21 • Metaphor
Bridges between concepts balance similarities and differences and connect abstract ideas with our intuition for embodied interaction — to help us make meaning.
An important concept we have come across many times already, but haven’t taken the time to fully investigate, is metaphor. How does it work and what is its role in our cognition?
Metaphors structure our experience of the world, shape our perception and thinking, and help us make sense of abstract concepts. In our quest to find meaningful connection to our self, the world, and others, metaphors literally are about making meaningful connections.
Flow and metaphor
Getting into the flow state — notice what's going on here. Notice you're getting something that's almost like a mystical experience. It's a powerful, altered state of consciousness. It's enhancing your cognitive processing. […]
What does that mean? […] Well first of all this is enhancing your cognition. But — and this goes towards the work of Michael Winkelman and also Matt Rossano — what's happening in this state is: Your brain is learning to get areas to talk to each other that normally don't talk to each other. This is especially the case, if you've gone through a massive disruption strategy — fasting, social isolation, taking psychedelics. If you look at a brain scan of somebody who's having a psychedelic experience, areas of the brain that normally do not talk to each other are talking to each other now.
If I were just to do that to you, if I was just to get areas to talk to each other, you'd experience that as just noise. But if you've got enhanced insight and enhanced intuition, those areas are now talking to each other and you can bridge between them, you can connect them. And now this is an ability you take for granted. You think it is just a normal part of your cognition. This is your capacity for metaphor.
The word “metaphor” is itself a metaphor. It means to bridge, to carry over, to connect things that are normally not connected. And what you need to understand is how pervasive metaphor is.
[…] I want you to reflect now (and notice the word “reflect” is a metaphor) on how your thought and language is filled with metaphor (by the way, that was a metaphor). I'll say, for example, "Do you see what I'm saying?", "Do you get my point?", "Do you comprehend it?", "Can you grasp it?", "Do you understand it?" These are all metaphors.
We're about halfway through this talk. I hope it's not too hard for you. Do you see? It's pervasive and profound. All of your cognition. This is work done by Lakoff and others; I have some criticisms of some of their theory, but the idea that your cognition is filled and functions through metaphorical enhancement, that's just, I think, the case.
Why is metaphor so powerful? Because metaphor is how you make creative connections between ideas. Metaphorical cognition is at the heart of both science and art. […]
One of the ways in which your cognition and meaning and altered states of consciousness come together is in how your embodied mind is generating metaphor in order to make insightful connections. There's a deep connection between how insightful, how good a problem solver you are, and your capacity for metaphorical thought. That's why when somebody is facing a problem and they need to restructure how they think about it, we tell them to use an analogy, to think of a metaphor.
Metaphor is not just a rhetorical device for poets and public speakers. It is at the core of how we make sense of things, by using it to connect new concepts to already familiar ones.
Balancing identity and difference
Look at how a metaphor works. If I say to you — and Sam is a human being — “Sam is a pig”, notice what you have to do in order to make this work: It looks like I'm creating an identity claim — Sam is a pig. But of course what makes it a metaphor is: It's not an identity claim. I can't use this as a way of telling you that Sam has pink skin and he lives on a farm and he's going to be eaten by other human beings someday. Because that's not what I mean. I mean something like he's gluttonous, or he's sexually selfish, or something like that.
Notice what I have to do: I have to keep the two different, while also saying how they're importantly the same. Why am I doing that? Because the difference gets me outside of my framing of Sam. And I look through this, I look through — if you'll allow me — the framing of something as a pig, and I use this to look and see something in Sam — a way in which they're identical. I step back through the difference, but I look through into the identity, and I see things in Sam through my “pig lenses”, if you'll allow the metaphor. And it allows me to see and understand Sam in a different way. It alters what I consider salient in Sam, it restructures.
Metaphor has this duality about it. You want to create a metaphor that balances [difference and identity] in an appropriate way. When a metaphor balances these two well, we talk about a metaphor being apt.
Notice if I make the identity relation too strong, if I emphasize this side too much and I say, “bees are hornets”, you don't think, “Oh wow, what a great metaphor that is! That's such a wonderful metaphor.” In fact, that's a really crappy metaphor. This doesn't give me enough distance. I can't step back enough and have an insight into [bees]. This provokes no insight, there's no insightful transformation of my understanding of bees. This is too close.
But if I emphasize the difference too much, something like, “Arguments are chairs because they're both human made structures and we use them on a day to day basis and…” This is a very crappy metaphor precisely because the difference is too great. I've stepped back so much, if you'll allow me, I'm losing sight of this and it's not clear, it's vague. What am I supposed to see about arguments through this distant lens of chairs?
Apt is when I get an appropriate balance of that.
It all boils down to similarities and differences. Things aren’t inherently similar or different to each other. We can make everything identical to anything just by abstracting far enough. And we can find differences in what seems to be exactly the same, if we just look close enough into the details.
In metaphor, the skill is to find the right balance to clearly differentiate the point we’d like to make, while simultaneously integrate both concepts based on what they have in common, to facilitate insight. Complexification = Differentiation + Integration.
Metaphor is pervasive and profound
We have to understand, first of all, how pervasive and profound metaphor is, because we have a tendency to think of it as largely ornamental. Our culture is so beset, comprehensively, by patterns of trivialization. Again, and again, and again, you hear me say, “We have trivialized this. We have trivialized that.”
We've talked about this, but I want to bring it back and develop it a little bit: How much of our thinking — and this goes to the work of Lakoff and Johnson, but I'll criticize it in a minute, and also somebody who I'm going to talk about later, Barfield — that we don’t realize how much of our cognition, our ways of thinking and interacting with the world, are being structured by metaphor.
To use an example: I’m halfway through this lecture, as if I was moving through a space. I hope you get my point. Or at least see what I'm saying. But you might not be able to, because some of this stuff I'm saying is really hard, it's really hard. It's really hard to get my point, but I hope you understand me. It used to be "unterstand", by the way, stand within, but we changed it to "understand", stand under. It's interesting. Even words that you don't realize are metaphorical, have a metaphorical origin like interest. Remember this? "Inter esse", to be within something. We're much more naturally poetic than we realize. We are constantly trying to do this: Use one thing, look through one thing at another.
“We are more naturally poetic than we realize.” Poetry as the skill to make profound connections by looking at one thing through another — what a wonderful description.
More than projecting embodied physical interaction
I have some criticisms of Lakoff and Johnson because they argue that what it is, is I have some embodied practice, and then that just gets projected up into abstract thought. One of their prototypical examples is: We'll say things like, “He attacked my argument.” And that's supposed to be from the hallmark of abstract thought, that's from argumentation where we're at our most rational, but we're actually using this word "attacked" which goes back to physical assault. And the idea is, we take what we have here and we project it onto here. I think this notion of projection is too simplistic.
But this is the basic idea: I know what [attacking someone] is, because it's embodied physical interaction, it's participatory. I know what it is to attack somebody. And then I use that, I sort of just project that onto the abstract conceptual domain. And that's how I get, “He attacked my argument.”
This reminds me of a point in Barfield: Barfield says you read in the old texts, and they'll use words like pneuma, which stands either for wind or spirit — and we can only hear it one way or the other, and that's why we break it into two words. I sort of get what Barfield is saying here, but the point is: We use this word [attack] and we move between these without realizing it: “We attacked the castle.” “He attacked my argument.” And those aren't the same, but we may actually not notice that we're using them differently.
Why do I say that? This is work that I published, a couple articles with John Kennedy, where we said: This simple model of just projecting doesn't seem quite right. Because [“attacked”], for example, carries with it… I can say “I attacked the castle” or “I assaulted the castle”, but if I say, “I assaulted his argument”, it's like… what? What does that mean? That's weird! The near synonym doesn't transfer. And notice the reverse — abstract thought. Instead of saying, “I attacked his argument”, I can say “I criticized his argument”. But if I say, “Let's criticize the castle”,… what? That sounds like a weird Monty Python routine.
What I'm trying to show you is: There isn't a simple sort of identity relation. We didn't just project this. And it's not that we're just sort of trapped between two meanings. We seem to clearly have a sense of [“attacked”] that points downward towards the physical assault and then points upwards — if you'll allow me these metaphors — towards the conceptual.
Notice also something else, notice the three things I used earlier: I used “Did you see my point?”, “Do you grasp what I'm saying?”, “Do you understand it?” — “Do you get it?” These are very different interactions! These are very different things. There’s seeing, there's understanding, there's getting, and there's grasping. And yet, all of those independently converge towards making something intelligible, the act of making something intelligible. What selected these four very different things and drew them up to their common converged meaning?
What I'm trying to show you is: It's not simply that this [physical assault] gets projected up. There's also something up here that's constraining and acting downward, helping us select which of all of our embodied existence we are going to use for our more abstract, conceptual topics.
Why is that important? Because, I think that points towards a different way of understanding what the metaphor is doing. There, of course, is an element of projecting, if projecting means to throw. But I think there's something much more complicated and interesting going on in a metaphor that isn't simply projection, which is of course itself a metaphor.
I think that symbols are going to tap into these deeper kinds of metaphors, not just the metaphors that are the ornamentations of language. These are the metaphors — these more profound metaphors — that are structuring our cognition. And I'm trying to point out to you that they have not only a bottom-up emergence, they have a top-down emanation going on in them.
There's a sense in which both sides are interacting in a powerful way. We need a much more dynamic account of what's at work in metaphor. So let's build towards that dynamic account.
And we've already gained something: That symbols are going to be making use of these profound metaphors — the metaphors that are not just metaphors of speech, but are structuring the way we are making sense, making meaning of the world.
Again, we find opposing processes at the core of what makes metaphors work: We balance similarities and differences. We bridge abstract thought and embodied interaction. We blend top-down emanation and bottom-up emergence.
Holding in mind — symbols
One important point of these kinds of metaphors that triggers on the participation, gets into the profundity, but is doing something with it, is: One of the jobs of these metaphors is to hold in mind.
Let me give you an example of this: We care about justice. We really do. It's important to us. Our culture in fact is really wrestling with what does justice mean and how do we best serve it, how do we best realize it? But that means you need to be able to reflect on justice, you need to be able to contemplate it, to think about it. If you're going to think about it — and not just emote or assert about it — if you're going to think about it, you need to hold it in mind. But how do you hold it in mind?
If I were to ask you: Without repeating the word justice, hold justice in mind. Do it! Hold it. What are you doing? You might be holding sort of a prototypical instance. But when I do this, and I do this repeatedly with my class, what people tell me is: When they want to contemplate justice so they can reflect on it and get clear about what it means to them, they often invoke a symbol. They invoke the symbol of the woman, blindfolded, holding a sword, holding the scales. One of the things you notice is that this of course is a profound metaphor. We use the notions of balance all throughout our talk about justice. We also use the sword as deciding, cutting. But let's stick with the balance.
This allows us to hold justice in mind. That's like… stop! Pause. If that's all a symbol was doing, that in and of itself is such a valuable thing — we need to pause and appreciate. If I can't relate to justice in a participatory fashion, where I can engage in it, and I'm trying to internalize it, and I'm trying to get clearer about it, I can't do any of that, unless I can activate it and hold it in mind. And I need a symbol to do that. The symbol is metaphorical. Justice isn't literally a scale, a balance.
Exapting neural circuitry
What's going on here, and how does it plug in to where I'm trying to argue? There's something more than just projection going on. And this gets me to a notion that I've mentioned to you before: exaptation.
Really important work, you’ve got to read his book, by Michael Anderson, “After Phrenology — Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain". This is the idea that your brain is a self-exaptation machine, not only across species evolutionarily, but more recently in his work within a brain and its own development.
To remember the example: My tongue has been exapted for speech. It has a structural-functional organization for doing a particular set of tasks. But of course it has […] all kinds of side effects. And those side effects are an ongoing reservoir of sets of capacities that I can tap into and make a new structural-functional organization to do a new thing, which is what I'm doing right now. I'm speaking. The tongue has been exapted for speech.
And what he's arguing is that a lot of what we see in our cognition is what he calls circuit reuse. Circuits that have been used for one thing get reused, can get exapted, in the way I've just described by reconfiguring their structural-functional organization, so that side effects become central effects. And what you do is you get a new machine, a new capacity created that way.
Let's try and think about this: We've got a clear example in the cerebellum. The cerebellum originally evolved for helping you to keep your physical balance. And what it does is: It takes information from many different sense modalities and is constantly looking for how to find patterns of contingency, patterns of relationship between what's happening in my vision, what's happening in my body. And it's really helping to do all this sophisticated coordination and smoothing out so that they start to coordinate together much better. That's your cerebellum. It's centrally involved in your balance.
But you know what you've done? The cerebellum has been exapted, it's used not only for finding balance between my seeing and my moving, it’s been exapted to find deeper coordination between any different areas of domain in your brain. The cerebellum also allows you to integrate your vision with your working memory so that you can do visual imagery.
Let's put this together carefully: You've got this machinery of exaptation, you've got balance, and now what you're doing when you call up the balance idea is you're actually — notice your cerebellum has been exapted up to helping to manage massively complex contingencies between variables — you know what you have to do to be a just person? You have to know how to balance. You have to optimize the relationship between, you have to pick up on and coordinate and smooth out the complex interaction between multiple variables. That's justice.
You know what you can do, if you invoke balance and don't just talk about it, but try and participate in it? You can actually do the reverse of this. You can go back through balance and trigger, activate… You can go from justice through balance back to activating the machinery of the cerebellum. Normally I am looking through all of that machinery at something. But what I can do with the symbol is: I want to actually sort of retrace, reactivate, go back through exaptation and activate the machinery of balance, so that I can then use that machinery in order to get an optimal grip on this other domain, which is justice.
This isn't just simple projection. There is not only a projecting up, there is an emanating back down. You're also reversing and going down and trying to reactivate this machinery in important ways. There's a top-down guidance that is intersecting with the bottom-up projection.
And so the symbol is, in that sense, deeply participatory. You are trying to participate in this activation of the very cognitive machinery that is used both in participating in balance — you don't just look at balance, you have to be balanced, perspectively, participatory — and then taking that machinery into being just, having your perspectival and participatory machinery aligned in a certain way. That's what the symbol is doing for you. It is deeply participatory. It allows you to hold in mind and then look back through to activate, and then bring that back up to have insight — participatory and perspectival insight — into something like justice.
If our understanding of the world is so deeply rooted in metaphor, imagine the possibilities of generating valuable insight by just offering to look at one thing through the lens of another. Poetic, indeed.
I can’t help but leave you with a quote from Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By:
Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different.
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