Review 6: Passover Imagery in 1 Corinthians

The final main chapter is on 1 Corinthians in Jane Patterson's Keeping the Feast. Previous chapters reviewed include:

• Introduction
• Sacrifice as Metaphor in Paul
• Jewish and Greco-Roman Sacrifice
• The Meaning of Sacrifice
• Sacrificial Giving in Philippians

1. Chapter 5 is titled, "1 Corinthians: The Community That Keeps the Feast." The previous chapter applied Patterson's understanding of sacrifice and metaphor to Philippians. This chapter does the same with 1 Corinthians.

Her aim in this chapter is to show that "metaphors relating to the Passover appear to bring together a number of Paul's counsels in 1 Corinthians, and to offer a set of associations to guide the community's ethical reflections in the future" (117). The chapter is largely set out by looking at the metaphors in 1 Corinthians section by section, following the rhetorical structure set out by Margaret Mitchell.

“Entailments of metaphors of the Passover (leaven, holiness, unity, freedom, wilderness, blood, covenant, remembrance) challenge the church at Corinth to become a community of belonging, to God and one another, by imaginatively placing themselves both within the exodus narrative and within the ongoing community of commemoration” (157). There is the essence of this chapter. Since I have a tendency to ask questions like, "What were the earliest layers of this book?" I tend to see the chapter on Philippians as very early, probably the inspiration for the book (I'm picturing this as originally being a dissertation). So the chapter on Philippians seems sloppier to me (sorry). By the time the chapter on 1 Corinthians was written, it feels like a bit greater sophistication might have developed. Mind you, this might all be in my mind. So she doesn't try to sweep all the metaphors of 1 Corinthians into a paschal pattern but recognizes a “layering” of metaphors.

Patterson finds sacrificial imagery and imagery relating to the Passover as far as chapter 13. As with Philippians, it is not clear to me whether the Passover plays as strong a role in the meaning of 1 Corinthians as Patterson sees. As far as the first four chapters, she takes the phrase logos tou theou in 1:18 as an expression of the “logic” of the cross rather than the “message about the cross.” Although she does not identify this logic with the later Passover metaphor, she believes it works in concert with it. Not sure I agree. For the time being, I'm sticking with the message of the cross.

Other images in the first main proof of the letter (1:18-4:21) similarly work in concert: the community as a building and the community as a temple. She sees an allusion to the scapegoat of Yom Kippur in 4:13. These two paragraphs were fascinating.

2. Certainly she is correct to see imagery relating to Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread in 1 Corinthians 5. She rightly notes that this sacrificial imagery is not principally about atonement. For example, the call to unity properly characterized those who kept the Passover feast. There was a preparation necessary to celebrate the Passover, so the Corinthians needed to prepare themselves properly for their ongoing life together. “The use of a metaphor of Passover, in a letter devoted to rebuilding true community among the congregation at Corinth, undergirds arguments against divisiveness by focusing on behavior within the community that Paul regards as corrupting” (135).

I don't know if I believe that the Passover metaphor lingered in Paul’s mind beyond 1 Corinthians 5. Patterson sees synergies with the purity and sanctification language of 1 Corinthians 6 and 7. She sees a synergy in the “higher slavery” to Christ in chapter 7. The “puffing up” of the Corinthians in chapter 8 is antithetical to the right kind of preparation for the feast. Just not really sure about this.

1 Corinthians 10 does evoke imagery of Israel just after the exodus. For Patterson, there is a consistency in this imagery, because “Paul continues to map the experiences of the Corinthian community onto those of the Israelites who were delivered from bondage in Egypt on the night of the first Passover sacrifice, wandered in the wilderness, and then kept the Passover immediately upon entry into the land” (145).

The Lord’s Supper was likely a Passover meal. She has helped me out with the historical Jesus here by pointing out that “The Passover is the only sacrifice that is set distinctly for nighttime” (150). Scholars like Hans Conzelmann and Richard Horsley have denied a connection to the Passover in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. Of course she disagrees. I think she would say that the kind of sacrifice in view is not an atoning sacrifice but a covenant making and restoring sacrifice. Maybe I'm groggy but thought she could have been clearer here.

Concluding Chapter
3. In the conclusion of chapter 7, Patterson does not provide a thoroughgoing study of sacrificial metaphors in Romans, but she does suggest the kinds of conclusions such a study might bring. “The use of cultic metaphors in Romans is as contextually specific and rhetorically strategic as those of Philippians and 1 Corinthians” (161). She sees a number of “partial frequencies” or sacrificial resonances in Romans, with a wide variety of sacrifices in view: Yom Kippur, the Akedah, the firstfruits, the shelamim and more.

Although she does not develop the idea, she stakes her claim with those who emphasize that the Jewish sacrificial system “was about life, not death, and that the modern preoccupation with the death of the victim is misplaced” (165). Meanwhile, none of the metaphors of Romans in any way undermine the continued functioning of the Jerusalem Temple.

So I personally really liked this book. I learned a lot. She gave me a lot of good fuel for thought.

Review 3: Jewish and Greco-Roman Sacrifice

I continue to read Jane Patterson's Keeping the Feast today. Previous chapters reviewed include:

• Introduction
• Sacrifice as Metaphor in Paul

1. Chapter 2 is titled, "Sacrifice as Greco-Roman and Jewish Practice." In this chapter she looks at what she has called the "entailments" of sacrificial metaphor both in broader Greco-Roman and in specifically Jewish sacrificial practices. The audiences both at Corinth and Philippi participated in both symbolic universes. As Gentiles, the Greco-Roman entailments of sacrifice were their cultural default.

Paul was of course enculturating them to more specifically Jewish entailments, although the two were not at all entirely distinct. Paul was "grounding his communities in a Jewish matrix of meaning" (35). On the whole, "the sacrificial metaphors he uses are intended to underscore the invitation to the Gentiles to become part of the people of the Jewish God, YHWH" (36).

2. The metaphors of sacrifice in Philippians, Patterson argues, had the greater degree of overlap between the Jewish and Greco-Roman frames of reference. In Philippians, the shelamim or thank offerings of Judaism overlapped significantly with the predominant nature of Greco-Roman sacrifices as commensal in nature. That is, Greco-Roman sacrifices provided an opportunity for celebration and feasting with the god in question.

Patterson spends several pages exploring the general functions of sacrifice in the Greco-Roman world, which she effectively divides into two categories: commensal sacrifices and covenant sacrifices, the first of which was by far the most common. She also notes the critique of sacrifice that existed in the Greco-Roman world.

In the commensal sacrifice, a portion of the meat is offered to the god, followed by a communal meal filled with merriment and joy. Thus, "Greek sacrifices had mainly to do with cuisine" (57), and some descriptions of Greek sacrifice almost sound like recipes. In such celebrations, "the boundary between human beings and the gods seems to disappear" (38). The god joins the celebration.

Less commonly, what some call "covenantal" sacrifices have to do with moments where a covenant is either made or broken. In such cases, the violence of sacrifice is highlighted, an element missing from the commensal sacrifice. "The consequence of a broken oath are shame and violent death for the perpetrator, and these consequences radiate out from him to all his family" (42), Patterson notes of what would happen to a person who might break covenant with Zeus in The Iliad.

Some have of course seen parallels in some Greek critiques of sacrifice to Paul's sacrificial language. Yet even a philosopher like Epicurus, who did not believe that the Greek gods were real, saw sacrifices as central to civic and public life. One of Patterson's central claims in this book is that "Paul's use of cultic metaphors relies upon the power of the practice, not upon its denigration" (43). "Paul was using metaphors of sacrifice at the same time that he participated in the cult itself" (48).

4. Next she turns to the Jewish sacrificial system. Patterson argues that while the whole burnt offering of the Jewish system has pride of place in the thinking of the priestly layer of the Jewish Scriptures, the shelamim reflected a much more "customary form of sacrifice in actual practice, the offering most frequently experienced by Jews" (47). Another central thesis of the book is that "when Paul refers to sacrifice in Philippians, without any qualifier, it is my contention that his repeated language of rejoicing suggests that he has the shelamim in mind" (47).

Some of the entailments of sacrifices of thanksgiving were festive joy and celebration. They reflected the whole-hearted dedication of the offerer and an intimate relationship with God and one's community. There was often a fragrance associated with them. These entailments "communicate metaphorically across a wide spectrum of ancient cultic experience" (53) and thus made thank-offerings an effective image for Paul to use with the Philippians.

5. The chapter ends with a discussion of the entailments of the more specifically Jewish sacrifice made at Passover. At its root, the sacrifice was probably apotropaic in nature, used to avert evil forces (56). In that sense it has some of the nature of a covenant sacrifice. It thus reinforces the dangers of breaking the covenant and binds together the people of Israel as a unified whole (57). Although the rite may have originally taken place in and around people's homes, at the time of Paul it took place in the Temple courts.

In that sense, there may be a stronger connection than might at first appear between the Passover metaphor of 1 Corinthians 5 and Paul's claim that the Corinthians are a temple of the Lord. The joining of Passover with the Feast of Unleavened Bread suggests an entailment of purity concern connected with the Passover metaphor. Other entailments of the Passover metaphor are those of liberation and of return to faithfulness.

Review 2: Sacrifice as Metaphor in Paul

Reading Jane Patterson's Keeping the Feast today. My thoughts on the Introduction are here.

1. Chapter 1 is entitled, "Sacrifice as Metaphor in Pauline Rhetoric." In this chapter she reviews some of the main theories of metaphor from the ancients to today while illustrating them in light of Paul's use of sacrificial metaphor. [1] Then she briefly engages how such metaphors might interact with the rhetorical nature of Paul's writings.

One observation at this point of her book is that these chapters are short and sweet. One wonders if she was asked to truncate longer dissertation chapters, whether she is only warming up, or whether this is her writing style. It of course makes for excellent reading. One gets the point. One gets a good overview of the subject. And there are plenty of references for further study. Frankly, it's my kind of book.

2. This chapter reveals one of her main goals in writing this book. "It is my hope that this study may recover some of the shock and tension of the original use of sacrificial metaphors in Paul's letters" (28). We have become so accustomed to the doctrinalization of sacrifice as a metaphor that we forget that this image once was fresh and unheard of. At first, Jesus was cruelly crucified by the Romans in a bloody act of capital punishment. Then someone made an "imaginative leap" (15), and his death became like an animal sacrifice.

In history, the practice of sacrifice came first. This was a familiar category. Then at some point in time, it became a metaphor "to explain the not-yet-understood implications of Jesus' life and death for the Christian moral life" (13). "The metaphor of sacrifice is one way among others... to unpack the implications of the cross of Christ" (14). One of Patterson's goals is "to catch Paul in the act of working out the complex of meanings that are born when one begins to use sacrifice as a metaphor in Christian thinking, and to allow the specific concerns of 1 Corinthians and Philippians to surface through a study of their particular range of uses of sacrificial metaphors" (16).

3. Her review of the history of metaphor takes us first to Plato and Aristotle, then to Paul Ricoeur and some twentieth century thinkers, then finally to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's cognitive theory of metaphor, Metaphors We Live By. Aristotle gives us a very limited sense of metaphor, but is still helpful in showing us that metaphors see similarity between things that are at least different on the surface. Patterson's main interest in Paul Ricoeur's work is the way he shows that metaphors can reach far beyond a comparison between two words such that they can pull in sentences, paragraphs, even whole works. She aims to see Paul's metaphors in 1 Corinthians and Philippians as having such a reach. [2]

Clearly Lakoff and Johnson have been the key influencers on her thinking. She identifies four characteristics of metaphor that she draws from their work. First, metaphors usually have a basis in human physicality. For example, it is common for human beings to relate "up" to good and "down" to bad. One of the shocking aspects of Paul's thinking is that he tries to make down to be up and up to be down. Crucifixion in the ancient world was bad, but the earliest Christians made it good.

A second aspect of metaphors is their "capacity not only to reveal but hide" (23). When the cross becomes a sacrificial metaphor, the Romans are disempowered as its agents and are sidelined by God, who becomes the primary actor. Metaphors also bring with them "entailments." Far more than one word compared to another, a metaphor can bring with it a whole host of potential resonances.

Finally, metaphors have a predictive capacity. "In a sense, a lively metaphor is out in front of one's ability to conceive of a thing" (27). Nice! "New metaphors, or new uses of existing metaphors, not only describe a state of affairs that had not been described before, but they are actually capable of creating new realities by inspiring a new set of behaviors congruent with the metaphor" (29). [3]

4. In the final section of this chapter, she connects Paul's use of sacrificial metaphors to the rhetoric of 1 Corinthians and Philippians. "In the letters of Paul, sacrificial metaphors are used primarily as high-stakes tools of persuasion" (30). After all, sacrifice was a central institution of the ancient world. One of her main claims in this section is that sacrifice is not an idea in the mind of Paul but a metaphor that drew its true life from the community for which it is trying to make sense of Christian living. Sacrifice is not a metaphor Paul is downloading to Corinth. It is a shared image from which Paul is trying to create a shared understanding.

[1] She references a study on 1 Peter that I did not know but that she has mentioned more than once as exemplary in its review of the history of how metaphor has been understood over time. Something to look into next pay day: Bonnie Howe, Because You Bear This Name: Conceptual Metaphor and the Moral Meaning of 1 Peter.

[2] Again, I am waiting to see this argument. I absolutely believe a metaphor can permeate a work--I have more or less argued this of Hebrews.

[3] There is a brief acknowledgement that Lakoff does not like the idea of a "dead" metaphor because it is ambiguous. Metaphors can die in very distinct ways.

Literal, Plain, and Figural Meanings

From something I'm working on this week:

By literal, I refer to words taken in what we might call their most basic or everyday sense. This definition is not without complications, but it will suffice for our purposes. There are of course dead metaphors too, whose ordinary sense was originally metaphorical (e.g., a “wild goose chase”), but in such instances a little reflection usually suffices to show that we are looking at an expression that was originally metaphorical. [1] To consider Christ’s death a sacrifice, for example, is a dead metaphor, for normally someone living in the Mediterranean world would not have called a crucifixion a sacrifice in the manner of a temple altar. In time, such metaphors can become the everyday sense of a word or expression, even if its originally metaphorical nature is evident.

A metaphor then is the creation of a new semantic pertinence by the comparison of two unlike things. [2] We should distinguish between the use of words "literally" and the use of metaphors as the intended meaning of an author. The “plain sense” or what we might call the intended sense of a sentence may involve metaphors that were intended by the author. "He worked like a dog on this project." [3] There is a non-literal use of language in this sentence, but it is intended.

 By “figural” interpretation, then, I refer to metaphorical interpretation on the part of a reader that was unintended by the author of the text being read. This figural interpretation can take place on any level from the non-literal interpretation of a single word to a full blown allegory. In an allegory, multiple features of the plain meaning are systematically taken to represent some other set of truths. The Parable of the Weeds is an allegory, where each soil in the surface story represents a type of person responding to the word of God...

[1] Lakoff and Johnson would argue that all language was originally metaphorical and thus that all "literal" language ultimately consists of layer after layer of dead metaphor. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980).

[2] P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984) ix. See also chapter 3 of Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Christian University, 1976) 45-70; and chapter 3 of The Rule of Metaphor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 [Fr. 1975]) 65-100.

[3] In my more general use of the word metaphor here, I am including similes and other non-literal speech as subcategories of metaphor as a general category.

Book Review: Campbell's The Deliverance of God

There are certain books that you have to read in your field, whether you want to or not. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God is one of them if you hope to be any kind of expert on Paul. I've come to admit that Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God is another. It's 936 pages.

Campbell teaches at Duke Divinity School but is originally from New Zealand. He also taught in London for a few years.

I see in this exhaustive, methodical tome a glimpse of my teenage self. His first chapter is an analytical philosopher's dream, a theologian's version of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In these opening pages, he tries to paint a picture of what he's about to do and why he's about to do it the way he's going to do it.

I find it a bit tedious at this stage of my life, but he's earned my endurance. I'll keep going and see try to keep an open-ish mind.

Some thoughts on the Preface, Introduction, and first chapter:

• I would be offended if I taught with him in Otago (xxv). Apparently there was nothing there to stimulate his brain cells.
• You can see that he is going to critique prevailing interpretations of Paul for being 1) individualist, 2) conditional, and 3) contractual. Here are also the first hints that I'm not going to end up going with him. I don't think Paul would have formulated himself necessarily in these terms, but to do what he's doing, I think Paul inevitably sets the stage for these three.
• I don't have a problem with Campbell starting with somewhat of a draft that he then will deconstruct and eventually newly construct from scratch...
• ... but I agree with the thought that his starting point is somewhat of a straw man. There were contractual, conditional arrangements in the ancient world long before Kant. He starts with a modernist draft of Paul that should rightly be deconstructed. But there are other "contractual" models that would be right at home in the ancient world (e.g., patron-client relationships assume a certain informal contract; suzerainty treaties were a sort of contractual arrangement). Again, he's going to deconstruct this starting point anyway, so it doesn't matter much to me at this point, other than the fact that I'm having to read through all this material he's going to later throw away.
• He says we should assume coherence until we see otherwise. I'm very fine with this. The question is, "When we are working 'too hard' just to maintain the assumption of coherence?"
• I'm fine with the idea of doing a hermeneutical circle. Start with a draft. Critique, revise, redraft. Repeat as necessary. There seems to be a "jump in at any point" dimension to the book, which is fine, although I intend to go from beginning to end.
• He sets out in numbered form a modernist, Kantian version of justification as a contract. It's very propositionally set out and is the bulk of the first chapter. It's not worth critiquing because it's just a draft he's going to unravel. Patience, Ken. Be patient.
• He ends chapter 1 with some recourse to Lakoff and Johnson's ideas of root metaphors. He mentions the fundamental anthropological and theological metaphors in the propositional structure of contemporary justification thinking. Again, since he's going to deconstruct these, I'm being patient. I will say that meaning is always synchronous, even if the diachronic sometimes leaves traces, artifacts in the synchronous. But metaphors aren't truly metaphors if they're dead in current usage. In that case, they've taken on a plain meaning. We might even say that they have become literal, though once metaphorical. 

Monday Ricoeur: Metaphor and Symbol 3

This is now my third installment of Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, a series of foundational lectures on hermeneutics that he gave in 1973 at Texas Christian University.

1. Language as Discourse
2. Speaking and Writing
________________
Now for the third chapter: Metaphor and Symbol

1. Introduction
Ricoeur considers a treatment of metaphor and symbol important for a theory of verbal signification to have its "greatest possible extension" (45). There were those in the early twentieth century, easily following the trajectory of Aristotle and others, who saw metaphors as non-cognitive and emotional, rather than cognitive features of language. By contrast, Ricoeur means to show that "metaphor is the touchstone of the cognitive value of literary works."

In this essay, Ricoeur will revisit a topic from his earlier work as well--the symbol. What distinguishes the symbol from the metaphor, in his view, is that symbols are not merely semantic (like metaphors). Symbols involve something non-semantic as well. More on this topic in a moment.

2. The Theory of Metaphor
In Ricoeur's day, it was common to see a metaphor as "bereft of any cognitive significance" (46). Metaphors were analyzed on the model of denotation and connotation. In this approach, "only the denotation is cognitive and, as such... of a cognitive order." Denotation refers to the basic meaning of a word.

I personally think of connotations as overtones beyond the basic meaning. The older approach to metaphor saw connotation as "extra-semantic because it consists of the weaving together of emotive evocations, which lack cognitive value" (46). He visits Aristotle, where metaphor is merely a matter of naming. For Cicero, metaphor is simply an abridged comparison.

Aristotle isolates words from one another (he thus can be critiqued by Ricoeur as not looking at meaning from the standpoint of the sentence). In the ancient rhetoricians, the function of rhetoric is to please or perhaps seduce the audience, to persuade them, and in that sense a metaphor might prove of some value.

Ricoeur sums up how the ancients treated metaphors: 1) as a trope, a simple substitution of one word for another, a figure of discourse relating to the "denomination" of an individual word or two, 2) as an extension of the meaning of a name, derived from the literal meaning of the word or words, 3) based on a resemblance of some kind, 4) with the literal word easily being substituted for the metaphor instead and the meaning remaining the same. Thus, 5) there is no semantic innovation with the use of metaphor and 6) no new information involved. It serves a merely emotive function (49).

Ricoeur's move is ingenius. He "shifts the problem of metaphor from the semantics of the word to the semantics of the sentence" (47). This move will allow him to provide a purely semantic definition for all literature in its three essential classes, poetry, essays, and prose fiction.

Ricoeur proceeds to reject the above presuppositions about metaphor. "Metaphor has to do with semantics of the sentence before it concerns the semantics of a word" (49). That is to say, it is a "phenomenon of predication, not denomination" (50). Metaphors involve a tension, not between two words or names, but between two interpretations. "A metaphor does not exist in itself, but in and through an interpretation." Ricoeur thus undermines the second presupposition above.

Now he attacks the third. A metaphor is not the clothing of an idea in an image based on comparison or similarity. Rather, for him the key semantic feature of a metaphor derives from the dissimilarity. How can these two dissimilar things be connected, we ask ourselves? The act of "reducing the shock engendered by two incompatible ideas" helps us find the resemblance that gives meaning.

The tension between two interpretations of meaning brings the creation of new meaning. There is no mere substitution of one word for another as in #4, and a new meaning takes place, against #5 and 6. "A new signification emerges" (52). "A metaphor is an instantaneous creation, a semantic innovation which has no status in already established language and which only exists because of the attribution of an unusual or an unexpected predicate."

Ricoeur thus does not include dead metaphors as metaphors any longer. There is no longer a tension in their use ("the foot of a chair"). Their extended meaning has become part of our lexicon. "There are no live metaphors in a dictionary" (52).

Therefore, "real metaphors are not translatable" (52). They can be paraphrased in many ways but a single word cannot be substituted for them. And metaphors are not mere ornaments of discourse.

3. From Metaphor to Symbol
Introduction
Ricoeur now switches to a treatment of symbols, a topic which has not long been studied by rhetoricians and which, unlike metaphor, moves beyond the merely linguistic and semantic. For example, psychoanalysis deals with things like dreams and other symbols relating to deep psychic conflicts. Poetics in the broad sense can engage persistent figures within a culture or a school of literature. Then there is the religious use of symbols that engages symbols of space and time, of transcendence, and the wholly other.

Symbols thus belong to too many and too diverse fields of research for their study to be as easy as the study of metaphor, and they bring together the linguistic order together with the non-linguistic order.

Nevertheless, Ricoeur believes that his approach to metaphor can clarify the significance of symbols. He aims first to identify the semantic kernel of a symbol. This move in turn will help him isolate the non-linguistic stratum of symbols. This will finally allow him to complete his theory of metaphor.

The Semantic Moment of a Symbol
To begin with, "the symbol, in effect, only gives rise to thought if it gives rise to speech" (55). Within language, the tension theory of metaphor he is laying out can provide an entry point for understanding the semantic dimension of symbols. "The metaphorical twist, which our words must undergo in response to the semantic impertinence at the level of the entire sentence, can be taken as the model for the extension of meaning operative in every symbol."

There is an "excess of signification in a symbol," just as there is in a metaphor. "It is the recognition of the literal meaning that allows us to see that a symbol still contains more meaning. This surplus of meaning is the residue of the literal interpretation" (55). "Yet for the one who participates in the symbolic signification there are really not two significations, one literal and the other symbolic, but rather a single movement."

As a side note, he takes a moment here to distinguish symbol from allegory. "Allegory is a rhetorical procedure that can be eliminated once it has done its job. Having ascended the ladder, we can then descend it. Allegory is a didactic procedure" (56). I'm not sure if this will do, but it is suggestive.

In symbol, we speak of assimilation rather than apprehension. "The symbol assimilates rather than apprehends a resemblance" (56). "All the boundaries are blurred--between the things as well as between the things and ourselves." "There is more in a symbol than in any of its conceptual equivalents" (57).

But it gives rise to concepts. Ricoeur disagrees with those who make us choose between symbols and concepts. Rather, "symbols give rise to endless exegesis" (57). "No given categorization can embrace all the semantic possibilities of a symbol. But it is the work of the concept alone that can testify to this surplus of meaning."

The Non-Semantic Moment of a Symbol
After clarifying the semantic dimension of symbols, Ricoeur now seeks to clarify the non-semantic dimension of symbols. "The opacity of a symbol is related to the rootedness of symbols in areas of our experience that are open to different methods of investigation" (57). Psychoanalysis, for example, delves into sleep. Poetry, he says, connects to a global form of behavior. And religious symbols engage engagement with supernatural forces, "which dwell in the depths of human existence, transcending and dominating it" (58).

"It is the task of many disciplines to reveal the lines that attach the symbolic function to this or that non-symbolic or pre-linguistic activity" (58).

The rest of this section analyzes the symbols of these three areas: psychoanalysis, poetics, and religious symbols. Ricoeur's basic conclusion is that "what asks to be brought to language in symbols, but which never passes completely into language, is always something powerful, efficacious, forceful" (63). They involve a "dialectic of power and form... which insures that language only captures the foam on the surface of life."

For psychoanalysis, symbols skirt the boundary between desire and culture, the boundary between primary repression (of our impulses versus reality) and secondary repression (the restrictions of society and culture). "Psychoanalysis must develop a mixed language," a mixture of the inner and the outer (58). Dream accounts involve a kind of "palimpsest, riddle or hieroglyph," a distorted presentation of a mixed inner and outer reality.

Thus while "metaphor occurs in the already purified universe of the logos... the symbol hesistates [sic] on the dividing line between bios and logos. It testifies to the primordial rootedness of Discourse in Life. It is born where force and form coincide" (59).

Ricoeur's treatment of poetic language seems a little more forced, but we can see that he is engaging it with a hint of the same psychological underbelly as he approached psychoanalysis. "The poetic project is one of destroying the world as we ordinarily take it for granted" (59).

Boundedness is significant for Ricoeur in this section. As he will say of religious symbolism, "The bound character of symbols makes all the difference between a symbol and a metaphor. The latter is a free invention of discourse; the former is bound by the cosmos" (61). So in poetics, "the poem is bound by what it creates" (60) just as in dreams and deep psychology, there is a boundedness of the symbols to our psychic reality.

Yet, in regard to poetics, the hypothetical realm created brings to life new meanings, "new ways of being in the world" (60). "What binds poetic discourse, then, is the need to bring to language modes of being that ordinary vision obscures or even represses."

His discussion of religious symbolism brings this discussion of the non-semantic boundedness of symbol home. He references Rudolph Otto's sense of the numinous (the transcendent that creates awe, as in Isaiah 6) and Mircea Eleade's sense of hierophany (manifestation of the sacred). There is a power to the sacred that cannot be captured in speech. It does not "pass over completely into the articulation of meaning" (61).

"The numinous element is not first a question of language, if it ever really becomes one, for to speak of power is to speak of something other than speech" (60). There is a preverbal character of such experience.

"The bond between myth and ritual attests in another way to this non-linguistic dimension of the Sacred" (61). Perhaps Ricoeur again goes too far, but his fundamental point is that there is a logic of correspondences between the universe and the Sacred and this law of correspondences makes religious language bounded by the universe rather than freely composed, as in metaphor.

"A temple always conforms to some celestial model" (62). There are intrinsic correspondences between the body, houses, and the cosmos. The skull is like a roof. Our breath is like the wind. A rite of passage is like a bridge.

But without language, "the Sacred would remain unmanifested" (62). Ritual is also a "modality of making or doing--a doing of something marked by power." But it would "lack the power to organize space and time without an instituting word." "Symbolism only works when its structure is interpreted... a minimal hermeneutic is required for the functioning of symbolism" (62-63). But the interpretation presupposes the symbol. "The revealing grounds the saying, not the reverse" (63).

4. The Intermediate Degrees between Symbol and Metaphor
Having explored the character of symbols, Ricoeur now returns to the metaphor, to see if his venture might in turn further clarify his starting point in the essay.

Ricoeur suggests three ways in which the foray into symbols shows how certain metaphors--especially those that have a connection to symbols--can have staying power beyond the moment of invention. How can the metaphor of the moment, a moment of invention in an event of discourse, resist simply becoming trivial and then a dead metaphor? And why is it that symbols seem to have staying power, that symbols never die.

The first potential extending factor is the fact that metaphors can function in a network or chain of metaphors. This is when "one metaphor, in effect, calls for another and each one stays alive by conserving its power to evoke the whole network" (84). Ricoeur uses the imagery of God in the Hebraic tradition--he is King, Father, Husband, Lord, Shepherd, Judge, Rock, Fortress, and so forth. These interconnections create a kind of equilibrium.

There is a "root metaphor" here of sorts, Ricoeur claims, that both assembles and scatters. The network "assembles subordinate images together, and they scatter concepts at a higher level" (64).

A second factor that potentially extends the life of a metaphor is a potential hierarchical structure. "Certain fundamental human experiences make up an immediate symbolism that presides over the most primitive metaphorical order" (65). "This anthropological and cosmic symbolism is in a kind of subterranean communication with our libidinal sphere."

Then there can be metaphors that build on these more fundamental metaphors--what Philip Wheelwright calls archetypes. "Everything indicates that symbol systems constitute a reservoir of meaning whose metaphoric potential is yet to be spoken" (65). "The most insistent metaphors hold fast to the intertwining of the symbolic infrastructure and metaphorical superstructure."

The final factor that extends the longevity of metaphor is its potentially referential dimension, the use of metaphor as a model for interpreting the world. Here Ricoeur recaps Frege, whom he mentioned in the first lecture. The sense of a statement is "the pure predicative relation, the reference its pretention to say something about reality, in short, its truth value" (66). The sense is what it says. The reference is what it says it about.

As in science, metaphors can serve like a theoretical model in science, a way of exploring a complex domain of reality by way of a heuristic, somewhat imaginary perspective. Such a model is "an instrument of redescription" (66).

Ricoeur uses this notion in the remainder of his analysis. Metaphor can be an instrument whereby we redescribe the world. We "describe a domain of reality in terms of an imaginary theoretical model" (67, Max Black's sense of metaphors as models). It is a "way of seeing things differently by changing our language about the subject of our investigation." "Thanks to this detour through the heuristic fiction we perceive new connections among things."

So "poetry creates its own world" (67). Both poetic and scientific language "aim at a reality more real than appearances." We suspend the reality of ordinary language in the metaphor so that we can gain the benefit of a "second degree of reference" (68). We redescribe reality. From this tensive apprehension, "a new vision of reality springs forth." "the eclipse of the objective, manipulable world thus makes way for the revelation of a new dimension of reality and truth."

"Poetic language does not tell how things literally are, but what they are like" (68). "The literal 'is' is overturned by the absurdity [of the comparison and representation] and surmounted by a metaphorical 'is' [that is] equivalent to 'is like.'"

Therefore to conclude this section, he writes, "Can we not then call insistent metaphors--those metaphors that are closest to the symbolic depths of our existence--metaphors that owe their privilege of revealing what things are like [referential dimension] to their organization into networks and hierarchical levels?" (68).

Then to conclude the entire essay, he asserts to contrary propositions. "On the one side, there is more in the metaphor than in the symbol; one the other side, there is more in the symbol than in the metaphor" (68).

On the first score, a metaphor "brings to language the implicit semantics of the symbol" (69). Thus the metaphor brings out more meaning. But, on the other hand, "metaphor is just the linguistic procedure--that bizarre form of predication--within which the symbolic power is deposited" (69). "Metaphors are just the linguistic surface of symbols," while "symbols plunge us into the shadowy experience of power."

Metaphors We Live By Chaps. 7 & 8

Philosophy writing and other things are zapping my life today, so I didn't have the time to give to resume reviewing Dunn today. I am hoping for a late post tomorrow with some of Hurtado.

But since Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors has really short chapters (and since my wife Angie is on my laptop looking for used cars), I thought I'd put a quick post up on a couple of their chapters.

Chapter 7, "Personification" is only 2 pages long (Ya-hoo!). Their point in this chapter is that we often understand things by comparing them to people (thus, by using metaphors).

Here are some examples. "Cancer caught up with him." "Inflation has attacked us." The latter example is not only an example of the general metaphor, inflation is a person. It is an example of inflation is an adversary.

By the way, since I've been reading Locke, Hume, and Kant this week, the connections of this book with empiricist philosophy are pretty clear to me. I'm sure someone (perhaps Lakoff and Johnson themselves) have pointed out the connection. In their own way, they are with much more specificity doing exactly what Locke and Hume did in the 1600 and 1700s. They are showing the empirical basis for our ideas.

Chapter 8, "Metonymy" is a painful six pages :-) L and J distinguish metonymy from metaphor because a metonymy is when something stands for something associated with it. They give as one example, "The ham sandwich is waiting for his check."

As far as meaning, L and J see metonymy as more focused than metaphors because a metonymy focuses on a particular association with the thing it stands for. I had some questions about this paragraph.

L and J subsume synecdoche under the heading of metonymy. A synecdoche is when you substitute the part for the whole, such as "There are a lot of good heads at the university." A fun paragraph was this one:

"If you ask me to show you a picture of my son and I show you a picture of his face, you will be satisfied... But if I show you a picture of his body without his face, you will consider it strange and will not be satisfied" (37).

The point is that the parts we choose for the whole (in this case--a face is a person) are not arbitrary. In this case it reflects a feature of one way our culture conceptualizes identity.

Wednesday Update

The summer whittles away and projects inch forward at a snail's pace. Here's some miscellany this morning and then I will probably make myself post a review later today of the introduction to Larry Hurtado's Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.

But first a couple things. First, Scot McKnight argues that James Dobson has skewed Obama's 2006 speech involving Christianity in the United States. Here's the link, which included the link to Dobson's site:

http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=4008

I don't know if Obama will be a good president or not (I don't think McCain will win, so brace yourselves if you are an anti-Democrat like most evangelicals over 40). But I continue to be embarrassed by the stupidity of the pseudo-Christian rumor mill, like that Obama must be evil because his middle name is Hussein or that he's Muslim because he attended elementary school in Indonesia and yet he's also a liberal Christian who hates whites. Wait a minute, don't those last two claims contradict themselves?

Basically, people are going to believe what they're going to believe. The reasons they give are seldom the real reasons. Maybe we can have a rational discussion here some time in the Fall before the election.

Second, I haven't stopped reading Metaphors We Live By. The most important chapter since I stopped reporting is chapter 6 on ontological metaphors. We had orientational metaphors in chapter 4 (things being up down behind, etc...). Ontological metaphors compare things to, well, things. The mind is a machine (Boy, my wheels are turning today) or the mind is a brittle object (I'm going to pieces).

A kind of ontological metaphor is the container metaphor that places boundaries around things. Are you in the race. He's coming into view.

It seems to me that Mary Douglas' view of purity fits well into this type of metaphor. She basically analyzes the clean/unclean legislation of Leviticus in terms of boundaries. Leprosy blurs the boundaries of in and out, just as blood outside the body does. Eels, snakes, and ostriches blur the boundaries of things in the sea, land, and air. I don't know if she's right, but it's a fascinating read.

Her famous, "Dirt is matter out of place," is a paradigm changer. Dirt in the yard is not unclean, but dirt on the living room carpet is. The difference is not a matter of the dirt but of the boundaries we draw around reality, what belongs where.

Metaphors We Live By 4

Chapter 4 was an 8 page burden :-)

Lakoff and Johnson tell us that thus far in the book we have been talking about structural metaphors. Chapter 4 presents now orientational metaphors.

The first part of the chapter runs through a host of conceptual metaphors having to do with up and down, ahead and behind. Here are some examples:

Conscious is up; unconscious is down.
"Get up," "Wake up," "He fell asleep." The physical basis for this metaphor is that humans and most mammals sleep lying down and stand up when they awake.

Having control or force is up; subject to control or force is down.
"I have control over him," "I am on top of things." "He is under my control." Physical size usually correlates with physical strength, and the winner of a fight is typically on top of the loser.

Foreseeable future events are up and ahead.
Our eyes look forward as we approach things. As we approach them, the ground stays level but the height of what we are approaching increases.

Conclusions:
The concluding part of the chapter pushes toward the idea that most of our fundamental concepts are organized around spatialization metaphors. We fit these together with each other without thinking about it. These metaphors are grounded in our physical experience of the world. Things we think of as purely intellectual concepts are often, perhaps always based on metaphors with a physical or cultural basis (e.g., high energy particles).

L and J suspect that "no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis" (19). [Very empiricist]

Metaphors We Live By 3

Probably two or three posts today... so many goals, so little time.

Today's chapter is a delicious 4 pages and deals with the fact that metaphorical conceptual systems highlight certain things and at the same time hide others. [This is a great Foucaultian recognition].

The example of this chapter is the metaphorical system of how we talk about language, namely, that language is a container, that ideas are objects, and that communication is sending an object through this container to someone else. Michael Reddy calls this the "conduit metaphor" of language. [and it is intrinsic to structuralism]

Examples: "I gave you that idea," "His words carry little meaning," "It's hard to get that idea across."

But this is a metaphor and following it through too closely leads to conclusions that do not hold true. For example, words and sentences do not have meanings in themselves independent of a context or speaker. [as Wittgenstein so aptly has shown. What is the meaning of the word "fire" independent of any context--getting fired, shooting someone, a command to run out of a building for your life, telling a child the name of the orangish-red thing in front of them?]

L and J use the celebrated example, "Please sit in the apple-juice seat." What does this mean by itself?

Another situation is where the same words might mean different things to different people: "We need to explore alternative sources of energy." Is it the President of Mobile Oil talking or the president of Friends of Earth?

The conduit metaphor does not work very well in instances such as these.

Metaphorical structuring is thus partial, not total. [This is the fatal flaw in Aristotle's simplistic definition of a metaphor] At least part of a metaphorical concept will not fit with the other. Accordingly, those parts that fit can be extended even further in a figurative direction, while other parts can't. [Derrida of course spent all his time focusing on the parts that couldn't]

Metaphors We Live By 2

Today's "philosophical devotional" was a delectable 3 pages long. This chapter suggests that metaphorical concepts often have a "systematicity" to them.

The metaphorical concept of this chapter was "Time is money." Some examples include "You're wasting my time," "How do you spend your days?," "You need to budget your time," and "He's living on borrowed time," among others.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that these linguistic metaphors are not only conceptual but that there is a system to them, namely, that time is money in our culture because for us time is not only a commodity, it is a valuable one. This is a cultural matter, for time is not conceptualized in this way in other cultures.

This network of concepts thus has a certain "systematicity" to it.

Metaphors We Live By 1

Torrey Seland's book referenced another book I've had on my shelf for a while: Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Another close friend of mine had recommended it long ago--Bill Patrick who teaches at the Asbury Florida campus. If I ever get filthy rich I hope to set up Bill on a stipend to write whatever he wants... as long as he actually writes something :-) He's brilliant... and wasted teaching Greek :-).

I finally opened it and discovered that it is my kind of book! There are 29 chapters, but they're like three pages each! It's like a philosophy devotional :-)

So the basic point of the first chapter is that most of the way we conceive of the world is metaphorical--not just in our language, but in our concepts themselves. Meanwhile, "the essence of a metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (5).

The example they give is argument. Our conception of argument, they argue, is patterned after the metaphor of war. We defend our claims, some of which are indefensible. We win or lose arguments. Criticisms can be right on target and we attack others' positions, etc.

This, they argue, is the normal way of conceptualizing arguments and, thus, arguments are fundamentally metaphorical on a conceptual and not "merely" linguistic level.