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3. Method of Research
It is apparent from the foregoing that there is a need to explore more about methods and tools for comparison that can fairly tackle the traditions compared while being able to appreciate their distinctive features. In the face of comparing Confucian and Aristotelian ethics, the following questions arise: is there a neutral ground on which to stand? Is there a suitable method that can do justice to the traditions under study?
Further, given that each person has inescapable cultural and mental prejudices, is it realistic to imagine that a perfectly impartial and objective comparison can be done?
In this regard too, should comparative work be left to persons of mixed parentage, or who have sojourned long enough in different places so as to have acquired the cultures of those places which he pretends to understand?
As I begin to undertake this research, I surmise the following answers to these questions. First, I doubt if a “perfectly balanced comparison” is possible, neither does it seem necessary for a fruitful comparison. In this research, I shall not be too concerned about placing Confucius and Aristotle on “equally balanced scales” as to attempt to understand each side’s views in the light of moral themes that come to the fore from metaphor study. I believe that placing them side-by-side – not “on equal scales” – will yield insights that are valuable enough.
Again, I do not aim for a “perfectly-balanced and impartial comparison” of Confucian and Aristotelian ethics. Instead, I envision this proposed research to be an exercise in comparative philosophy that will, given a topic, allow the incipient saliencies, nuances, and perhaps also thought structures of the participating traditions to stand out. The task of trying to understand Confucian and Aristotelian ethics on “their own terms” constitutes a tall order. Notwithstanding, I am confident that it can be achieved to some degree by exercising comparison with caution and earnestness. The measures of caution and earnestness which I propose to take are:
(1) sympathetic reading of both moral traditions; (2) substantial use of each side’s primary literature; and, (3) careful study of their respective historical-cultural milieus.
Having stated the above and going back to a question previously raised, it seems to me that while being of mixed Eastern and Western parentage or sojourn would be an asset for comparative work, I do not think it indispensable for two reasons. First, I suppose that measures such as I have outlined above can provide for comparative research in ways that go beyond the sheer fact of simultaneously belonging to different races or places of residence. Instead, acquiring a bi-cultural perspective seems both more workable and essential. A second reason – one which I take to be an aid to acquiring a bi-cultural perspective – is that the set-up of present-day academic research in itself entails a collaboration of minds and exposure to multi-cultural influences. Add to this are advances in technology and education
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which, through better opportunities for travel, language-learning, and data-sourcing, contribute to expanding the learner’s cultural base.
Exploring archery as metaphor seems promising. Metaphors, as will be discussed thoroughly in the first chapter, are linguistic and literary phenomena whose cognitive potentials have been re-discovered in recent decades. While I agree with Slingerland about the potentials of metaphor for cross-cultural studies, I refrain from applying in my study the kind of metaphor theories that seem to have more implications and use for brain science than philosophical research. I shall not treat archery metaphor as a mental structure, nor as formal category ala Kant, much less claim its network of associations to correspond to neural mappings in the brain. I hold strong cognitive views about metaphor, but my working notion and approach to it will vary greatly from Slingerland’s.
Characterized by divergence from direct speech, a metaphoric expression is an image-ridden verbal expression where noted features of an image supplied by the source domain resemble and exemplify a subject usually of higher-order. Compared to usual concepts, metaphors are less abstract, and comprehending them invites broad, tangential knowledge about the speaker, receptors and a host of other contextual details and associations surrounding the utterance. In poetry, metaphors enhance words with image and dramatic effect, while in prose, they lend force to arguments and, at times, enable the conveyance of thoughts that elude direct speech. Now, there are comparative scholars who like to note the disparity of language between Eastern and Western philosophies (e.g., Northrop 1946, Cheng &
Bunnin 2002, Sun 2009, Zong 2010). It is widely held, in concrete, that Confucius’s language is heuristic while Aristotle’s is analytic. Setting aside the truth of the claim, what is clear is that both sides had recourse to metaphor in communicating ethical views.
Upon reading the Analects and Nicomachean Ethics, archery struck me as a powerful metaphor that could function as a hermeneutic tool not only for understanding early Confucian or Aristotelian texts but also for comparing them inasmuch as archery is a common theme in their figurative speech. My initial investigation into the usages of archery metaphor in these two works indicate that although sample passages are not many, they are nonetheless significative and link to a string of central passages. Metaphoric expressions inspired by archery touched on fundamental matters such as rituals, benevolence, and early rulers in the Analects, and the ethical mean and eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics.
From ancient times up until the last dynasty, archery in China held pride of place in military, ritual and sporting practices. In ancient Greece, by contrast, archery was largely a foreign skill that only gained limited importance due to a combination of
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factors affecting Athens and the Peloponnese in the Axial period. Notwithstanding the disparity in history, archery generated images useful for moral discourse in both Confucian and Aristotelian literatures. This happy chance enables me at present to take archery metaphor as tertium comparationis for probing into Confucian and Aristotelian ethics, a “neutral ground” for initiating and developing comparison between the two schools.
Present research follows a tri-partite theoretical model: I start with a common ground for comparison – identified as archery metaphor –, proceed to separate inquiries into the context and meaning of pertinent metaphoric expressions, then end with a common forum where the two schools will be set side-by-side. Apart from comparing ethical views, the final phase will give occasion to comment about comparative method and metaphor theory. The study focuses on early Confucian and Aristotelian texts, and this limits the scope of interest to material and literary sources illuminative of the foundational periods of Confucian and Aristotelian schools.
Likewise, since the study was first motivated by the general feeling of inadequacy over comparative approaches taken by North-American based scholars, I will particularly seek to engage authors writing in English. This plus the student’s own language constraints force her to leave aside the wealth of relevant material in other languages.
To state the major thesis, I hope to show that shared metaphors are powerful tools for comparing independent philosophical traditions. A narrower thesis is that archery is a fundamental metaphor in Confucius and Aristotle, perhaps more loaded and representative of each school’s moral thought than the conceptual metaphors that draw more attention in present publications.
Earlier I had stated the worthwhileness of comparative philosophy as a premise of the study. According to my stated research model, however, I shall leave comparison to the final stage, so that the bulk of the dissertation will consist in independent inquiries into the two schools, allowing an encounter to take place only in the concluding forum. Such course will enable me to firmly consolidate each side’s stance – that is, as far as I am able – before gloating on apparent commonalities. I believe it is necessary to attend to the context of each school’s moral views, that context details bring nuances of meaning to key terms and expressions. Hence, only after these are established would I hope to understand the similarities and differences that come to light. Herein is another premise of my study: in comparative work similarities count for little when the underlying differences are still unclear. I take context to be explanatorily crucial as it gives the necessary perspective for the practices and claims of a tradition. Without due contextualization, it would be difficult to skirt dangers such as surface-level associations, image distortion, and
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failure to appreciate diverging views.
In light of all the above, the dissertation will have the following structure: the preliminary chapter on metaphor theory serves as groundwork and will explore the nature, mechanism and comprehension of metaphors; the core chapters are independent surveys of the historical and cultural panorama of archery in ancient China and Greece, followed by separate incursions into archery metaphor in the Analects and Nicomachean Ethics; finally, the last chapter will compare the two schools based on the points that surface from the core chapters.
An acquaintance who trained at modern archery recently explained what he thought unique about the sport. Archery, he said, requires the person to do much calculation, discerning and proper self-positioning before calmly releasing the arrow, that the slightest deviation in the beginning matters, that the arrow, once released, will keep at the course to which it has been directed and that, in the end, whether one hits or misses the target will depend almost entirely on oneself. From these and other details of archery there are poignant parallelisms that can be drawn with the sphere of ethics. Turning to Confucius and Aristotle, what moral significance did each give to archery? How does archery metaphor function in their ethical discourse? From answers to these questions, we may ask further what implications this study of a shared metaphor might have on comparative research.
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CHAPTER 2
Metaphor: The Coming of Age
The perspective furnished by a metaphor guides, directs, even commits us to go on metaphorically. When we adopt a metaphor, we adopt - or inherit - its respective scheme and network.
- Josef Stern1
It is difficult to think of a topic of research today that draws as much attention and excitement from such diverse camps as the phenomenon of metaphor. For the most part of its history in academic writing, metaphors have been viewed as a mere literary device, a flowery alternative to factual speech. Current interest in metaphor, however, attracts scholars well beyond the fields of language and literature. As Josef Stern puts it in the preface of his monograph work on metaphor, fascination with it meets us “on every intellectual front: among linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians of science, art historians, and theologians; what was once a specialized topic in rhetoric and poetics has now also come to be fertile ground for interdisciplinary research” (Stern 2000, xi). The sudden surge in the past four decades of interest in metaphor has not been traced to a single person nor event. If at all, authors cite John Middleton Murry, a prolific English writer in the first half of the twentieth century, as a forerunner of modernity’s reappraisal of metaphor (e.g., Black in Ortony 1979, 17; Punter 2007, 7). Renewed interest in metaphor seems rather to have been brought about by a convergence of factors in the academic world which created the right climate for metaphor study. For example, in philosophy, the falloff of positivism in analytic inquiry on the one hand and the application of the phenomenological method to literary theory and psychoanalysis on the other helped draw attention to manifestations of verbal communication2; in the sciences, Thomas Kuhn’s idea of gestalts and paradigm shifts showed the importance of models – akin to metaphors – in knowledge discovery and theory-formulation; the development of new disciplines such as linguistics and cognitive science also contributed to the trend by furnishing us with methods and conceptual devices for examining components of
1 From his work Metaphor in Context (Cambrigde, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 280.
2 For the relation between metaphor study and the vicissitudes of 20th century analytic philosophy, see Kittay 1987, 6-10. Meanwhile, Paul Ricouer and Jacques Derrida’s contributions to literary theory as well as Jacques Lacan’s exploration of metaphor and the unconscious are some ways in which phenomenology favored metaphor study.
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language, modes of expression, and thought patterns underlying speech.3
The aim of this chapter is to explore what metaphor is: its features, mechanism, and ramifications. Metaphoric expressions as opposed to literal ones seem to possess surprising capacity to communicate – with force and in bulk – a mental scheme, be it a perspective, a network of ideas, or an entire thought system.
Metaphoric utterances, then, seem not only more compelling than literal speech but also more complete in that they give more besides factual assertions. We want to examine what makes metaphoric expressions different from literal statements, and how it communicates what it does. This chapter’s discussion of metaphor will hopefully equip us with the necessary tools and framework to examine and interpret archery metaphor in early Confucian and Aristotelian ethical discourses. In these texts, the images deriving from archery appear doubly significant: first, since they function as metaphor, they are a valuable guide for nuanced and in-depth reading of ancient literature; then, second, inasmuch as both schools use the same image source to communicate moral teaching, they also serve as fair and sturdy fulcrum for comparative study.
1. Background History
As mentioned earlier, metaphors were for a very long time regarded as mere poetic or rhetoric device. In this section, I shore up the arguments surrounding its current recognition as a figure of thought more than a figure of speech, a fundamental rather than ornate manner of expression, a conceptual instead of mere linguistic phenomenon.4 The history of metaphor theory which I write in this section does not pretend to be exhaustive. I intend to focus on developments in metaphor theory that will suffice to show its status in present day academia. .
Fortuitous to the overall theme of this dissertation, scholars of metaphor almost unanimously point to Aristotle as the earliest Western thinker to make significant claims about metaphor. Even today, his thoughts continue to influence metaphor research. While metaphor was a peripheral topic in Aristotle’s writings, his mention
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, has helped modern understanding of metaphor through his notion of “seeing as aspect”, or seeing one thing as another, cf. Moran 1989, 89.
4 Andrew Goatly writes: “Over the last thirty years, however, philosophers, psychologists and linguists have begun to agree that metaphor is not something that can be easily confined, but is an indispensable basis of language and thought”, Goatly 1997, 1. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago, 1980) can be considered the most influential manifesto of modern-day regard for metaphor. They commit, however, to all too strong claims about its cognitive and political implications, claims which Goatly and many of our sources in this chapter are cautious about and consider unnecessary for appreciating metaphor. For criticisms of Lakoff & Johnson’s
“findings”, see Stern 2002, xiii, and Steen 2009, 8, 20-21, 28. On the other hand, Edward Slingerland supports Lakoff’s strong theses and determinedly uses conceptual metaphor analysis for comparative study of Chinese and Western thoughts, see Slingerland 2004, 8-15.
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of it in a handful of treatises sufficiently show his awareness of its ubiquity and import. Aristotle explores metaphor in chunks of the Rhetoric and Poetics, as well as in isolated areas of the Posterior Analytics and Topics. I surmise, however, that insights and instances of metaphor use in philosophical works such as De Anima, Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics lend more support to modern treatment of metaphor than overt passages in other manuscripts. It is beyond the scope of present study to look into the matter in detail, but there will be occasion to mention some ideas along the line in the course of this chapter.
While scholars generally acknowledge the significance of Aristotle’s early remarks on metaphor, they are divided as to Aristotle’s regard for it. A number of authors criticize Aristotle for giving little importance to metaphor by keeping it out of serious philosophical discourse (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Punter 2007).5 One author notes, for example, that while any “serious study of metaphor is almost obliged to start with the works of Aristotle”, in reality, Aristotle regarded metaphors as “primarily ornamental, not necessary (but) just nice” (Ortony 1979, 3). Other authors, however, think otherwise. For the latter group, whatever Aristotle may have written explicitly about metaphor has important implications that come to light only with careful reading and a general understanding of Aristotelian thought. Going through relevant passages about metaphor in the Aristotelian corpus, it seems to me too that such is the case. In what follows, I gather Aristotle’s ideas about metaphor. It is a valid starting point and somewhat unavoidable too since much of current studies on metaphor continue to take impetus from his claims, criticizing them, revising them, or taking them further.
Let us turn to Aristotle’s definition: a metaphor is “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy” (Poetics 21: 1457b6-8). The bottom line of Aristotle’s understanding of metaphor – more explicit in the surrounding discussion than in the definition itself – is that it contemplates a semblance between things that are different, a semblance which motivates a name transfer. The idea sounds simple enough yet is rife with implications about the pedagogical, rhetorical, poetic, cognitive and, perhaps, even deeply philosophical significance of metaphor. Pedagogically speaking, metaphors are highly conducive to knowledge transmission and acquisition by virtue of the similarities to which they call our attention. Going back to the definition above, genus and species refer to varying scopes of classifying things according to similar
5 The charge seems anachronic. Despite Aristotle’s sparse but succinct comments about metaphor, it took posterity two millennia to draw out its significance, equipped with new sciences and input from a broader base of linguistic and cultural data. I return to this matter later.
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traits. The sentence “the boy was planted on the ground”, for example, posits a likeness between the upright, immobile stature of a plant and a standing boy. There is a transference or cross application of the concept “plant” to the boy, as both plant and boy are classified on the basis of such similarity of being fixed firmly in place. We notice, however, that the word used metaphorically, “planted”, primarily refers to vegetal things and is applied only derivatively to the boy. The metaphor, in this way, transfers a name – in this case a verbalized noun – ordinarily said of plants to a person who is standing still. In a simple metaphor such as this, there is a name or
traits. The sentence “the boy was planted on the ground”, for example, posits a likeness between the upright, immobile stature of a plant and a standing boy. There is a transference or cross application of the concept “plant” to the boy, as both plant and boy are classified on the basis of such similarity of being fixed firmly in place. We notice, however, that the word used metaphorically, “planted”, primarily refers to vegetal things and is applied only derivatively to the boy. The metaphor, in this way, transfers a name – in this case a verbalized noun – ordinarily said of plants to a person who is standing still. In a simple metaphor such as this, there is a name or