Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Band 59: Metaphorologien der Exploration und Dynamik (1800/1900)

Using the example of Johann Gottfried Herder, this article aims at a functional history of ›metaphor‹. In Herder’s theory of language, metaphors on the one hand represent the phenomenon of the ›inexplicitness‹ of language: According to Herder, human beings can never achieve unambiguousness because of the specific human conditions they cannot avoid. On the other hand, and this is an aspect where Hans Blumenberg came very close to Herder, metaphors do enable people to solve communicative issues just because they are indeterminate and open.

In the late 19th century, the discourse of ›metaphor‹ expands – often times metaphorically itself – from the realm of traditional rhetoric to aethesiophysiology, psychology, epistemology and cultural anthropology. This development may indicate the general capacities of metaphor to explore new concepts and to put the existing ›system of knowledge‹ of a specific period in ›motion‹. It may support intellectual exploration by providing a novel nomenclature to new thought (e.g.Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge), and it often serves to project sketchy mental notions which may eventually help to conceptualize a ›yet unknown‹ domain (e. g. Freud’s psychoanalysis). Moreover, metaphor may also stimulate the genesis and the structuring of academic disciplines in their entirety (e. g. Steinthal’s and Lazarus’s ›Völkerpsychologie‹). And it is a means as well to ensure cohesiveness and stability of a period’s system of knowledge as to prepare and to conduct general systemchange (e.g. Mauthner’s ›critique of language‹).

Sarah Goeth: Fortpflanzung – Verpflanzung. Vegetabile Metaphern in den Wissenskulturen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts In times of globalization terms of›transplantation‹ and ›reproduction‹ became ubiquitous describing diverse forms of cultural contact and exchange. The literal botanical meanings of thewords ›transplant‹ and ›reproduce‹ (German: verpflanzen/fortpflanzen) have inspired various figural and metaphorical conceptualizations thatemerged parallel to the botanical discoveries in the 18th and 19th century. The article examines this surprising phenomenon with references to the botanical writings and theoretical discourses in the areas of education, early linguistics and philology at that time.It aims to explore to what extent thesemetaphors have stimulated innovative notions of transmission and circulation. Besides, it is shown how the metaphorical concepts of ›transplantation‹ and›reproduction‹ describe the structure of metaphors itself.

After natural history had become temporalized during the 18th century, the spatial order of geological strata could equally be read as a chronological order. Thereby, the spatial phenomenon of the strata acquired a metaphorical quality: they could become a metaphor for bygone ages. – This article will focus on these processes of temporalisation and metaphorisation in its first part. In the second part, it will briefly be shown how the metaphor of the stratum as spatialised time was taken over by various fields of knowledge (archeology, linguistics, political economy, psychology) after 1800.

The article is focused on Fourier’s Théorie des quatre mouvements, published in 1808. With respect to Fourier’s borrowings from the discourses of cosmology and natural history it is shown how the author developed a quite idiosyncratic social science: a social utopianism inspired by geological »deep time« (Steven Jay Gould) leading from social chaos to »universal harmony« and the happiness of mankind. Although the work of an academic outsider Fourier’s theory can be used to explore the rather divergent ways in which the dynamics of cosmic and human history was conceived around 1800.

This essay explores how Charles Darwin’s concept ›struggle for existence‹ was received in German philosophy and literature. It starts from the idea that the struggle for existence is a cause for dynamic change. According to Ernst Haeckel and others it propels progress (Fortschritt). Exploring the various ways in which the struggle for existence is metaphorically used, the essay argues that the Darwinian formula can be separated from other concepts of struggle (e.g. the Schopenhauerian) by a specific ambivalence. As the struggle for existence causes progress and defeat at the same time, observers and narrators of such a struggle can be repelled or fascinated, or both at the same time. Nietzsche’s early aesthetics and Max Kretzer’s naturalistic novel Meister Timpe (1888) are examples for such an ambivalently conceived struggle.

The article introduces the basic epistemology of the concept of ›milieu‹ (or ›ambience‹) that was so significant for nineteenth-century studies of nature, society, and art: focusing on an object’senvironment means to include a formerly »unmarked space« (Niklas Luhmann) into the realm of observation. This paradoxical crossing of ›inside‹ and ›outside‹ was highly productive for innovative theories of life in philosophy, science, and literature: drawing from George Canguilhem’s reading of Claude Bernard’s concept of the milieu intérieur, the article reads Hegel’s description of the »prose of the world« as an early version of the awareness that reality is not found ›out there‹ butproduced by discourses which, as the naturalistic movement at the end of the century shows, also include aesthetic theories.

This article deals with metaphors of classical bacteriology, especially in the writings of Robert Koch, that conceive primitive monocellular organisms as human-like creatures with intentions and the capacity to act. It is shown how different theoretical approaches towards metaphor help to describe different functions of Koch’s tropes: while conceptual metaphor theory and Ludwik Fleck’s ›Gestaltsehen‹ explain their epistemological impact within the laboratory, wider effects such as political normativity and aesthetic transformation can be described with Jürgen Link’s theory of ›collective symbols‹. Finally, Koch’s writings on Cholera that conceive deadly germs as invading predators are discussed from the perspective of postclassical narratology.

One of the most prominent and effective cognitive metaphors in recent scientific history is the tipping point structure of emergent causality. Vulcanism is one prime example of how this elliptic, irreducible and unnarratable, yet explicative figure of thought can usefully be applied. Since the age of Goethe, it is argued, this figure of thought has been increasingly deployed in literature, to denote otherwise obscure causal relations initially not in things or nature, but in the individual and collective human psyche. Three writers, all positioned representatively at the turn of a century, exemplify the trend. In Goethe the figure illuminates the irrational and destructive behaviour of the mass under the authoritative sign of natural causality. In Jensen it discloses the censored causality of masculine sexual dysfunction. In Hohler’s art, it enables observation of systematic dysfunction in the inner, social and natural worlds, bidding fair to serve as a universal metaphor of the Anthropocene, so that both scientific and aesthetic deployments of the metaphor become for the first time congruent.

This article shows that the metaphor ›Wahlverwandtschaften‹ – which had become eponymous for Goethe’s early 19th century novel – was used in chemistry for almost 200 years, from theearly 18th century onwards, although the concept referred to widely diverging semantic fields that emerged with the development of the natural sciences. By using this example, the authors argue that, within the fields of history of science and history of knowledge, conceptual history (or, more precisely, Begriffsgeschichte) needs to precede the history of metaphors.

The article discusses the main thesis concerning metaphorology from the articles of Johach and Saul.

The following account is based on the idea that metaphors are not only illustrative but constructive: they connect things and create new meanings that would not exist without them. The tricky point seems to me that metaphors are unavoidable, yet can only be determined situatively, because they are the result of complex transfers of meaning. In order to make these assumptions plausible, I will use some examples from the history of microbiology, especially from the discourse of the parasite.

This article analyzes in a first step the implications and hidden side-effects of Darwin’s concept of the ›struggle for life‹. In a second step it drafts the concealed affinities between these metaphorical implications and Hegel’s theory of the novel in which he defines the latter as the form and metaphor of life.