Abstract

There is some limited contemporary scholarship on the theory of metaphor Kant appears to provide in his Critique of Judgment. The dominant interpretations that have emerged of Kant’s somewhat nascent account of metaphors are what I refer to as the symbolist view, which states that Kantian symbols should be viewed as Kantian metaphors, and the aesthetic idea view, which holds that Kant defi ned metaphors as aesthetic ideas . In this essay, I claim that the symbolist view of Kantian metaphors is not plausible and that we should accept the aesthetic idea view in its stead. The jumping off points for my discussion are two fairly recent essays on the subject: A. T. Nuyen’s “The Kantian Theory of Metaphor” and Kirk Pillow’s “Jupiter’s Eagle and the Despot’s Hand Mill: Two Views of Metaphor in Kant.” Nuyen defends the symbolist view of Kantian metaphor and Pillow defends a split view, i.e., Pillow thinks Kant has a dual-aspect view of metaphor that can bear both the symbolist and the aesthetic idea interpretations. Although I make use of some of Pillow’s objections against the symbolist view, I conclude that both he and Nuyen are wrong in thinking that Kantian symbols have any relationship to Kantian metaphors at all. Lastly, I will provide my own positive account of Kant’s theory of metaphors as well as show how this debate affects Kant’s overallaesthetic theory