Metaphorical extension

The concept of metaphorical extension 

"Our relationship's roots run deep, yet its branches spread thin, truncated by greed and pride; still, its fruits remain abundant and ripe."

Metaphorical extension is the process of taking a concept and using it as a descriptive scheme in a sentence or proposition. Like we used tree in the above sentence. We see that common properties of tree are being used here as a way of making the object of the sentence more expressive. This is a common and very useful literary method, in fact ‘good writing’ is a phrase invented to express this literary device as the epitome for all forms of writing, and there’s a good reason for this; a reason that may strike you as paradoxical given what’s just been said. The reason is that Metaphorical extension, though a staple in the domain of literature and poetry, is no more literary than coding is merely typing, or painting merely brushing a canvas with certain colors. It is a faculty and often skill (techne) that we cannot do without in language, it’s an art” as Kant says,

“Hidden in the depths of the human soul, an art the true manipulations of which we will be hardly likely ever to guess from nature, and to have open before our eyes”

Critique Of Pure Reason 'B181, 182 I A142, 143 '

Language is almost entirely metaphorically extended; extended in the same way Descartes thought space was extended so that it contained no vacuum or vacancy anywhere. In a sense, this is true, to think of an empty space is to immediately fill this supposedly empty space with content, namely, ‘the present thought of this space’. 

“It’s easy for us to see that the extension that constitutes them nature of a body is exactly the same as the extension that constitutes the nature of a space. They don’t differ any more than the nature of a genus or species differs from the nature of an individual ·belonging to that species or genus”

Descartes ‘Principles Of Philosophy’ sec11

My beholding of a presumably empty section of space places me in it and renders it no longer empty, in much the same way, every act of speech, every word is a metaphor; it represents an aspect of the world, in the sense that the meaning of a word is never exhausted in any of the instances of its use, it always seems to point beyond itself. We know it by the term ‘context’, defined in merriam webster as “the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs, environment, setting".

We can’t so much as think without a context; the context is something that comes before and foregrounds our thought and by extension, language. This context can be anything, a color, a mood, a shape, whatever it is, it would serve the same function as tree does in the foregoing example, where as we saw ‘tree’ helps in articulating the theme ‘friendship’ organically in a way that no other substance could. Here it seems that ‘friendship’ mimics trees in the pattern of its development; only that (and this is a big disclaimer), it’s not mimicry, but that friendship here really is ‘tree-like’, in its development. 

‘Tree’ is the underlying concept by means of which we are able to perceive maturation or any pattern of growth that involves maturation, not that maturation and trees share this relation incidentally. Tree-ness here is what Kant would call ‘Transcendental schema’, it’s that third function that mediates and makes possible the application of pure concepts of the understanding to appearances. As he says

“This mediating representation must be pure (that is, free from all that is empirical), and yet be intellectual on the one side, and sensible on the other. Such a representation is the transcendental schema” (B178, 179 I A139,140).

The meaning which the phrase acquires when expressed metaphorically is evidence as to the reality of that which the experience is illustrated through-- the tree. What’s noteworthy here is that whenever a metaphorically extended concept is used, it always changes the course of the proposition and its overall sense, it’s never the proposition that changes it. The proposition merely provides the material, the manufacturing articles which the metaphor then ‘moulds’ into a certain shape. The innate properties of substances of nature appear to have a metaphysical being with tremendous expressive power, helping us express ideas that vernacular or regular speech can only hint at. 

There’s a sense in which the substances of nature have a being, that everything that belongs to nature, has a being which we can intellectually master and use as a solution to certain (intellectual) problems. This is a complicated extension of the idea, however, it becomes a given if we somehow adjust our cosmological view of the world so as to see its teleological nature, that is, to see the final causes of things rather than their accidents, and see that each component in this universe

“Retains a tendency to its "natural place," prescribed to it by its property, even after it has been forcibly deprived of this place”

E.Cassirer 'Substance & Function' (p135)

This way we can approach the various teleologies of nature as various solutions to various existential and ontological problems, that, for example, we owe to tree-ness the ability to conceive the genealogical side of things. The concept of maturation, which is related to genealogy, is the real mental representation of the being of the tree more than its physical nature and not a fiction devised by language out of convenience. ME (metaphorical extension) is the application of the being of something to the being of another, this operation is abstract, inasmuch as language consists of terms that are abstractions of real physical processes, this line of reasoning inevitably leads to questions as to the ‘nature’ of language and its overall utility. 

And the answer is found in its ability to perform abstractions of real-world processes and combine said abstractions in a manner that could never be realized in physical reality due to the obvious limitations of the laws of physics; to modify one idea by another, e.g for a situation to be sticky, or to have been ‘under the weather’ are the parts of language for which it’s most valued, it’s an almost alchemical process, aptly describing operations that are more nuanced than can be seen or sensed; rather, these relations are purely intuitional or platonic, the sort of relations that literary devices and poetry emerged out of. 

These relations stem from the same world to which we return when we want to use examples, analogies, allusions, and comparisons to help articulate ideas. In this world, what an idea is, is an infinite thing, individual, yet capable of the greatest diversity;

“The image of a triangle can never be adequate to the concept of a triangle in general. It would never attain that generality of the concept which makes it applicable to all triangles” (B180 I A141)

In other words, the actual representation of a triangle in a mathematical graph is not the triangle itself, but only one of the ways in which it can be represented. This explains Plato’s meaning that the world of the senses, the world we see is just a pale copy of the true and unchanged world of the forms. This is because perception is occasional and focal, it can only see the instances of things, it builds a concept of triangle after seeing an acute, equilateral, degenerate, and right-angled triangle. It recognizes triangularity in specific figures, and though it may seem that it’s the object that gives the impression of triangularity or that this quality belongs to it, it’s also the observer, in the act of recognition, configures the object based on prior acquaintance with the general concept. A triangle here is used as a general program by which to designate and distinguish, in objects of experience, those which fit a certain description. 

But this procedure is not to be sought empirically, that is, in how objects physically effect one another, but in our ability to actually embody the objects intellectually, to imagine them. The focus thus shifts from observing the object, to actually using the object intellectually by metaphorical extension, this is the mode of being called ‘readiness-at-hand’. By thinking of anything, say ‘of language’, genealogically, we are actually using the tree as our schema. The worldview that results, is one which represents language in its development from other, earlier languages, i.e any explanatory model that relies on concepts of chains and links, branching and inheritance, employ, knowingly or not, the metaphorical extension of the tree, that’s already built into us. 

It seems somehow that the higher principles of nature have a certain affinity to our mind and reasoning. That the case can be made, that certain literary devices can be traced back to real physical substances, substances in relation to which they can be interpreted as attributes, as German physicist Carl Neuman, held in his theory of the ‘body-alpha’; a description of which goes; 

“Only in a world in which there exists at an unknown point of space an absolutely rigid body, unchanging in its form and dimensions to all time, are the propositions of our mechanics intelligible”

E.Cassirer 'Substance & Function' (180)

Neumann applies this same concept to the phenomenon of motion; according to this view, inasmuch as all genealogical processes are traceable to the tree, and as such render the tree their most appropriate symbol, so is motion itself traceable to a substance, Neumann suggests, in reference to which the laws of mechanics are intelligible, and that could serve as their most appropriate and perfect symbol’. Call these ‘perfect symbols’ ‘pure substances’, the contrast of Kant’s ‘pure concepts’.

 Now assuming that there is an affinity, why should there be, and how far does it go?. 

Follow this discussion over to Part 2