Beginnings are not beginnings until something grows out of them; but what you grow from is never left entirely behind. Even today, Western philosophy begins with Homer, in the sense that it begins against him.
Homer began a peculiar sort of turn to λόγος. The turn is already implied in the Homeric view of immortality: if you are going to spend eternity as a gibbering ninny, the one worthwhile thing that might outlive you is your reputation—your κλέος ἀθανατός, the undying fame which, in Homer’s Mad Max-ish culture, can be won only on the battlefield. Even there, however, your exploits will need to inspire some bard to put you into a poem, so that you can be sung about forever. The salvific λόγος for the Homeric hero is thus poetic.
So consider this passage from Book IX of the Odyssey in the Samuel Butler translation:
… We bore the red hot beam into his eye, till the boiling blood bubbled all over it as we worked it round and round, so that the steam from the burning eyeball scalded his eyelids and eyebrows, and the roots of the eye sputtered in the fire. As a blacksmith plunges an axe or hatchet into cold water to temper it—for it is this that gives strength to the iron—and it makes a great hiss as he does so, even thus did the Cyclops’ eye hiss round the beam of olive wood, and his hideous yells made the cave ring again.
Typically for Homer, the simile in this passage compares something strange and awful to something familiar, even routine. The wild thrust into Cyclops’ eye and the everyday action of a blacksmith are revealed to have certain similarities.
A simile is, then, the evocation of a resemblance. Resemblance, in turn, is a matter of aspect: two or more things which resemble each other (here, the living eye and the cold water) do so in some ways and not in others; so to form a simile is both to liken and to contrast. Thus, while Homer’s simile likens the thrust of the heated log into the wet tissues of Cyclops’ eye to the thrust of the heated blade into the cool water, it also notes the contrast between the strengthening of the iron and the wounding of the giant.
Since resemblance is a matter of aspect, a simile likens two things in view of a third thing, which is the specific set of likenesses that are applied to both things. We can call that third thing, common to the other two, a “concept,” though as Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have argued, such a set of likenesses is often much more complex than we usually take concepts to be, incorporating such things as practices and expectations.[1] Similes thus lean on concepts; but since similes, especially literary ones, are supposed to be fresh, we can say that a good simile is the genesis of a concept: it collects a set of resemblances between two things which have not been collected before.
This leads us to the standard representational controversy: to what extent are the similarities unlocked in a simile invented, and to what extent are they discovered?
The question would not have made much sense to an ancient Greek, whose language contains no word for “invention,” though several for “discovery.” We may say, even today, that the resemblances revealed by a simile must actually exist, phenomenologically, in the experiences it compares; if two things are extremely different, like the blinding of Cyclops and a hand of canasta, there simply is no simile. So the resemblances were there before the simile is formulated; but they were unnoticed, unrevealed.
This is not a minor change. The Platonic elenchus, the argumentative give-and-take that recurs through Plato’s early dialogues, is often presented as a refutation: someone advances a thesis and Socrates shows its falsity. But this is not always the case. Look at Charmides: after being asked to define temperance, he at first refuses to answer; but eventually, at the urging of Socrates, he responds: “It seems to me, in sum, that what you are asking about is a kind of quietness” (159b). This claim is not refuted subsequently, because it cannot be; it is an incorrigible report of what temperance appears, to Charmides, to be. Same for Euthyphro: “I say that the holy is what I am now doing” (5d). Of course he does; again the elenchus is begins from something irrefutable.
What the dialogue achieves is therefore a movement from private truths, matters of seeming and saying, to a publicly shared situation, which in Plato’s early dialogues is defined by the recognition that no one knows what he is talking about. Better shared bafflement, Plato is saying, than private certainty.
So a simile works like this: the poet becomes aware of a set of resemblances between two things; this set is a sort of ”concept.” She puts that concept into words, often for the first time, so that others can become aware of it as well.
A simile also includes, typically, a selection: any two things that resemble one another usually do so in more than one aspect (they are at least both things, and whatever more interesting resemblances they may exhibit are added to that). A simile rarely mentions all of these. Thus, my Homeric example mentions the wetness of the eye and the cold water and the sound of their conjunction, but other things go ummentioned. Both the blacksmith shop and the cave, for example, presumably get warm from all the heating that goes on in them; but Homer doesn’t mention it. The simile thus selects from a number of resemblances the ones which it asserts to hold.
Taken as a whole, we may say, the names which exist in a language select, from among all the ways in which things resemble other things, those few which receive names. It is long known that different languages do this differently: the English word “mind,” for example, has no analogue in French or German.
Similes traffic in resemblances, which are aspectual (and also matters of degree, but that is not of concern at the moment). They wrest unity from disparate experiences, and in so doing create what I here call “concepts.” Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze have occasionally seen the critical creation of concepts as their job, which puts philosophy into the same league as poetry; but most philosophers have abjured this Homeric orientation and have gone down the path, not of simile and resemblance, but of two absolutes: identity and truth. To such an extent that when Derrida and Heidegger placed those absolutes into question, philosophers saw nowhere to go, and thus reached—or, in some cases, ran from—the shared bafflement that might have defined philosophy’s situation at the end of the 20th Century. If philosophers had only let it.
[1] Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier “Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10:3 (1995) pp. 183-203