Lao Tze The Daodejing Compared With Aristotle's Physics Metaphor Study

Metaphor has drawn attention since the period of Aristotle as the research object ofRhetoric and Poetics. Although Plato denounced the metaphor, he still used it in hisCave Theoryμ in The Republic to describe his view of the world. Although Aristotleonly admitted that noun and nominal content words are metaphorical words, he stillused it to explain his Four Causesμ in Physics. It is too numerous to mention theexamples that philosophers use the metaphor to explain the philosophical connotation.It had been a long history, since philosophy and metaphor were studied as theresearch object. There are close association between them. Fail to differentiate into aspecialized philosophical language in the human language system, confusion inphilosophical expression are made. As "common factor" in all languages, metaphormakes up the limitations of philosophy that consists of everyday language, scientificlanguage and poetic language. Metaphor not only can modify the words, conveyinformation, but also express the truth.Nietzsche believes that the metaphor is not just linguistic units but a method ofunderstanding the world. He believes that we experience the world in a metaphoricalway. Richards thinks that the thought is metaphorical and all words are full ofmetaphors, so if there is no metaphor, we will don·t know how to deal with the world.He thinks the world is a projected worldμ on the basis of metaphor. Lakoff thinks thatthe world where we live is what our ability to understand, which not the objectiveexistence of the world is. According to this philosophy, Lakoff put forward the conceptof source and target domains. The well-known, specific source domain is used to mapunfamiliar, abstract target domain. Understanding of a thing is to realize the mappingbetween the source and target domains. This process reflects the normal trail of thought:from concrete to abstract. Therefore, this paper is based on the conceptual metaphortheory to analyze metaphor how to express the philosophical meaning.This thesis is the application type of contrastive linguistics, taking applied researchmodel (on the basis of the conceptual metaphor theory), using descriptive researchmethod, to make comparison and contrast of characteristics of the metaphor in the philosophical discourse and philosophical content. The research body is to analyze thecharacteristics of the source domain in the Dao and Physics, and to compare the sourcedomains that describe the meaning of "Dao Concept" and "Four Causes", in order tounderstand the target domains in a conceptual metaphor way.