Every word is metaphorically linked to the something in the lived world
Language is constituted by metaphor. Also, the right hemisphere is responsible for the capacity to understand metaphor. This might not sound too important, but that is just a sign of the degree to which our world of discourse is dominated by left hemisphere habits of mind. Language is constituted by metaphor, and metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.
The word metaphor implies something that carries you across an implied gap (Greek meta- across, pherein- carry). Every word, in and of itself, eventually has to lead us out of the web of language, to the lived world, ultimately to something that can only be pointed to, something that relates to our embodied existence. Even words such as āvirtualā or āimmaterialā take us back in their Latin derivationāsometimes by a very circuitous pathāto the earthy realities of a manās strength (vir-tus), or the feel of a piece of wood (materia).
Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body. There is nothing more fundamental in relation to which we can understand that. Thus the human body is a particularly generative metaphier, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the cheeks of a vise; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailorās voyage, or cricket field; and so on and on.
The gap across which the metaphor carries us is one that language itself creates. Metaphor is languageās cure for the ills entailed on us by language. If the separation exists at the level of language, it does not at the level of experience. At that level the two parts of a metaphor are not similar; they are the same.
References
-
McgilChrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 3 LANGUAGE TRUTH AND MUSIC (Epub p. 236). London, UK: Yale University Press.
-
Jaynes, Julian. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Chapter 2 Consciousness (Epub p. 57). New York, NY:Ā Houghton Mifflin Company.
Metadata
Type:š“ Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Psychology / Neuropsychology Status:āļø