Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.
What I think metaphors demonstrate is not so much that we think with our bodies, but that to be is to interact with the world. Thoughts are not simply thought. They are felt, not just in the sense of emotionally, but in the sense that they are physical, palpable, not simply "abstract" or "mental." I am reminded of the exchange between Flannery O'Connor and Mary McCarthy, when McCarthy called the Eucharist a wonderful metaphor, and O'Connor said, "If it's just a metaphor, then I say to hell with it." Odd that both writers seem to have underestimated the reality of metaphor. I would suggest that the Eucharist is the ultimate metaphor, wherein image and essence form a single, living identity.
Update: I have been thinking about this all day, and I am not sure I made myself clear. My view is that we think in metaphors not because we are bodies, but because our bodies are the outward signs of our substantial forms. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is the definitive explanation of form, metaphor, knowledge, and being.
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Update: I have been thinking about this all day, and I am not sure I made myself clear. My view is that we think in metaphors not because we are bodies, but because our bodies are the outward signs of our substantial forms. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is the definitive explanation of form, metaphor, knowledge, and being.
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Aristotle, of course, regarded metaphor as the highest achievement in diction within poetry and tragedy. So, for at least 2300 years, metaphor reigns supreme.
ReplyDeleteI loved what you had to say and I wish you hadn't added the update. It reminds me of when Flannery O. began trying to explain her short stories -- it killed some of the mystery to read that stuff. I believe the best writing is visceral -- people feeling what they are writing as concrete sensations, metaphors that are bodily and living rather than abstract and distant.
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