Abstract
In the current paper I will focus on a less known theory of metaphor that is however by no means unimportant or uninteresting. Although the name of its author, Marcus B.
Hester, does not belong among the most cited in theory of metaphor debates, one of the most distinguished French philosophers of the twentieth century, Paul Ricouer, who also wrote extensively on metaphor, considered Hester's theory very subtle and stated that he was himself influenced by it. Hester's theory leans on the Wittgensteinian concept of seein-as or aspect seeing fundamentally.
Hester found this idea, i.e. the possibility to use this concept for a theory of metaphor, in writings of an American philosopher and aesthetician Virgil C. Aldrich.
Aldrich was one of the first philosophers, who shortly after publication of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953), where among other important concepts the notion of aspect perception was introduced, realized the great potential of this book and took inspiration from it. At the same time, the way Aldrich elaborated on selected topics from Wittgenstein was significantly aesthetic in nature.
Hester's theory grows up from an observation that metaphor is a fusion of perceptual experience and concepts. Metaphor offers controlled or structured quasi-perceptual experience, says Hester.
Meanings and connotations of words joined in the metaphorical phrase structure this experience. To appreciate what metaphor says we have to "overlap" meanings of its words, or, to put it differently, we have to notice a new aspect of the existing, familiar meaning (as if one suddenly recognize a face she knew in her childhood in an aged face of someone, whom she could not at the first moment identify).
This is a case of Wittgensteininan aspect seeing, argues Hester. In other words, this is to say that metaphor has a perceptual core that is irreducible to concepts.
In spite of its value, I do believe that Hester's theory does not fully exhaust what Wittgenstein's as well as Aldrich's thought have to offer. Mainly, Hester does not pay proper attention to Wittgenstein's distinction between ordinary aspect perception (so called continuous aspect perception) and the experience of noticing an aspect.
In my critical interpretation of Hester's theory and in assessing full potential of the concept of aspect seeing for the theory of metaphor I take inspiration from an analysis of aspect perception provided by British philosopher Stephen Mulhall.