I think one of the difficulties of making good analogies is to decide whether or not the analogy should inflate or deflate the thing that prompts comparison, or to keep the comparisons parallel. To inflate is to be sardonic or -- most commonly --hyperbolic. When you compared a famous academic dispute to a shooting battlefield, as if the two things were parallel, you used hyperbole. Popper did that himself when he joked that Wittgenstein was threatening him with a fireplace poker. It's irony, or trivialization, I suppose, when the comparsion goes the other way. A sober analogy keeps the things being compared more or less equal to emphasize that they really do share at least one attribute. Yes, I agree that anything can be likened to anything else, and that anything can be taken as if it were something else -- metaphorically -- but of course one must recognize how the matches will alter the concept being addressed. Being alert to that and being good at manipulating the comparisons and stand-ins of things and concepts must be central to creativity. It's certainly true of art from all the periods and styles I know of. Every painted or sculpted shape or every spoken or written word is a stand-in for something else and many other things and feelings and confabulations.
I've been reading Proust and just finished a lengthy and wonderfully hyperbolic analogy where the narrator compares an wierd event in a crowded restaurant involving an agile soldier who prances along the top of a continuous row of banquettes to a sculpted Greek frieze on the Parthenon. Proust describes a ludicrous event and turns it into a graceful and noble dance, worthy of gods and awe. It's hyperbole but it also underscores the grace of the soldier who prances along a very narrow ledge as if he was carved in marble on a shallow long frieze. wc ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, January 16, 2013 11:21:04 PM Subject: Re: Art is money William, you're the guy who champions anything at all as "like" anything else, "anything at all as a "metaphore". For you now to declare that you can't tolerate the comparison of parlor or meeting-hall conflicts to "battlefields" feels dismayingly disingenuous. In a message dated 1/16/13 6:22:34 PM, [email protected] writes: > As a longtime academic and administrator in a tier 1 research university, > where > real reputations are at stake for the merest of reasons, I know what > lecture > hall or conference room arguments are like and they cannot be equated with > actual foxhole or battlefield life and death terror, usually random, which > makes > it all the more fearful. It's hyperbole to compare any academic dispute > with > any real-world shooting battlefield. Period. > wc
