ABSTRACT
Books dealing with metaphor frequently start out with Aristotle’s celebrated discussion of this figure of speech. To shift the focus of attention from a mainly formal outlook to a more interactive approach to human metaphoricity we will also invoke the Aristotelian view of metaphor, but in conjunction with revealing aspects of his social philosophy. As a preliminary, we should note that as soon as we recall our Greek origins we can see that our linguistic tradition is not so distant from a Platonic legacy ‘demonstrating’ that one cannot grasp the truth via any corporeal senses but must employ the mind in the form of ‘pure and unadulterated thought’.1 And although in contemporary philosophy we have gradually substituted language for the notion of ‘pure thought’, and words for ‘concepts’,2 a subject-object cognitive model still seems to prevail; this model does not ultimately allow for the developments we seek through work that might originate in our coexistence with nature and culture, rather than in an abstract rationality intent upon controlling the world.
