Monday, September 5, 2016

The Extension of Metaphor

Roger Kimball has an interesting article on Conservatism with a lot of provocative asides. One is the over-extension of metaphor. One wonders what would have happened had Freud been more captured by The Duchess of Malfi than Oedipus. Or how limited our sociological conversation would be had Shakespeare not written: "This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more."

Kimball writes: Oswald Spengler’s sprawling, two-volume lament, The Decline of the West, is a good illustration of what happens when genius is captivated by a metaphor. Spengler’s book, published in the immediate aftermath of World War I, epitomized the end-of-everything mood of the times and was hailed as the brilliant key to understanding — well, just about everything. And Spengler really is brilliant. For example, his remarks about how the triumph of scepticism breeds a “second religiousness” in which “men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect,” have great pertinence to an era, like ours, that is awash in New Age spiritual counterfeits. Nevertheless, Spengler’s deterministic allegiance to the analogy between civilizations and organisms ultimately infuses his discussion with an air of unreality. One is reminded, reading Spengler, of T. S. Eliot’s definition of a heretic: “a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood”.

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