Metaphor and the Rhetorical Structuring of Consciousness
Ted Remington, interviewed by Brendan Leahy, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: Ted Remington interviewed by Brendan Leahy on the role of metaphor in consciousness and how this relates to Julian Jaynes’s theory.
Excerpt: Brendan Leahy: Can you talk about the topic of metaphor and its relation to subjective consciousness?
Ted Remington: As a rhetorician what’s most interesting about Jaynes is the way he deals with metaphor, because I think in talking about the way metaphor generates consciousness — to do that he has to really dig into how metaphor works. What’s fascinating is the way Jaynes breaks down the concept of metaphor into four categories: metaphier, metaphrand, paraphier, and paraphrand. So the idea that consciousness is actually created through metaphor is provocative — for someone who comes from a field where we’ve been preoccupied for 2,400 years with how metaphor works, why it works, what it does, and frankly never coming to any real clear consensus about it. When I read Jaynes, suddenly it became much clearer to me. …