The manuscript is partly a historical exploration of early Chinese and Greek theories of metaphor, partly an epistemological reflection on comparative philosophy and literature and their methodologies, and partly a literary scholar’s critique of Cognitive Metaphor Theory. It argues that despite sporadic differences between their respective philosophical systems, early Chinese and Greek thinkers construed metaphorical expressions as based on a perceived likeness between two objects or phenomena, but also, crucially, as inducing a moment of conceptual confusion in the addressee. The latter explains why early metaphor theories are closely associated with discourses on misleading appearances, and why in Xunzi’s (d. 238 BC) theory of figurality, the corpse (which resembles but no longer is the living person) is the ultimate ‘metaphor of metaphor’.

It discusses critically relevant scholarship in the above-mentioned fields, contending that a methodology that allows the philosopher Xunzi to be read ‘against’ Plato’s Sophist and ‘with’ Aristotle’s Rhetoric not only exposes a thematics unnoticed in sinological scholarship on early rhetoric and philosophy; it also reveals an inverted correspondence between Plato’s critique of phantasmic representation and Aristotle’s insistence that a well-crafted metaphor defers the reader’s decoding of the intended meaning. Interlacing these thematic strands—and banking on twenty years of teaching these texts—the manuscript is the first of its kind.