Karl Simms
The concepts of metaphor and symbol within the context of hermeneutics are indebted to Hans-Georg Gadamer and, especially, Paul Ricoeur. Both of these thinkers depart from the accepted, or “scientific,” definition of symbol, and both see a fundamental difference between symbols and metaphors: a symbol is not simply a metaphor in miniature, nor is a metaphor simply a symbol writ large; symbols (even if they are expressed through language) are not primarily linguistic, whereas metaphors are fundamentally so. The value of symbols lies in their not referring, or at least, in their not referring in the way that language does, whereas the value of metaphor lies in its character of referring beyond itself.
In “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” Gadamer (1986, 32) writes that “the proper function of reference is to direct our view toward something else that can be experienced or possessed in an immediate way.” But the symbol does not refer in this way; if it did, it would be an allegory. In an allegory, what we say is different from what we mean, but for an allegory to work, the reference must be known in advance. (George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm makes no sense as an allegory to someone unfamiliar with the history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, even though it would still make sense as an animal story.) In the case of a symbol, meanwhile, “the particular represents itself as a fragment of being that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it. Or, indeed, the symbol is that other fragment that has always been sought in order to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life” (Gadamer 1986, 32). This, for Gadamer, is an explanation of the meaning of art, which finds its highest expression in nonrepresentational modern art. Asking “What does it mean?” of a piece of modern art is a false question, since it presupposes that the artwork represents something. But modern art does not represent, it presents—and what it presents is itself. Understanding it is a work of experience: we gain the experience through perceiving the artwork, and arrive at a fuller understanding of ourselves in understanding it. In fact, that is what understanding it consists of, so that the work of interpretation of art traverses the hermeneutic circle. Such art is symbolic for Gadamer; this is what it means to experience symbolism. For this to work, of course, the work of art must be unique (by contrast with a metaphor, which is fundamentally iterable). As Gadamer (1986, 33) summarizes:
The symbolic in general, and especially the symbolic in art, rests upon an intricate interplay of showing and concealing. In its irreplaceability, the work of art is no mere bearer of meaning—as if the meaning could be transferred to another bearer. Rather the meaning of the work of art lies in the fact that it is there.
For Gadamer (1986, 32), this places the symbolic within “the holy order of things.” For Ricoeur, too, the symbolic is both a work of culture and an entry into the order of the sacred. According to Ricoeur, the philosophical problem of symbolism lies in its being tied to our own historical situation, which is to say, modernity. A philosophical analysis of symbols does not have the luxury of going back to first principles in the manner of, say, Descartes, since symbols are already pre-given to us. In modernity, our understanding of the natural world has, through science, increased, while our understanding of what symbols tend to symbolize: defilement, sin, guilt, the triangular relationship between Evil, God, and Man—in short, the sacred—has diminished. It is the task of philosophy in relation to symbols to “forget the forgetting,” and restore their meanings. But this does not mean that we should also forget our modernity: while the originators of the great symbols of culture, lost in the mists of time, simply believed what the symbols meant, it is the task of the modern philosopher to question these meanings through positing such questions as “What do I believe?” in relation to them. This will not result in the meanings of symbols being revealed as false, necessarily—rather, a deeper, more generalizable and generic meaning will come to light.
Ricoeur identifies three “primary” symbols as being particularly important: the stain (or defilement), sin, and guilt. They represent a progression in man’s historic relation to the sacred: the stain is an evil visited upon the sufferer from an exterior force; sin interiorizes an exterior force’s interdiction; guilt wholly interiorizes the process, as a transgression of conscience. In each of these cases, the stain is just a stain, sin is just sin, and guilt is just guilt—these are the literal meanings. But these symbols also have what Ricoeur calls “existential” meanings—of being impure, of being sinful, of being guilty. As Ricoeur (1989, 316) puts it, “to undergo the experience of evil is also to express it in a language, but furthermore, to express it is already to interpret its symbolic expressions.”
Ricoeur wishes to stress, however, that the second, symbolic, meaning can only be arrived at through the first. This is what he means by “the symbol gives” in his formulation “The symbol gives rise to thought”: these two intentional meanings are encapsulated within the symbol; by presenting its literal meaning the symbol gives up its symbolic one. But equally important is the “rise to thought” part of Ricoeur’s formula. Those living at the time when these symbols were current would not have understood them in the same generalized way as we do, which is not to say that they did not understand their symbolic nature at all, but rather that they lived through them heuristically— in other words, the question “What do I believe?” did not arise for them, since they lacked the modern objectivity which enables one to stand off from the phenomenon. “Every symbol,” says Ricoeur (1989, 296), “gives birth to understanding by means of an interpretation.” Symbols, then, are at the very heart of what constitutes hermeneutics. But it is the task of contemporary, critical hermeneutics to achieve understanding in its full human universality, which entails advancing “from living in symbols toward thought that thinks from symbols” (Ricoeur 1989, 297). There are two facets to this. On the one hand, we should be appreciative of the entire mythological structure in which the primary symbols of evil are couched: sin, for example, is embedded within the Adamic myth. Adam and Eve together stand for all people; the allegorical truth that the myth contains is that evil consists in my weakness in the face of my own desires, the serpent (and Eve in relation to Adam) being mere objectifications of those desires for purposes of telling the story. But in grasping this, I have merely replicated what the original culture that produced the allegory has understood. And so, on the other hand, it is the task of contemporary, critical hermeneutics to demythologize the myth, by reading comparatively. Such a comparison reveals an ethical progression from the myth of Oedipus, who defiles the city by his presence, and an anticipation of Christian allegories, such as that of the woman caught in adultery. Oedipus was unaware of his parentage; while being the source of the defilement, he is not “guilty.” Adam and Eve, meanwhile, are sinful before God. But Christ’s invitation to “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” is an appeal to conscience, first and foremost, and therefore exposes the relationship between conscience and guilt, as well as demonstrating that guilt has degrees, in contrast to the absolutes of the impure or the sinful.
This comparative demythologization, then, enables the stain, sin, and guilt to be interpreted in generalized, and generic, terms: as pure exteriority, internalization of the exterior, and pure interiority in relation to evil, respectively (these being the respective ethical foundations of Greek, Judaic, and Christian culture). But where does this hermeneutics lead? Ricoeur’s (1967, 393) answer is to a “rejuvenation of philosophy.” The demythologization of symbols reveals them to be an allegory. But Ricoeur is not satisfied with merely an allegorical interpretation, since once achieved, that interpretation would render the symbols themselves useless—they would become stripped of their meaning. As Gadamer (1986, 32) also points out, no symbol can be merely an allegory. If we simply say, for example, “sin is a transgression of the laws of God,” we have not addressed why those particular symbols—of Adam, Eve, and the serpent—have been used to teach this, and we lose sight of the tragic dimension to the Adamic myth. As Ricoeur writes:
In an allegory, the detour through a figurative expression has a purely didactic or ornamental function. It is always possible to say directly what has been said indirectly out of an intention to teach something or give pleasure. With the genuine symbol, the transfer from the literal to the figural sense is the only means of access.
(Ricoeur 2013, 5)
Ricoeur’s goal is both to remain sensitive to the dimension of meaning realized through the symbol, and to the philosophical meaning of the symbol. Such is the task of a hermeneutic philosophy, or of a philosophical hermeneutics; indeed, this is, for Ricoeur, what philosophical hermeneutics consists of. Thus, we can discern an “irreducible element” to the symbolic: symbols are bound to an experience through which they are lived. Sacred symbols are bound to the cosmos as understood by the culture using them; psychoanalytic symbols, meanwhile, are bound to the psychic life of the analysand, while poetic symbols are bound by “the need to bring to language modes of being that ordinary vision obscures or even represses” (Ricoeur 1976, 60). “The bound character of symbols”, says Ricoeur (1976, 61), “makes all the difference between a symbol and a metaphor,” since a metaphor is “a free invention of discourse.”
As with the symbolic, so too with metaphor is Ricoeur aligned with Gadamer. In Truth and Method, Gadamer (2004, 429) writes of the “fundamental metaphoricity of language.” “The genius of verbal consciousness,” writes Gadamer, “consists in being able to express … similarities.” As a person’s experience widens, they look for similarities between things; indeed, Gadamer goes so far as to say that this is what constitutes experience as such. This places Gadamer at odds with the empiricist tradition of, for example, Locke, who held that verbal consciousness was a process of classifying particular concepts under general ones. But for Gadamer (2004, 428), “if a person transfers an expression from one thing to the other, he has in mind something that is common to both of them; but this in no way needs to be generic universality.” Being able to express similarities is fundamental to the experience of language, and it is a peculiarly human trait that we are able to do this without necessarily assuming that these similarities subsume two species under one genus—rather, in expressing these similarities we are noticing what it is about the concepts that are culturally significant for us. Such is metaphor, and it follows that the metaphorical meaning of a word is as much its real sense as the literal meaning.
Gadamer’s theory owes much to Aristotle, and Ricoeur, too, is heavily indebted to Aristotle for his theory of metaphor, which is not inconsistent with Gadamer’s, but which develops the hermeneutics of metaphor in much greater detail. Ricoeur compares Aristotle’s theory of metaphor in his Rhetoric with his theory of mimesis in his Poetics. He notices that, for Aristotle, metaphor is to simile what mimesis is to imitation. Mimesis is not imitation as such, but, rather, a representation. The difference lies in that a representation is a work, and correspondingly, the interpreter must also perform a work of interpretation to understand it: how and in what ways does a mimetic work of art represent that which it represents? Likewise, a metaphor does not merely assert that something is like something but, rather, asserts that one thing is another thing. The work of interpretation lies, again, in discovering how and in what ways the metaphor and that which it is metaphorical of are similar. Granted, a simile does this also, but similes tend to make the likeness explicit, and in any case do not involve a “scandal of truth.” If we say “Achilles is like a lion,” then that proposition is empirically testable, and thus has a simple semantics of being either true or false. If, however, we say “Achilles is a lion,” then clearly in terms of simple semantics, this is merely false. But there is a level at which this statement is true; Ricoeur calls it the poetic level of language. Metaphorical language used in this way projects the interpreter into an imaginative realm in which, through the freedom of thought, she discovers the ways in which the metaphorical statement is true (Achilles has qualities that are shared by lions as culturally received, such as strength, courage, nobility, and so forth). Through metaphors, then, the interpreter is projected into the world of the fictive, and hence of narrative. Every metaphor, we could say, is a micronarrative.
But Ricoeur is not content with resting with this essentially Aristotelian model, since it treats metaphor merely at the level of the word (one word is substituted for another; “Achilles” for “lion”). Ricoeur also draws on the work of I. A. Richards (1936) and Max Black (1962) to consider how the meaning of metaphor is extended over the whole sentence in which it occurs. Following Richards and Black, Ricoeur points out that metaphors entail a “tenor” or “focus,” which is the underlying idea, and a “vehicle” or “frame,” which is the idea through which the underlying idea is arrived at. To take the Achilles example, the underlying idea is the strength, courage, and nobility of Achilles, and the vehicle or frame is the idea of a lion. It is not just that one word is understood through another, but also that one idea is understood through another. These ideas do not simply correspond to the meanings (references) of the words: what are being referred to in the metaphor are not the defining characteristics of Achilles and the lion, respectively (that one is a human warrior with a weak heel and the other is a feline animal, etc.), but merely their perceived shared qualities. Moreover, these can only be discerned through comprehending the whole sentence in which the metaphor is couched: to take Black’s example, if we say “We ploughed through the meeting,” on the one hand the word ploughed is metaphorical while the other words are not, but on the other hand ploughed cannot be comprehended as a metaphor without the surrounding context. The upshot of this is that metaphor is not merely a means by which something is understood, but the means by which understanding is increased. To revert to the “Achilles” example, for evermore (ever since Aristotle used it as an example), Achilles will be known not only as strong, courageous, and noble, but also as lionlike, a quality which does not correspond to the sum of its constituent parts. And there is a two-way traffic between tenor/focus and vehicle/frame: we remarked earlier that the qualities of the lion that come into play—strength, courage, and nobility—are qualities of lions as culturally received. But it is precisely the creation of metaphors such as “Achilles is a lion” that causes lions to be received culturally in this way: lions are not really courageous and noble, since those are peculiarly human attributes, and lions are only strong compared to some other animals (specifically, us), not compared to other lions. In other words, the attribution of lionlike qualities to Achilles leads to the anthropomorphization of the lion.
In saying all of this, we are well on the way from metaphors examined at the sentential level to metaphors at the level of discourse, if by “discourse” we mean the world of the text. For Ricoeur, as for Gadamer, metaphors are central to the process of understanding as such. For Ricoeur, living (newly coined) metaphors are preferable to dead metaphors: a slogan in The Rule of Metaphor which may be read as a counterpart to The Symbolism of Evil’s “The symbol gives rise to thought” is “Lively expression is that which expresses existence as alive” (Ricoeur 1977, 43). Lively expression is expression that is constantly creating new metaphors. Such a language is elevated, it is “poetic” language. It is the language of truth. This does not mean that it is the language of scientific truth, since clearly Achilles was not, literally, a lion. But—and here Ricoeur is faithful to a Heideggerian conception of poetry—it is the language that is true to what it means to be alive. Metaphorical truth, for Ricoeur, is “tensile”—it is produced by a series of tensions, for example, between tenor/focus and vehicle/frame, or between literal and metaphorical interpretations. The most important of these tensions for producing and defining metaphorical truth is that held within the copula “is”: a metaphor, says Ricoeur (1977, 249), “preserves the ‘is not’ within the ‘is’.” Arriving at metaphorical truth is not a matter of judgment on the interpreter’s part (if I were to judge the truth of “Achilles is a lion” I would either have to declare it false, or accept the contradiction of his being at once a lion and not a lion). It is, rather, a question of suspending, or bracketing off, my judgment regarding the literal truth of the proposition. Understanding metaphor is thus a phenomenology, a phenomenological interpretation.
What, then, is the relationship between metaphors and symbols? While being superficially similar in standing for something, they tend to function through their respective histories in an opposite manner. A metaphor is a linguistic innovation, which is subject to what Ricoeur calls “evanescence”: what is at first vibrant becomes, over the course of time, trivial, and then dead. A symbol, meanwhile, is not innovative, but already preexisting, with a lost origin. It does not fade over time, however, but rather maintains its cultural potency, albeit reappearing in differing forms.
Nevertheless, metaphors tend to keep themselves alive by disseminating themselves over “a whole array of intersignifications” (Ricoeur 1976, 64); although each individual metaphor may die, the power of the whole network is retained. An example is God in the Hebraic tradition, who is called variously King, Father, Husband, Lord, Shepherd, Judge, Rock, Fortress, Redeemer, and Suffering Servant. These are dominant metaphors within that tradition: their sheer diversity ensures that they engender an infinite number of interpretations, which keeps the network alive. Moreover, “certain fundamental human experiences make up an immediate symbolism that presides over the most primitive metaphorical order” (Ricoeur 1976, 65). There is an originary symbolism which “adhere[s] to the most immutable manner of being in the world, whether it be a question of above and below, the cardinal directions, the spectacle of the heavens, terrestrial localisation, houses, paths, fire, wind, stones, or water.” These symbol systems “constitute a reservoir of meaning”; the network of metaphors enables a culture to draw out this meaning, at least partially. The great symbols of culture are embedded in the poetic language of our tales and myths, and it is through understanding this metaphorical superstructure that we gain access to the symbolic infrastructure.
Thus, according to Ricoeur (1976, 68), “there is more in the metaphor than in the symbol,” while equally, “there is more in the symbol than in the metaphor.” The metaphor “brings to language the implicit semantics of the symbol” (Ricoeur 1976, 69): the metaphorical utterance clarifies the assimilation of one thing to another and of us to things that the symbol confuses. But “metaphors are just the linguistic surface of symbols”: just as Ricoeur welcomes the freedom of thought that metaphors lend us, so too does he welcome the boundedness of symbols, that their semantic, or literal, meaning can only be referred back to the non-semantic, symbolic meaning. Symbol and metaphor are thus mutually dependent: “the symbol gives rise to thought,” while metaphor “forces conceptual thought to think more” (Ricoeur 1977, 303).