The guiding question of this study is: What is Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of metaphor? It is widely appreciated that Merleau-Ponty himself never explicitly developed a theory of metaphor. He did, however, engage in a style of writing so tied up with literary style and thick with metaphor. Despite the absence of a distinct theory of metaphor on the part of Merleau-Ponty, the obvious importance of metaphor to his philosophy has motivated others to develop explicit and coherent theories of metaphor out of Merleau-Ponty’s work that offer themselves as responses to philosophical history of metaphor theory.
I look at two interpretations of Merleau-Ponty that take up the topic of metaphor. Donald Landes suggests metaphor’s importance stems from the its being paradigmatic of what he calls the “paradoxical logic of [human] expression.” Renaud Barbaras’s take, on the other hand, is deeply ontological: metaphor is embedded in reality as its structure. Ultimately, I believe that neither of these theories is sufficient to capture the significance of metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy—specifically, metaphor as experienced. I argue that what is missed in both of these theories is a careful attention to how, in the experience of metaphor, we feel solicited to speak in certain ways, and that this experience suggests that the activity of metaphorical expression does not exist or operate only on one side of the expressive relation—on the side of being as Barbaras urges, or on the side of the one who speaks, as Landes urges. Rather, metaphor evinces a kind of expression that is not simply about, or even according to, the world—metaphor is a kind of expressing that works together with the world.