Tropes and play: a new account on embodied figures of thought

1.1 Linguistic principles

On first analysis, what might appear the easiest take on the hard problem of tropes would be to formulate an answer drawing on either Saussure or Sapir–Whorf and to consider tropes as nothing but habituated, arbitrary linguistic patterns. According to this hypothesis, both the existence of tropes and the limited number of them would be the result of a particular linguistic environment.

It is interesting to notice, however, that not even in postmodernist linguistic thinking has this easy hypothesis been applied. Indeed, as convincing as this answer may be regarding the first question (leading us to think that we use tropes because they reflect our habituated language use), it does get us into serious trouble with the second. If this hypothesis were correct, one would predict a variety of different tropes for different linguistic cultures: constantly changing, newly emerging and disappearing as these diverse linguistic cultures change and transform. But this is simply not the case. Certainly, there is some kind of “economic” cycle for special tropes, partially reflected by literary genres. Petrarchism, e.g., promoted the oxymoron, romanticism elaborated on irony, and classical modernism since Proust and Rilke favored metonymy and personification. It is also true that these cultural changes do produce special varieties or nudges for the respective use of special tropes. However, the repertoire of the tropes is still far too stable for this hypothesis to be plausible. New tropes hardly ever emerge – not even when avant-garde movements like the futurists and surrealists gave it their all to find new and different semantic short circuits and unfamiliar linguistic twists.

Now, of course, one could still argue that the limitation stems from a literary-linguistic canonization: The ancient system of tropes, one might argue, is so rigid and so dominant that it has utterly limited the use of tropes in the West. But even this argument cannot be upheld. Comparable classifications of tropes, such as those produced by ancient rhetoricians, are largely absent from other cultures – even Indian (see Keating 2022) and Chinese (Jiang 2019), where the art of good speech was the object of attention and reflection just as it was in European antiquity. Nevertheless, and even though slightly differing in classification, the tropes used in Japanese or Chinese speech can be described surprisingly well with the grid of western rhetoricians. These descriptions may still be Eurocentric, and conceptually inappropriate – but if there were fundamentally different tropes in the respective literatures this would certainly have been noticed by the failure of such descriptive modes. Interpreters and translators who know every nuance of the respective languages would have stumbled across these problems. Yet, as it is, they translate metaphors with other metaphors and metonymies with other metonymies, encountering many problems, but not the problem of having to use (or even invent) completely different tropes (see Dickins 2018).

A conceivable answer to both the existence and the limited number of tropes would be to draw upon the intrinsic and unchanging properties of language itself. Then, indeed, tropes would rely on a kind of hidden syntax or Chomskyan “universal grammar” in the system of language as such, which is either system-dependent or innate – but not culturally variable. Jakobson’s (1956) theory of paradigmatic (metaphorical) and syntagmatic (metonymic) principles is here the most promising since it embraces structures not as such, but as necessities of language use. Metaphor, in his eyes, follows the principle of linguistic selection (taking one phoneme or word pattern instead of another), while metonymy represents the principle of combination (building the order or syntax in which selection can take place). According to Jakobson, the criterion for selection is, indeed, similitude (we select between similarly fitting tokens), whereas the criterion for combination is contiguity (we build out of patterns that fit together in neighboring positions). So, according to this theory, at least two of the “four master tropes” (Burke 1941) are tied to basic linguistic principles that allow us to speak in the first place.

There are, however, two problems with this theory: First, once more, it explains but a very small number of tropes, leaving out the others (or reducing them to the same principles, which can only work so far). Secondly, after nearly seven decades, one might also doubt Jakobson’s structuralist premises – since modern linguistics tends to view structures more and more as a mode of description for what in reality is a set of embodied skills and habits rather than generative principles. To be sure, Jakobson’s principles have nevertheless been successfully adopted by Large Language Models (used in translation machines and chatbots) that compute the exact same principles of selection and combination. However, these machines did a poor job as long as they used nothing but the Jakobsonian principles. Rather a third component proved crucial: predictable linguistic behavior, i.e., human habits, skills and routines of speech that can be read from Big Data. Indeed, Large Language Models have had a huge success since their “latent space” started to predict the probability of the use of certain words following certain other words and use this very prediction for selection.

This development on the one hand displays the importance of habits and automatisms rather than just structures – but on the other hand these habits and automatisms alone cannot account for the use of tropes but in a very limited way: In fact, a mere statistical emulation of speech habits and speech automatisms could only account for catachreses – i.e., tropes that have themselves been automatized and habitualized. So it is an open question whether selection and combination are as pivotal as Jakobson thought – or if they must be integrated into a larger picture of language use.

1.2 Logical relations

The first take on this larger picture is also the oldest approach to answering the question of why we use tropes at all and why there is a limited, yet constant number of them; it consists in translating tropes into basic logical relations. You will find this thesis explicitly stated in most manuals of literary and rhetorical tropes from antiquity to the present (see, e.g., Lausberg 1997 [1963]: 248–271). To explain and categorize tropes, these manuals focus on the relation between the figurative expression and the literal meaning (the former then being the actual proposition expressed in an imperfect manner). For example, they state that metaphors express the relation between a literal and a figurative term by analogy, metonymy by contiguity, synecdoche by a part standing in for the whole (or vice versa), irony by negation, paradox by contradiction, and so on.

There is, however, something odd about this way of categorizing the basic logical operations because most fundamental logical operations do not have a trope as a counterpart. The four “master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, for example, do not map onto the most prominent and common logical operations, such as the principle of identity, the principle of non-contradiction, the excluded middle (i.e., the differential exclusion of ambiguity), or the different ways of establishing causality (e.g., along the lines of Aristotle’s distinction between causa formalis, causa materialis, causa efficiens and causa finalis). To make things worse, the four tropes favor the very ambiguity that logical principles aim at excluding: In tropes and their way of thinking, all terms are used as something else, which counters the principle of identity; and in doing this, metaphor favors analogy over sound logical operations, metonymy uses contingency for the same outcome, synecdoche establishes ambivalent relations between part and whole, irony goes as far as to deliberately challenge the notion of contradiction – and if these tropes then entail assumptions of causality, these cannot be but logically insecure at best. In addition, there are tropes that can hardly be reduced to logical operations at all, but rather appear stuck in linguistic and aesthetic performance (such as tropes of word similarity or personification); and, regarding the oxymoron and the paradox we could even talk about tropes of the illogical.

So as intuitive as it is to assume that tropes help thinking by establishing logical relations between terms, the counter-intuitive truth of the matter seems to be that they rather hinder thinking by destabilizing logical relations that could more easily and more precisely be established without them.

1.3 Notions and concepts

A further example for what I will henceforth call the “little helpers of thought hypothesis” is the production of notions and concepts rather than the production of logical relations between them. Since Aristotle (see Rhetoric: 3, 11) we find a variety of theories claiming that metaphors serve the task of offering a kind of clarity to the mind that is based on quasi-sensual experience and thus stuck halfway to a terminologically correct proposition. In the middle of the twentieth century, Blumenberg (1960) still argued in this vein – but added the notion that purely propositional thought produces logical lacunae that can only be approached metaphorically. The “light of truth” and the whole metaphorical field of enlightenment, according to this argument, had to recur to visual metaphors to grasp what insight (yet another visual metaphor) is. Hence, Blumenberg claimed that the allegedly propositional philosophical discourse had never arrived at the full-blown production of purely logical truth statements but was – often unnoticed – still pervaded by metaphorical expressions that cannot be translated into a literal terminology. Only partially, Blumenberg argued, could these metaphors be rendered in clearly defined notions; they were rather “absolute” metaphors that could not be relativized, let alone translated and integrated in a purely logical discourse. Nevertheless, as absolute metaphors rather than concepts, the respective proto-notions were still subject to terminological shifts in the ‘history of concepts’ (Begriffsgeschichte). In turn, if literal thought were cleansed of all metaphorical thinking, this operation would leave behind human existence and meaning and fall into the trap of merely abstract and self-referential axioms. Tropes, or at least metaphors, in this line of thought, function as a scaffold for literal thinking – even though the scaffold, here, is integrated into the building of propositional thought, which, left to itself, would collapse.

However, this explanation, too, is weaker than it seems at first glance. First, examples like the “light of truth” are catachreses rather than metaphors, which means that they are used as notions rather than being read for their metaphorical imagery (like the “mouse” of a computer). As such they can be used precisely because they are straightforward literal expressions – which makes them much easier to think with than metaphors would be. To be sure, Blumenberg pointed at the lack of clear definitions and the rather imagistic and evocative power of these catachreses; however, to be fair, many non-metaphorical terms are also more evocative rather than conceptually defined – and if metaphors can have an underlying conceptual definition, literal expressions may very well have a felt, aesthetic dimension to them too (in Section 2.1, I will discuss James 1950 [1890] in this vein).

A similar approach was put forth by Weinrich (1963), who turned to the aesthetic quality of tropes to discuss their quality as “little helpers of thought.” Yet, while Blumenberg favored an account focusing on the aesthetic distance (allowing the threats of immediate reality to be kept at bay by lending them an experiential form that can be worked on), Weinrich (stepping away from the classical definition of a metaphor grounded in similitude) focused on the ‘audacious metaphor’ (kühne Metapher) allowing a word to mean something different than it usually means and hence opening up new paths for imagination and thinking. This move is at least partially in line with Richards (1936), Black (1962) and Ricœur (1997 [1975]), who focused on the “interactive” and aesthetic productiveness between metaphor (“focus” in Black) and context (“frame”).

The problem of this line of thought, however, is that all these thinkers fall short of explaining why the hermeneutic process of producing and coping with semantic ambiguities should have an aesthetic, and hence embodied dimension to it. Embodiment, indeed, is rarely ever a Dionysian chaos, but usually comes with utter precision: a precision that is only rarely translatable into propositional precision (see, e.g., Polanyi 2009 [1966]). Metaphors used in poetry and also physical training therefore might seem semantically vague, but is it really their vagueness and ambiguity that addresses emotionally nuanced or motorically precise phenomena such as atmospheres in poetry or a violinist’s feeling for better bow stroke on their instrument? The painstakingly slow hermeneutic process of semantic interaction cannot be helpful for this task; rather, seen from this angle, propositional ambiguity might simply derive from a different, in Polanyi’s words: “tacit” precision. It may, yes, be a necessary condition for aesthetic productivity – but most probably not a sufficient one.

Accordingly, this debate was upended by Davidson (1978) who claimed that metaphors meant exactly the same thing that their words mean when used literally – but that they are simply used differently, by extending their meaning to domains where they do not fit at first glance. This objection has all the grace of Occam’s razor: it cuts off a huge and complex theoretical abundance and replaces it with a simple answer. The problem, however, is that it does not answer the hard question of tropes: why is it that the forms the presumed “semantic extension” takes on are not necessarily metaphorical, but can also be, say, ironic, metonymical, oxymoronic and so on? Davidson might answer that these are just different forms of the extension he describes – but why, then, do they always fall into the same structures?

1.4 Embodiment

Soon after Davidson’s objection, the “little helper of thought hypothesis” was given another twist in Lakoff’s and Johnson’s (1980) pathbreaking Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), based on embodied and “metaphorical reasoning” (for an overview, see Gibbs 2008). They aligned the hermeneutic endeavor entailed by metaphors with a bodily felt (and subliminally enacted) sense, which, in turn, they brought down to a limited set of what they called “image schemata” – such as a “container” in metaphors like the “content” of a book, thoughts being “in” one’s head, or the ability of thinking “out of the box”. Nota bene, this theory is still aimed at claiming that metaphors help or enable thinking by developing notions and concepts and hence endorses the “little helpers of thought hypothesis” – the only difference to the theories described above is that these notions and concepts are now seen a) as linked to the formation of whole propositions rather than just simple terms or notions and b) as rooted in the body. In this Lakoff and Johnson (1999) even went as far as to claim that logic itself is shaped by the body and its “image schemata” (thereby also giving a new twist and inspiring new life to some aspects of Blumenberg’s theory, especially when considering more the aesthetic dimensions of cognition, as does, e.g., Charteris-Black 2017).

This shift to the body allows for an answer to the problem of “interactive” and notoriously ambivalent metaphorical procedures: Such procedures, it predicts, will only take place if metaphors step out of the realm of preset “image schemata,” and will otherwise be settled against the backdrop of a bodily orientation. Moreover, the very same move also allows the problem of catachresis to be overcome by subliminal dimensions of meaning, which are, yes, habitualized – but not just in a linguistic way. They share our existential skills, habits, and inclinations. Research on gestures (cf., e.g., Armstrong et al. 1995; McNeill 2005; Müller 2008) has affirmed the existence of such patterns of embodied cognition, displaying the enaction of a subliminal, non-propositional thought, and leaving traces in language use. Gestures, indeed, communicate a subliminal embodiment even (or especially) of the most abstract thoughts while priming other people for how to reenact the bodily concepts underlying these thoughts (e.g., if we use the word “grasping” for understanding and enact a grasping movement, the interlocutor will be primed to reenact the abstract concept and embody the metaphor in an even more concrete way). In this vein, it has also proven interesting to radicalize the approach by questioning the state of the “literal” and the clear distinction between “source” and “target domains” thereby creating more detailed discussion about the relation between the bodily and the conceptual (see especially Kövecses 2020).

Yet, there are also serious limitations to CMT. First, the theory is all-too limited by the heritage of the “little helpers of thought hypothesis.” The bodily “image schemata” are viewed as an underlying pre-reflexive stratum translated by the metaphors into proto-propositional semantics; Lakoff and Johnson – like Aristotle, Blumenberg, and Weinrich – follow a theory according to which metaphors lead half the way down the road to concepts; as such they can be analyzed, and their shortcomings can be focused on. It is, however, easy to see that metaphors are not only used as a way to involve the body in mental activity, but also the other way around: Aesthetic metaphors and metaphors used in training situations (cf., e.g., Söffner 2014) are used for going to the body where their presumed propositional ambiguity and hence imprecision can be compensated for with an extremely nuanced bodily precision and unambiguous feel for action. Moreover, even in everyday life, bodily metaphors can be used to promote attitudes or empathy. If I say, for example, that a friend should “take a deep breath,” then I address not so much a conceptual understanding but the re-enactment of a feeling or “felt sense,” which, at least according to Gendlin (1991), constitutes a large part of our thinking. So, metaphorical reasoning also offers a means for understanding a reverse functioning of metaphors. They can also be viewed as the “little helpers” of empathy and enaction – not just of thought (for a more recent discussion, see Littlemore 2019).

Most of all, however, a theory of metaphorical reasoning, unfortunately does not answer the two questions of the hard problem of tropes in a satisfying manner: If aesthetics or bodily schemata are, ultimately, explainable as logical relations, why are there so many concepts and propositions around that are not metaphorical? What about tropes other than metaphors? Do these other tropes not count? If they do count, then why limit the consideration to one trope? And if metaphorical reasoning is so closely tied to analogy and they therefore do not count – why then do they persist as much as metaphors?

2.1 Thinking in and thinking about

To lay the groundworks of this theory, I will heavily draw on a rather unlikely source: Vico’s (1948 [1744]) La Scienza nuova (‘The New Science’), which is rarely referred to in recent rhetorical theory and rather, if at all, quoted for its influence on Herder, Hegel, and Marx in their respective historical and political theories. Vico, indeed, held a chair in Rhetoric at Naples – and his anthropological as well as historical theories are heavily imbued with rhetorical thinking (and rightly so, as I will argue).

What matters most for my argument is Vico’s theory of human understanding or knowing (conoscere), which is not limited to contemplazione (contemplation, mental representation) and the formulation of propositions that can be true or false, which he would deem “philosophical” understanding. Vico, instead, in following Aristotle’s and Plato’s respective theories of mimesis embraces human imitation of and human participation in their surroundings – and he also embraces a concept of poiesis as ‘making,’ ‘constructing,’ and ‘building’ that he deems to be at the core of understanding and even interchangeable with contemplative understanding: according to his credo we only fully understand what we are able to make or do, to build or re-enact.

These premises pave the ground for a better understanding of tropes. I quote a famous passage from the second book of La Scienza Nuova (1948 [1744]), in which Vico explains why propositional non-understanding constitutes an access to the world not inferior to logical understanding, but, in fact, partly even superior,

[s]o that as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), . . . imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia), and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (Vico 1948 [1744]:116–117)

For Vico, the constitution of mental content (and the use of propositional speech) is but an imperfect means of understanding – what he aims at instead is re-enactment and empathic participation. It is easy to understand that this thought does have a parallel in children’s play: constructing and drawing are acts of making or modelling things in order to understand them, while role-play and play with toys entail a stance apt for thinking oneself into them in an embodied way and hence for transforming oneself into them. Vico (1948 [1744]) is very well aware of this. “The most sublime labor of poetry,” he writes earlier in his work, “is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons” (1948 [1744]: 64). Such a theory of “giving life to the insensate things” today might recall what Winnicott (2005 [1971]) meant when he described children’s play (as) a “transitional phenomenon”: dolls or teddy bears, indeed, seem to be animated by human interaction – and so much so that parents never even ask whether a child thinks their teddy bear is really alive, or only comes alive in their imagination; this comes pretty close to the state of thinking that Vico describes. If for Winnicott the distinction between outer reality and inner imagination, between thing and attributed meaning, is not valid in a state of feeling oneself into a situation, because, indeed, one is inside that situation and mind and action are merged, the same is true for Vico. Meaning, here, is not attributed or ascribed, but it resides in the participatory activity.

From here, the decisive space, into which Lakoff and Johnson do not advance – but Vico does – becomes manifest. For Vico, understanding is not aimed at producing propositions, rather the opposite: understanding, for him, requires a non-insight that enables empathy, self-transformation, and participatory experience; in short, a broad theory of empathy and imitative re-enaction is essential to understanding. Indeed, like Plato and Aristotle, Vico embraced a broader notion of mimesis, one that included understanding by (mental and physical) re-enactment and hence imitative participation. Plato, whom Vico often closely followed, had also integrated music into his mimetic theory and thereby had not limited imitation to the production of images or copies – but included choric co-enactment (imitating music by singing along with it, taking on a complementary role within a choric performance – see Nomoi 659c–671a); and while Vico does not develop an equally music-centered theory, his notion of imitation still embraces participation rather than copying – and it is exactly for this reason that he links his notion of understanding to metaphor. In his view metaphor is not so much about understanding things by comparison, it is rather about imitation, assimilation, and empathic interaction. Metaphors are hence, yes, about analogy; but Vico’s focus lies on becoming similar oneself rather than just confronting objects of thought with one another in order to understand them.

This reversal of perspective is the reason why in his view, metaphor “gives sense and passion to insensate things” (“alle cose insensate, ella [la metafora] da senso e passione” 1948 [1744]: 116); rather than just helping logical thinking by offering analogies, metaphor uses empathy and assimilation to animate the objects of thought. Thus, if metaphorical thinking leads to formulations such as that the magnet is in love with iron (1948 [1744]: 63), then, for Vico, magnetism and amorous attraction do not stand in a relationship of comparison – but in a somewhat animist (following Descola’s [2013] definition of the term) relationship in which a human experience is lent to the things just as children lend a human experience to their toys when playing with them. If Vico’s “people of the early ages” (in my reading: childlike thinking) understand magnetism as love, they did not have to compare the two things to each other: they understood magnetism by imaginatively enacting and thus experiencing the relation – which also does justice to Vico’s famous “verum factum” principle (see: Vico 2020 [1711]: 13–17), that we can only understand what we can enact or build. Enacting (from roleplay to play with toys to games) and building (from building blocks to drawing, from speech play to bricolage) are not only the two most prominent characteristics of child’s play, they are also central to understanding similar metaphors that imply an imaginary empathic enaction, in which the magnet is also imaginarily constructed like a toy: like a stick becoming a horse in the context of a child’s play, the iron becomes a lover in the play of the metaphor about the magnet.

Once we allow for such re-enactment to be an essential part of thinking, the function of metaphors – and as we will see, other tropes as well – suddenly becomes less opaque: metaphors do not establish relationships of similarity between two terms in order to then compare them, they rather allow us to become similar to the thing we are contemplating – to no longer just think about it but to re-enact it, empathize with it, and, hence, understand it from within. This kind of metaphorical figuration asks for distinctive definitions. I therefore term the kind of equivalence or similitude drawn from imitation rather than comparison enactive analogy and distinguish it from an analogy understood by contemplation; and, moreover, I term this kind of re-enactment, empathy or becoming the things thinking in – in order to oppose it to the thinking about that occurs in the production of propositional content. Introducing the two aggregate states of thinking in and thinking about allows us also to introduce two metaphorical states. One is the state of similarity and comparison – it is possible (but difficult) to compare magnets with lovers in terms of thinking about them – which will lead to a productive “interaction” of semantic fields. But this comparison only goes so far – and empathy or thinking in is not based on a comparison. It is based on a work of empathic self-assimilation, re-enaction, and participation.

There is, indeed, quite a lot of evidence for the existence of such enactive analogies – and thus thinking in – in terms of metaphorical reasoning. For example, Gallagher and Lindgren (2015) have developed a theory of metaphor based on “taking as” rather than comparing with (e.g., a child taking a banana as a telephone while playing). This echoes Jakobson’s approach but ties it to an embodied affordance. The notion of thinking in, indeed, helps to re-consider known examples of metaphorical reasoning, too. A similar analogy of taking this as that, however, is also present, when a certain sensation is taken as a seemingly unrelated felt sense. For example, people with a cold drink in their hands consider other people to be cold-hearted; or socially excluded people experience a room temperature as two degrees lower (Zhong and Leonardelli 2008). There is, indeed, no clear similarity between social inclusion and temperature that could be deduced by comparison or an “interaction” of semantic fields which could substitute such a comparison and lend plausibility to the metaphor. There is, however, an adequacy of re-enacted sensations that can only be revealed by thinking in. The same is true with metaphors about time (is the future in front of us or, as in some cultures behind us?): time, indeed, is not comprehensible in spatial terms without movement – and the way movements translate into time are culturally different (Boroditsky 2000). So, we understand time not by comparing it with space, but by enacting our own temporality in a special spatial way that I would call thinking in. By then turning this temporal enaction into a re-enaction (an enaction repeated, reviewed and thereby gained as an object of contemplation) we create an opportunity to then think about it.

The seeming tautology of thinking in (understanding time by shaping one’s temporal experience, understanding social exclusion by experiencing it cross-modally as a temperature, taking something as something else within the realm of an enacted dynamic), is, more often than not, our only option for experiencing comparisons as meaningful, since they would otherwise remain in the realm of abstract logical relations; and mental re-enactment for contemplation is in turn our only way to transcribe thinking in into thinking about (in the case of metaphor: turning empathic assimilation into comparison) and thereby to gain concepts. In Vico’s words, the physical nature of the situation and its sensual understanding is offered by becoming the things, which is, indeed, the easiest way to put it.

What becomes tangible in these examples is the fact that words are not used to convey or constitute referential content, but rather to offer a special kind of affordance to re-enact a bodily feeling – and I use the term “affordance” in drawing on Gibson (1977). I think that it is in this way, too, that William James described linguistic semantics as “feelings” (expanding his notion even to conjunctions and talking about a “feeling of and” and a “feeling of but” – James 1950 [1890]: 246). The only difference between – say – a chair affording or inviting us to sit down and a word affording a feeling is the fact that the latter affordance aims at an imaginary enaction. The difference is not that big, however, once we turn to the question of how we learn these affordances; and rhetoric play a key role here – and not only to form and enact the image schemata for CMT in the first place, but also to form James’ “feelings,” or, as we might also call them, drawing on Daniel Stern the Forms of Vitality in both their syntactic (“feeling of if”/“feeling of but”) and their semantic dimension (“feeling of blue”), as they are both reflected in rhetorical figures of speech: rhetorical schemes (playing on word order and sound) and tropes (playing on semantics).

Indeed, both what Malloch and Trewarthen (2010) call “Communicative Musicality,” and “joint attention,” “joint commitment” “cooperative communication,” which Tomasello (2019) sees as important steps for Becoming Human (in both ontogenetic and evolutionary terms) serve language acquisition and enculturation – and indeed are displayed as essential features of certain children’s language games. Syntax is tied to a rhythmic and prosodic order, playfully learned in manifold forms of speech play such as jabberwocky rhymes or gibberish rhymes (see Sanches and Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1976) – and with these come rhetorical schemes such as alliteration, rhyme, figura etymologica, anaphora, parallelism, and chiasm, all of which feature in children’s play. But I would suggest, play is even more important when it comes to the semantic figures of speech and hence to tropes.

2.2 Tropes in play

As I wish to argue, children’s play offers an explanation for both the questions raised at the beginning of this paper. The first one is now easy to answer: Why do we need tropes? Because, like children’s play, they help us to transform ourselves into the things to be understood, while propositional thought would only help us to understand them from outside. The second question still requires more consideration: Why is there just a limited number of tropes? And here my hypothesis is: because playing follows a limited number of evolutionarily acquired forms of enacting.

This hypothesis can best be described with reference to the most common tropes we will encounter in literary texts. All of these, I will argue, can take on two interchangeable forms, according to whether they are used for thinking about or for thinking in – just as metaphor can take on the form of compared similitude for thinking about as well as the form of imitation, assimilation, and empathic re-enaction and becoming for thinking in. These different forms are negation (thinking about) – and distance-taking (thinking in) in irony; the continuation of comparisons – and continued mimesis in allegory; contiguity – and appresentation in metonymy; personification – and role play in personification or prosopopoia; the interchangeability of part and whole – and the interchangeability of overview and inside-view in synecdoche; contradiction – and aporia in paradox; contrast – and conflict in oxymoron. But to make my point, I will have to elaborate on this thesis a little more in extenso.

In following Vygotsky (2016 [1967]), I wish to argue that play paves the ground for detaching oneself from immediate situations; it helps us understanding them according to imaginary and then symbolic rules. Toys, for example, are things used in a way that makes sense only in the imaginary context of the game. But whereas for adults things can acquire fully symbolic and arbitrary dimensions (so that just by definition, a pen can represent one car and the tap of a bottle another car when explaining an accident on a table), in children’s play, the same objects would have to become cars, and could do so only within an enacted imaginary situation. Play ranges between the concretely embodied and enacted on the one hand and a constructed symbolic reality on the other – a concept of transition similar to that discussed above in relation to Vico and Winnicott. Such a transition is, indeed, what tropes (not only metaphors) are about, as they are coined by forms of play.

When looking at tropes from the vantage point of children’s play, the simplest trope is irony. Irony here occurs as a distancing move taking place in any playful activity (see Bateson 1956). It even manifests itself in what behavioral scientists know to be present in many animals’ behavior: the playfully shared suspension of consequences that actions would have if they were carried out seriously – e.g., the bite to the throat that is only hinted at by playing dogs (see, e.g., Eibl 2009). Logically speaking – as evidenced in the textbooks of rhetoric – this leads to a paradox of negation and assertion at the same time. What one enacts is and at the same time is not the real thing. Bodily enactment, however, knows no negation – you either do something, or you do not. Thus, in play, irony is the condition for the difference between what one does in play and what one really does. It is a stance that allows one to do something while at the same time distancing oneself from it. Vygotsky gives the convincing example that factual situations can also be played out – real sisters can play sisters, while having a dinner one can play dinner, and only in the playful situation are the children fully aware of their role and their activities (Vygotsky 2016 [1967]: 9–10). This explains why children learn such a semantically complex grammatical function as the conditional tense rather easily – indeed, in play this stance is as ubiquitous as phrases like “now I would be/do this or that . . . ” or “in our game, now this or that would happen . . . ” To be sure, in play this irony is not a figure of speech, but an attitude – however, linguistics too assert that the recognition of a speaker’s posture or tone of voice is essential for understanding oral irony, while literary irony depends on the context; the essence, however, is always “playing through” a different position or argument than one really endorses, and understanding rules while constructing them in an imaginary way (see Vygotsky 2016 [1967].

The opposite of irony is metaphor in Vico’s sense – since it travels in the direction of thinking in rather than symbolic thinking about as does irony. Metaphor rather favors what Piaget (1951 [1945]) called “assimilation.” But, as we will see, it also knows the way back. While the irony in child’s play is, so to speak, the procedure that allows distance from one’s own actions and the suspension of consequences, the metaphorical principle of enactive analogy rather calls for immersion or empathy by imitation, re-enactment or assimilation. This becoming allows the child to get involved in the playing situation, to empathize with it and to overcome distance – a fact Huizinga (2014 [1938]) called the in-lusio (musing on the etymology of illusion as immersion in a play). Combining Vico’s theory of becoming and animating with the notion of “taking as” (as has been put forth by Gallagher and Lindgren 2015) is not limited to, e.g., taking a stick as a car. “Taking as” also means animating this stick and experiencing it as a transitional object. And it also includes what Heidegger (1995 [1929/30]: 452–454) discussed as the “ontological difference,” where he understood Being as the possibility of making something intelligible as something (as a being). Making something emerge from a mere sensation into the something we then take it for requires the metaphorical operation lending it meaning – so that Vico’s iron by experiencing it as a loving agent (thinking in) becomes a magnet (to be thought about as an object). This function of metaphorical reasoning for the ontological difference becomes clearer if we do not limit the examples of metaphors to objects (taking a potato as a person when speaking about “couch potatoes” in later life), but also include metaphors for enacted situations (playing a car’s acceleration by altering the pitch of one’s voice like shifting gears as a child, and talking about “gearing up” for work as an adult) and for embodied moods – thereby making the phenomenon intelligible as the particular being it is in the game. This even helps us to better understand classical conundrums of metaphorical speech as well. As Heidegger (1995 [1929/30]: 85) pointed out in the same text, for example, the canonic example for metaphor in rhetorical textbooks (falsely ascribed to Quintilian) – pratum ridet, the ‘meadow laughs’ – does not hold any outer similarity between the beauty of a meadow and human laughter: In order to work as a metaphor, it rather affords a work of empathy and becoming Vico described as being transformed into the thing or the situation. Only while being drawn into the beauty and only by playing out the experience of the joy engendered by this beauty can we understand what the strange copula of words might mean and hence understand it as a metaphor. This empathizing is exactly what showed up previously as the clue for understanding the “coldness” of social exclusion or the “love” of magnet and iron. Metaphor in play is, therefore, not only a circumscribed phenomenon concerning only objects, it also holds a broader dimension as a principle. As such, it figures as the enabler of animation; and in this capacity, it can be viewed as the opposite of irony in a decisive tension between taking and overcoming distance: irony and metaphor.

If children play, however, they do not use single metaphors, but rather networks of them. This is, indeed, the enactive equivalent to allegory. In classical textbooks, allegory is a continued metaphor, a set of metaphors linked to one another constituting a whole scene. What happens “in the game” can thus be understood as the enactive variant of an allegorical parable – while at the same time (“in reality”) for the playing children they remain what they are. This double attitude might well prime us for the weird, yet useful kind of social construction of the different social realities that constitute our adult lives; and it might also prime us for an understanding of allegorical texts, plays, movies and rhetorical figures with (at least) two layers of meaning, in which each element can figure as one thing and as something else at the same time. Let me give an example: When we speak of a “war” against Covid, this turns the virus into an enemy, an infection into an aggressor, its invisibility into a subversion and, hence, lends meaning to the meaningless, which is just the reverse operation of Albert Camus using the parable of a plague to transpose an ideological meaning onto the absurdity of meaningless events. Both rhetorical maneuvers enable us to play through a whole reality in a different way: they not only allow us to confront and compare objects of thought, but also to enact our lives differently in taking one set of events as the other in our everyday attitudes towards them.

It might now become easier to understand another one of the important tropes, namely metonymy. According to my hypothesis, metonymy should aim at empathy, just as metaphor does – yet allow for a different kind of empathy, one that is not built upon imitation and hence similarity. I would like to suggest apperception and appresentation as its guiding principles; by this I mean, in line with Husserl (1960 [1929]: § 50–54, 108–120), co-perception and enacted co-presence of things that do not belong to sensory perceptions as such, yet figure as a habitual and necessary perceptive supplement to sensual data – such as the far side of a cup when grasping it, the weight of a hammer before taking hold of it, or the softness of a bed before letting oneself fall onto it; appresentation is, hence, filling the gaps of perceptual data in the service of enactive immersion. The fact that appresentation is part of human perception becomes clear once it is fooled (the cup is shaped in a different way, the hammer is made of a different metal and hence lighter, the bed is harder than expected). Playing with this co-perception in a more deliberate manner is one of the important characteristics of children’s games – even if it is usually misunderstood as their “fantasy,” because apperception appears to be much stronger and more surprising in children than in the more standardized or habitual appresentations (or metonymies) of adulthood. Fantasy, however, would entail the need to imagine whole alternative worlds, while in children’s play, what is appresented is mostly tied to the circumstances of the game and to ad hoc co-perceptions, rather than outright fantasies – albeit in a way that this capacity is used to appresent things more deliberately, like the motor of a toy car, the voice and emotional expression of a doll, the trigger of a “gun” that is actually a stick and so on. Once more, Vygotsky (2016 [1967]: 16) offers the best clue for understanding this trope’s presence in children’s play. By giving the example of smacking sounds for eating in play or trampling on the ground enacting riding (both horse and rider) he clearly describes metonymies in playful action – also offering a theory for what Tomasello (2019: 106–110) would later call iconic gestures as key to understanding pretense. The iconic dimension, however, is not merely iconic in terms of creating an image or idea – it is rather enacted in a metonymic way. In adult life, too, metonymic appresentation and metonymic enaction are at the core of usual metonymies: the “lead foot” in driving makes sense only while appresenting the accelerator pedal (while the mere fantasy of a heavy foot would rather be a metaphor of slowness than a metonymy for a fast driver); “pushing the button” allows us to appresent, rather than mentally represent, the effect of this action; sensing smoke prompts us for seeing fire and talking about the “lead guitar” affords the appresentation of a person. Especially in terms of agency, metonymy – and hence appresentation – is crucial. So it is no wonder that metonymy, also in adult life, is very akin to an anthropology of tool use, which nearly always affords a mostly spontaneous appresentation of agency with regard to inanimate things – e.g., when one is insulting one’s broken computer, giving names to a car or experiencing agency and emotion in a sat nav, these kinds of agency appresentations are common (Gell 1998).

Pondering on agency, however, also leads us to the broader phenomenon of personification, which is also one of the most powerful and cross-culturally present tropes. This is especially true when we’re dealing with roleplay in the sense of playing oneself as a different person, or not just a person, also an animal, a machine, a tree. An interesting aspect of personification is disguise – indeed the Latin persona was the word for mask, and the Greek word for personification is prosopopoeia i.e., the ‘making’ – poiein – of a face-in-interaction (prosopon, from pros opsis, before the eyes). Personification indeed is always a kind of masquerade, with or without masks. The poet most famous for his use of prosopopoeia was Rainer Maria Rilke, whose personifications have been celebrated by De Man (1979) as Allegories of Reading. If a prosopopoeia, however, shapes and signifies reading, the literary game is not just confined to texts, personified as itself in the act of reading. If the “ego” of a poem turns out to refer to the poem itself, in the embodied reading experience we have to deal with a phenomenon of disguise, the speaker personifying the reading experience and the reading experience personifying the speaker. In a much simpler way, the same goes for traditional mythical personifications such as forces of nature and skill being personified as gods, or rhetorical personifications too: the gods appear as and in the things they personify. They play them.

We can, however, also observe a kind of transition between the states of playing with toys – and personification. Roleplay is not always played by the children taking on different roles – there is also the state of identification with a toy, and hence playing as this toy, which is a kind of transitional stage between the mimesis of playing with the toys (metaphor) and playing roles (personification). This brings us to yet another trope, the synecdoche. Children play with toy cars as a kind of avatar with which they merge, so that they can be the car themselves or, better yet, act as the car they are holding in their hands. They mutually perceive each other as the cars they play – which is relatively easy to recognize as a clear enactive and interactive model for pars pro toto figurations. The synecdoche thus performed also allows children to think themselves out of the context and to be able to look at the scene of the play from the outside – yet they also put themselves into the constructed things and test perspectives. In shared toy play, there are, in fact, always two perspectives involved, whose co-presence is sometimes astonishing: One is the focus on a smaller field (how are two toy cars interacting?) and the other is the focus on the overall context (how two children interact with each other). As a figure of enaction – rather than a figure of speech or thought – the enactive synecdoche is highly important in adult life, too, when it comes to controlling tools or even steering large engines (such as cars or ships) – which also require an enactive pars pro toto control (and totum pro parte agency ascription: it is the driver, not the car that has failed to see me). Enactive synecdoche is also essential for understanding crowds and swarms, and hence the experience of merging with a larger collective body. It is for this reason that I view synecdoche – far from its common definition as a sub-category of metonymy (as it would be in logical terms) – as one of the most important tropes. Due to its properties, it can rather be viewed as the overarching trope that partially includes metonymy and personification. What makes synecdoche even more important is that – as can easily be understood from child’s play, too – it paves the way for understanding the threshold between thinking in and thinking about.

Playing would be boring if it were just “playing through” – rather, most games stage contrasts, conflicts and resistances – which are reflected in rhetoric’s playbook by such related tropes as the oxymoron, the paradox, and the aporia. They can be reflected in conflicts between children about what part a given toy may play in their game, or whether it be good or evil. These intentional conflicts are not an obstacle to playing – they are also the essence of it and the reason for it: they get the whole thing going. It is easy to see that what is a contradiction and hence a logical problem in the realm of propositional content and thinking about, is, in the realm of thinking in, a conflict; and rather than calling for a solution, this conflict needs to be fully explored (with or without playful irony). It is here that I also view a key to the aesthetics of the oxymoron, such as the “icy fire” in Petrarchist love, which immediately becomes boring once it is resolved as a hermeneutic riddle (the beloved lady appears so cold in rejecting the poet-lover, yet at the same time inspires such heated passion) but can be extremely beautiful if read as an affordance for re-enacting a feeling.