Metaphors about Metaphors

This page is a personal homework reflection for Kira's Ways of Knowing workshop.

The title of the session is Metaphor - Treat or Trap?

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The question of metaphor gets one pretty quickly into the murky depths of the philosophy of language (metaphor intended).  But rather than standing back and looking at the history of philosophy since classical times, I'm tempted to cut to the chase ... or rather, to dive right in.

To understand the concept of metaphor -- hmmm, let's start digging right away -- to understand suggests to get to the bottom of something in a certain way, which if I were to "dig up" some of the possibilities, is about being with it in a certain way -- to be underneath it and yet, to be standing up.  And that in turn means (you can start to see the network of meanings (as if meanings were like knots in a space-filling structure of string, tied together systematically)) ... that you are not lying down, you aren't snowed under like a log in winter, but are on your feet, alert, able to look around, turn, step this way and that; able to orient yourself at will and look in different directions; your hands are free and you can do a credible job of grasping (whatever is there to grasp when doing this thing called understanding a certain thing, which in this case is metaphor).

Ordinary language is laden with metaphors, like a fruit tree heavy with fruit, except that they aren't all the same kind of thing, like apples on a tree.  We could pick them (that is, to choose and take away from the whole) and if we like, even in a certain way, eat them (as when we take something in and make it part of ourselves, part of our own structure of knowledge or concepts or ideas).  But hmm, metaphors are not all alike like apples on a tree.  Maybe they're more like different kinds of animals.  How many species of metaphor are there?  Well even there we're not going to completely escape the pull of metaphor, since for example the naturalist Linnaeus, in 1735, advanced biology by creating a system for categorizing animal "species" as if the were parts of a big "tree of life".  That of course may have been influenced both by ideas of taxonomy and by earlier archetype of the Tree of Life.  In some way, some of our intellectual ancestors thought Life is like a Tree.  Moreover to really understand what Linnaeus was up to, we'd need to know what influences he followed, or on which he based his ideas.

If one were to follow the concept network in nearly any use of natural language as far as it goes, what would it include?  Life, the Universe, and Everything! 

The most common current theories of language are what makes sense -- implicitly and for the main part without awareness -- of a lot of statements about language, and more than that, attitudes and values.  In this way metaphors are a Trojan Horse filled with lots of other potential actions that we don't comprehend when we use them.  The basic idea with these theories tends to be, that the real world is separate from the world of language, and language tries to correspond with or refer to the world, and that it doesn't do a very good job, and we shouldn't trust it.  Or maybe, we're even trapped in it in some ways.

Now the story of the Trojan Horse was about a problem ... but that depends on your point of view -- it was a problem for the Trojans, but a clever solution for the Greeks, invented by the wily Odysseus.  Clearly (meaning it's presumably possible to see through this topic) metaphors say certain things about the things and ideas we talk about, and say them in certain ways, and don't say them in many other ways.  Pretty cool, huh?  And efficient, too!  Imagine trying to state explicitly, all the subtle meanings wrapped in a single metaphor, especially one embedded in a single word like "understand".

Do metaphors "mislead" us?  They send our thinking in certain directions, but isn't that just part of life, that you say certian things and not others, at any particular time, in a way that is more or less appropriate to the circumstances and what needs to be accomplished?  The wily Odysseus (or rather Homer) understood this when he escaped from the den of the Cyclops, but telling his captor his name was "No-Man", which his captor thought identified him.  However, when Odysseus escaped, and the Cyclops called out to his tribe to come help him, saying "No-Man has blinded me!" they thought he meant nothing had happened, and they did not come to his aid.  Thus Odysseus exploited the amgibuitiy in this metaphor in a way that was useful to him and not to the Cyclops.  So this early story, the Odyssey, is full of metaphoric insights into language and metaphor.

So in a way what theories of language say about metaphor, has a whole story behind it, in the sense of what came before.  And more than that, we could say it sets up a system of possibilities that set the stage for what might come after, as the metaphors are used and unfolded and played out on the stage of human life and communication.  To continue to mix metaphors, I'll leave it to another time to unpack this story.

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