The tree of wisdom is within us: this emblem, which closes Guillaume de la Perrière's collection, expresses and sums up the story of man's proximity to the tree: " cur cordis medio radix? And we reproduce its laws around us to rediscover Nature's forgotten order, as Ulisse Aldrovandi writes in his Dendrologia books: " Leges Hortenses, sive Pomariorum Statuta pro Armonia delitiarum animi et corporis. "
In this lecture, we aim to go beyond the idea of an "archaeology" to reach the "paradigms for a metaphorology" proposed by Hans Blumenberg: the aim is to identify a few "absolute metaphors" capable of better articulating and enriching the dialogue between imagination and logos. Metaphors bring together and synthesize knowledge, they are not a digression or an ornament; the forms of language we are addressing are not a diversion, but a quest for a center and an origin. Indeed, as Blumenberg has done, it is a matter of taking on board the limits of the Cartesian principle of "clarity and distinction":
"To this ideal of complete objectification would correspond the perfect completion of terminology, which captures the presence and precision of the given in defined concepts."
Yet we constantly see that neither in experience nor in the vagaries of the most advanced scientific discoveries is there a "perfect congruence of logos and cosmos", and that a genuine analysis of the "representations" of the human condition "must have as its objective the identification of the logical 'embarrassment' for which metaphor stands in the place of". This "work of adequacy" done by "absolute metaphors" will not be studied here at the cosmological level illustrated by Blumenberg, but rather interrogated in relation to one of the most obvious anthropological aporias.