METAPHOR
Metaphor as a new creation of meaning
I understand metaphor as a new creation of meaning.
The poetic discourse, which is that of metaphor, has a poetic or second-degree reference, not a literal reference. However, it does not mean that such a reference is not real, it is real but not in a literal sense.
Thus metaphor suspends the literal reference, goes beyond it, to another field of reality.
Metaphor, as a ‘lively expression’, turns the inanimate into animate, that is, it can transfer the property of life from one entity to another: “lively expression is that which expresses existence as alive” (Paul Ricoeur). Thus, abstract ideas or inanimate terms become living entities (feeling being), to be put into our eyes, through metaphor.
Metaphor as a trope will be placed within the ‘generative causes’ of the trope, that is, its reasons are ‘imagination, spirit, passion’. Such a trope extends meaning into the non-literal realm:
“This purely extensional trope, giving rise to a proper meaning of second degree, presents (or intends to present) one idea only; and it presents this idea “completely naked and undisguised, as opposed utterly to figurative tropes, which always present two ideas” (Paul Ricoeur)
My main actual metaphors are Face, Garden, Flying, Sea.