A comparison between mystical metaphors and Rhetorical Metaphors according to Hans Blumenberg’s notion of Absolute metaphor

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Persian Literature Department . Tehran University

2 Professor at the University of Tehran

Abstract

As Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) distinguishes between metaphors of truth and other types of metaphor, regards this fact as the conceptual matter in this ground. He also characterized these two groups in terms of meaning which states that absolute metaphors are not been able to be expressed by any conceptual or theoretical method. These metaphors have formed by a cluster of ideas which are aggregate beneath a fundamental major idea and reaches the situation of “belief” in human’s knowledge and becomes stabilized as well.

The narrative power of absolute metaphors which has laid in their totality, has made them as a replacement for existential concepts and according to Blumenberg, this point is the major difference between these two groups of metaphors. Until 1936 and before I.A. Richards represented terms of “Vehicle” and “Tenor” as two parts of a metaphor, classical approaches of rhetoric (according to Aristotle) vividly considered metaphor under similarity-based classification, while modern approaches went further; in Blumenberg according to the metaphor which its self-evidence and generality contravene rhetorical standpoints, represents a metaphorology which succeeded to define a metaphor by its own contents. Blumenberg also in “Light as a metaphor for truth” named and categorized metaphor of truth by drawing a history for them and as the matter of fact he distributed the features of the truth to its metaphors.

Keywords

Literary Text Research

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 20 May 2023

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