Aren’t metaphors merely a colorful way of saying something literal, that is otherwise, a nonboring way of saying something boring? Merely the rhetorician’s weapon that subjects his/her audience into compliance? The dictionary of literary terms denote the metaphor as a figure of speech where something is described in the terms of another, or attribute something with a quality that is associated with something else. For instance, Whitman’s metaphor for grass is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” The relation between the two terms in a metaphor is implicit, unlike a similie, where it is explicit.

Not only is metaphor the basic linguistic unit of poetry, often found in romantic and modernist poetry, it is also a pervasive presence in all forms of language. Generally, the metaphor is a catch-all category for all figures of speech. Yet, as long we remain within the conception of metaphor as an embellishment of speech, we only decieve ourselves - for it is actually the original impulse of language, where its primal level is poetry. The concepts we now determine as literal used to be metaphorical, and we have long forgotten their origins.

However, metaphor in philosophy should not be mistaken as a merely aesthetic phenomenon found in poetic language, for even metaphors contain an explanatory principle.

If language is actually based on rhetoric, as opposed to logic - the presumption of the philosophers before Nietzsche - then signs representing ideas do have spatiotemporal qualities, a history, thereby making platonism impossible, and the boundary between sense and reference is erased….

Hardcore empiricists like Thomas Hobbes condemned metaphor as an “abuse of language,” largely because of its capacity of obfuscation and corruption. He couldn’t get beyond the narrow conception of metaphor as an “ornament” of language, which insists that rational language is free from such contaminants, and well-equipped with the reliability of literal meaning in natural language.

For Nietzsche, metaphor is the ultimate key to language, religion, concepts, perception, for it is the very symbol of interpretation, the foundation of meaning and truth themselves. Nietzsche agreed with Hobbes that metaphor distorts, but departed from the Leviathan in the insistence that truth can be apprehended by metaphorical thought. The very privileging of metaphor promises a philosophy that elude the neatness of conceptual language. In the Birth of tragedy, Nietzsche condemns conceptual language for it contains little more than “dead metaphors,” totally inappropriate for the expression of the truth of the world. We are but representations of the essence of reality, mere appearances of the “indescribable-in-itself.” Once we forget that our concepts come from metaphorical origins, then the belief that concepts represent reality sinks in and entrenches our minds.

Concepts themselves, say, the concept of a book, have been abstracted three levels away from the original sense data, sensation. First, the sensory stimuli is transformed into an “image” by the complex physiological processes of the brain, a representation of perception, a coherent symbol of significance. Then this “image” is ostensibly given a sound, a word, a generalization, making language the second level of abstraction. Lastly, within consciousness the word-sound becomes the concept. In other words, there is no direct conception that ideally correspond to reality, or at least the first level of sensation, for the initial sense data is metamorphed three times in order to arrive at a concept, which is merely a “figurative metaphor.”

For instance, “cause” and “effect” are conventional fictions that designate and communicate, but not explain, given that there is no ‘causal connection’ in the in-itself. If we are the inventors of causes, then our thoughts are essentially mythopoetical - where the grammatical subjects of language is converted into the substance of the world. Once we realize that we always transform our experiences with metaphors, not duplicate or reproduce them with concepts, and that metaphors themselves become concepts, and build vast edifices and systems, then our conceptual thought is necessarily “anthropomorphic through and through, and contains not a single point that is true-in-itself, objective, universal, apart from man.” (Concerning truth n falshood in an extramoral sense, I) We are the architects of our prisons, and cannot go outside the bars of reason.

Once metaphor is realized as the master key of meaning: then epistemology is little more than a set of aesthetic preferences. Metaphysical knowledge is the most useless of all knowledge, although post metaphysical thought is possible, as long interpretation consists of concepts derived from active metaphors.

Therefore, there is no metaphysics or epistemology or even an axiology in the philosophy of Nietzsche. In essence, the style of Nietzsche demonstrates that all his linguistic artifacts are metaphors themselves. Sarah Kofman did a huge favor for the future of Nietzsche scholarship by publishing a book called “Nietzsche and Metaphor,” in which she pointed out nietzsche’s aim: the deconstruction of all metaphysical oppositions where the indefinite metaphorical play of style places his texts beyond metaphysics.

I first encountered philosophical boredom in Nietzsche and Sartre during my early years, and didn’t really grasp the significance or magnitude until I read American Psycho.

While vacationing in Italy, I read the majority of the Fritzean corpus and came across two important aphorisms regarding boredom: (paraphrased from memory) if the highest creatures are susceptible to boredom, then the infinitely perfect being is also susceptible to infinite boredom. Therefore when god “rested” on the 7th day he was bored with his creation so he sank to the grass and became a snake…. Great shades of manicheanism! Perhaps this inspired James Morrow to postulate a dual God, somewhat schizophrenic at the end of his fictional tale of theothanatology…..

in the second aphorism, finding such infinite boredom to be unbearable, the Gods invent man for entertainment. Yet man himself in turn, grow afflicted with boredom, meaning the Gods merely passed the buck…

While those aphorisms left a brand on my thoughts, it wasn’t until i took a class on existentialism and read Sartre and learned how boredom is the naked access to being. In the Nausea, the main character Roquentin is having one hell of a boring time. He is utterly bored with his task, the city he lives in, the people, and his life. This boredom isn’t transient, or temporary – it actually becomes a malady that transforms his entire perspective, or more accurately, intensifies his awareness of existence where individual objects lose their identities, and become unfamiliar - a rather nauseating experience. Once things no longer have identities or are familiar, this nauseating feeling exposes us as the ultimate arbitrator of meaning.

There is a metaphysics of boredom…. Where ordinary boredom is being bored by something, the metaphysical and more profound, boredom is when “it is boring for one.”

Heidegger says boredom is an illustration of mood a condition of being, which means when we are bored, we disclose the ontological status of the world… Boredom discloses the world in its “everydayness” and results in an understanding of it. Therefore there is no “cause” of boredom, nor is it “out there.”

Nonetheless… i feel Schopenhauer has the most persuasive take of boredom: if unhappiness or dissatisfaction is the default state, normal, and the desires of an individual is consistently met, then his or her mode of being actually dissolves, and he or she encounters emptiness – for the sole mode of existence (restless striving) has been abolished. Therefore, we all are “zigzagging” between two extremes: the Scylla of the will and the Charybdis of boredom. The 20/21stcentury version of Schopenhauer’s formula of bread and circuses is McDonald’s and television.

In literature, Kate Chopin’s Awakening captures this formula quite well where the protagonist grows disenchanted with her good life.

Life may be a “hundred times too short to bore ourselves,” that time is what we want most but yet, what we use worst.

Here is an interesting link to a paper on Voegelin and Boredom.