The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricœur

The Rule of Metaphor Reviews

• 
  Alex Lee

  I've decided that Ricoeur is more of a meta-rhetorician, a philosopher of rhetoric in the sense that unlike many other rhetoricians and semioticians, he doesn't do any hard low level analysis himself. He may analyze terms, other's uses of terms, and with encyclopedic mastery, run the gambit of tearing through collected works of so many others to pull the threads he needs to weave a larger discourse, but he almost never takes you through line by line synthesis and application. Stranger too, he never presents you a diagramatic appraisal of the field. He presents you choice snippets and then at the end provides you his tact conclusion. Ever so polite, his writing generally doesn't explode off the page either.
  
  In this book, he tackles metaphor. Tries to find a place for it, and in the end results in universalizing it. While he goes through the figure of metaphor across many discourses relating to metaphor (poetics, tropes, semantics of word and discourse, and finally reference and philosophy) Ricoeur is able to construct a place for metaphor such that metaphor is a kind of column, a null point from which each of these fields can be organized and made coherent. His conclusions is that the zero sum signifier of the copula (to be) is only a nullified designator of which metaphor is the rule -- not the exception. Copula's nullification is only made possible because of the height of its position within semantic conception -- metaphors serve more as the general binder for various arrangements. In this way, Ricoeur flips the relation of metaphor and positivist discourse on its head; metaphor is the general mode of presentation.
  
  While this seems to presents a kind of detachment of language from the field of designation (or reality is composed only of language) it would be a mistake to jump to this relativist position, as Ricoeur makes clear, words need to be of something in order for there to be the stability of difference, even if expression can always be overcoded through metaphorization.
  
  What Ricoeur wants to talk about rather, is the possibility of discourse. Rhetoric doesn't decide what is said it only describes what it is possible to say, and how we can connect one part to another, to get to One or many ones, although for Ricoer there is no One, although as he notes Heidigger and many others are looking still for the magical word, the One that will designate One upon which justification is self-justified without appeal to semantic slippage.
  
  All in all, I found this book to be a good read, although I was less interested in what others have said than what he says. Ricoeur still remains worth while to read, though he is less flashy and in that way more down to earth as one who goes through the widely ignored field of rhetoric to find the stabilizing struts of discourse itself, at a tactical level, rather than the starry-eyed strategies of ones like Deleuze, Foucault or Zizek.
• 
  Mary Fisher

  The first time I read this book 1998-99 I read it badly and did not realize until I was more than half way through that I had read it badly. so I started from the beginning again and realized how important it was for me, especially with Time and Narrative.
  
  But it was key for my understanding of use of language as the biblical canon developed over more than a millennia.
  
  I see it as a key book for understanding theological hermeneutics. Along with Ricoeur's use of Frank Kermode' concept that the end of the narrative defines how the narrative is to be read, Gadamer's "ontology of play" and Barth's first volume (both parts) it was central to my understanding how we can claim to build a theological hermeneutics ( though as Colin Gunton used to point out Barth's first volume is weak on pneumatology. )
• 
  Alan Lindsay

  I’ve finished the rule of metaphor—a book whose conclusions re: philosophy and metaphor are—one must use a metaphor—enlightening. One can take from this work of philosophy the fact of the necessary failure of philosophy which is an effect of the failure of language, the inability of language to articulate even once the thing the speculative philosopher desires, attempts to articulate. Metaphor is the conduit from the known to the unknown. Metaphor always erases what it writes as it writes, leaving only its trace. The end of philosophy leads to poetry—the next rung on language’s ladder. Poetry the cauldron of metaphor too must fail. The final step to being is silence. Knowing, inarticulate, smiling silence.
  
• 
  Christopher

  Hard going, but presented in a reader friendly manner, really I only ploughed on through as this book forms a pair with the Time & Narrative volumes, which is where more of my interest really lies.
  
  Check: 'predication' + 'syntagmatic' + a host of literary terms.
  
  Get the most out of this linked collection of studies by reading the original texts that Ricoeur covers.
  
  Fascinating to follow the development of his argument, stretching from Aristotle up to more contemporary treatments of metaphor.
  
  Useful to read the introduction and appendix first to help get the motivation behind the texts' production.
  
  
• 
  Czarny Pies

  Let me explain Ricoeur's system of the living metaphor ("Métaphore vive") using my personal experience as a school bus driver. Two years ago, I arrived at a home to pick up Ali a new passenger. Ali sprinted out of the house at a high speed that surprised me and my passengers. I then shouted "Safe at first" and then said to the other passengers: "Ali ran like a Blue Jay trying to beat the throw to first base."
  My complete phrase was a metaphor. A Blue Jay is a member of Toronto's professional baseball team. After hitting the ball, the batter has to arrive at first base before a fielder from the other team retrieves it and throws it to first base. Arriving before the ball is referred to metaphorically as "beating the throw." The batter who fails to "beat" the throw is retired from the inning. "Beating the throw" requires that the batter run very rapidly.
  Most of my other passengers who knew the game of baseball laughed at my metaphor. First Ali had run very fast but inappropriately as there was no need for him to run quickly. Second, like the baseball batter who is allowed to run only along the chalk-marked baseline, Ali had run a remarkably straight line.
  The first time I used the metaphor it was under Ricoeur's system "living" in that it was new and it possessed a predicative ("prédicatif") value in that it enounces that Ali's speed was effective. I have repeated the statement "Safe at first" over 300 times since I first used it as Ali continues sprint onto my bus whenever my bus arrives. In Ricoeur's term, my metaphor is now dead ("morte") not because it is stale but because my expression has become part of the lexicon on my bus.
  I personally would advise the GR member to read Ferdinand de Saussure's "Cours de linguistique générale" which regards the metaphor as a substitution for the true word and to not bother with this longwinded philosophical essay.
  
  
• 
  Jack Hayne

  Chapter 8 and the Appendix are valuable.
• 
  N Perrin

  The Rule of Metaphor is a sequence of eight studies which begins with the history of rhetoric, moves into an analysis of metaphor, a reflection on the nature of language, before offering an entire redescription of speculative discourse and the nature of reality.
  
  Most works of philosophy begin with profound observations before subsiding into repetitions of lesser themes. Ricoeur accomplishes the reverse by beginning with interesting exegesis of Plato that eventually culminates in a potentially comprehensive thematization of Western thought and unthought. He even sets aside a section on the analogia entis debate where he thoroughly demolishes the presupposed formulations of being and participation through a genealogical evaluation of the metaphorical concepts employed within the structures of theological discourse. Honestly, he made Barth and von Balthasar repartee on the subject seem completely trite.
  
  More than most great philosophers, Ricoeur has really done his homework. He quite offhandedly engages with the theoreticians of linguistics, psychology, rhetoric, literary criticism, and phenomenological hermeneutics while also giving a thorough treatment of the relevant dimensions of the history of Western philosophy. And, he also throws in a variety of literary and poetic allusions to top it off.
  
  Because Ricoeur is so precise in his treatment of his subject matter, it is impossible to really summarize the contours of his argument. He calls into question the semantic/semiotic focus on words/signs instead calling attention to the holism of sentences and texts. He makes persuasive claims regarding the omnipresence of metaphor in language and thought. He exerts great pressure on exploring the effects and operations of predication and the copula. He unveils the inherent tension within the meaning of truth, resemblance, and the is. He deconstructs and redescribes the false dichotomies of Western philosophy (inner/outer, subject/object, realism/nominalism, reason/emotion, language/object, etc.) within an illuminating revitalization of the capacity of words to describes things and an equally enlightening recontextualization of speculative discourse in conversation with poetic metaphoricity.
  
  Wittgenstein and Heidegger seem crass in light of Ricoeur. He's a daringly provocative thinker.
• 
  Ben

  Well, I'm sure this book is better than I rated it, but it rather exposed my lack of philosophical training. Still, despite really following about half of it, I found it a very useful review of the development of metaphor theory from Aristotle to the mid-twentieth century. I learned quite about about new (to me) philosophers like Max Black and French schools of thought.
• 
  Mary

  Ugh. Why are the continentalists do dang difficult to read? If they really loved poetry of language, couldn't they practice a little of it? Still, it's nice to get the perspective of this Structuralist as well as heaping quotes from theorists like Jakobson and Max Black to round out my education.
• 
  Joe Danielewicz

  Too technical for non linguists
• 
  Linda

  An important precursor to the more well-known Lakoff and Johnson work on metaphor theory. Particularly interesting when read in conjunction with Derrida’s White Mythology and Retrait of Metaphor (there’s a snarky-sparring match between the two men which is hard to follow but worth attempting). As a non-linguist though, it’s really tough going, and probably not the best place to go to learn about metaphor.
• 
  Quiver

  Recommended (but not necessary) preparatory reading for Ricoeur's three-volume Time and Narrative . The richest, most comprehensive classic overview out there.
• 
  Carl

  I love Ricoeur and enjoyed his take on metaphor in his slim volume "Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning", and I'm interested in the Cognitive Linguistic take on metaphor, so I hope to read this as well. Actually, Gary Holland recently did an analysis of skaldic kennings using Cog Ling metaphor theory, and my dissertation is all about skaldic poetics, so it could be that this whole area is a chapter waiting to be concieved. I'd better read fast.
  
  Nov 2008 update-- have read the first chapter and part of the next and am enjoying it so far! He spends a lot of time on Aristotle, as with his Time and Narrative volume 1. I think those two works, plus the short Interpretation Theory, share many of the same concerns, and they were all written roughly in the same period of his career (well, over the course of maybe 15 years, but all coming in the period after he took the linguistic turn himself and started bringing structuralism and post-structuralism into his hermeneutics). Rule of Metaphor also has a good review of his career up to that point in the appendix.
• 
  Marc

  Tout ça pour ça...
  
  A whole lot of wearisome (but minute) studies to end on a totally idealistic (and unfunded) conclusion. I was not really enlightened about what metaphor was all about.
• 
  Ivan Iordanov

  A grate and important read...
• 
  Dean Allison

  Stars are meaningless. The book is so in love with its own content. I don't believe that it is talking of metaphor.