Metaphor-statement and other figures of speech
10
Jun
Paul Ricoeur makes a deep analysis of what he calls the
“Rhétorique generale” as one that reserves only to metalogisms that which incorporates discourses, beyond which there are metasememas, which is a type of figure of speech that modifies the meaning of a word .
Just to give an example within the philosophy of metasemema, the word eidos from Greek culture translated as idea, became in modernity something else that it was for the Greeks.
The importance of this metaphor-statement is said by Ricoeur himself: “the most apt to show the deep kinship, in terms of statements, between metaphor, allegory, parable and fable and, for the same reason, it allows us to open this entire set of figures – metasememas and metalogisms” (Ricoeur, 205, p. 265), while a good part of the discourses (Ricoeur cites Retórique Generale) are reserved only for metalogisms.
The metalogisms are the logics that are beyond the figures of languages, for example an allegory, so Ricoeur creates for the first the concept of a trope, where the meaning of words only changes while the second conflicts with reality itself.
For this, he uses the figure of the “drunken boat” by Rimbaud, who used the expression “the drunken boat joined the great solitary sailboat” (p. 264), which “are allegories of Malraux and Gaulle, as these are neither boats or sailboats”, explains Ricoeur: “the tension is not in the proposition, but in the context”.
The impact of this analysis, as Ricoeur himself points out, is that the “deviation” of the word carried out by the metasememe, the metaphorical utterance “re-establishes the meaning” (p. 265).
This semantic impact “which concerns the entire utterance, so it is necessary to name the entire utterance as a metaphor with its new meaning, and not only the paradigm shift that focuses on one word the mutation of the meaning of the entire utterance” (p. 265) the clearest explanation of his metaphor-statement.
The long analysis made by Ricoeur, by authors known as the classics (Aristotle and Plato), Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, and reasonably known as J. Dubois, F. Edeline, and others little known as Le Guern and Jean Cohen, makes it his own complex but very important work.
The great merit and importance of the deep and hermeneutic analysis of metaphor as the center of the question about current narratives, which involve the linguistic use of various figures of languages such as allegories, parables and metonyms, is shown on page 275, illustrated above, and beyond this discourse to establish a high goal as the one that penetrates the “ineffable”.
RICOEUR, P. Metáfora Viva. Living Metaphor. Brazil, São Paulo, trans. Dion David Macedo. 2nd ed., Ed. Loyola. 2005.
