ABSTRACT

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's contribution becomes essential to a history of metaphor. Both Kirk Pillow and Clive Cazeaux approach the topic of Kant and metaphor with an exposition of the third Critique, in which analogy surfaces as a significant element in Kant's epistemology. Although Kant is the principal architect of modern philosophy, the excavations presented in this chapter reveal a fracturing simultaneous with a founding, a necessarily interpretive substructure or metaphoric a priori upon which or against which philosophy enacts the drama of pure reason. He resolved the contradiction between the contingency native to the discursive understanding and the necessity inherent in the intuitive understanding by analogy to practical reason. He established the existence of things-in-themselves as analogues to experience, the conditions that must pertain to render experience as it is. The influence of Kant's theory of mind on the worldview of modernity was monumental.