Metaphor requires the reader to do the work of constructing a logic of categories and analogies. Metonymy accomplishes its transfer of meaning on the basis of associations that develop out of specific contexts rather than from participation in a structure of meaning. A metonymy does not call for the magical sharing of meaning that a metaphor implies; instead, it relies on connections that build up over time and the associations of usage. Metonymy places us in the historical world of events and situations, whereas metaphor asserts connections on the basis of a deep logic that underlies any use of words. Even when there is no strongly figurative etymology, meaning is figurative in the sense that it relies on categories and associations. Language is thus not a simple process of naming preexisting objects and states but a system through which we give meaning to the world. Now if language give meaning to experience, we have to think of it as the system which our idea become possible. Language is a conceptual grid, a system of values, through which we experience reality. Wisdom in dhyāna describles its own metaphysics with the name "nihilism" and conceives it to be the counterstroke to all preceding metaphysics. The name nihilism thus loses the purely nihilistic sense in which it means a destruction and annihilation of previous values, the mere negation of beings and the futility of human history. Nihilism, thought in dhyāna, calls for freedom from values as freedom for a revaluation of all values.
