XLIII Международная филологическая научная конференция

Thinking in Metaphors: Transcendentalist Prose from the Perspectives of Stylistics, Cognitive Linguistics, and Philosophy

Dieter Schulz
Докладчик
профессор
Heidelberg University

ауд. 6, Административный корпус
2014-03-13
11:00 - 11:30

Ключевые слова, аннотация

Traditionally relegated to the realm of stylistics, figurative language has recently come to be recognized as an integral feature of thought. Drawing on the work of cognitive linguists (notably Lakoff/Johnson and Kövecses) and philosophers (notably Blumenberg and Konersmann), I wish to show how key metaphors of Transcendentalist prose carry considerable conceptual weight. In fact, the very notion of 'transcendence' combines a sensory image – walking across a boundary – with a concept usually taken to be highly abstract.



Тезисы

Thanks to the work of philosophers and cognitive linguists – notably Hans Blumenberg in Germany (Blumenberg 1960) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the United States (Lacoff, Johnson 1980) – we now appreciate the degree to which even the most abstract concepts rely on metaphors derived from sensory experience. As Ralf Konersmann, a former student of Blumenberg’s, explains in the Introduction to his handbook of philosophical metaphors (Konersmann 2007), concepts and metaphors serve different functions, but there is no need to play the former against the latter as they possess equal value in constituting our ideas. Along the same lines, in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) Lakoff and Johnson have proposed an intellectual approach that forgoes the traditional privileging of abstract concepts and instead tries to do justice to the “corporeal” dimension of language and the physical grounding of thought, with metaphor advancing from an ornamental position to the fore of linguistic and philosophical analysis. Given these developments, Emerson’s reflections on the importance of the imagination and figural language appear a good deal more pertinent today than they may have seemed in his time. In Nature (1836) he claims that “words are signs of natural facts”, and that “every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance”. If in an early Journal entry he still sounds a bit diffident and apologetic about his “strong imagination” as hopefully offsetting a deficiency in his “reasoning faculty”, the later Emerson unabashedly claims equal if not superior authority for the former; not only do they possess equal value, but they also need each other. As he explains in the late essay Poetry and Imagination (1876), Athe term genius, when used with emphasis, implies imagination; use of symbols, figurative speech. A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.