ABSTRACT
From a synoptic view of our Greek heritage we could surmise that by devaluing metaphoricity and upgrading epistemic literality, a rationalist claim prevails in which knowledge can be assessed without reference to tradition, culture and human finitude. The ‘essential’ way of thinking is then to be described in terms of stable principles and general ideas which transcend the dynamics of everyday events. The value-and fascination-of our nascent western thought consists, in fact, in its revolutionary claim to supplant preceding theories of decisionmaking, which were primarily dependent upon myths, tradition and institutional power; this is our celebrated transition from mythology to rationality. A new form of adjudicating knowledge claims is propagated which is only linked to logical principles, whereby anyone lucidly examining the propositions will be led to a comparable conclusion. At this level of cognitive abstraction the unique individuality of the person no longer enters into a process of rational thinking uninfluenced by the metaphors of tradition. But the belief that thinking should be construed as a thinker-independent process does not coincide with the devaluation of the sophist’s tendency to deal with argumentative sequences so as to serve his self-interests. In fact, the interests of the pure philosophers and those of the opportunistic sophists may primarily differ in the sort of power to which they aspire: cognitive control as differentiated from social control. From our classical background we thus tacitly derive a literalist view of language which often occurs in our philosophical debates. The literality of meanings is here generally regarded as primary and proper, while any propensity for metaphoric usage is deemed parasitic and deviant, alien to ‘normal’1 communication and only acceptable to the extent that it can be paraphrased into the standard vocabulary of the dominant context.
