Metaphorology

from The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, by the Brothers Quay

One of my overarching interests is in the images that have captivated and continue to captivate us human beings, and thereby mold our perception of the world and everything in it. When these images are manifest as metaphors, we can speak of the study of them as a sort of metaphorology, following the coinage of Hans Blumenberg, who offers various “paradigms for a metaphorology” that have had a decisive influence on my own studies. For further discussion and some bibliography, please see the link below to the working group on comparative metaphorology that I’ve started together with my friend and former colleague, Prof. Boqun Zhou.

Here, for the time being, I’ll just offer some pieces from another rich field of metaphors.

the ship of thought

I’m slowly accumulating some addenda to Hans Blumenberg’s Shipwreck with Spectator, to explore a little further the uses of metaphors of shipwreck and related phenomena. As with everything described on here, any inquiries and contributions would be most welcome! My focus, following Blumenberg, is on the philosopher as either the spectator of shipwreck (most memorably developed in classical antiquity by Lucretius) or the victim (e.g. Nietzsche), but I’m also collecting evidence for the image in earlier poetry, such as sympotic poetry dealing with the storm-tossed ship of state, or the likes of Empedocles’ “perfect harbors of Kypris [Aphrodite]” (Κύπριδος . . . τελείοις ἐν λιμένεσσιν, DK B98.3) and Socrates’ “second sailing” in Plato’s Phaedo. The sources so far are mostly from ancient Greece, but one particularly intriguing case comes from Francis Bacon’s treatment of Greek philosophy. Taking up the notion of the weight of antiquity, Bacon doesn’t do what one might expect him to, namely to claim that it is something to be cast overboard, the swifter to sail to new seas. Instead, he claims that the real weight was lost to the waves long ago, that what seems to be of tremendous gravity is in fact the lightest of antiquity’s remains. And so, as Blumenberg noted (in his essay “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality”), “the metaphor of the stream of time was used destructively by Francis Bacon in attacking the assurance that truth was to be the daughter of time; out of this stream, only what was light enough not to sink into the river reached our present position, according to Bacon—the metaphorical proof of tradition’s failure with respect to the burden of truth” (Blumenberg 1997: 87-8). What Blumenberg didn’t make note of is that Bacon’s reiterations of this “metaphorical proof” elaborate upon his beloved image of the shipwreck, so that “when on the inundation of barbarians into the Roman empire human learning had suffered shipwreck, then the systems of Aristotle and Plato, like planks of lighter and less solid material, floated on the waves of time, and were preserved” (Novum Organon 77). The real weight of antiquity belonged, in Bacon’s estimation, to the early Greek philosophers (or Presocratics), whose fragmentary remains have often been taken to hint at unplumbable depths. I’ll be giving a paper on this topic, entitled “Francis Bacon on the Sunken Weights and Philosophical Flotsam of Antiquity,” at the upcoming conference The Weight of Antiquity: Early-Modern Classicisms, 23 February 2019, at the University of Chicago.

THE SHIP OF FOOLS

The most amusing side of the history that Blumenberg began to trace begins with Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Ship of Fools (Daß Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam or Stultifera Navis). A nice collection of instances of the image ranging from Plato through Echo and the Bunnymen can be found here.

boatload with BYSTANDER

the boat of evacuated consciousness?

A new take on Caetano Veloso’s song, The Empty Boat.