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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 14 No. 2

© 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 39–61
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Mind, meaning and metaphor:

the philosophy and psychology
of metaphor in 19th-century
Germany
BRIGITTE NERLICH and DAVID D. CLARKE
ABSTRACT
This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which pro-
posed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for
metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetor-
ical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the
figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection
between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the
nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul and others laid the foundations
for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber,
Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its 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 psy-
chology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only
nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and
language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of
metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by
Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout.
Key words: cognition, history, metaphor, philosophy, psychology
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40 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 14(2)
INTRODUCTION
Metaphor has had three relatively unrelated waves of fame in the 20th
century, the first brought about by the reflections on metaphor by Ivor A.
Richards and Max Black published between 1930 and 1960, the second pro-
voked by Roman Jakobson’s papers on metaphor and metonymy (Jakobson,
1956; 1983[1956]), the third, more recent one, triggered by George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By in the 1980s. Metaphors We
Live By has become a standard text for those interested in cognitive linguis-
tics, as well as the philosophy and psychology of language. However,
although well aware of the fact that the reflections on metaphor have their
roots in ancient rhetoric, only a small number of 20th- and 21st-century lin-
guists, psychologists and philosophers of language seem to appreciate just
how much research into metaphor was done during the 19th century in the
fields of rhetoric, lexical semantics, philosophy and psychology.
In the 19th century, the study of metaphor was on the one hand part of
historical semantics studying mechanisms of semantic change, such as
metaphor (Nerlich, 1992). It was, on the other hand, part of an ongoing philo-
sophical reflection on the relationship between language, thought and reality.
But the analysis of metaphor was also still part of the tradition which studied
tropes and figures of speech in rhetoric, poetics and stylistics. This older
approach was only partially integrated into the more modern linguistic
current of thought on metaphor and was rejected as mere classificationism
by most of the philosophers of metaphor. They objected strongly to the defi-
nition of metaphor as a shortened comparison, a view (arguably) held by
Aristotle, Quintilian and many other rhetoricians that followed in their foot-
steps. Whereas the rhetorical and the philosophical approaches to metaphor
mostly clashed, the linguistic and the philosophical ones intersected in the
works of certain scholars, some of which will be discussed here.
In this article we want to focus on a philosophy of metaphor, which, well
before Johnson (1987), proposed a close link between the body and the mind
as the basis for metaphor; which, well before Lakoff and Johnson (1980),
debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device; and
which, well before cognitive linguistics came along, questioned the distinc-
tion between the literal and the figurative.1 This philosophy of metaphor
developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought
and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as
Giambattista Vico (see Leezenberg, 2001), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) and others laid the foundations for
this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred
Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the
linguistics of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for
instance, by Philipp Wegener, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Stählin and Karl

MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 41
Bühler (see Nerlich and Clarke, 2000). This philosophically and linguistically
grounded psychology of metaphor was integrated with an emerging prag-
matist psychology of language by a lesser-known American scholar,
Gertrude Buck (1971[1898]), who, like her German counterparts, objected
strongly to the prevailing way of studying metaphor as a mere poetic device.
All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy of the metaphoric according
to which metaphor was neither just a ‘figure of speech’, nor just a poetic
fiction or decoration, but was regarded as underlying the structure and evol-
ution of human thought and language.
The whole movement of analysing metaphor in the context of ordinary life,
language and thought, which began during the 18th century (see Schmitz,
1985; Nerlich, 1996; Nerlich, 1998), seems to have reached a first pan-Euro-
pean peak in the 1830s when linguists, philosophers, literary theorists and
some rhetoricians proclaimed that figures of speech are, as Ortony was to say
some 150 years later, not only nice, but necessary (Ortony, 1975). For the
English rhetorician and philosopher Benjamin Humphrey Smart, for
example, they are (pace Locke, who had called metaphors a ‘perfect cheat’;
Locke, 1975[1689]: III, X, 1):
. . . essential parts of the original structure of language; and however
they may sometimes serve the purpose of falsehood, they are on most
occasions, indispensable to the effective communication of truth. It is
only by [these] expedients that mind can unfold itself to mind; – lan-
guage is made up of them; there is no such thing as an express and direct
image of thought. (Smart, 1831: 210)
For him, as for many after him, tropes and figures of speech ‘are the original
texture of language, and that from which whatever is now plain at first arose.
All words are originally tropes; that is expressions turned . . . from their first
purpose, and extended to others’ (Smart, 1831: 214).
A similar view had been expressed by the philosopher Jean Paul in
Germany in 1804. He wrote in his Vorschule der Asthetik:
Ingenious figures of speech can either give soul to the body or body to
the spirit. Originally, when man was still at one with the world, this
two-dimensional trope did not yet exist; one did not compare that
which showed no resemblance, but one proclaimed identities:
metaphors were, as with children, necessary synonyms for body and
mind. Just as in the case of writing pictures preceded the alphabet,
metaphor (insofar as it designated relations and not objects) was the
first word in spoken language, and only after losing its original colour
could it become a literal sign.2 (Quoted in Biese, 1893: 12)
This seems to have been the spark that ignited a whole bonfire of metaphor
analyses in Germany and abroad (see Trench, 1890[1851]. One can find

allusions to the claim that the literal is but the pallid remnant of the figura-
tive in Gerber, Nietzsche, Biese, Buck and many more. Another of Jean Paul’s
aphorisms became even more widely known and has to be quoted yet again
in this context: ‘every language is . . . but a dictionary of pallid metaphors’
(Jean Paul, 1962–77[1804]: 184). J. Bauer echoes Jean Paul’s view when he
writes, like many others:
Primitive languages are still in the state of un-discoloured imagery. In
those times prose did not yet exist, as every word already evoked a
poetic impression through its roots and compounds, as every intuition
was already thought, and every name an attempt to write poetry. (Bauer,
1878: I, 9)
This was written in 1878 at the beginning of two decades of furious meta-
phorical research activity, another peak in a meta-metaphorical wave of
activity which continued well into the beginning of the 20th century.
In the following we shall examine how metaphor was studied between 1870
and 1900 in the German philosophy of language. We shall then briefly turn
to the psychological study of metaphor. But instead of analysing the work of
the German psychologists Stählin and Bühler (see Nerlich and Clarke, 2000),
we shall examine an American treatise, which was, however, heavily influ-
enced by European, especially German, reflections on metaphor.
T H E F U N D A M E N TA L M E TA P H O R I C I T Y O F
THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE
Every discourse on metaphor originates in a radical choice: either (a)

language is by nature, and originally, metaphorical, and the mechanism
of metaphor establishes linguistic activity . . . or (b) language (and every
other semiotic system) is a rule-governed mechanism, a predictive
machine that says which phrases can be generated and which not, and
which from those able to be generated are ‘good’ or ‘correct’, or
endowed with sense; a machine with regard to which the metaphor con-
stitutes a breakdown, a malfunction, an unaccountable outcome, but at
the same time the drive toward linguistic renewal. (Eco, 1984: 88)
The philosophers of language of the 1880s opted for the first choice, just like
the philosophers of language of the 1980s. They reacted against a view of
metaphors as philosophical trouble-makers which had pervaded English
philosophy since Locke; the 20th-century philosophers of language reacted
instead against a view of language and metaphor as ‘deviation’ which had per-
vaded linguistics in the form of generative grammar and against a correspon-
dence theory of truth which had prevailed in neopositivist philosophy. Both
reacted against a view of language and metaphor as just a formal mechanism.

One of the central figures in 19th-century German philosophy of language

was Gustav Gerber whose works became a central reference point for many
metaphor researchers. In a way, he was the Lakoff of his generation.
G U S TAV G E R B E R ( 1 8 2 0 – 1 9 0 1 )
Gerber had studied in Berlin and Leipzig and had attended lectures in a wide
variety of fields: mathematics, astronomy, the natural sciences, geography,
philology and linguistics (Boekh, Bopp), philosophy (Hegel) and history
(Frank Vonk, personal communication). However, for most of his life he
worked at the Städtisches Realgymnasium (technical high school) in
Bromberg, that is, well away from the hub of linguistic life at that time. He
wrote three major works: Die Sprache als Kunst [Language as Art] in 1871–4,
two volumes which went into a second edition in 1885; Die Sprache und das
Erkennen [Language and Cognition] in 1884; and Das Ich als Grundlage
unserer Weltanschauung [The ‘I’ as the Basis of our World-view] in 1893. The
first two books were widely reviewed and became quite popular references.
Despite this Gerber remained an intellectual outsider who was unwilling to
conform and compartmentalize his work so as to fit it into the various new
branches of philosophy, linguistics, aesthetics and psychology (Vonk, 1999:
294).
Gerber’s philosophy of language merges all strands of post-Kantian
philosophy and exploits them for a new assessment of the relation between
language and mind and for a new theory of semantics. He had read Immanuel
Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Heymann
Steinthal, as well as Johann Heinrich Lambert, Johann Gottfried von Herder,
and many more post-Kantian or anti-Kantian philosophers of language.3 He
was also well acquainted with the British empiricist tradition in philosophy
(Cloeren, 1988).
He belongs to those philosophers who criticized Kant’s uncritical attitude
towards language and who wanted to supplement Kant’s critique of pure
reason by a critique of language (Gerber, 1884: 190).4 He also wished to put
the study of language and metaphor on a more empirical footing and to avoid
empty metaphysical (Hegelian-type) speculations (see Lakoff and Johnson,
1999 for a recent account).
At a time when . . . we have become sceptical of scientific investigations
which are based on mere concepts and abstractions, and when we call
for empirical research to provide creditable foundations to our research
activities, it has also become clear that what Kant began to investigate
in his ‘Critique of pure reason’ must be continued as a critique of
language. The diversity of scientific, moral, and religious concepts . . .
demonstrate clearly that it would be entirely wrong to assume a general

system of thought for all people. This would be a mere abstraction on

the par with a universal system of language. (Gerber, 1871–4: I, 244)
Such a ‘critique of language’ also flourished in the works of Victoria, Lady

Welby,5 Ogden and Richards (1994[1923]), and Fritz Mauthner, who claimed
with Gerber and then Nietzsche that metaphor structures human knowledge.
Mauthner wrote, for example, ‘that even the most ancient spiritual com-
ponents of the soul must have been acquired metaphorically, that is by com-
paring things, that even the most minimal pre-linguistic understanding of the
world must have been based on metaphor’ (Mauthner, 1923[1901/2]: 464).
Gerber analysed language from three different perspectives: as art (aes-
thetics), as communication (philology) and as cognition (philosophy)
(Gerber, 1884: 1). Metaphor is central to all three, as Gerber argues that lan-
guage (at its inception and in its continuous use) is inherently metaphorical
and therefore a form of art, and that all thought and all concepts are linguis-
tically mediated and therefore metaphorical in nature.6
Unlike other philosophers who worked with the image of a mirror when
talking about the representation of thoughts in language, Gerber compared
linguistic representation with representation in the arts. For Gerber, the
lexicon and grammar are the instruments (Darstellungsmittel) that allow us
to create verbal art; they are what Humboldt had called the ergon, what
Gerber calls Sprachtechnik (language as technique). In the artistic creation of
linguistic representations in the act of speaking, language becomes energeia,
what Gerber calls Sprachkunst (language as art). All linguistic represen-
tations, not only tropes, are therefore figurative depictions (bildlich). He
stressed that there is, in principle, no difference between literal and figurative
speech and that words are tropical in nature from the very start and will
always remain tropical (Gerber, 1871–4: I, 299–300). This view, already
anticipated by Vico, was also adopted by Nietzsche, who had read Gerber.
He wrote, for example: ‘It should be stressed that there are no “literal”
[eigentliche] expressions and that there is no real [eigentliches] understanding
without metaphor’ (quoted in Schumacher, 1997: 18).
Whereas most rhetoricians regarded metaphors as exceptional poetic
expressions which are substituted for other more normal signs, Gerber con-
sidered metaphors as normal and regarded arbitrary signs as degenerate
symbols.
The multiplicity of uses gradually transforms the work of art that is

language, it destroys the figurative or pictorial splendour of each word
through the overall sense of the utterance as a whole and forces them
into a service in which they are used as mere signs. (Gerber, 1871–4: I,
117)

But where do conventional signs come from then? According to Gerber, they
derive from metaphors in a two-stage process of figurative or pictorial rep-
resentation. At first, mental pictures (Bilder) are called up or triggered auto-
matically as a last member in an unconscious chain of mental and verbal
events which produces a first type of conventional signs. Later, when lan-
guage is well established, people can use language itself creatively and
produce metaphors and other tropes. These fresh metaphors then die and can
again become mere conventional signs. Let us now look more closely at the
very beginning of language.
It all starts with the (unknowable) ‘thing in itself’, which causes a certain
nervous stimulus, which calls up a sensation, which triggers a sound, which
triggers a mental picture or representation.7 After habituating to these pic-
tures born from necessity, we start to play with them more freely and we
create a representation (Abbild) of them in a sound. The sound we choose to
represent the mental picture is taken from the sound-material that nature
provides us with (we can imitate sounds in nature or we can build on sounds
produced by ourselves through reflex or emotion). This linguistic picture
(Lautbild ) is what Gerber also calls a linguistic root (Sprachwurzel). It com-
bines freedom (choice) and necessity (natural material) which are reconciled
through imagination (Phantasie). Every root is therefore already ‘tropical’ in
nature, and it can be understood only if it is supplemented by something else,
such as a gesture, perception or the knowledge of the circumstances in which
it is heard (Gerber, 1884: 104).
From the root the word develops, and from this finally the concept
emerges (Gerber, 1871–4: I, 174). It is certainly not the case, in Gerber’s view,
that the concept is given and then just labelled with a word. And it is also
wrong to say that the words which have become conventional through use
have a ‘literal’ meaning and that new meanings are ‘figurative’. The con-
ventional meanings only appear to be literal through habituation. They once
were as ‘figurative’ (bildlich) as the new ‘figurative’ meanings. As in the case
of the first use of a root word, new word meanings are understood only by
reference to the context in which they are used, but also, in this case, by refer-
ence to our accumulated knowledge of the meaning relations they entertain
with other words in the language (Gerber, 1884: 104). Here the linguistic or
symbolic frame or field supplements the situational one. ‘Meaning’ is always
adjusted or adapted by reference to both (for a more elaborate psycholin-
guistic field theory of meaning, see later Bühler, 1990[1934], who distin-
guished between the symbolic field and the deictic field).
For Gerber, ‘the relativity of concepts and the pliability of meanings are
tied to the living use of language’ (Cloeren, 1988: 155). Cloeren compares this
approach to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘theory of family resemblances and the
overlapping of meanings, as well as his view of language as a form of life’
(ibid.; see Gerber, 1884: 161–2).

As we shall see, this theory of the emergence of words and concepts was
directly endorsed by Nietzsche in his philosophy of language. He claimed
that what we regard as truth is nothing but a metaphor to which we have
become accustomed:
The most ordinary metaphors, the usual ones, now have the status of
truths and are points of comparison for the rarer ones. In fact, what we
have here is nothing but a difference between convention and novelty,
frequency and rarity. (Nietzsche, 1988b: 491)
In this view, eternal truths and essences go out of the window, together with
pre-established concepts. As Gerber wrote: ‘Nothing is more wrong than to
suppose that we use language to designate things in the world’ (Gerber,
1871–4: I, 248). What is left is the insight that truth is conventionalized
metaphor and that meaning is use, as Wittgenstein would later say.
Just as Gerber had stressed the importance of context, so he also stressed
the importance of social language use, that is to say: the linguistic images or
pictures created by the individual can become ‘language’ only if they are
acknowledged (anerkannt) and used by a wide circle of people and regarded
by them as apt symbols of mental representations. This is true at the begin-
ning of language as well as in its continuous existence and use.
Created, recreated, reinterpreted by the individual, the sound never-
theless has only value as a linguistic sound when it has become a
common possession. . . . The treasure of knowledge which is common
and accessible to all is transmitted from generation to generation, and
nevertheless each and every individual has a limited freedom and power
to contribute to the improvement of language and knowledge. (Gerber,
1884: 60–1)
In his philosophy of language Gerber argued against dichotomies such as man
and nature, individual and society, freedom and necessity, language and
cognition, and speech act and thought act. He declared instead that ‘the
formation of concepts is no less a speech act than a thought act’ (Gerber, 1885
[1871]: I, 241). Furthermore, at the origin of language, both speech act and
thought act have their roots in a Lebensakt (life act) (Gerber, 1871–4: I, 229;
quoted by Buck, 1971[1898]: 10, N2). ‘The speech act is thus the completion
of the thought act and therefore not simply the thought act’s form, but it is
the very existence of the thought act’ (Gerber, 1885: I, 241; quoted in Cloeren,
1988: 148): ‘the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’
(Wittgenstein, 1958[1953): §23).

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900)
That Nietzsche read and appreciated Gerber and integrated many of his
thoughts into his reflections on language, truth and knowledge has been var-
iously noted (e.g. Ungeheuer, 1983; Meijers, 1988; Gilman et al., eds, 1989;
Gerhardt, 1992; Schumacher, 1997). For Nietzsche, as for Gerber (and Hum-
boldt before them), language mediates through free poetic creativity between
individual and society, man and world, nature and freedom, mind and body.
This is why Nietzsche liked Gerber’s schema of the emergence of language
(Schumacher, 1997: 219) and elaborated it himself:
What is a word? The representation of a nerve stimulus in sounds. . . .
He [the linguistic creator] only designates the relations that things have
to man and to do this he uses the boldest metaphors. In the beginning,
a nervous stimulus is transformed into an image! First metaphor. This
image in turn is shaped into a sound! Second metaphor. . . . We believe
that we know something about the things themselves when we talk
about trees, colours, snow and flowers, when, in fact, the only thing we
have are metaphors of things, metaphors which do not correspond in
any way to the original essences. (Nietzsche, 1988c[1873]: 878–9)
In his recent book on language and cognition, entitled Kant and the Platypus
(Eco, 1999), Eco takes up this passage and elaborates it in turn. He shows
how Nietzsche developed a new theory of concepts, according to which con-
cepts are but metaphors gone stale.
Since nature has thrown away the key, the intellect plays on fictions that
it calls truth, or systems of concepts, based on the legislation of lan-
guage . . . we think we talk about (and know) trees, colors, snow, and
flowers, but they are metaphors that do not correspond to the original
essences. Every word becomes concept as its pallid universality takes
the color out of the differences between fundamentally unequal things:
thus we think that in correspondence with the multiplicity of individual
leaves there exists a primordial ‘leaf’ on ‘the model of which all leaves
have supposedly been woven, drawn, circumscribed, colored, wrinkled,
and painted – but by a clumsy hand – in such a way that no exemplar
would seem to be correct and reliable as a faithful copy of the original
shape. (Eco, 1999: 44, citing Nietzsche, 1895[1873]: 360)
Eco continues:
In fact, the truth is a poetically elaborated ‘mobile army of metaphors,
metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’ that subsequently gel into
knowledge, ‘illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten’ . . . so
we become accustomed to lying according to convention, in a style that

is binding for everyone, placing our actions under the control of

abstractions, and having reduced the metaphors to schemata and
concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks, laws and de-
limitations, constructed entirely by language, an immense ‘Roman
columbarium,’ the graveyard of intuition. (Eco, 1999: 45)
How can one escape from this conceptual prison built out of dead
metaphors? According to Eco, this is only possible through ‘a permanent
poetic revolution’ (Eco, 1999: 46), because, as Nietzsche noted, art ‘continu-
ously muddles the rubrics and the compartments of concepts, presenting new
transcriptions, metaphors, and metonymies; it continuously reveals the desire
to give the subsisting world of waking man a figure so multicolored, irregu-
lar, devoid of consequences, incoherent, exciting and eternally new, which is
that provided by the world of dreams’ (Nietzsche, 1895[1873]: 369).
The assumption that every ‘word becomes concept as its pallid universal-
ity takes the color out of the differences between fundamentally unequal
things’, that the literal is only the latest stage in a process that starts with the
figurative, had been hinted at by Jean Paul (see above) and was later investi-
gated psychologically by Buck. Before we come to her treatise on metaphor,
we shall deal with another follower of Gerber’s who developed a rich phil-
osophy of metaphor but hated Nietzsche because of his metaphorical use of
language, especially his metaphors of the super-man and the super-race which
he regarded (rightly, as it turned out) as very dangerous (Biese, 1893: 223).
This literary and linguistic philosopher was Alfred Biese.
ALFRED BIESE (1856–1930)
Like Gerber, Biese was well versed in philology, philosophy and the natural
sciences. He therefore brought to the study of metaphor certain insights from
the theory of perception and optics: ‘The images produced by our retina are
transformed mirror images, and even more so the images produced by our
receptive and creative imagination, which cannot really be separated from
sensual perceptions’ (Biese, 1889: 319). Biese and Gerber (when he writes
about nerve excitation) were certainly aware of the progress made in the
physiology of neural pathways and the psychology of perception, especially
in the works of Johannes Müller, Gustav Fechner (Biese, 1893: 111),
Hermann von Helmholtz (Biese, 1893: 76) and Rudolf Hermann Lotze, for
example (see Reed, 1997). This confluence of ideas on perception and
(neuro)physiology with ideas about metaphor has striking parallels with
modern developments in this field.
In his major work Die Philosophie des Metaphorischen [The Philosophy of
the Metaphoric] (1893) Biese synthesizes the philosophical and linguistic

discussions on the nature of metaphor carried out in the 18th and 19th
centuries (Biese, 1893; also Biese, 1889). Biese followed in the footsteps of
Vico who had rejected the literal/figurative distinction and regarded
metaphor as a necessary form of intuition (Biese, 1893: 8), Lambert who had
claimed that metaphor is an important tool in constructing the architecture
of a language (ibid.: 113), Goethe who had said that language anthropo-
morphizes reason and reality, and that reasoning and categorization are
inherently embodied (ibid.: 16 and passim), Arthur Schopenhauer who had
argued that all primitive thinking is carried out in pictures (ibid.: 104), and
Gerber with whom Biese agrees that it is fundamentally wrong to say that
literal meaning is different from non-literal meaning on the basis that the
latter is ‘figurative’ (ibid.: 13 and 23).
Biese also refers to the 1857 work by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the Aes-
thetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen [Aesthetics or Science of the Beautiful]
which was widely read up until the beginning of the 20th century. Vischer
had analysed metaphor as a mixing or blending of spheres or domains. He
pointed out that rather than comparing something with something else,
metaphor equates something with something else (Vischer, 1857: III, 1226;
quoted in Biese, 1893: 14; also paraphrased by Stählin, 1914: 310; see Nerlich
and Clarke, 2000).
Biese agrees with all those who no longer say that metaphor is an abbrevi-
ated comparison. He therefore praises Gerber, but also Wilhelm Dilthey who
had written around 1880 (in some of his reflections on aesthetics) that figures
of speech are not mere decorations of speech but are an integral part of poetic
creativity, that language is a treasure chest of discoloured images, and that the
image or figure of speech is a kind of linguistic painting (quoted in Biese,
1893: 15).
Summarizing what he had learned from all these philosophers and psy-
chologists, Biese declared: ‘Metaphor is not a poetic trope but an original
form of cognitive perception.’ Metaphor is ‘the most important inner schema
used by the human mind’ (Biese, 1893: VI). The old Greek term of ‘schema’
or figure and the Kantian term of ‘schema’ are brought to a linguistic syn-
thesis by Biese so as to analyse the role of metaphor in child language, myths,
religion, art and philosophy; to each of these topics he devotes a chapter in
his book.
For Biese, metaphor is mainly based on anthropomorphization, on analo-
gies between the inner and the outer, the body and the mind. It bridges the
gap between man and world, the internal and the external, the macrocosm
and the microcosm (terms made popular by the philosopher and psycholo-
gist Lotze, 1856–64; see Biese, 1893: 4–5).
This focus on anthropomorphization was criticized by some literary
theorists, such as Ernst Elster, Emil Stern (Stern, 1898: 218) and Leo Spitzer
(see ibid.), but the literary intelligentsia of the time much preferred Biese’s

philosophy of metaphor to the hair-splitting trivialities reiterated over and

over again by rhetoricians of the type of Wilhelm Wackernagel (Wackernagel,
1873[1836]; see Elster, 1897: 384). They also agreed that Biese had rightly
stressed the subjective character of metaphor and therefore of cognition,
knowledge and truth (Biese, 1893: 105). For Stern in particular (fresh) sub-
jective metaphors are the very expression of the speaking and writing subject.
But like Gerber and others, Biese also warned that metaphor, although essen-
tial to human language and cognition, might pose a problem for explanation
and understanding, especially in philosophy and in the sciences, where
certain metaphors, such as ‘(vital) force’, ‘the struggle for survival’, ‘soul’ or
‘faculty’, can illuminate as well as adumbrate. A similar warning was issued
by Lady Welby in her article on metaphor and meaning, which was published
in the same year as Biese’s treatise on metaphor (Welby, 1893).
Biese stands in a long line of thinkers on metaphor, not all of whom can be
treated here. Stern (1898), Elster (1897, 1911) and Richard Moritz Meyer
(1930[1906]) refer, for example, to the works of Wilhelm Scherer, Dilthey and
Wundt, three major figures in the fields of philology, philosophy and psy-
chology respectively. More minor contributions to the debate were Friedrich
Brinkmann’s (1878) book on metaphors in modern languages (which still
stood with one leg in the tradition of the rhetoricians, but was widely quoted
and criticized by the philosophers of metaphor), and G. von Kohfeldt’s article
on the aesthetics of metaphor (Kohfeldt, 1892), which was more kindly
received (Stern, 1898: 217; Buck, 1971[1898]: 71). All later readers of these
major and minor works agreed on the fact that metaphor could no longer be
regarded as a shortened comparison, a view still held by many of the rhetori-
cians. This new view of metaphor gradually made its way into handbooks of
literary theory (see Elster, 1897: 395; 1911: 119) and even stylistics:
In former times one used to regard metaphor merely as a shortened

comparison. . . . But GERBER criticised already the general validity of
this view. . . . SCHERER . . . then adduced that metaphor usually
emerges through focusing on one feature or personification without
making the ‘detour through the image’. BIESE, finally, has demon-
strated this quite vividly. (Meyer, 1930[1906]: 117)
Teachers of poetics and stylistics began to stress that metaphor was funda-
mental to human thought and language (Elster, 1897: 376):
. . . the [tropes and figures of speech, B.N.] are not there for ‘enter-
tainment’ or ‘edification’, but they continue the process by which lan-
guage itself was originally created (compare e.g. GERBER 2, 250 f.). . . .
and MAUTHNER has stressed with real passion that in principle all
language development is based on metaphor. (Meyer, 1930[1906]:
108–9)

A P S Y C H O L O G Y O F M E TA P H O R
The view that metaphor ‘is no extraneous adornment fitted upon plain
language, nor an artificial perversion of non-figurative statement, but the
necessary stage through which speech must pass on its way to literalism’
(Buck, 1971[1898]: 69) was put on a psychological, even pragmatist, footing
by Gertrude Buck (1871–1922). This she did in her dissertation The
Metaphor: A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric (1971[1898])8 for which she
received her doctorate of philosophy in rhetoric from the University of
Michigan in 1898 (see Kitzhaber, 1990). Influenced by work in experimental
and developmental psychology, Buck states that metaphor is not just a
mechanical rhetorical device but an organic principle or procedure under-
lying thought and language:
The purpose of this study is to explain metaphor in terms of the con-
temporary psychology. In so doing it has, perhaps, been inevitable that
a new face should be put upon this figure. From a mechanical structure
it has become a biologic organism. It has come to stand as the linguis-
tic representative of a certain stage in the development of thought, and
thus an expression perfectly natural and universal, rather than as a liter-
ary device, somewhat artificial and wholly unique, obedient to no laws
save those empiric ones whose validity extends no farther than itself.
(1971[1898]: iii)
She takes up Gerber’s thoughts about the development of language (Buck,
1971[1898]: 10, N2) but brings a new type of psychology to this issue, namely
that developed by the pragmatist psychologist John Dewey (ibid.: iii, 21)
(who, like all American pragmatists, was influenced by Darwinian evolu-
tionary theory). Following him, she regards metaphor as ‘the expression in
language of a certain stage in the development of perception’ (ibid.: iii).
Dewey shared with many thinkers of the turn of the century a ‘pragmatic
Weltanschauung’ (Malinowski, 1923: 328; see Nerlich and Clarke, 1995,
1996),9 especially with George Herbert Mead, Grace Andrus de Laguna and
Jacob Robert Kantor in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski, Lady
Welby, Alan Henderson Gardiner and John Rupert Firth in Britain (see
Nerlich and Clarke, 1996). They all saw language as a form of contextual,
situated interaction and rejected theories of meaning where words just stand
for concepts or objects, where meaning is equated with mental representation
and language with the pure expression of thought. They did not develop
theories of metaphor of their own, but shared with metaphor researchers
influenced by them, such as Buck, and those influenced by 1970s linguistic
pragmatics, such as Lakoff, the insight that language and human (bodily, per-
ceptual and interactional) experience are inextricably linked, that mind and
language are embodied.

Building on both Dewey’s philosophy of language and the European

tradition of metaphor research, Buck argues that metaphor helps in the con-
struction of language and thought by establishing bridges between percep-
tion, situation and human interaction. Buck claims that ‘in the early stages of
thought-development words stand not for some unique clearly-defined
entity in the world, but for a somewhat inchoate perception of a whole situ-
ation, the details of which have not yet disentangled themselves so as to be
projected sharply against the consciousness’ (1971[1898]: 13).
Whereas Gerber distinguished between the general figurative nature of all
language, and the special use of figures of speech in ordinary language and
literature, Buck goes back to Friedrich Max Müller’s10 similar distinction
between radical and poetical metaphor (F. M. Müller, 1877[1864]: 388; Buck,
1971[1898]: 3, N6), a distinction which had been well known to Gerber
himself.
Rejecting the resemblance or comparison theory of metaphor, Buck argues
that there are not two objects of thought which primitive man then compares
so as to extract a resemblance. On the contrary: ‘The two are one so far as his
perception can testify’ (1971[1898]: 13) The same is true for children. Both
primitive man and children do not compare, but equate. The actual per-
ception of resemblance is therefore an activity comparatively late in the
development of mankind and of children (ibid.: 15). This means that ‘radical
metaphor is observable only in past stages of the growth of a language. It
exists continually but can not be recognized as such until the stage of homo-
geneity for any given perception has been passed’ (ibid.: 16). However, there
came a stage when people began to perceive differences between situations
which were designated with the same word and therefore ‘the use of the same
word to represent them had become metaphoric’. This was the stage when,
gradually, ‘social consciousness’ passed from homogeneity or identity to
complexity (ibid.: 17; see Jean Paul above).
Buck therefore postulates three stages in the growth of metaphor: radical
metaphor; poetic metaphor; and simile (1971[1898]: 39–40):
The first represents that stage of perception in which the figure is still
homogeneous. Teeth are pearls. The one name stands for a single
sensation produced by a row of vaguely-perceived small objects, white,
glistening and all but translucent. The second is that representing the
stage of perception at which it has begun to differentiate into two main
constituents. This is expressed by saying ‘pearly teeth.’ The third
represents a later stage of perception in which the two objects, just
beginning to draw apart from one another in the second period, have
separated so far that a connection is visible between them, this connec-
tion being commonly expressed in language by the words ‘as’ or ‘like’.
(ibid.: 36–7)

Buck stands the venerable tradition of defining metaphor as an abbreviated

simile on its head and in doing so she also overturns the old assumption that
literal meaning comes first and figurative meaning comes later: ‘The relation
between these [three types of] figures is more than merely verbal. It is a
fundamental relationship of thought. Simile is a half-way house for the
metaphor-process on its way to plain statement’ (ibid.: 40). So, first we have
the figurative (radical, then poetic metaphor), then simile, then the literal. But
this is not the end of the story of how human thought and language develop:
There is thus no limit to the new situations of which our expanding uni-
verse and our expanding selves are capable. Metaphor, while a stage in
the perceptive process which must always be superseded by plain state-
ment, must as certainly recur in a new perceptive process. Though one
metaphor may die into abstract speech, another rises out of the very
extension and complication of experience which the former process of
growth and death has afforded. To paraphrase Swinburne’s assertion,
‘Metaphors perish, but metaphor shall endure.’ (ibid.: 45)
Gerber and Biese had freed the philosophy of metaphor from Hegelian
abstractions and tried to put it on a more empirical basis (Gerber, 1871–4: I,
244; Biese, 1893: 104). In Buck’s thesis on metaphor we find this more empiri-
cal approach supplemented by a pragmatist theory of situation, perception,
and meaning. Like Lakoff (see Brockman, 2000 [on-line]) in the 1970s she
was impressed by Dewey’s experiental and pragmatic philosophy of lan-
guage, but unlike Lakoff she also knew about the rich German tradition of
metaphor research. Her work can therefore be regarded as one of the missing
links between 19th- and 20th-century research into metaphor.
M E TA P H O R I N T H O U G H T A N D L A N G U A G E :
THEN AND NOW
The 19th-century reflections on metaphor and truth, on conceptualization

and perception, and on the literal–figurative distinction have some counter-
parts in the modern philosophy of metaphor. We shall concentrate here on
three points of overlap: (1) the rejection of the comparison theory of
metaphor; (2) a new conception of truth and knowledge; and (3) the rejec-
tion of the literal–figurative dichotomy.
As Lakoff and Johnson wrote in their book Metaphors We Live By, their
theory of metaphor ‘runs counter to the classical and still most widely held
theory of metaphor, namely the comparison theory’ (Lakoff and Johnson,
1980: 153). According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor does not only
passively exploit pre-existing similarities via comparison, it can actively
create new realities.11 This also goes against the traditional view of metaphor,

especially the view that metaphor is merely a linguistic or poetic device.

Metaphor is seen instead as ‘a means of structuring our conceptual system
and the kinds of everyday activities we perform’ (ibid.: 145). Finally, simi-
larities are no longer regarded as objectively given, but as subjectively con-
structed, as based on the experience of people (ibid.: 154). This view goes
against the grain of any objectivist theory of cognition. Lakoff and Johnson
conceded that this ‘new’ metaphorical theory of truth and knowledge is not
so new, but they overlooked how old it actually is:
It should be obvious from this description that there is nothing radi-
cally new in our account of truth. It includes some of the central
insights of the phenomenological tradition, such as the rejection of
epistemological foundationalism [see Nietzsche, B.N.], the stress on the
centrality of the body in the structuring of our experience [see Biese,
B.N.], and the importance of that structure in understanding. Our view
also accords with some of the key elements of Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy: the family-resemblance account of categorization . . . and
the emphasis on meaning as relative to context and to one’s own con-
ceptual system [see Gerber, B.N.]. (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 182)
Let us now briefly look at one of the more recent books on figurative lan-
guage, written by some eminent scholars in this field, Figurative Language
and Thought (Turner et al., 1998). In his chapter, devoted to the ‘literal versus
figurative dichotomy’ (see Turner, 1997 [on-line]), Turner points out that in
his previous work he
. . . offered demonstrations that the commonsense dichotomy between
‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ is a psychological illusion. There is no doubt
that some products of thought and language feel literal while others feel
figurative. We have reactions, and they are motivated, but these
motivations do not come from fundamental differences of cognitive
operations. ‘Literal’ and ‘figurative’ are labels that serve as efficient
short-hand announcements of our integrated reactions to the products
of thought and language; they do not refer to fundamentally different
cognitive operations.
He argues that we judge a mental or verbal connection to be literal or
figurative depending on ‘the degree to which the conceptual connection or
the linguistic expression is generatively entrenched. The greatest degree of
generative entrenchment for a conceptual connection occurs when it becomes
established as a central part of basic category structure: for example, a woman
is a human being.’ Here we are dealing with ‘metaphors’ which, according to
Nietzsche (and Jean Paul, and Gerber, and Buck), have been reduced to
schemata and concepts. ‘Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks, laws
and delimitations, constructed entirely by language, an immense “Roman

columbarium,” the graveyard of intuition’ (Nietzsche, quoted by Eco, 1999:

45).
Like Nietzsche, Gerber and Buck, Turner assumes that conceptual
entrenchment is graded, with category structures that are so entrenched that
they seem ‘literal’ at one end and others that appear to be ‘figurative’ at the
other, and certain well-worn, but not quite dead, metaphors in between. As
Nietzsche said: ‘In fact, what we have here is nothing but a difference
between convention and novelty, frequency and rarity’ (Nietzsche, 1988b:
491). Some metaphors are more active than others, some more dead than
others.
At the end of the 19th century, just as at the end of the 20th century, it was
therefore argued that we can only understand how our conceptual and
semantic knowledge is structured and how it changes with use if we accept
that
. . . metaphor is not, as we have been taught, an isolated phenomenon,
a ‘freak’ in literature, more or less inexplicable, an arbitrary ‘device’ of
the writer, but a genuine expression of the normal process of thought at
a certain stage in its development, consonant with the ordinary laws of
psychology and interwoven with all our common experiences. (Buck,
1971[1898]: 69; italics added)
CONCLUSION
To close this article a final question must be asked. Why did the conception
of metaphor change at the end of the 19th century, and why did it have to
change again at the end of the 20th century? Why did metaphor become so
important to linguists, psychologists and philosophers at the end of the 19th
and again at the end of the 20th century?
In both cases interest in metaphor, that is, the creative aspects of language,
was aroused in reaction against more formal approaches to language, devel-
oped on the one hand by some historical comparative linguists, on the other
by some structural and transformational linguists. There was, perhaps, also a
reaction against more and more mechanistic views of life and language, first
after the industrial revolution, and then again after the information tech-
nology revolution. In both traditions there was opposition to an objectivist
world-view, to language as a mere transfer of thoughts, and to a conception
of metaphor as a mere rhetorical ‘device’. And finally, both traditions rebelled
against a philosophy of language which divided language use between the
straightforward, logical and literal expression of thought and truth and the
figurative and deviant expression of emotions and passions. In the 19th
century, philosophers of metaphor reacted against this division, which had

been promoted in the works of John Locke as well as the Port-Royal gram-
marians and logicians, for example. In the 20th century, philosophers of
metaphor in turn reacted against the works of the neopositivists, the corre-
spondence view of truth, and the first Wittgenstein, for example, based on a
similar division of linguistic labour.
One can almost say that the followers of Lakoff and Johnson are, to some
extent, the new romantics of linguistics, but, just like Gerber, Nietzsche,
Biese and Buck, they also have a good understanding of contemporary
advances in philosophy, psychology and the natural sciences, including
(neuro)physiology.
NOTES
1 We shall focus on the theory of metaphor developed by cognitive linguists, such

as Lakoff, but we are aware that similar theories were proposed in other disci-
plines, such as psychology (see, for example, Ortony, 1993; Leary, 1990; Soyland,
1994) and philosophy (see the special issue on metaphor in Critical Inquiry, 1978).
2 All translations are by Brigitte Nerlich, unless otherwise indicated.
3 Is it more than coincidence that another reader of Humboldt, Steinthal, Herbart,
Moritz Lazarus and Lotze (see below) developed, like Gerber, a theory of
language as verbal art, namely Aleksandr Alexandrevic Potebnia, in his 1862 work
on thought and language (Potebnia, 1993[1862])? According to Serhii Wakulenko,
Potebnia, who studied in Berlin between 1862 and 1863, conceived of language as
dynamic activity. His theory of language included, as in the case of Gerber, a
theory of the relations between ‘speech act’ and ‘thought act’ and between art and
language. Like Gerber and Humboldt he saw in metaphor the most basic linguis-
tic procedure by which man can appropriate the world via language (Wakulenko,
2000: 419).
4 Ironically, it was Kant who had shown in his aesthetics what role productive
imagination played in perceptual experience and had laid the foundations for a
new aesthetics of imagination, interpretation and experience (see Makkreel, 1990;
see also the review by Mark Johnson, 1992).
5 Lady Welby was a philanthropist, philologist and semiotician. She corresponded
with Charles Sanders Peirce, collaborated for some time with Ogden, knew all the
main philosophers and psychologists of her time, wrote treatises about meaning
as use in the tradition of a future linguistic pragmatics and had a big following in
the Netherlands, where philosophers of language developed their own type of
pragmatic semiotics, which Lady Welby had called ‘significs’ (see Schmitz, 1992;
Nerlich and Clarke, 1996).
6 One can find a modern echo of this view of the close link between language and
art in Nelson Goodman’s 1968 work Languages of Art, which he wrote in reaction
to certain excesses of structural linguistics. Goodman’s work is now being redis-
covered by cognitive scientists (see McIver Lopes, 2000), and so should Gerber’s
be. Thanks to Pedro J. Chamizo Dominguez (University of Málaga) for alerting

us to this similarity. For more background material on modern philosophical

theories of metaphor see Johnson (1981).
7 This theory might have some of its roots in Müller and Steinthal’s reflex theory
of the origin of language. According to this theory, humans are equipped in such
a way that if struck, so to speak, by the perception of an object, they have to emit
certain sounds (Steinthal, 1871: 363). It is also possible that Gerber was referring
to the new physiology developed by Müller dealing with neural pathways, sensa-
tions, and so on (see below).
8 Which Elster in Germany regarded as a very valuable contribution to the
metaphor debate (Elster, 1911: 111, N1).
9 This phrase was quoted by Dewey in an interesting footnote to his chapter
‘Nature and Communication’ in his book Experience and Nature (1929[1925]:
206, note 4). De Laguna and Malinowski quoted in turn a passage from this book
in which Dewey characterizes words as ‘a mode of social action – with which to
realize the ends of association’ and not as ‘an expression of a ready-made, ex-
clusively individual, mental state, sensation, image or feeling’ (Dewey, 1929[1925]:
184).
10 Müller became Deputy Professor at the University of Oxford in 1851 and was
later appointed Professor of Comparative Philology. Müller’s books on the origin
and evolution of languages (partly influenced by Darwin) became bestsellers of
their time and Müller became an international celebrity.
11 Which seems to repeat Humboldt who wrote that language is not really the instru-
ment we use to represent already established truths but a means to discover not
yet known ones (Humboldt, 1968[1903–36]: IV, 27).
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
BRIGITTE NERLICH was a Research Fellow in Psychology at Nottingham

University, UK. She studied French and philosophy in Germany and France
and has published books and articles on the history of linguistics, especially
on semantics and pragmatics, on cognitive semantics, figurative language,
semantic change and language acquisition. She is now a Research Officer at
the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks & Society at the University
of Nottingham.
DAVID CLARKE is Professor of Psychology and director of the Action
Analysis Group, at Nottingham University, UK. He has a DPhil in Psy-
chology (Oxford) and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences (Cambridge).
He has co-authored articles and the 1996 book Semantic Theories in Europe,
1830–1930 with Brigitte Nerlich.
Address: Dr Brigitte Nerlich, Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks &
Society, Law and Social Sciences Building, University of Nottingham, Uni-
versity Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. Tel: (0115) 8467065. Fax: (0115)
8466349. [email: Brigitte.Nerlich@nottingham.ac.uk]

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(3) Nerlich (d/MJ) 25/5/01 12:06 pm Page 39

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 14 No. 2

Mind, meaning and metaphor:

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40 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 14(2)

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 41

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Every discourse on metaphor originates in a radical choice: either (a)

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 43

One of the central figures in 19th-century German philosophy of language

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system of thought for all people. This would be a mere abstraction on

Such a ‘critique of language’ also flourished in the works of Victoria, Lady

The multiplicity of uses gradually transforms the work of art that is

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 45

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46 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 14(2)

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 47

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900)

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is binding for everyone, placing our actions under the control of

ALFRED BIESE (1856–1930)

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 49

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philosophy of metaphor to the hair-splitting trivialities reiterated over and

In former times one used to regard metaphor merely as a shortened

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 51

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52 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 14(2)

Building on both Dewey’s philosophy of language and the European

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 53

Buck stands the venerable tradition of defining metaphor as an abbreviated

The 19th-century reflections on metaphor and truth, on conceptualization

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54 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 14(2)

especially the view that metaphor is merely a linguistic or poetic device.

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 55

columbarium,” the graveyard of intuition’ (Nietzsche, quoted by Eco, 1999:

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1 We shall focus on the theory of metaphor developed by cognitive linguists, such

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 57

us to this similarity. For more background material on modern philosophical

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Cloeren, H. J. (1988) Language and Thought: German Approaches to Analytic Phil-

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MIND, MEANING AND METAPHOR 59

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