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Synthesis
The word "figure" has been used in two main ways throughout the course. First, "figure" is often used as a placeholder that refers to any language that is non-literal in nature. While some translators of earlier readings seem to use the "figure" and "metaphor" interchangeably, later theorists become more discerning as they formalise the languages used describe language itself. There seems to be a trend of broadening the category of "figurative language" to mean any language that is symbolic in nature, and as such it seems to encompass metaphorical language. Second, "figure" is used literally to denote the "shape" or "image" of an object. Since "figurative" so clearly stems from "figure", an understanding of the relationship between the figurative and the literal can perhaps be reached from an exploration of the relationship between the "figure" and the "truth". Finally, one may find it humourous to note that though "figurative language" is etymologically rooted in "figure", it does not necessarily denote language that evokes a literal "figure" or "image"; as such, using the word "figurative" to describe the rhetorical devices commonly referred to as "figurative language" is figurative in itself.
In our earliest readings, the word "figure" refers to metaphorical language. In this era of literature, metaphor primarily refers to the transference of lexicon across domains of knowledge. Consider the earliest discussions of "simile" in Aristotle's Rhetoric: simile is categorised as a type of metaphor since it implies this type of movement. Let metaphor be defined as such. Thus, in the translations of the earliest literature, the usage of the word “figure” can be best described as a pronoun for metaphor and types of metaphors. It refers to an aforementioned word such as "simile", "metaphor", "metonymy", etc, but at times may also refer to specific similes, metaphors, etc. made previously. Functionally, the word “figure” serves as a syllogistic figure, referring generically to some metaphorical language that appeared usually preceding it.
Though "figure" may be poorly defined in early literature, a distinction is drawn between what is a figure and what is literal. The translation of Augustine's On Christian Doctrine takes "figure" to be mutually exclusive the literal; he suggests that any scripture that engenders vice must be taken as a "figure".
If the term "figurative language" stems from the Aristotelian idea that language should set an image, a figure, before men's eyes, then in order to define the relationship between figurative language and the subject it is trying to describe, it may be worthwhile to consider the literal meaning of "figure": as philosophers begin to explore the relationship between the human experience and an objective truth, "figure" is often used to refer to the shape and images that we can see. Locke uses "figure" often in reference to shape. He makes a distinction between figure and colour. In Sculpture, a further distinction is made between the shape of an object in three dimensions, "form", and the two-dimensional "figure". Nietzsche asserts that men obtain "form", that which is perceived, by overlooking the "actual". A more recent example would be Burke's categorisation of the physical manifestations of shame as a "figure" and symbol for the actual emotion of shame. Though "figure" is used differently across texts, there seems to be a consensus that there is a gap between "figure" and reality.
Though "figurative language" is clearly related to the concept of "figures", a theorist named Richards asserts that figurative language need not rely on literal figures or images. He believed that the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle (the idea and the language used to convey it) need not be illustrative in nature, so long as some sort of relationship was present. Perhaps to him, the act of describing language as "figurative" is itself figurative as it does not connect directly to the literal definition of a “figure”. Aptly, the word "figure" has become a figure and symbol itself; it no longer carries solely its literal meaning of "shape" and "image", but is used to convey the idea of symbolic representation. Just as the figure of an object represents part of its reality, figurative language represents some part of the idea being conveyed.
"Figurative language" when defined may be recursively figurative: "figurative" refers not to literal definition of "figure" which is synonymous with "image", but to a more abstract definition of "figure" that is synonymous with symbolic representation. This idea of figurative language, not as language that directly evokes imagery, but as symbolic language, seems to be most in line with most modern day definitions. Since “figure” has been used liberally and persistently throughout the literature presented, there can be no easily consistent and universal definition of "figure". However, through an analysis of the different usages of "figure", it is easy to reconcile its different usages and understand why "figurative language" was so named: it highlights the representational aspect of language, and language that is figurative is more abstracted than most others.
Finally, though figurative language provides clarity and may be key to the human learning experience, "figurative language" stems from setting up a "figure". This seems to imply at the very least that figurative language is an incomplete representation of the object being described. More egregiously, it does not preclude the possibility that the figurative can be the exact opposite of reality, as is the case of Augustine's figures. The truth, and our language representation of it, is important: Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By discuss the way languages have power on culture. Though they do not explicitly pass judgement on our monetised cultural perception of time, if we accept their argument that figurative language shapes culture, it's not too hard to accept that figurative language can shape culture sub-optimally. As such, the epistemic validity of figurative languages should be scrutinised. At best, analogies or metaphors or similar rhetorical devices in an argument may present an incomplete representation of the truth; at worst, figurative language can distort the truth altogether.
Quotes
This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should have a share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us.
Augustine, Marcus Dods, J. F. Shaw, and S. D. F. Salmond. On Christian doctrine: the Enchiridion. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873): p. 95
Mr. Arlo Bates declares explicitly: "The object of using figures is to add clearness, or force or elegance—or all of these—to the presentation of an idea. Constantly it happens that, by declaring that an unknown thing is like some known thing, the writer enables the reader to form an idea of it as it is Figures are used to increase the lucidity of style."
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899): p. 25
Acquiescing in the theory of rhetoric that the metaphor is an expression not necessarily of the speaker's own vision of things, but of his desire to make other people see them in a certain way, the "practical man" is straightway seized with a distrust of the figure, amounting almost to fear. He regards metaphors much as the old saints regarded women as charming snares, in which he may too easily be entangled.
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899): p. 30
The frequent productions of monsters, in all the species of animals, and of changelings, and other strange issues of human birth, carry with them difficulties not possible to consist with this hypothesis: since it is as impossible, that two things, partaking exactly of the same real essence, should have different properties, as that two figures partaking of the same real essence of a circle should have different properties.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding With a Life of the Author. 2 vols. (Boston: Cummings & Hilliard, 1813): Vol. I, p. 416
Thus the word statue may be explained to a blind man by other words, when picture cannot; his senses having given him the idea of figure, but not of colors, which therefore words cannot excite in him. (422)
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding With a Life of the Author. 2 vols. (Boston: Cummings & Hilliard, 1813): Vol. I, p. 422
He was taught to distinguish, to recognize visually, what he had previously known through touch, to transform figures into bodies and bodies into figures.
Herder, Johann Gottfried., and Jason Gaiger. Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalions Creative Dream. (University of Chicago Press, 2002): p. 34
Every object reveals just so much of itself to me as the mirror before me reveals of myself, that is, the figure, the frontal aspect. In order to know that I am more than this I must employ my other senses, or deduce that there is more by means of ideas.
Herder, Johann Gottfried., and Jason Gaiger. Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalions Creative Dream. (University of Chicago Press, 2002): p. 36
The rounded form becomes a mere figure, the statue a flat engraving. Sight gives us dreams, touch gives us truth.
Herder, Johann Gottfried., and Jason Gaiger. Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalions Creative Dream. (University of Chicago Press, 2002): p. 38
Or, to make a more exact comparison, what would the most elementary arithmetic feel like, if we used the word twelve (12) sometimes for the number one (1), sometimes for the number two (2) and sometimes for the number twenty-one (21) as well, and had somehow to remember, or see, unassisted by our notation, which uses we were making of it at different places in our calculations? All these words, meaning, expression, metaphor, comparison, subject, figure, image, behave so, and when we recognize this we need look no further for a part, at least, of the explanation of the backward state of the study. Why rhetoricians have not long ago remedied this defect of language for their purpose, would perhaps be a profitable matter for reflection.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965): p. 97
The words 'figure' and 'image' are especially and additionally misleading here. They both sometimes stand for the whole double unit and sometimes for one member of it, the vehicle, as opposed to the other. But in addition they bring in a confusion with the sense in which an image is a copy or revival of a sense-perception of some sort, and so have made rhetoricians think that a figure of speech, an image, or imaginative comparison, must have something to do with the presence of images, in this other sense, in the mind's eye or the mind's ear. But, of course, it need not. No images of this sort need come in at any point. ... We cannot too firmly recognize that how a figure of speech works has nothing necessarily to do with how any images, as copies or duplicates of sense perceptions, may, for reader or writer, be backing up his words.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965): p. 98
Examples
There are a bunch of examples of "figure" being used to generally denote metaphorical terms (e.g. where the text refers to a specific term such as metaphor or conceit, and then later says "this figure") so these examples are not included since they're fairly trite.
The metaphor grown entirely conscious of itself, conscious of the gap between reality and figure; divided into (a) Implied simile: 'he is a lion' and (b) Stated simile: 'he like a lion" (37)
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899): p. 37
Our conclusions, then, as to the relationship between metaphor and simile must be quite contrary to those commonly held by the rhetoricians. The simile is not the earlier figure, transformed into metaphor by the simple device of cutting out the connective "as" or "like": but it is a stage later than metaphor in the process of developing a vague sensuous impression into the clear-cut judgment upon a given situation. The relation between these figures is more than merely verbal. It is a fundamental relationship of thought.
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899): p. 40
Thus the traveller putting his luggage and provisions on board and old age stowing away a stock of good works upon which to support itself through the ordeal of death are firmly spliced together and presented to the reader as a figure.
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899): p. 62
There may be a resemblance between these two things, but it is not a resemblance sufficiently obvious ever to have presented itself to the writer as total identity. It had to be sought for specifically in order that two objects might be united in a figure. And the result of thus uniting them is not metaphor, but conceit.
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899): p. 63
If expression takes place just at the moment when the two prime elements in the figure are beginning to disclose themselves, we have the poetic metaphor.
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899): p. 68
Giddy brink, jovial wine, daring wound are examples of this figure. Here are adjectives that cannot be made to signify any quality of the substantives to which they are joined: (106-107)
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965): p. 106-107
He knows that "shame," for instance, is not merely a "state," but a movement of the eye, a color of the cheek, a certain quality of voice and set of the muscles; he knows this as "behavioristically" as the formal scientific behaviorist who would "reduce" the state itself to these corresponding bodily equivalents. He also knows, however, that these bodily equivalents are but part of the idiom of expression involved in the act. They are "figures." They are hardly other than "symbolizations". (425-426)
Burke, Kenneth. "Four Master Tropes." The Kenyon Review 3, no. 4 (1941): 425-426
Works Cited
Augustine, Marcus Dods, J. F. Shaw, and S. D. F. Salmond. On Christian doctrine: the Enchiridion. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873.
Buck, Gertrude. The Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric. Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press, 1899.
Burke, Kenneth. "Four Master Tropes." The Kenyon Review 3, no. 4 (1941): 421-38. Accessed April 15, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4332286.
Herder, Johann Gottfried., and Jason Gaiger. Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalions Creative Dream. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. With a Life of the Author. Vol. I. 2 vols. Boston: Cummings & Hilliard, 1813.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press, 1965