Mind, meaning and metaphor: the philosophy and psychology of metaphor in 19th-century Germany

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a clo se link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked t he view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language an d thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vice, Johann Wolf gang von Goethe, Jean Paul and other s laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in it s turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar , Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychol ogy of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but n ecessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obviou s parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-c entury theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examine d throughout.