How many times have you heard someone say: “But it’s only a metaphor”? While this phrase can crop up in conversations about any discipline, it seems to make itself heard most often in complaints about Christian fundamentalists who have chosen to interpret one or another Biblical text in literal terms. The person making the complaint is typically a self-described liberal who is annoyed that a legalistic interpretation has been applied at the expense of deeper meaning. This is an instance of a broader category of complaint—what we might call the demystifying tendency of postmodern Western culture. It is a critical strategy—maybe deconstruction‘s simple-minded cousin. Like Dorothy, the liberal interpreter draws back the curtain to reveal a man like any other pulling the knobs and levers that create the illusion of a wizard. But note the tone of the complaint, the emphasis on the word “only” which denigrates the concept of metaphor, as if metaphor is a second- or third-class citizen within the realm of verbal communication. The irony of the complaint is that it unwittingly affirms the existence and priority of a literal mode of communication.
In Poetic Logic: The Role of Metaphor in Thought, Language, and Culture (Atwood Publishing, 2004), Marcel Danesi traces the intellectual tradition which delivers to us the prevailing literalist conception of language. At the same time, he reveals the history of a countervailing view which sees metaphorical expression, not as the superfluous accretion to a more fundamental (and literal) mode of speech, but as the outward traces of our mind at work, without which human thought and action would be impossible. Within the last thirty years, the countervailing view has come to be called Conceptual Metaphor Theory or CMT for short.
The “literalist” conception of meaning has its origin in Aristotle who first gave metaphor its name which means (literally?) “to carry beyond.” You may have noticed that the translation is, itself, metaphorical. There is an apocryphal story that when a student asked Aristotle “What is life?” he replied “Life is a stage.” Metaphor allowed him to answer the question with extraordinary economy by dropping a shared understanding of theatre into close proximity with the concept he was trying to explain. To our knowledge, this is the first time anybody noticed this “trick” of language. Aristotle tried to explain how metaphor works by suggesting that it follows a proportional logic: A is to B as C is to D. So, for example, if life is a stage (A is to B), then any given instance of life can be equated to the theatre; death can be described as the final curtain (C is to D). For Aristotle, metaphor was a rhetorical device. It’s function was merely to embellish a prior and literal meaning already accessible through language. This has been the dominant view down to the present day.
While Aristotle may have held a neutral view of metaphor, subsequent thinkers tended to denigrate it as an inferior device that got in the way of truth. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke wrote of rhetorical devices as tools “for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment” and where the object of writing is to instruct, rhetorical devices must be avoided because they “cannot but be thought a great fault, either of language or [the] person that makes use of them.” Similarly, John Hobbes regarded metaphor as a source of ambiguity and obscurity which should be eliminated from philosophical and scientific writing.
Computationalism also contributed to the denigration of metaphor. This is the idea that thought functions according to mathematical models which have precise rules. Leibniz and Descartes were early proponents of this model, and it found fuller expression with Alan Turing who pioneered studies of AI (artificial intelligence). It’s worth noting that computationalism is metaphorical at its root, drawing what is fundamentally an irrational association between machines and the human mind. This observation illustrates why Danesi maintains that the quest for artificial intelligence is pointless. It ignores the irrationality which lies at the heart of both scientific and mathematical thinking. One need only consider the stories which accompany all major scientific and mathematical discoveries to recognizes how the associative power of metaphor is essential to creative advances. Danesi offers the example of Ernest Rutherford who conceptualized atomic structure as a miniature solar system. Another well-known example is the story of how German chemist Kekulé discovered the structure of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a snake biting its own tail.
But perhaps the single most important reason for the continued denigration of metaphor in contemporary thinking is the overwhelming influence of American linguist Noam Chomsky who “went so far as to characterize metaphor as a “deviation” from fundamental linguistic rules.” While Danesi respects Chomsky’s work, I sense throughout his book a hint of annoyance at the unquestioning deference that is paid to Chomsky. Perhaps Chomsky’s dominance owes less to the persuasiveness of his ideas than to the fact that dominance itself has prevented most of his students from an awareness that other ideas are possible. And yet, as Danesi observes, “literalist theories are virtually useless for understanding semantic systems in their origins.”
There is another strand of thought which Danesi brings to the fore and which deserves serious consideration. He starts with St. Thomas Aquinas who observed that the writers of scripture referred to material things as a way to speak of spiritual truths because that was the only way to make visible the invisible. But the thinker most influential upon Danesi is Neopolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) who coined the term “poetic logic” to indicate that usages like metaphor are intrinsic to thought and cannot be separated from “pared-down” or “bare” speech that gives more immediate access to meaning. Danesi identifies Vico as the first proponent of a psychological theory of metaphor. He writes:
Like Aristotle, Vico saw metaphor as a strategy for explicating or exemplifying an abstract notion such as life. However, he went much further in claiming that the strategy itself resulted from an association of sense between what is unknown and what is familiar. … The association, however, is not just a matter of convenience or expedience. Rather, the two parts of the metaphor suggest each other phenomenologically. In effect, by saying that life is a stage we are also implying that stages are life. The two parts are hardly combined through a mere act of comparison. [italics in original]
While Vico went ignored until the 20th century, other thinkers expressed ideas which would encourage his reappearance. Nietzsche viewed that part of thought which occupies the “domain of conception” as a series of linked sense impressions. In other words, it is highly associative. Unrelated things become related through linguistic forms. Nietzsche makes no distinction between a “bare” speech and a speech that is dressed up in rhetorical tropes. Instead, he chooses to denigrate all speech as inherently unreliable as a vehicle for truth statements.
The next stop on the journey (note the metaphor) is literary theorist I. A. Richards whose 1936 book, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, applies gestalt theory to develop a psychological account of how metaphor works. He argues that metaphor is not merely substitution of a literal meaning for something frilly, but communicates something more, something which Danesi describes as “an entailment based on perception of relationship.” So, for example, if life is a stage, then the “true” meaning of that phrase does not reside in some literal perception of either life or stage but in the conceptual space where these two words overlap.
This takes us to CMT which emerged in the early eighties. Danesi identifies three major findings of CMT:
- There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that the literalist approach (that we encode and decode language based on literal meaning) is just plain wrong.
- Metaphorical meaning is probably our default communication strategy and literal meaning is exceptional (or more likely illusory).
- Metaphor implies mental imagery, rendering meaning accessible (even to the congenitally blind) in ways that are unavailable through so-called literal language.
Let’s return to my opening harangue against Biblical literalists: “But it’s only a metaphor.” Applying Danesi’s approach, we discover an inversion in the way we describe competing interpretive strategies. It may be that the people we normally describe as Biblical literalists are, in fact, honouring the metaphorical nature of the writing. At the same time, the people we normally describe as liberals are, in fact, deploying literalist strategies in their approach to language. The problem is: the Biblical literalists honour metaphor at the expense of its relationship to the real world. To take Aristotle’s “life is a stage,” the Biblical literalists start with stage and use it to determine the meaning of life. Liberals tend the skew the balance in the opposite direction. They use literalist strategies to strip metaphorical language of its numinous quality. They start with life and use it to climb onto an empty stage.
I prefer a balanced approach—one which describes itself as neither liberal nor conservative/literalist—one which acknowledges simultaneously 1) the presence of meaning in metaphorical language which is uninterpretable except in its own terms, and 2) the fact that all such meaning must find its ground in the real (literal) world. That places responsibility for the meaning of language, not in the text nor in the world, but in the interpreting mind.