purely equivalent to the sum of its physical composition and its external effects on the world at large. The same holds for the definition of a teacher. If somehow our friend also does not know what “teacher” means, we can give him this knowledge by moving in the same two directions. Looking downward (undermining) we find that a teacher is “a person,” since human beings are the raw material from which all teachers so far have been made. We can also look upward (overmining) to learn that the teacher is someone who “teaches, especially in a school.” Here once more we gain knowledge, and knowledge always entails that an object is replaced by an accurate description of its components, apparent properties, or relations. No aesthetic effect occurs, and hence there is no beauty. We have nothing but paraphrase: nothing but literalism. There is no sense of any surplus in the candle or the teacher that goes beyond what we get from adequate definitions of them. Even if these definitions leave out numerous additional details about candles and teachers, we are already on the right track, and cease defining them further only because we have already conveyed enough information for the person to grasp what we mean.
Literal descriptions sometimes fail, of course. It is possible to define a candle or teacher incorrectly, however rare this may be with such widely familiar objects. Yet I remember a moment of youth when someone asked me the meaning of “concierge” and I gave them an incorrect definition: not as an impish prank, but because at that age I misunderstood what the word meant. When this happens, we have simply ascribed the wrong qualities to the object named. We saw this occur earlier in more bizarre fashion when the definitions of candle and teacher were absurdly combined: “A cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns is like a person who teaches, especially in a school.” Failure also occurs when we replace just one of the definitions and say either “a candle is like a person who teaches, especially in a school” or “a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns is like a teacher.” Such combinations fail because the literal similarity of candles to teachers is not especially compelling. But this is precisely what makes their metaphorical union possible, which leads to some important insights.
Consider the following three statements: (1) “A professor is like a teacher.” (2) “A candle is like a teacher.” (3) “The demographic makeup of Los Angeles at the time of the 2010 census is like a teacher.” Which of these is a good candidate to work as a metaphor? Number 1 is out of the question in most cases, since it is merely a literal statement that points to numerous banal properties shared in common by teachers and professors. With number 3 we have the opposite problem. The two terms appear so unrelated that no aesthetic effect occurs when we hear the sentence: though again, perhaps a poet or comedian of genius could make it work, given the right set-up. Number 2 seems closer to a happy medium, one in which candle and teacher have some connection, though it is not entirely clear what that might be. Perhaps it has something to do with the way that both “bring light” in different senses of the term. But once this is made too explicit, we have again entered the realm of the literal comparison of qualities, and the metaphor immediately falls apart. Imagine the following lines by a poet who should have quit while she was ahead: “A candle is like a teacher, because candles literally bring light to a room, and teachers figuratively bring light to the minds of students.” We now have little more than an annoying platitude. For metaphor to occur, there must be a connection between its two terms, but it must be non-literal and should not be made too explicit.
To learn another important property of metaphor, we can simply reverse each of the three statements from the previous paragraph and see what happens. (1) “A teacher is like a professor.” (2) “A teacher is like a candle.” (3) “A teacher is like the demographic makeup of Los Angeles at the time of the 2010 census.” In Number 1 there is really no change from the previous version. A professor is like a teacher, and a teacher is like a professor; reversing the order of the terms makes no difference to the palpable if tedious truth of the statement. Since the two objects share similar properties, it hardly matters which is mentioned first. In Number 3 there is also no real difference when the terms are reversed: an already highly implausible description has been flipped around, and it is no more or less plausible than it was in original form. It is still difficult to see any connection between a teacher and the demographic makeup of Los Angeles in 2010; this comes off as merely a failed literal description in which the properties of the two terms do not match. But notice how different things are with Number 2: “A candle is like a teacher” and “a teacher is like a candle” both work as metaphors, even if not as especially brilliant ones. Yet the important point is that the metaphors are completely different in the two cases. In the first, we have a candle that seems to impart some sort of teacher-like wisdom and prudence as we sit with it vigilantly through the night, or something along those lines. In the second, we have something like a teacher who somehow illuminates young minds or sets them aflame, though no such literal paraphrase can ever exhaust the metaphor, any more than a globe can be successfully rendered in a two-dimensional map without certain distortions. In the first case the candle is the subject and somehow acquires vague teacher-predicates; in the second, the reverse is true. Literal description or paraphrase simply compares the qualities of whatever two objects are discussed side by side, and hence the order is easily reversible. In metaphor, however, it is a case of translating qualities from one object to another, and thus it is either a teacher with candle-qualities or a candle with teacher-qualities, each completely different from the other.
This has philosophical importance. Imagine a literal statement of the following sort: “a teacher leads the classroom, prepares lesson plans for each day, assigns homework, grades student performance, and lets parents know how their children are faring academically.” We need not interpret this statement in empiricist fashion as just a bundle of qualities. We may be well aware – like Husserl himself – that teachers do many other things besides these, and that the teacher remains a teacher no matter what limited things they are doing at this very moment. If that is the case, then we are already aware of a certain tension between the teacher and his or her currently manifest qualities. In OOO terms, we are dealing with the teacher as SO-SQ, an accessible sensual object with numerous shifting sensual qualities. Yet something different happens with “a teacher is like a candle.” Here, the teacher takes on candle-qualities rather than the expected teacher-qualities. We have no clear idea what a teacher with candle-qualities would be like, and for this reason the teacher is no longer an SO teacher presented directly to our minds, but an RO teacher: a withdrawn object, a kind of black hole around which the candle-qualities mysteriously orbit. Here we have the (Heideggerian) RO-SQ tension that is the basis of all art. Even if we know that the sensual teacher is different from his or her sensual qualities, in principle he or she can always be described in terms of an accurate qualitative description. But no such paraphrase is possible when the teacher becomes a real object, one that mysteriously withdraws behind the sensual candle-qualities it is now said to possess. Elaine Scarry is on to the same insight when she tells us of metaphor that “when one term ceases to be visible (either because it is not present, or because it is dispersed beyond our sensory field), then the analogy ceases to be inert: the term that is present becomes pressing, active, insistent, calling out for, directing our attention toward, what is absent” (BBJ 96).
But this also raises a significant problem: in what sense do we direct our attention toward what is absent in the metaphor? That which is absent is said to be inaccessible in any direct way to human cognition, like a Kantian thing-in-itself or Heideggerian tool-being. Just the same, it makes no sense to think that an object might withdraw and leave behind purely detached qualities, given our acceptance of the phenomenological axiom that objects and qualities always come as a pair. In the metaphor “a teacher is like a candle,” the teacher becomes an RO withdrawn object that leaves behind insistent candle-qualities. And since these candle-qualities cannot attach themselves to a withdrawn teacher, and cannot reattach themselves to their original candle without collapsing into a merely literal statement, there is only one remaining option. Namely, it is I the reader who am the real object that performs and thereby sustains the candle-qualities once they are stripped from their usual candle-object. As strange as this may sound, it really just expresses the obvious fact that if the reader is not truly engrossed in the poem, then no aesthetic effect can occur amidst the literalizing boredom.
