpose.
By stasis, Hermagoras has in mind a discursive tool the orator uses to make sense of a conflict. A dispute is made intelligible when it is reduced to a series of precise questions so that what is at stake in it can be clearly identified. That is what the orator must focus on in building his attack or defence.13 So, for example, when a dispute arises between the prosecutor’s charge (You did it) and the defendant’s counter-charge (No, I did not do it), the audience or jury will have to decide whether he did it and what he did. The orator will attend to these questions in constructing his discourse in order to persuade the audience or jury one way or the other.
Hermagoras calls his first stasis or question – Did he do it? – conjectural. The facts about the case have to be established or inferred by conjecture before anything else. The second question – What did he do? – is definitional, since once the facts about the case have been established their nature may still be in doubt.
He adds two further questions, one concerned with the quality of the action (e.g. Was it right for the defendant to do this?) and another about the competence of the tribunal to deal with the case at hand. Quintilian reduces this fourfold division of questions to an opposition between two terms, opposing the first question to the last three. The conjectural question is the primary one on which the understanding of the whole case depends. Since this question aims to establish the certain facts of the case, that will determine how the nature and quality of the facts are understood.14 The last three questions are from this standpoint circumstantial.
There is also another method of dividing the status into two classes: according to this, disputes are either about substance (de substantia) or quality (de qualitate). Substance is dealt with by conjecture; for in enquiring into anything, we ask whether it has been done, is being done, or is likely to be done. (Quintilian, 1924: III.6.39)
He reformulates this opposition once more, drawing this time on Theodorus of Gadara. According to Theodorus, there are two basic facts in a dispute that must be identified. The first is addressed by the question peri ousias, the second by the question peri sumbebekoton. Theodorus ‘holds that the question is either as to whether such and such a thing is so (an sit), or is concerned with the accidents of something (de accidentibus) which is an admitted fact: that is to say it is either peri ousias or peri sumbebekoton’ (Quintilian, 1924: III.6.36). Quintilian introduces in this context Aristotle’s categories of being:
Aristotle lays down that there are ten categories on which every question seems to turn. First there is ousia, which Plautus calls essence, the only available translation: under this category we inquire whether a thing is (an sit). Secondly, there is quality, the meaning of which is self-evident. Third comes quantity. (III.6.23)
Courtine (2003: 47) rightly remarks that Quintilian may well recall the strict translation of ousia by essentia. But his interpretation of the question, peri ousias as the orator’s line of approach for establishing the certain and solid facts of a dispute, inevitably leads him to reinstate the expression substantia.
Aristotle’s categories of being find their way into rhetoric with Quintilian in the context of Hermagoras’s stasis theory as discursive tools that furnish the orator with angles of attack and defence in a legal or political dispute. That will prove to be decisive for the nominalistic reception of Aristotle’s Categories in Boethius and others.15 Equally decisive for the history of commentaries on Aristotle from the fifth century ad to the present is the opposition between substantia and accidens, which appears here for the first time.
I have shown that the metaphorical pair solidum/imago articulates the difference between being and non-being in the factical life of the Romans. What is the connection between being and metaphor?
That connection was indirectly addressed in Chapter 3.2 where I argued that being is unthinkable except as a figuration of something or someone, that is, as a figure in which the force of the distinction between the who and the what is suspended. That a figure of speech or metaphor should articulate the difference between being and non-being, or that a figure like the feminine should make being thinkable, suggests that something other must be meant by figure or metaphor than what is ordinarily meant by these terms.
Heidegger briefly analyses the concept of metaphor on at least two occasions, first in his Der Ister lecture and then in Lecture 6 of The Principle of Reason (1955–6). On both of these occasions, he shows that metaphor is a metaphysical concept. In any given circumstance where a metaphor is used, the distinction between the sensuous and the non-sensuous is presupposed.
The idea of ‘transposing’ and of metaphor is based upon the distinguishing, if not complete separation, of the sensible and the nonsensible as two realms that subsist on their own. The setting up of this partition between the sensible and the nonsensible, between the physical and nonphysical is a basic trait of what is called metaphysics and which normatively determines Western thinking. (PR 48)
The sensuous is not something in nature. Something is sensuous insofar as it is the image of something else. The sensuous is an appearance. It is an image that points away from itself to something other.
According to the metaphysical interpretation of art, that is the mode of being of the physical in the work. The river in Hölderlin’s Der Rhein, for instance, is distinguished from the geographical river that goes by that name. Abstracted from nature, the river in the poem is usually seen as an image that conveys a non-sensuous idea or meaning. The sensuous is an image that points away from itself to something non-sensuous.
Accordingly, a metaphor, figure of speech or, generally speaking, a written or spoken symbol – that is, anything that is of the order of the image – is standardly conceived as the becoming-sensible of the non-sensible, as the temporalization or spatialization of a meaning or ideal object (see Derrida, 1982: 227–8). It is the work and product of the imagination, which shares in the sensuous and in the non-sensuous.
However, the pair solidum/imago is not a metaphor in that sense. These terms cannot be interpreted as a pair of images that make sensuous a non-sensuous meaning or content. Far from presupposing the distinction between the sensuous and the non-sensuous, the corporeal and the incorporeal, that turn of phrase first articulates and renders it intelligible in Roman thought.
Following Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Derrida argues in White Mythology that an entire metaphorical language precedes and conditions the philosophical distinction and classification between idea and word, sensible and nonsensible, the literal and the figurative expression (such as the metaphor), and that that language cannot, therefore, still to be called metaphorical.
But ... can these defining tropes that are prior to all philosophical rhetoric and that produce philosophemes still be called metaphors? (Derrida, 1982: 255)
The same question might be posed about the pair solidum/imago, a turn of phrase whose textual use articulates how entities show up, that is, as sensuous or as nonsensuous. Either that turn of phrase cannot be identified with a metaphorical turn of phrase or, providing we insist on thinking of it as a figurative expression, the ‘figurative’ must be thought beyond the opposition between the sensuous and the non-sensuous, that is, beyond metaphysics.
Aristotle says in the Poetics that to produce a good metaphor we must observe a likeness between things. In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche says that a good metaphor (or concept) creates that likeness between things. It posits as equal or similar the unequal or dissimilar (Gleichsetzen des Ungleichen).
What we have in the case at hand is a figure of what is singular in the extreme, unlike anything else in the world, without precedent in nature or history. Perhaps such a figure should in truth be called a non-figure. Is the image of that which lacks a determinable identity as an entity (and, hence, as an image) still an image? I am not sure.
At any rate, the pair solidum/imago institutes the relation to being in the idiomatic language of the Romans. It makes possible the relation between Roman Dasein and entities in general. Far from being an accessory to or ornament of thought, this turn of phrase makes it possible to forget being.
Are we then better served to think of ‘metaphor’ as a condition necessary for being (the light in which entities show up) to have a history? How is this connection to be understood between the turn of phrase and the turn in or of being, the turn between forgetting and remembering, throwness and projection, need and belonging?