Although Plato's notion of spiritual pregnancy has received a great deal of critical attention in recent years, the development of the metaphor in the Symposium has not been fully analysed. Close attention to the details of the image reveals two important points which have so far been overlooked: (1) There are two quite different types of spiritual pregnancy in the Symposium: a ‘male’ type, which is analogous to the build-up to physical ejaculation, and a ‘female’ type, which is analogous to the physical experience of pregnancy as normally understood.
This chapter explores in detail how Plato's creation narrative in the Timaeus is presented as a ‘scientific’ reworking of the Theogony, taking up and transforming the primal figures from that work, and central polarities embodied by them (especially male/female).
‘Metaphor’ in Platonic vocabulary is included in the term for ‘image’ (eikôn), and structurally related to ‘models’ (paradeigmata) in identifying the similarities and differences between two subjects. As the Politicus makes clear, ‘models’ differ in providing a more developed and systematic exploration of these similarities and differences, and can be used to aid understanding of difficult or unfamiliar subjects. Although Plato to this extent foreshadows 20th-century cognitive theories of metaphor, he believes that neither ‘images’ nor ‘models’ can ultimately be of more than heuristic value.
Words move, music movesOnly in time; but that which is only livingCan only die.Words strain,Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,Will not stay still.T.S. Eliot, Four quartets (Burnt Norton V)The poet gives voice to the action of words as they reach out to attain expression. He observes the dangers inherent in this effort: words can break, can become simply unintelligible. Such broken words can no longer function within the fixed constraints of grammar and thus ‘will not stay in place, | Will not stay still’. A.J. Greimas in Structural semantics defined an ‘actantial’ model of language:If we recall that functions in traditional syntax are but roles played by words – the subject being ‘the one who performs the action’, the object ‘the one who suffers it’ – then according to such a conception, the proposition as a whole becomes a spectacle to which homo loquens treats himself.
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