Metaphor as “Deception”: Thomas Hobbes and political metaphor

Leviathan In Metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson cite Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) as the chief proponents of a philosophical trend through which " the suspicion of poetry and rhetoric became dominant in Western thought " and " metaphor and other figurative devices [became] objects of scorn " (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 190). In his overview over " Metaphor in the Philosophical Tradition " (1981), Johnson ascribes to Hobbes an " Aristotelian view of metaphor as the transference of a name from its proper object to some other object " , which made it " natural " for him " to fear that such a transfer was likely to deceive those who had taken the word or name in question as signifying only the original object " (1981: 11-12). Johnson interprets Hobbes's theory as the expression of a " literal-truth paradigm " , which is built on three assumptions, namely 1) that " the human conceptual system is essentially literal " , 2) that metaphor is " a deviant use of words in other than their proper senses, which accounts for its tendency to confuse and to deceive " and 3) that " the meaning and truth claims of metaphor (if there are any) are just those of literal paraphrase " (1981: 12). Similar assessments of Hobbes and of Locke as