I believe I have probably been putting off the writing about metaphor, because I really needed to do some more thinking about it first. I believe I might be ready to start now. So here goes.
Even though the events of the body, in the body, the human body, are factual, there is a distinction to be drawn between facts of the body and facts of the outside world. The facts in the world, we’ll call them public facts, are observable and describable by more than one person. The facts of the body– call them private– are perceived and described by one person, then communicated (or not) to the second, and others. I believe this distinction has led to a difference in the language that we use for public and private facts. A cat, for example, is a public object with a name, which we teach to our children by saying cat when the cat comes around, and eventually by working it into sentences. A pain, or hurt, is a different matter. We see our child do something that we think should hurt, and we ask "Does it hurt?". We guess at their inner condition in order to name it for them.
Because there is always this guessing about what is going on with another person, the language which has developed to describe private facts is less determinate than that we use for the public events of the world. We do a certain amount of guessing in ascribing feelings to ourselves, as a result. This indeterminancy extends from physical feelings like pain or warmth to emotions or feelings (which are always partly physical, as well) to moods and some of what we might call our ‘spiritual’ experience.
Consider for a moment the words for feelings and what they try to do. Consider anger. This one small word can encompass a range of facts which might include all of the following: a rising heart rate, a feeling of nausea or a tightening of the stomach muscles, a tightening of other muscles in the fight or flight reaction, a mental sensation which we call ‘rage’, a desire to do violence to persons or things, a desire for revenge for the pain that triggered the anger, maybe some tearfulness or tears held back, and so on. The feeling words often seem inadequate to encompass all of this, and therefore we bring poetry to the task. We use words in novel ways in order to more fully capture the complete event, and we may pay attention to the similarities between the feeling and public events as well as using the words for their sounds, rhythms, etymologies and connotations in addition to their meanings. We might bend or break the ordinary rules of sentence construction. We might set the words to music which tries to evoke the feelings which should accompany the ideas. We might use graphic presentation to give the words more impact or a different impact. All of these techniques expand the meanings of language by breaking the rules of ordinary meaning, or by adding more to the sentence than the mere words and grammar. Metaphor is one of the most powerful weapons in this armory, but it is by no means the only one, and it is rarely used in isolation from the others.
All of this enrichment of language is fine and good and aesthetically pleasing and even useful, but we can confuse ourselves if we allow ourselves to forget that it is going on when we try to produce logical and scientific descriptions of the world.
I'm going to stop here today, but Scott Rosenberg just posted this link to a blog entry which demonstrates the use of metaphor in computer programming very well. Geoff Cohen points out that programming is really "designing a series of electrical charges and impulses to act in concert, manipulating other charges that, in turn, stand for the abstraction of numbers, or further layered abstractions of other functions or locations", but the language for describing this gets strained, so we resort to metaphor to aid our understanding and communication.
9:03:59 AM 
|
|
