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übereinander / nacheinander

Zur Metaphorologie der Schicht



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.