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1. In the broadest sense, all nontautological predication [every act of describing, asserting, etc.]—indeed all communication—is metaphoric, inasmuch as it identifies some particular item with something else. Of course, there is a grammatical (and psychological) difference between attributing a general property to a general class (“Roses are red”), attributing a general property to an individual (“This rose is red”), comparing an individual to another individual (“My love is like a red, red rose”), and identifying an individual with another individual (“I am a rose of Sharon”). But in each case, we are asked to look at something in the light of something else, finding a certain abstraction in a specific individual or individuals. In the first three instances, we are made aware of our abstracting, which therefore has a certain precision; in the fourth instance (metaphor, strictu sensu) we must refocus without attending to—and thereby disciplining—our act of abstracting. It is the unconsciousness and indeterminateness of this sort of refocusing that gives ordinary metaphors their special power. (I will ignore metonymy and synecdoche as sharing the specificity of ordinary predication.)
1.1. All predication is thus propaganda, urging the receiver to see “this” as a “that.”
1.1.1. If it is easy to see “this” as a “that,” i.e., if it does not disturb other ways of seeing “this,” we take it as a simple true/false statement. In that case, only gentle propaganda is involved. (See Kenneth Burke [1954]. But also, of course, pre-Socratic philosophers, classical rhetoricians, Nietzsche [in Mandelbaum, 1971, p. 344], Foucault, 1972; White, 1973; and many others.)
1.1.2. If a predication grossly disturbs other ways of seeing something, it will be received as an error, or as a colorful, or inapt, or pretentious simile, or else as a metaphor. In any case, if it disturbs a customary way of seeing things, it will constitute strenuous propaganda.
1.2.3. Nothing is a metaphor.