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~  The Truth In Metaphor  ~

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The Truth in Metaphor

The truth in metaphor is situated in bodies, places, spaces, and times.  It creates the potentiality for the hermeneutic fusion of horizons and reifies power from discursive regimes of truth, put simply it creates the potential for both contact with others and dehumanization.  It is important then that we cultivate an awareness of the metaphors we use so that we can metaphorize well, reviving old metaphors, creating new metaphors, supporting situated knowledges, working towards understanding and respecting others so that we may better understand ourselves. 

The focus of this section will be on the situatedness of metaphor.  Let us first define metaphor.  Lakoff and Johnson authors of Metaphors We Live By argue that “Metaphor is principally a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding” (14%).  We use metaphors both consciously and unconsciously everyday, they are embedded in the etymologies of our words, they constitute our allegories, and they give us a means of expressing some of the ineffable qualities of being. 

(Odd angle quote discussing Heidegger’s use of  Being as the shortest allegory ever told http://www.stanford.edu/group/csp/phi60/janicaud.pdf    ).  

The truth in metaphor, or possibly the truth in metaphor concerns us here because as Lakoff and Johnson argue “We have found that metaphor is pervasive, not merely in our language but in our conceptual system.  It seems inconceivable to us that any phenomenon so fundamental to our conceptual system could not be central to an account of truth and meaning”  (78%). 

Within this paper I hope to highlight and bring to awareness to the saturation of metaphor in everyday life.  The title of this paper is in itself a metaphor.  It is a “container metaphor”, which proposes that metaphor somehow holds, binds, or transports truth.  Lakoff and Johnson argue that we project truths of our own experience onto the things in the world that lack those truths as inherent properties.  (61%).  Lakoff and Johnson argue that our metaphors are situated contextually in our embodied physical experience. 

“We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us.  Each of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation.  We project our own in-out orientation onto other physical objects that are bounded by surfaces.” (Lakoff and Johnson 12%)

 We experience containers everyday, we are containers in some sense and we use this understanding when we apply it to more abstract concepts(Lakoff and Johnson 13%).  We speak of being out of our minds in love; which metaphorically makes our minds and love containers and because of our shared cultural experiences with containers we are able to understand what it means. 

It is important that the metaphors we use highlight certain aspects of the things that we are comparing.  James Geary, author of I is an Other, argues that  “Metaphor is a lens that clarifies and distorts.  It focuses our attention on a specific set of associated commonplaces, but in so doing also narrows our view”  (40%).  Therefore we can speak of the mind as a machine or as a brittle object and the difference is that of ‘running out of steam’ and ‘grinding out’ ideas or being ‘fragile’ possibly having ‘snapped’ (Lakoff and Johnson 11%).  Our metaphors in part define what we consider to be real or true so the truth is not necessarily in the association between the things being compared but is situated in a particular lived experience and culture.  Lakoff and Johnson argue “Truth is always relative to a conceptual system that is defined in large part by metaphor” (60%)

Place as a side note “Thus ‘objectification’ itself is abstraction; since no actual thing is ‘objectified’ in its ‘formal’ completeness” (Whitehead 25-26)

Lakoff and Johnson argue for an experientialist account of truth which is a realism lacking an absolute truth but gaining an acceptance of multiplicities of knowledges and ways of knowing.  This means that the understanding of a statement is always based in the situation in which the statement is made (Lakoff and Johnson 68%).  Sharing in this debasement of absolutist objectivity is Donna Haraway, who suggests instead the idea of partial perspectives or situated knowledges.  Haraway suggests,

“That is one of the reasons the debates about objectivity matter, metaphorically and otherwise.  Immortality and omnipotence are not our goals.  But we could use some enforceable, reliable, accounts of things not reducible to power moves and agonistic, high-status games of rhetoric or to scientistic, positivist arrogance.” (Haraway 580) 

The question of the truth in metaphor is also very important to Haraway who notes, “We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life”  (580).  We shall contextualize metaphor as a situated knowledge or way of knowing.  This is not so that we may deconstruct it, but so that we can more effectively use metaphor to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life. 

‘To be’ or not ‘to be’ Metaphor situated 

Metaphors are situated.  The act of comparison for metaphor is situated in the verb ‘to be’.  Metaphor lacks the obvious ‘like’ that functions similarly in simile.  Hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur notes “Herein lies metaphor's superiority over simile, that it is more elegant" (6%).  Ricoeur is the author of The Rule of Metaphor and extensive philosophy of metaphor and the creation of meaning in language. 

"I conclude that the 'place' of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is neither the name, nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the copula of the verb to be.  The metaphorical 'is' at once signifies both 'is not' and 'is like.'  If this is really so, we are allowed to speak of metaphorical truth, but in an equally 'tensive' sense of the word truth" (Ricoeur 2%). 

I believe this ‘tensive’ sense of the word truth affirms Haraway, Lakoff and Johnson’s push against objectivity and absolute truth.  Truth here can be shown to be non-absolute, situated, partial, and finite as truth.  This strikethrough is to signify that it is a truth lived in a body by a person.  This is not the absolute, infinite, and objective sense of the word. It is instead a partial, finite, situated sense of the word so that it may be held more gently, let go of more often, and shared more readily. This is because all things need eventually to be able to decay, in order to make both room and nutrients for new knowledges and ways of knowing to grow forth.  It comes with a sense of humility and the responsibility of self-reflexive awareness of the historical contingency for all knowledge claims and our methods for making meanings.  This is not to deconstruct all truths, it is so that we may re-cognize and think again about what truths we are keeping alive through cultural reification and what truths we need to let go of.  When I describe the truth in metaphor, truth is situated, contextual, syntactical, historical, and embodied.  In the Foucaultian sense it is only true insofar as persons within a culture reify it; truth is what a society takes and makes function as true (Foucault 131).  This is a more organic representation of truth, open to change, interpretation, introspection, others and is more relevant to life. 

            There is always already a historicity present within metaphor.  Therefore the truth in metaphor is situated historically.  Some etymologies trace the metaphorical reference of days and even societies long past.  Even the word ‘metaphor’ has a metaphorical etymology it comes from the stems meaning to carry or bear and beyond, transformation or substitution.  Appropriately, metaphors are carried into new time periods.  Geary argues "This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't been named or so abstract that they cannot be named" (6%).  This is a naming of a new technology in terms of a preexisting one, such as horsepower in cars, or viruses on computers. 

            It makes sense for people to attribute known words to new unknown things.  This also happens in subcultures, a known word will be used to describe a new relatively unknown thing or action.  This leads to major variance on the meanings of certain words.  For example a flower for a fire performer is much different than for a painter.  In a fire performance flowers are geometric designs that are made when the prop is moved in a certain way and a camera takes a long exposure photo.  In painting flowers are still in part geometric but in this medium there is more play in representation of actual flowers and intricacies of color and design.  Even within a particular subculture metaphors can be applied to new emergent technology.  For instance DJs which stands for Disk Jockeys do not even use disks anymore they use digital files and programs.  However some still practice beat juggling and scratching known as turntablism, although they use jog wheels and not turntables.   

Metaphor is to a major degree open to social construction and reconstruction.  As Lakoff and Johnson say “Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities” (59%).  This is important within academia because science may be more metaphorical than we thought, and in that way the truth in metaphor is reflective of the underlying assumptions of a culture or a sub-culture that which it has taken and made to function as true.     

            Tatsuo Motokawa was visiting Biologist at Duke from Japan, he was astounded at the difference in the two cultures they ways they expressed themselves, they way they cook, and especially the ways they thought about and practiced science differently.  In his article Sushi Science Hamburger Science, Motokawa describes the two ways of practicing science by way of a metaphor about the traditions style of cooking.  He notes that western science is like western food the chef applies lots of ingredients and cooks it in the right way forcing the thing to be true food; in the same way western science is hypothesis driven and lots of words are used to spice up and force things to be absolutely true.  On the other hand eastern science is like sushi, the point is not to add anything it is to let the fish speak for itself and the utmost care is necessary not to spoil it with ones own ego; therefore eastern science is fact oriented but they never express their final all encompassing thoughts.  Motokawa argues that this is representative of the dominant religious culture.  In the west Christianity seems to suggest that words are a way back to God a sort of mediator.  In Zen, words are distrusted and seen as egoic and only serve to further remove oneself from the possibility of enlightenment.  (498-504)    

            Metaphors or the truth in metaphor can help us to be aware of the culture assumptions that make up not only the way we think, but also how we think, and even experience the world.  Lakoff and Johnson make the point “A metaphor can serve as a vehicle for understanding a concept only by virtue of its experiential basis”  (8%).  Lakoff and Johnson argue that there is always a ‘direct physical experience’ that underlies metaphors, and metaphors ‘make sense’ in places where people share some ‘direct physical experience’.   However not everyone experiences the world in the same way.  Again Lakoff and Johnson argue for the situatedness of metaphor embedded in the direct experience presupposed by a culture.  “What we call ‘direct physical experience’ is never merely a matter of having a body of a certain sort; rather, every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions” (23%).  We embody these social constructs, we embody our metaphors, and the truth in that is reified in our actions and a felt sense when we ‘get’ a metaphor that ‘makes sense’. 

(Place Whitehead Quote here as a side note) 

“symbolism is an essential factor in the way we function as the result of our direct knowledge” (Whitehead 6). 

            Metaphors are situated in bodies and the truth in metaphor can be seen acted out.  The New York Times recently posted an article about research from the University of Aberdeen that found when people were asked to image events in time they subconsciously moved their body in tune with their metaphorical presuppositions.  (New York Times article?).  We project a front-back orientation onto time which is then though of as a moving object, I look forward to our meeting in the weeks ahead.  Thinking back about that makes me glad that is all behind us now.  (Lakoff and Johnson 17%).  Not all cultures make the same association between front as future; actually some place the back as the future because you can see into the past but you cant see the future, makes more ‘sense’ to them.  This is also an argument for the idea of embodied cognition.

           

KIKI Bouba test here

            Everyone is synesthetic to some degree, Geary argues that synesthesia may be one of the neurological building blocks of metaphor especially in childhood.  We metaphorize attractive people as ‘hot’ the in kids as ‘cool’ and wild ideas as ‘far out’.  However it appears in varying degrees, some synesthetics see colors when they hear certain notes of music and others perceive taste when they see shapes (Geary 21%).  The Oxford English Dictionary defines Synesthesia in part as “The use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds” (Oxford English Dictionary).  Geary agrees with this definition and in the example of vision as understanding I see what you mean he notes “Metaphor is synesthetic, equating the concrete experience of vision with the abstract experience of understanding” (24%).  This is inline with Lakoff and Johnson’s arguement that metaphors are based on culturally preconfigured ‘direct physical experiences’ “The structure of our spatial concepts emerges from our constant spatial experience, that is, our interaction with the physical environment.  Concepts that emerge in this way are concepts that we live by in the most fundamental way”  (Lakoff and Johnson 23%).  It makes sense to use our concrete experiences to describe our intangible abstract experiences, much like applying existing words to new technologies.  Love can be burning, and my computer has a mouse, even though it is a touch sensitive square and no longer looks like a mouse. 

            The use of metaphor helps us to describe our indirect experiences in terms of our direct ones and because of that Gestalt Therapist Dave Mann notes "The use of metaphor expands our capacity to convey our felt sense verbally" (135).  Metaphors help connect us to those emotional abstract realms of experience and give us the tools to describe how we feel in a way that ‘makes sense’ to others.  The structure of our metaphors are socially constructed and situated in our ‘direct physical experience’, which is presupposed by our culture.  Metaphors are situated historically, hidden in the etymologies and in words used to describe new technology in terms of old.  Metaphors are situated in the verb ‘to be’.  The truth in metaphor is that it is a situated knowledge and that there are multiplicities of situated knowledges, ways of knowing and ‘making sense’ of the world.  The social construction of the truth in metaphor is seen in the ways groups of people take and make it function as true within their culture.  

                

Metamorphine: A Powerful Pharmakon at the Horizons of Interconnection and Dehumanization

In order to further describe the truth in metaphor I shall now turn to Michel Foucault.  Foucault, like many late 20^th century philosophers is hard to classify.  His philosophy will be important for us here in defining what we mean by truth and the power of metaphor.  For Foucault power is situated in discourses, which are reified as true. 

“In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.  There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association.”  (Foucault 93).

           

This is of utmost importance in metaphor because as Ricoeur says “Metaphor is the rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality” (2%).  These ‘certain fictions’ for Foucault are regimes of truth and for us will be metaphors or more precisely the truth in metaphors.  “Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true” (Foucault 131). 

Foucault’s regimes of truth are the types of discourse a society takes and makes function as true, for us metaphors operate in the same way.  Cultures take and make metaphorical projections from our culturally influenced direct experiences and we apply them to abstract concepts.  The truth then is in the use of the metaphor itself as a discourse that a society has accepted and made to function as true. 

These are not absolute or transcendent truths they are situated within the discursive use of the metaphor itself and its power to elicit an experience that ‘makes sense’ in reference to a shared culturally influenced perception.  However they are so pervasive they have become like water to the fish and we are often unaware of the truths we are presupposing with our metaphors.  It is better to think of the truth in metaphor as the truth in metaphor so we can re-cognize our participation and responsibility in accepting and making it function as true as well as to highlight that truth is actually situated within the metaphor as a discursive function that has the power to redescribe and reorder the world.       

            It is an expression of these regimes of metaphorical truth that we say I see what you mean, using vision as the primary means of knowing the world in a hierarchy above the other senses.  These regimes of truth can also be seen as the expression of power physicalized in discourse, and these discourses are powerful.  One issue of particular importance is “the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true“ (Foucault 131).  If we take our metaphors as truth and not as truth we risk the subjugation of other cultures ways of knowing and being that underlie their metaphorical structure, possibly to the extent of dehumanizing them.  In Geary’s book on metaphor, which inspired a lot of this paper, he notes, “But ‘seeing is knowing’ only makes sense if you’re a member of a species for whom vision is the primary source of information” (25%).  Geary obviously has had a lot of experience with metaphor and may be making a very clever reference that I am unaware of.  He could possibly be referencing Donna Haraway being inspired of the idea of situated and differential knowledge while walking her dog (Haraway 679).  However, he seems to be referencing an English author named Olaf Stapledon who wrote a novel about a race of “Other men” which could be truer than intended when thinking of the Othering process of dehumanization on the grounds of metaphor usage.  This could be an insidious slip of the metaphorical tongue because to say that other than visual metaphor users are not in the same species is to subjugate and dehumanize a great many human beings.  For the Ongee smell is the primary sense for knowing the world and for the Tzozil it is heat and their metaphors are physicalized representations of this shared cultural belief.  The Ongee give directions in smell and the Tzotizl talk about time of day as half heat (Classen, Worlds of Sense, 122).  What a society takes and makes function as true comes out in everyday metaphorical expressions that seek to reify the underlying cultural beliefs. 

This Othering process on the grounds of metaphorical usage also happens within cultures and within subcultures where groups seek power through their definition of truth based on their discursive metaphorical formations.  This epistemocracy of metaphor can be seen in Academia in the subjugation of body knowledge and embodied ways of knowing.  Barbara Stafford addressed this in her Book Body Criticism,

"Among my several aims is to expose how the visual arts, and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence in general, were damned to the bottom of the Cave of the humanities.  In today's text based curricula, sensory and affective phenomena continue to be treated as second-rate simulations of second-class reflections.  The strength and reality-quotient of metaphors is evident negativity in the capacity that certain tropes had and have in subjugating whole classes of physical experience" (Stafford 2).

Metaphors are rooted in direct physical experience which makes the subjugation of metaphors at the same time a subjugation of the experience that underlies that metaphor.  It is possible to see in the dominant metaphors a regime of truth, which seeks to reify, even if unconsciously, a particular metaphysics.  Metaphor becomes a metaphysics in its assertion of certain truths "The act of comparison becomes a metaphysics" (Stafford 3).  Subjugation and dehumanization is not however the only metaphysics or function of metaphor.  I want to argue that metaphor can also function as fusing and interconnective.

The Interconnective Horizons of Metaphor

Metaphor is a medium that facilitates the hermeneutic fusion of horizons.  What I mean by the fusion of horizons can be summed up in this quote by Vessey

"Either new information or a new sense of the relative significance of available information leads, and ideally to a new agreement between the two parties about the subject matter.  In any case, the original understanding is surpassed and integrated into a broader, more informed understanding.  Our horizons are broadened; we have a new perspective on our old views, and maybe new views as well.  This is the meaning of the 'the fusion of horizons'"  (Vessey 534).

Metaphors are a “co-operative act of comprehension” (Geary 38%).  In this co-operative act, we are at times enabled to fuse horizons with others.  This is one of the major elements of metaphor and the important role it plays in our everyday lives.  Through metaphor we are able to describe one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 3%) which allows us to share in an understanding of a new concept based on a metaphor.  If one person is really familiar with carpentry and another is really familiar with cars, but they both are really familiar with music they could both learn about the others specific interests through metaphors about music.  For example ‘Carpentry is a symphony orchestra, you need a conductor or it all falls apart.’ Or ‘Cars are a instrument, when tuned they work well.’  It does not so much matter that cars are not musical instruments or that a foreman is not a orchestral conductor when a metaphor is understood we make it function as true in our discursive regimes of truth.  These discursive regimes can vary drastically in size and overlay from subcultures or overarching states but one thing is common, we are participants.  We reify our metaphors. 

Metamorphine the Pharmakon

Odd angle top quote? "One of the ironies of etymology is that the less conscious we are of a metaphor as a metaphor, the more literal it becomes, a paradox observed by Nelson Goodman:  'with progressive loss of its virility as a figure of speech, a metaphor becomes not less but more like literal truth'" (Geary 7%) 

Pharmakon means at the same time means medicine and poison (Derrida 70).  Metaphor is a pharmakon because it is at the same time a medicinal fusing and interconnective as well as poisonous subjugating and dehumanizing.  As Lakoff and Johnson point out, “’The ham sandwich wants his check,’ she is not interested in the person as a person but only as a customer, which is why the use of such a sentence is dehumanizing” (14%).  We often associate people with metaphors about their lifestyles or hobbies, hippies, punks, jocks but also about their race, sexual preference, and mental states.    

The thematization (Levinas) of a person or a group of people with a metaphor can be subjugating discriminating and even dehumanizing.  Not necessarily just of the person being labeled as the metaphor, it can have implications in the social regime of truth and thus power for the entire social group both labeling and being labeled.  This can be seen in the plethora’s of metaphors about subjugated groups of people.  These can range from racial slurs and gender roles, ‘that’s girly’ or a ‘macho man’ to metaphors about mental states ‘retarded,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘insane’. 

The same word can be used both to build a sense of communality and connection as well as can be used to subjugate discriminate and even dehumanize the group it is referencing.  “Metaphor has a paradoxical power.  It distances an experience by equating it with something else, but in doing so actually brings that experience closer” (Geary 60%).  The truth in metaphor and therefore the power in metaphor is paradoxical, it is a pharmakon that can be used as medicine and a poison. 

Cultivating an awareness of metaphor. 

I hope I have been able so far in this piece to persuade you that metaphor is important and relevant, for now I shall attempt to persuade you to take note of the metaphors you hear and the metaphors you use so as to be conscious of the metaphors we live by. I this section I will argue that some of our metaphors have become dead and dusty and it is our responsibility to either dust them off or create new living metaphors; I will argue this specifically situated in roses and academia.  Lastly, we shall ponder how to ‘metaphorize well’ may be the great task we are called to.  Because as Whitehead says,

“The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason.  Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.”  (Whitehead 88). 

We shall begin again with Nietzsche’s famous passage “God is dead. God remains dead. And we killed him” (Thus spoke Zarathustra).  However this time god was slain only metaphorically, in the steady decline of the word awesome.  Awesome, from awe, which represented Yahweh, the divine and all of the fear, dread, reverence, and wonder, that came with the divinity (Oxford English Dictionry).  Has lost its throne of great reverential reference and is subjugated to the description of mundane materialist products in such common statements as ‘those sneakers are awesome’, on par with ‘cool’.  At urban dictionary a site where anyone can write a definition and they are voted up or down based on modern relevance and applicability; the definitions for awesome range from “Something Americans use to describe everything” to “an overused adjective intended to denote something as ‘cool’ or ‘great’ but instead winds up meaning ‘lame’” (Urban dictionary). 

Metaphors actually die all the time and eventually we bury them, Geary notes “Etymology is often said to be the final resting place for dead metaphors” (7%).  Which often makes searching for words etymologies a fascinating venture.  Geary references the philosopher and etymologist Owen Berfield in saying, "every modern language, with its thousands of abstract terms and its nuances of meaning and association, is apparently nothing, from beginning to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors"  (7%).

Side note “a man cannot utter a dozen words without wielding the creations of a hundred named and nameless poets.” (Geary 7%). 

            C. Nadia Seremetakis has written about memory and material culture, which I believe, is relevant to this discussion of ‘dead’ metaphors.  She uses the metaphor of dust to explain why we become numb to some of our experiences; such as when an air conditioner shuts off and you suddenly become aware that it was even on.  The things that we get used to and therefore pay little attention to because it becomes background noise.  Seremetakis notes that Dust is “the form that residual culture takes once it is compartmentalized as the archaic and sundered from any contemporary pertinence and presence” (35). 

This is the process of dying metaphors, metaphors that have lost their contemporary life.  This process also affects the sensory world in which we live.  Seremetakis notes, “Dust is the perceptual waste material formed by the historical-cultural repression of sensory experience and memory” (35).  Our metaphors emphasize some of our senses and denigrate others. 

Constance Classen author of Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Culture argues that since the enlightenment we have seen a rise in the importance of sight and vision as the primary means of knowing the world and have also experienced the decline of olfactory sense (15).  This has led to the persistence and saturation of visual metaphors in our modern world and has been the historical-cultural repressive ‘dusting’ of olfactory sensory experience.  Classen argues that in the sixteenth century the odour of the rose played an important role in society from perfumes to medicines and this showed in the designs of their gardens (17-26).  However by the nineteenth century, “Odour was bred right out of certain new breeds of roses” (29).  In this shift from olfactory to visual “it follows that it would express not only a shift in sensory preferences, but also a shift in corresponding cultural and conceptual paradigms” (16).  This relates back to metaphor because as Lakoff and Johnson argue, metaphor structures our concepts and this is determinate of our sensory experiences.   

“But metaphor is not merely a matter of language.  It is a matter of conceptual structure.  And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect – it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: color, shape, texture, sound, etc.  These dimensions structure not only mundane experience but aesthetic experience as well” (Lakoff and Johnson 87%).   

There was a contemporary ethnographic movement in anthropology in the 90’s that sought to bring an awareness to these other modalities of sensory orientation; this was termed by David Howes as ‘anthropology of the senses’ (167).  The proposition of this movement was that in order to understand a culture we had to stop interjecting our visual bias onto their culture.  This allowed the cultures own sensorial orientation to play a role in the structure by which they were ethnographically understood.  It is thought that visual culture is the result of literacy so non-literate cultures can be more accurately portrayed as oral or aural cultures (Classen 121). 

For example the Suya people of Brazil do not have a world view rather a world sound.  “The Suya word for hearing, ku-mba, means not only ‘to hear (a sound)’ but also ‘to know’ and ‘to understand.’” (Howes 176).  So like our visual metaphor for understanding ‘I see what you mean’ the Suya metaphor for understanding is aural they say “it is in my ear” (Howes 176).  It is the same for the Ommura in Papau New Guinea, the verb “Iero” means “’to hear’ and ‘to know’ or ‘to understand’” (Howes 180). 

However there are other sensorial orientations, for the Tzotzil of Mexico “everything in the universe is thought to contain a different quality of heat” (Classen 123).  They speak of illness a depleting heat, their power arrangements between gender and age are signified with the most powerful being the hottest.   The directions of east and west are known as ‘emergent heat’ and ‘waning heat’ (Classen 122-123). 

It has been argued also that a study of the body also requires this sensual awareness.  Paul Stoller argues for a ‘sensuous scholarship’ because “ Discussions of the sensuous body require sensuous scholarship in which writers tack between analytical and the sensible, in which embodied form as well as disembodied logic constitute the scholarly argument” (Stoller, xv).  This takes us back to Donna Haraway , Lakoff and Johnson and the idea of truth in metaphor originally presented in this paper. 

Haraway, Lakoff and Johnson are all pushing for an embodied stance of knowledge and ways of knowing; Haraway through the reclamation of visual metaphors in situated knowledges and partial perspectives; Lakoff and Johnson through the embodiment of metaphors structuring our concepts.  Both argue we need to move beyond the current scientific myth of disembodied objectivity.  Lakoff and Johnson argue “Giving up the claim to absolute truth could make scientific practice more responsible, since there would be a general awareness that a scientific theory may hide as much as it highlights” (84%).  Much like all metaphors the metaphors rooted in objectivity such as “SCIENCE PROVIDES CONTROL OVER NATURE” (Lakoff and Johnson 84%) come with their own assumptions.  In this metaphor is the idea that “Man is separate from his environment” (Lakoff and Johnson 84%).  Haraway, speaking of her chapter On the Persistance of Vision in Primate Visions, says, “this chapter is an argument for situated and embodied knowledges and against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims” (679).  Both are arguing that the situatedness in an embodied person is the way out of the myth of disembodied objectivity.  Lakoff and Johnson note, “What legitimately motivates subjectivism is the awareness that meaning is always meaning to a person” (84%).  And Haraway argues,

“So I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subject, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.  Harding calls this necessary multiple a desire for a successor science project and a postmodern insistence on irreducible difference and radical multiplicity of local knowledges.”  (Haraway 579)

If, as Lakoff and Johnson have argued, metaphor is one of our main tools for creating conceptual structure and therefore making meaning then, metaphor becomes of utmost importance in Harway’s search for a new situated knowledges perspective.  A critical practice for recognizing that method of making meaning is in our cultivation of awareness of the metaphors we use and the assumptions that come with them.  This also means studying and being aware of the metaphors that others use and how their sensorial orientations are different.  As Lakoff and Johnson say, “At a minimum, the skills required for mutual understanding are necessary even to approach self-understanding” (85%).  We need to be aware that others such as the Tzotzil, the Ongee and the Suya live in very different worlds of sense and their metaphors are based on the differing sensorial orientations.  Studying others with this in mind and being aware of our own metaphorically referent sensorial orientations can be a beneficial practice for us because as Haraway notes, “We are not immediately present to ourselves.  Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology linking meanings and bodies” (680).         

Haraway, Lakoff and Johnson’s push against objectivity and absolute truth.  Brings us back to the idea of the truth in metaphor.  Truth here is be shown to be non-absolute, situated, partial, and finite as well as situated within the discursive function of the metaphor which is itself rooted in the embodied sensorial orientations of the cultures within which it is found.  Again I argue that it is better to think of the truth in metaphor as the truth in metaphor so we can re-cognize our participation and responsibility in accepting and making it function as true as well as to highlight that truth is actually situated within the metaphor as a discursive function that has the power to redescribe and reorder the world.  Because as Gaddamer says “being that can be understood is language”. (Miles 18).  This is why our task of tasks may be to metaphorize well. As Ricoeur says in referencing Plato,

"But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor [literally: to be metaphorical, to metaphrik on einai].  It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius [euphuias], since a good metaphor [literaly: to metaphorize well, eu metapherein] Implies an intuitive perception of the similarity [to to homoin theorein] in dissimilars' (Poetics 1459 a 3-8; see also Rhetoric 1412 a 10).  (Ricoeur 6%).

            It is our responsibility to dust off our metaphors so that they may shine with all the sensorial life they were born with.  It is also our responsibility to create new metaphors where the old have become buried in the historical-cultural repressive dust because as Lakoff and Johnson propose, “New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities” (86%).  This responsibility for socially reconstructing reality may lie only within the language itself as Ricoeur rhetorically questions,

"The only functioning of language we are aware of operates within an already constituted order; metaphor does not produce a new order except by creating rifts in an old order.  Nevertheless, could we not imagine the order itself is born in the same way that it changes?  Is there not, in Gadamer's terms, a 'metaphoric' at work at the origin of logical thought, at the root of all classification?" (Ricoeur 5%).

            Through recognizing the importance of metaphor in our conceptions and experiences of our world as well as the worlds of others, and by holding a gentler grasp on the truth therein; I believe we can socially reconstruct and reify realities that are more coterminous with our shared similarities because as Ricoeur notes "To apprehend or perceive, to contemplate, to see similarity -- such is metaphor's genius-stroke, which marks the poet, naturally enough, but also the philosopher" (6%).

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Threads

Paragraph style arguments

How to read this text.  “There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the ‘object,’ without risking – which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught – the addition of some new thread” (Derrida Dissemination 63).  This text can be read in any way you see fit, one could read trough skipping all of the sideways threads and side notes if one saw fit, however if one stops to read the threads with an open mind one may form new connections that would have otherwise been impossible with standard linear text.  Either way “Reading is writing”  (Derrida, Dissemination, 63) 

KIKI Bouba Test...   

Threads

“To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say. ["The only functioning of language we are aware of operates within an already constituted order; metaphor does not produce a new order except by creating rifts in an old order (Ricoeur 5%).]  Our lexicon at any rate is not far from being exhausted.  [Nevertheless, could we not imagine the order itself is born in the same way that it changes? (Ricoeur 5%).]  With the exception of this or that supplement, our questions will have nothing more to name but the texture of the text, reading and writing, mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementary, and the graphic relations between the living and the dead: within the textual, the textile, and the histological. [Is there not, in Gadamer's terms, a 'metaphoric' at work at the origin of logical thought, at the root of all classification?" (Ricoeur, 5%).] We will keep within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the histos and the question of the histos of the metaphor” (Derrida, Dissimination, 65). 

(Maybe make this a odd angle quote?)  Moving from the sentence to the ways in which metaphor transforms reality Ricoeur says this, 

“The issue is no longer the form of metaphor as a word-focused figure of speech, nor even just the sense of metaphor as a founding of new semantic pertinence, but the reference of the metaphorical statement as the power to ‘redescribe’ reality” (Ricoeur, 1977, 2%).  The power of metaphor is the power to socialy reconstruct reality.  We use or ‘fictions’ or our ‘regimes of truth’ or our truth in metaphors to structure our society, our cultural interactions, and our sense of what it means to be-in-the-world.   

Alfred Whitehead notes the importance our linguistic structure plays on our perception of the structure of reality, specifically in the placement of ‘real,’ ‘enduring,’ ‘thing’ in the subject-predicate structure.  Ricoeur calls this a ‘semantic kernel’, “The modern reader certainly has the right to isolate this 'semantic kernel' and, by the same token, to initiate a purely internal critique of the privileged status of the noun" (Ricoeur, 4%).  We often speak of a book as being a thing, and that the color, weight, and smell are attributes of that thing.  The book is the subject and the attributes are the predicate(Measle Process....  Whitehead calls this the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead 6% Process and Reality).  This is because all of the attributes can be changed out, new color less pages new weight, etc.  Therefore what is real is the process-relational concrescence of an actual entity being-with the eternal objects of attribution. 

“It is the task of reason to understand and purge the symbols on which humanity depends” (Whitehead 7). 

“Free men obey the rules which they themselves have made”  (Whitehead, 88).