METAPHOR AS AN IMPERATIVE OF HUMAN SOCIO-CULTURAL EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Metaphor claims the status of one of the most effective communicative tools: the list of its key advantages includes the ability to creatively connect the accidental and the necessary, to heuristically visualize the invisible, to express the significance of latent and seemingly peripheral factors that are actually contextually significant.
Metaphor is a truly rhetorical figure, a key tool of any rhetorical cases. The rhetorical, discursive, communicative and suggestive advantage of metaphor lies in its laconicism and semantic incompleteness, which researchers identify with a wide range of semantic markers: “potential semantic energy”, “open semantic option”, “latent communicative resource”, etc.
Metaphor accumulates in itself the quintessence of human culture at least of the era of writing. An essential characteristic feature is that at the level of human evolution, metaphorical language preceded conceptual language: a concept is a signifier derived from a metaphor, and not vice versa. Another important aspect is due to the fact that the cultural meanings of almost any ethnic, national, confessional, demographic, gender, scientific and other environment are concentrated around a metaphor, which is illustratively indicative and semantically defining for precisely such a social cluster and historical era, and a change in the social environment and era is necessarily accompanied by a profound transformation of the basic metaphor.
The transtemporal meaning of metaphor is determined by its imperative status in the system and structure of the socio-cultural experience of humanity: metaphor actually accumulates the total socio-cultural experience of humanity, becomes the quintessence of human culture, because hierarchies of cultural meanings are always built around metaphors that are significant for the historical era, and the change of era was necessarily accompanied by a reformatting of the hierarchy of metaphors that determine the style, method and horizon of socio-cultural thinking and communication.