Metaphors – Does ‘Swiss Army Knife’ Carry Negative Connotations?

To have a good ear for music has nothing to do with making music: it means to be able to listen to music, put it in its technical and historical context, and understand what is going on in it. “Ear” thus stands for the great complex of physical, intellectual and emotional capabilities which constitute the critical sense.

This figure, in which a part stands for the whole, is termed synecdoche. Some people regard synecdoche as a kind of metonymy; others specifically exclude synecdoche from metonymy, insisting that a figure is only properly termed metonymy if the term alluded to does not embrace the alluding term.

Decoding metaphors can be tricky. It's very important to distinguish the tenor of the metaphor from its vehicle. The former is the actual thing being described. In the case of your example, it's nature. The vehicle is the figure which the reader is invited to imagine, and to visualize in analogy to the tenor.

In the text cited here, to "to carve at the joints" refers to a method of dismembering a piece of meat - likely the carcass of a fowl or even (if one is hungry and thinking of a medieval feast) something considerably larger. That the carving is associated here with a "rapier" reinforces the image of whacking great chunks from the carcass.

I might suspect that you may be overthinking the metaphor by reading aspects of the tenor back into the vehicle, a reversal that's certainly easy to experience in the midst of a discussion of B.L. Whorf and conceptual frameworks.