Borges on metaphor.

Diana I. Prez
UBA-CONICET/IIF/SADAF

Buscarle ausencias al idioma es como buscar espacio en el cielo

2
(Inquisiciones, p. 73)

This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first original
book of theoretical analytic philosophy in Spanish Formas lgicas, realidad y
significado (Logical Forms, Meaning and Reality), a book in which Thomas
Simpson, Argentine philosopher, explores classical issues in philosophical
semantics mainly the connection between language, reality and thought. One
of the things that I learned from Thomas's book is that it is difficult to separate
the answers to the question how the language works from ontological theses.
For example, in the excellent chapter on Russells theory of descriptions
Thomas shows in detail how this theory, developed as a language analysis
device in order to solve classical metaphysical problems, is inextricably linked
to a specific ontology and a peculiar epistemology. In fact, the ontology to
which the theory of descriptions is attached is, somehow, an idealist ontology:
everything referred to by the terms of the perfect language are: sense data,
universals and the Self, entities that are introspectively accessible, things
which are immediately given to experience, that we know by acquaintance.

It is quite interesting to see that at about the same time in which

Simpson published this book in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges was giving
the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1967 - 1968) at the University of Harvard.
These lectures were rediscovered, transcribed and published in 2000 under
the title This craft of verse. In these lectures, Borges considers several issues
regarding the literary language, more specifically the language of poetry,
developing his own views on several important issues.

I will not discuss the topic of whether Borges, in addition to a sublime

writer, was a philosopher or not.3 In fact I think all discussions about
disciplinary boundaries make no sense. Borges was certainly an excellent
writer, but he was also an avid reader of both literature and philosophy,
especially of certain philosophical traditions, mainly English empiricism to

1
I want to express my gratitude with Marcelo Sabats, Eduardo Rivera Lpez, Eleonora
Orlando, Silvia Espaol and Marina Prez, who read a previous version and/or discussed
with me some of the ideas I included in this paper.
2
My translation, always poorer: Seeking absences in language is like looking for space in the
sky.
3
Borges (2000, p. 32) tells us a story about his first approach to Bubers writings. According
to Borges he read them as poetry and then he realized that all his philosophy lay in the
books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted these books because thay came to me
through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments. May
be Borges is here talking about the different ways in which we can read his own work.

1
which he refers in many of his works but he also was a brilliant theorist of
literature. In any case it is interesting to note that many of the things Borges
says in these lectures about the language of poetry -for example about the
various poetic devices such as metaphor, the question of the translation of
poetry, and other issues- are linked to the adoption of an idealist metaphysics
and a nominalist conception of language.

It is worth noticing that Borges ideas on language suggested in his

literary texts are interwoven with his writings about literature. For example, in
the story "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," a classical short story by Borges in
which he explores the possibility of an appropriate language for an idealistic
view of the world, he holds:

Nouns are formed by stringing together adjectives. One does not say moon;
one says aereal- bright above dark-round or soft-amberish-celestial or any
other string. (Borges, Tln, p. 73)

and in La metfora (1), he also uses as his first example the moon, saying:

"... When a geometrician says that the moon is an extension in three

dimensions, his expression is no less metaphorical than Nietzsches when he
prefers to define it as a cat walking across the rooftops. In both cases a link is
laid from the moon (synthesis of visual perceptions) to something else. In the
first, into a series of spatial relationships, in the second, to a set of evocative
sensations of stealth, stickiness and Jesuitism " (Borges 1921, pp. 140-1, my
translation)4

As we can see, in both cases Borges imagines a language where the

reference to the moon is implemented through various sets of words, always
taking as a starting point, as a touchstone for language, the set of visual
perceptions we experience when we perceive the moon.

Something similar happens with his remarks about memory, and the role of
this psychological faculty in the constitution of language. In "Funes, His
memory" another of his most famous short stories, Borges tells us:

In the seventeenth century, Locke postulated (and condemned) an

impossible language in which every individual thing every stone, every bird,
every branch- would have its own name; Funes once contemplated a similar
language, but discarded the idea as too general, to ambiguous. The truth was,
Funes remembered not only every leaf in every tree in every path of forest,
but every time he has perceived or imagined that leaf. Funes was
virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to
see that the generic symbol dog took all the dissimilar individuals of all

4
cuando un gemetra afirma que la luna es una cantidad extensa en las tres
dimensiones, su expresin no es menos metafrica que la de Nietzsche cuando prefiere
definirla como un gato que anda por los tejados. En ambos casos se tiende un nexo desde la
luna (sntesis de percepciones visuales) hacia otra cosa: en el primero, hacia una serie de
relaciones espaciales; en el segundo, hacia un conjunto de sensaciones evocadoras de
sigilo, untuosidad y jesuitismo.

2
shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the dog of three fourteen in the
afternoon seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog in
three fifteen seen frontally (Borges, Funes, p. 136)

and in his first written text on metaphor (1), he also takes up the question of
the power of memory as a source of explanation of why we possess certain
words but not others. He says:

(4) "Our memory is primarily visual and secondarily auditory. From the series
of statements that link together what we call consciousness, only those who
endure are translatable in terms of visual or hearing ... Nothing muscular,
olfactory, nor gustatory, find a place in memory, and the past is reduced,
hence, to a lot of shuffled visions and a plurality of voices ... to name a noun is
to suggest its visual context ... " (Borges 1921, pp. 141-2, my translation)5

As we can see, once again the basis of our language is the plurality of
experiences, especially of visual experiences which are those that we more
easily remember and retrieve.

In this paper I will focus on a particular use of language: metaphors. I

would like to explore the question whether some of the ideas Borges
suggested about language allow us to get a better understanding of the
phenomenon of metaphor.

Borges explicitly discusses the nature of metaphors in four different

6
texts. My purpose in this paper is to sketch a view of metaphor inspired by
the ideas discussed in these texts, and more specifically from an idealistic and
nominalist philosophical view that could be developed from some of his
remarks about language. Perhaps the question that guides my thoughts could
be formulated as follows: what would a metaphor be if there was no distinction
between literal and metaphorical meaning? In other words, how can we
explain the power of metaphors if we understand that there is no language
uniformly connected with an extra-mental reality as we naively believe there
is? My aim now is to answer this question from philosophy, i.e. I will not
consider metaphors as a literary phenomena studied by literary theory,
instead I will approach metaphors as a phenomenon which reveals something
about human thought. Many considerations have been drawn from various
fields about metaphors in relation to human thought (and derivatively with
human speech). For example, there is an important line of research which
considers metaphor as a key psychological mechanism in order to explain the
nature of abstract thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1982, 1999), and also in the
5
Nuestra memoria es principalmente visual y secundariamente auditiva. De la serie de
estados que eslabonan lo que denominamos conciencia, solo perduran los que son
traducibles en trminos de visualidad o de audicin Ni lo muscular, ni lo olfatorio ni lo
gustable, hallan cabida en el recuerdo, y el pasado se reduce, pues, a un montn de visiones
barajadas y a una pluralidad de voces nombrar un sustantivo cualquiera equivale a sugerir
su contexto visual
6
In chronological order: (1) Borges, J.L. "La metfora" en Textos recobrados. 1919-1929, (2)
Borges, J.L. "Examen de metforas" en Inquisiciones (1925), (3) Borges, J.L. "La metfora"
en Historia de la eternidad. (1936) y (4) Borges, J.L. "The metaphor" in This craft of verse,
Cap. 2 (1967)

3
field of philosophy of science, much work has been done on metaphor and
analogy as privileged forms of scientific thought (Bailer- Jones 2009). But I am
not interested today in these two areas, it is literature my target, because this
is the area in which Borgian considerations about metaphor are located. This
topic literature, especially poetry- has been at the center of the philosophical
reflections on metaphor, at least since Aristotle's Rhetoric. So, I will be
concerned with metaphors as a form of expression of thought with a specific
aesthetic impact.7 In what follows, I will first make some brief remarks about
how metaphor is understood in the most recent philosophical literature.
Secondly, I will briefly reconstruct Borges ideas about metaphors and finally I
will try to extend these ideas in order to explore to what extent they can help
me to develop a plausible theory of metaphor.

What are metaphors?

Metaphors seem to involve at least two conceptual domains. In classic

accounts they are called subject and predicate (which is reasonable for cases
like the famous "Juliet is the sun" ), but in more recent accounts they are
called the source domain and the target domain, in order to include other type
of metaphors which are not canonically formulated. In the most recent
philosophical literature there are four main theoretical lines that seek to
explain the nature of metaphor. They are: (1) the classical Aristotelian theory
of simile, (2) Blacks interactive theory, (3) neo- Gricean theories and (4) non-
cognitive theories.

(1) Simile theories hold that metaphors are abbreviated similarities or

analogies, i.e. comparisons between two different conceptual domains. For
example, in the paradigmatic case "Juliet is the sun," this theory would say
something like this: A person Juliet- (and the set of concepts related to the
concept of person and also the characteristics of that particular person) is
compared with the sun and the set of related concepts. For example, human
relationships are compared with the relationships between the planets and the
sun in terms of their dependence, or the importance of the sun for peoples
lives, or as a source of light and/or heat, etc. This is a reductive theory, in the
sense that a metaphor is an abbreviated, suggestive and elliptical way of
expressing a comparison that could have been linguistically developed in
detail using all the words with their literal meaning8, hence the metaphorical
meaning is reducible to a sentence in which all terms are understood literally.

(2) The theory proposed by Black 1954, known as "interactive theory" is

based on the thesis of the irreducibility of metaphorical meaning to the literal
meaning: according to this thesis, the metaphorical meaning can not be
expressed, can not be reduced to non- metaphorical meaning. Blacks idea is
that in a metaphor two different thoughts are activated, each of them with a
set of "topics", i.e a set of beliefs, or common sense platitudes associated with
the concepts included in the metaphor. Metaphor reorganizes the way in
7
Note that this distinction cuts across the distinction between living and dead metaphor, since
in the three areas we find metaphors for these two types.
8
For Aristotle a metaphor is an enthymeme: a syllogism with a missing middle term.

4
which we see the focal element, i.e. it produces changes in our attitude
toward the focal element (p. 51). The metaphor creates a new meaning but
this can not be translated without loss of content in terms of a sentence in
which the terms are used only in its literal sense. The metaphor allows us to
see one thing in terms of a new conceptual structure. This account makes
room for an interesting phenomenon: the explanation of a metaphor does not
ruin it, but on the contrary, it enhances the understanding of the metaphor, in
the same way in which the analysis of a musical piece helps us to have a
better understanding of the composition.

(3) In the third place there are theories we might call neo-Gricean, which
are the most widespread in contemporary philosophical literature. These
theories seek to explain metaphorical meaning from literal meaning plus
something more: the context and the maxims governing communication
stated by Grice.9 The basic idea behind this theoretical perspective is that
understanding a metaphor is like understanding any other utterance: one
should try to interpret what the speaker/writer wanted to communicate with the
metaphor. It may be the actual writer in flesh and blood, or the fictional
narrator that every literary work has. The idea is to state the meaning of the
metaphorical (or the literal) utterance with the classical resources stated in
Grices theory of meaning. The proposition expressed with the metaphorical
utterance, is the one the speaker wanted to express, and not the one said
with the metaphorical utterance, which can be literaly false (like in the case
Juliet is the sun), or nonsense (idem), or trivially true (No man is an island).
So the metaphorical language can be reduced to the literal meaning of the
sentence that expresses the proposition expressed by the speaker through
the metaphorical sentence; in this sense this account holds that it is possible
to exhaust the metaphorical meaning in propositional terms.

(4) Finally we find in contemporary literature the non-cognitive theories of

metaphor which are a minority today. The central theses in this case are: (i)
that the meaning of a metaphor is only its literal meaning, or in other words,
there are no two meanings, one literal and the other one metaphorical, and (ii)
that metaphors have effects beyond the effect of their literal meaning,
because they "make us see things differently. They generate, as Black said,
a change of attitude, but not exclusively a change in our cognitive or
conceptual attitude, as Black held, but also an emotional and imaginative
change. Davidson, one of the defenders of this position along with Rorty
argues for the irritating idea that metaphors are as "bumps in the head"
because they only have a causal effect on our non-rational set of beliefs. The
central idea held by Davidson 1978 is to distinguish between what the words
mean in a metaphorical expression and the way in which the author makes
use of these words. According to Davidson the words always mean the same
thing (both in literal and metaphorical contexts): what they mean literally. But
they are not always used in order to communicate facts, there may be other
uses of language involving appreciation, emotion, and imagination. In his
words:

9
Sperber and Wilson 1986 develop in detail this idea.

5
 Joke or dream or metaphor can, like a picture or a bump on the head,
make us appreciate some fact but not by standing for, or expressing, the
fact. ...there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of
what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character if I show you
Wittgensteins duck-rabbit, and I say Its a duck, then with luck you see it as
a duck; if I say, Its a rabbit, you see it as a rabbit. But no proposition
expresses what I have led you to see (p. 425, my italics).

As we see in this quote, the central idea is that language -at least
sometimes- allows us to make a cognitive shift, that is a change in the way we
think and perceive the world, a change that cannot be put into words. As we
see this effect sometimes produced by language, is not dependent on the
existence of a second (non-literal) meaning, but on the ability we have to
rearrange our perceptions and thoughts. It is important for my purposes to
note that Wittgensteins example mentioned in Davidsons quotation, involves
sentences which are clearly not metaphors (so may be the effect that
language has on us, in all the cases, are like bumps in the head!).

Borges remarks on metaphors.

Borges's ideas about metaphors did not change substantially from the
first text in the 20s to the last of the late 60s. His main point can be
summarized in these four theses.

First, a general thesis about language as a whole. His ideas about

language in general are tied to an idealist metaphysical view, or at least the
idea that the touchstone of our language is not the objects and properties in
the world, but our kaleidoscopic experience. Our language is nothing more
than an ordering among many other possible orderings of our human
experience, which serves to some practical purposes.10 In this sense,
metaphors are specific ways to organize the experiential world.

A main consequence of this approach is this: since several alternative

ways to organize our experience are possible (being metaphorical ways just
one of them), it makes little sense to say that there is a language that is literal,
a language with which we can describe things as they are, that establish one
to one correspondences between language and the world. In laudatory tone,
Borges refers to Whiteheads ideas in this quotation, which points in this
direction:

"There's a persistent assumption that sterilizes philosophical thought. It is the

certainty, the most natural certainty that mankind has all the fundamental
ideas that are relevant to their experience. It is also intended that these ideas
found explicit expression in the human language, in single words or phrases.
This assumption is what I named "the fallacy of a perfect dictionary". (from a

10
All of them equally valid, although Borges does not say so explicitly.

6
commentary on Witheheads Modes of Thought, reprinted in Textos
recobrados IV, p. 518, my translation)11

On the other side of the theoretical spectrum, we could recall Russells

and first Wittgensteins concerns regarding the imprecision and vagueness of
ordinary language that requires translation or analysis of natural languages in
terms of a logically perfect language. As I said before Russell developed this
ideal language involving an ontology that may be called idealistic as a
correlate of this perfect language. This idealistic ontology is precisely the
other side of the coin of the logically perfect language: language describes the
structure of the world as it is, all there is are sense data, and so ideal
language is transparent and literal.

But Borges believes that there will never be a one-to-one

correspondence between items in any language and an extra linguistic reality.
May be because we will never find a logically perfect language behind the
natural language that can be matched with our experience. Or maybe
because, in the end, the link between language and the world should not be
understood in semantic terms but in causal terms as Davidson did, and as
Borges suggests in this quotation:

Is it licit to observe (with the lightness and peculiar brutality of such

observations) that the philosophers of England and France are interested
directly in the universe, or some feature of the universe, while Germans tend
to consider it as a simple reason, a mere material cause, of their huge
dialectical buildings: always unfounded, but always great. The good symmetry
of the system is their eagerness, not its possible correspondence with the
unclean and untidy universe (Textos recobrados IV, p. 288, my italics, my
translation)12

In this quotation we can find an alternative to the perfect dictionary

understanding of the relationship between language and the world. Indeed,
even when we consider that both Borges and Russell, in one possible
reading, adopt an idealist metaphysics, their understanding of language is
quite opposite: where Russell held a perfect literalness of the ideal language,
Borges sees only more ordinary language making unremitting efforts to
achieve an elusive reality that escapes to the possibility of a definitive and
specular conceptualization. In Borges 2000 we read:

11
Hay una persistente suposicin que esteriliza el pensamiento filosfico. Es la certidumbre,
la naturalsima certidumbre, de que la humanidad posee todas las ideas fundamentales que
son aplicables a su experiencia. Se pretende asimismo que esas ideas han encontrado
explcita expresin en el lenguaje humano, en palabras sueltas o en frases. A esta
postulacin yo la nombro Falacia del diccionario perfecto.
12
Es lcito observar (con la ligereza y brutalidad peculiar de tales observaciones) que a los
filsofos de Inglaterra y Francia les interesa el universo directamente, o algn rasgo del
universo, en tanto que los alemanes propenden a considerarlo un simple motivo, una mera
causa material, de sus enormes edificios dialcticos: siempre infundados, pero siempre
grandiosos. La buena simetra de los sistemas constituye su afn, no su eventual
correspondencia con el universo impuro y desordenado

7
When I was young, I believed in expression I wanted to express
everything. I thought, for example, that if I needed a sunset I should find the
exact word for a sunset or rather the most surprising metaphor. Now I have
come to the conclusion (and this conclusion may sound sad) that I no longer
believe in expression: I believe only in allusion. After all: what are words?
Words are symbols for shared memories. If I use a word, then you should
have some experience of what the word stands for. If not, the word means
nothing to you. I think we can only allude, we can only try to make the hearer
imagine. The reader, if he is quick enough, can be satisfied with our merely
hinting at something. (Borges 2000, p. 117, my italics.)

The second thesis to consider is the way in which Borges explicitly

characterizes metaphors. In Textos recobrados he defines metaphors as "a
voluntary identification of two or more different concepts, with the aim of
emotions (p. 141). Note that he is not saying that the main purpose of
metaphors is communication; it is not a different way of communicating facts.
By contrast, the purpose of the author/speaker when he adopts a
metaphorical language is quite different. In fact, metaphors include cognitive
elements (given that they are a combination of concepts) but also emotional
elements at the same time. But not just every combination of concepts
produces these cognitive and emotive characteristic effects.13 There are some
combinations of concepts (dead metaphors we would say - and most of our
ordinary language has this character of dead metaphor (Borges 1967/2000, p
23.) - which are not felt as metaphors (i.e. do not produce the emotional effect
that metaphors have). Borges highlights that he is speaking of poetic
metaphors that are the living, heartfelt metaphors. And he adds in that
metaphors have also effects on the imagination (Borges 1967/2000, p. 24).
Thus we have three elements in play in the poetic / literary metaphor:
cognition, emotion and imagination.

The third idea developed by Borges - and I think this is the most
original one- is that there are actually very few metaphors, because there are
few combinations of concepts that create the effects I mentioned above. And
this is the reason why the creation of new metaphors is a mindless task, he
says (Borges 1936/1974, in the beginning). This does not mean that there
cannot be what Borges calls "extraordinary metaphors" those that go beyond
these patterns, I will return to this at the end of this paragraph. What he
means is that there are quite a limited number of associations that are
repeated in the literature such as dream - death, women flowers, etc. But it
is important to note that although these combinations are few and far
explored, they are able to generate plenty of unforeseen effects, cognitive,
emotional and imaginative. Because the way in which the combination of
concepts is embodied in each particular text, with some specific words,
generates countless different effects, even contradictory. In Borges words:

"The first monument of universal literature, the Iliad, was composed 3000
years ago; it is plausible to conjecture that in that vast period all intimate,
necessary affinities (dream-life, dream-death, rivers and lives that pass, etc..),

13
This is the way in which Borges 1936/1974 starts.

8
were noticed and ever written. This does not mean, of course, that the
number of metaphors has been exhausted; the modes to indicate or imply
these secret sympathies of the concepts are indeed limitless. Its virtue or
weakness is in the words ... "(these are the last words of Borges 1925)14

And he says more or less the same thing in Borges 2000 (p. 33): What is
really important is the fact not that there are a few patterns, but that those
patterns are capable of almost endless variations. And he makes a great
effort in order to identify these patterns of association required in the
generation of the countless metaphors that populate the literature.15

The last thesis is about these few metaphors that go beyond these
patterns. I want to recall the few words Borges says about what he called the
"exceptional metaphors." Borges asks himself:

(9) "And what about the exceptional metaphors, those which are
outside any intellectualization? ... These are the heart, the true miracle of the
millennial verbal epic, and they are very few. In them the linking knot of both
terms slips away, and yet, a more effective force is exerted than the pictorial
or verifiable sensory images of a recipe. In ... [them], that objective reality
the objectivity that Berkeley denied and Kant sent to the polar exile of the
useless noumenon, reluctant to any adjetivation and ubiquitously alien,
contorts until it conforms a new reality. "(Borges 1921/2002 p. 147)16

Towards a Borgian understanding of metaphors.

14
"El primer monumento de las literaturas universales, la Ilada, fue compuesta har 3000
aos; es verosmil conjeturar que en ese enorme plazo todas las afinidades ntimas,
necesarias (ensueo-vida, sueo-muerte, ros y vidas que transcurren, etc.), fueron
advertidas y escritas alguna vez. Ello no significa, naturalmente, que se haya agotado el
nmero de metforas; los modos de indicar o insinuar estas secretas simpatas de los
conceptos resultan, de hecho, ilimitados. Su virtud o flaqueza est en las palabras..."
15
Some of the kind of metaphors he identifies are (a) those which mix two visible objects two
visibilities"; these are the simplest and easier ((1) p. 142 e.g. sapphires stars) , (b) other
less effective are those that combine visual and auditory perceptions, eg colors and sounds,
(c) the realization (spatialization) of concepts pertaining to time and vice versa the expression
of the transience of time given by the fixity of space; (d) static turned into dynamic
perceptions and finally (e) those involving negation, for example the antithetical adjectives: "in
algebra, the plus and the minus sign are excluded, in literature, the opposites are twined and
a mixed feeling is imposed to our consciousness, but not less true than others." (("En lgebra,
el signo ms y el signo menos se excluyen; en literatura, los contrarios se hermanan e
imponen a la conciencia una sensacin mixta; pero no menos verdadera que las dems".))
And finally in (4) he explores the following specific examples of combinations of concepts and
their multiple and sometimes contradictory - instantiations : Eyes and Stars (pp. 23-5 ), time
and flow (pp. 25-27), flowers and women ( p. 27 ), dream and life (pp. 27 - . 30 and is another
example on pp. 33-4 ), sleep and death (pp. 30-32 ), battle and fire ( p. 32 ) .
16
Y las metforas excepcionales, las que estn al margen de toda intelectualizacin?... me
diris. Esas constituyen el corazn, el verdadero milagro de la milenaria gesta verbal, y son
poqusimas. En ellas se nos escurre el nudo enlazador de ambos trminos, y, sin embargo,
ejercen mayor fuerza efectiva que las imgenes verificables sensorialmente o ilustradoras de
una receta. En [ellas], la realidad objetiva -esa objetividad que Berkeley neg y Kant
envi al destierro polar de un nomeno inservible, reacio a cualquier adjetivacin y
ubicuamente ajeno- se contorsiona hasta plasmarse en una nueva realidad."

9
 Perhaps the philosopher who came closest to the Borgian ideas about
metaphors has been Nelson Goodman. Beyond the philosophical labels like
"realism", "idealism", "nominalism" etc.., some of the statements contained in
Chapter 2 of The languages of art could be certainly subscribed by Borges.
For example, when Goodman says:

Realism is a matter not of any constant or absolute relationship

between a picture and its object but of a relationship between the system of
representation employed in the picture and the standard system. Most of the
time, of course, the traditional system is taken as a standard; and the literal or
realistic or naturalistic system of representation is simply the costumary (LoA,
p. 38)

According to Goodman there are many different "systems of

representation," among others: natural languages, formal languages like the
language of logic and mathematics the one that Russell thought it was the
perfect language-, scores, and Labans notation used in dance. (He is
particularly interested in these last cases, that is why the book has the title:
"Languages of Art") . To the metaphysical question about what do these
representations represent, Goodman would answer from an anti-realist
position, ie he would hold that there is no reality independent of the
representational systems. Borges, on the other hand, was not primarily a
metaphysician. Of course he admired English idealism, but also German
philosophy. And if we go back to the above quotes, he might answer the
question holding that in his view there is not an independent reality, or that if
there were such an independent reality we could not have known to it (he
uses the adjective "noumenal" in order to talk about what is outside the reach
of our senses); probably he would have said that it is by means of language-
one of the Goodman representation systems- that we have an indirect access
to this noumenal stuff.

But what I would like to remember today is Goodmans conception of

metaphor. According to Goodman a metaphorical attribution is a real one,
though not literal one. The boundary between the literal and non- literal is
given by newness. A metaphorical attribution is an extension of the
boundaries of a concept. When a concept that is usually applied to certain
things is applied to other things within the same realm (the same sort of
things), the application will be probably false. But when applied to objects in
other realms (eg when we speak of the temperature of a color such as in
"blue is cold"), we have a metaphor: we are applying the system of concepts
that suit a given realm of things (the colored objects) to object from another
realm (the temperature of objects) for which there is usually another set of
concepts. The boundaries between the metaphorical and the literal are not
sharp but a matter of degree: the more innovative, more unusual, will be a
more metaphorical application of a label. Goodman says:

The question why predicates apply as they do metaphorically is much

the same as the question why they apply as they do literally. And if we have
no good answer in either case, perhaps that is because there is no real
question Standards of truth are much the same whether the schema used is

10
transferred or not. In either case, application of a term is fallible and thus
subject to correction (LoA pp. 78-9)

There are, however, some differences between Goodmans and

Borges account of metaphors. Goodman's explanation is purely cognitive. He
makes no mention at all of any emotional or imaginative element. Another
important difference is that Borges would not draw the literal / metaphorical
distinction based on novelty, since his original thesis is precisely that there is
not much new in metaphors. In fact metaphors follow always the same
patterns that Borges identifies; and in his view there are very few
extraordinary new- metaphors. Goodman cannot explain the phenomenon
that Borges highlights: how can it be that despite the lack of novelty (who
does not ever heard that the eyes of the loving person are the lights that guide
the lovers way!) metaphors continue having the aesthetic effects they have
on us, the emotional, imaginative and cognitive effects; that is that makes us
change how we do see and feel things in a way, as Davidson suggests, that
cannot be expressed in propositional terms. And I believe that we can go
further to understand this phenomenon if we take into account some other
things Borges says in 1967/2000.

In the fourth lecture, "Word-music and translation", Borges places great

emphasis on the sound of words. Briefly said, Borges idea is that the difficulty
in translating poetry (and literature in general) is dependent on two elements.
On the one hand, the sense of the words, since the application of a term in a
language does not necessarily correspond to the application of the term that
supposedly is its translation in another language (this fact is apparent in the
case of color terms), and the conceptual associations that a word activate in a
given language are not necessarily the same in the other (to give an example,
"boyfriend" contains the word "friend", but it translation in Spanish novio has
no conceptual association with "friend"). This phenomenon clearly depends
on meaning, it is a cognitive phenomenon. But there is a second equally
important element in poetry (and literature in general) which is the sound of
words.17 And the sound inevitably changes from one language to the other.

17
Cortazar held something similar regarding translations of his stories: "My problem is when I
get translated: when translating my stories into a language that I know, many times I find that
the translation is impeccable, all is said and nothing is missing but it not is the story as I lived
and wrote in Spanish because that pulsation, the palpitation to which the reader is sensible,
because if we are sensitive to something is to the deepest intuitions, to irrational things, we
are even if often our intelligence becomes defensive and forbids us, denies us certain
disclosures. Large pulses of blood, flesh and nature pass above and below the intelligence
and there is no logical control that can stop them. When the translator has not received this, it
has not not been able to put in another language the equivalent to that pulse, to that music,
and so I have the impression that the story falls to the ground ... "(p. 153-4) ((Mi problema es
cuando me traducen: cuando traducen cuentos mos a un idioma que conozco, muchas
veces me encuentro con que la traduccin es impecable, todo est dicho y no falta nada pero
no es el cuento tal como yo lo viv y lo escrib en espaol porque falta esa pulsacin, esa
palpitacin a la cual el lector es sensible, porque si a algo somos sensibles es a la intuiciones
profundas, a las cosas irracionales; lo somos aunque muchas veces la inteligencia se pone a
la defensiva y nos prohibe, nos niega ciertos accesos. Las grandes pulsaciones de la sangre,
de la carne y de la naturaleza pasan por encima y por debajo de la inteligencia y no hay
ningn control lgico que pueda detenerlas. Cuando el traductor no ha recibido esto, no no

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And this difference in sound alters the effect produced in us by the text.
Borges gives many examples, among others he considers the last line of a
stanza by San Juan de la Cruz, "estando ya mi casa sosegada", and he
translates it as "when my house was quiet" which is a literal translation. And
he adds that the hissing sound of the three s's in "casa sosegada" is missing
in the translation, but the poem is talking about the silence of the night, so that
sound (sh, sss) is relevant to the content of the poem and guides us into a
special atmosphere when we read it.

Moreover, Borges holds that we can feel the beauty of a poem before
we even begin to think of a meaning (Borges 2000, p. 84, his italics).
Meaning here, means interpretation but in any case he is referring to what
is beyond a first reading of a metaphor. What I am tying to argue is that we
can think that before and independently of the further meaning /interpretation
we can make of a poem, there are many emotional and aeshetical effects that
the words make by their sound and the evocations/allusions we make form
them. Borges reminds us his experience as a young kid hearing his father
reading Keats. He says: I hear his voice saying words that I understood not,
but yet I felt those verses came to me through their music (Borges 2000, p.
98-9). Nobody denies that, after hearing or reading for the first time a poem,
we do make a cognitive effort in order to achieve a deeper understanding of
the words, seeking for a deeper interpretation of the metaphor, and also that
this cognitive effort will probably provide us with an additional aesthetic
experience.

In short, the idea that I can extract from Borges observations that I
briefly summarized is the following. Natural language (which is the vehicle of
literary works) does not have direct contact with the world, given that either
the world is partly constituted by our language, or that it is inaccessible to us,
and we can only describe it partially and crudely with anyone of the languages
available to human beings. Literary metaphors (and literary language in
general) are combinations of words of our natural languages with which the
author seeks to produce an effect on the reader/audience not only cognitive,
but also imaginative and emotional. And in order to produce these effects are
relevant both the conceptual structures tied to a given word and the sounds
associated to the hearing of such words. In the same way that there are
certain combinations of literal words that are more frequent in everyday
language, there are also some "necessary partnerships" between concepts
underlying most literary metaphors. But despite the fact that the same
conceptual patterns underlie most metaphors, each particular embodiment
with different words, and hence different sounds, alters the effects that
metaphors produce on us, and also the associations with the different
meanings that each of these words trigger on us. It is for this reason that even
the most common metaphors can produce novel and pleasurable effects, and
that a few patterns still strike us.

ha sido capaz de poner en otro idioma un equivalente a esa pulsacin, a esa msica, tengo
la impresin de que el cuento se viene al suelo))

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 Referencias

Bailer- Jones, D. (2009) Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science. Pittsburgh

University Press.
Black, M. (1962): Metaphor In Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press).
Borges, JL. (1921/2002) La Metfora. In: (2002) Textos Recobrados. Vol. I:
1919-1921. Barcelona: Emec.
Borges, J.L. (1925/1993) "Examen de metforas." In Inquisiciones. Seix
Barral: Buenos Aires.
Borges, J.L. (1936/1974) "La metfora" in Historia de la eternidad. Reprinted
in: Obras Completas. Emec: Buenos Aires
Borges, J.L. (1967/2000) "The metaphor". In This craft of verse, Harvard
University Press: Cambridge. Cap. 2
Borges, JL. (1974) Obras Completas. Emec: Buenos Aires
Borges, JL. (2002) Textos recobrados 1919-1929. Emece: Barcelona.
Camp, E. (2006) Metaphor in the Mind: the cognition of metaphor
Philosophy Compass 1/2, pp. 154170,
Cortzar, J. (2013) Clases de literatura, Berkeley 1980. Ed Alfaguara: Buenos
Aires.
Davidson, D. (1978) What Metaphors Mean. In On Metaphor, ed. S. Sacks.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goodman, N. (1976) Languages of Art. Hackett Publishing Company: Indiana.
Lakoff, G. y Johnson, M. (1980/1986) Metforas de la vida cotidiana. Madrid:
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Lakoff, G. y Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic
Books.
Simpson, TM. (1964) Formas lgicas, realidad y significado. Eudeba: Buenos
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Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1986): Loose Talk, Proceedings of the
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