Andrew Hines on Metaphor and Truth
The Journal of the History of Ideas blog features a fascinating interview by Jonathon Catlin of our author Andrew Hines, whose book Metaphor in European Philosophy after Nietzsche: An Intellectual History (Studies In Comparative Literature 54) appeared with Legenda last October. The full interview, entitled 'Truth Is a Mobile Army of Metaphors', can be read here, but just as a taste:
I think we grasp the usefulness of metaphors, whether as writers, academics, politicians, or public speakers, when we realize that we are never fully in command of them. The tendency for ideological metaphors to create false immediacy is the tendency to forget that metaphor, like myth, is never attributable to a single author. When Romeo metaphorically compares Juliet’s beauty to light in the famous balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, we can attribute Shakespeare as the author of that bit of verse. However, the metaphor of light, whether for beauty, goodness, truth, or knowledge, is the province of the history of the English language and, more broadly, an abundance of languages who use similar metaphors.
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