In an article on dead metaphor, Andrzej Pawelec contrasts Lakoff and Johnson’s ballyhooed (by them!) notion of “cognitive metaphor” with the romantic view of metaphor propounded by Shelley and other poets. ”Lakoff’s view is ‘scientific’: he looks for a mechanism, a system behind a range of phenomena. Shelley’s view is ‘romantic’: he perceives phenomena as the work of a creative spirit. Lakoff’s approach is certainly at odds with the social, historical nature of his object. Conventional metaphors are not generated in the Cognitive Unconscious but in the life of a community. They manifest a semblance of ‘rational design’, because a given perspective on things (e.g. that an argument is like a war) is taken up repeatedly through centuries and used for expressive purposes at hand. On the other hand, Shelley’s ‘poetic’ genesis of language seems to be an exaggeration. He is certainly right about the importance of the ability to find new perspectives, to get new things into focus through metaphor. But his view of social reality as constituted by disorganised poetic visions is obviously wide of the mark.”
Neither theory, in Pawelec’s view, takes the social and historical setting of language seriously enough, and both leave the relation of metaphor and thought “as mysterious as ever.”
