Multi-Tasking at its Finest: Working on My Honors Project while Waiting for the Electoral Votes to Come In
A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors (Charles Pierce)
Introduction
Now we are finally arriving at the core of this paper, where one will be able to gain an understanding of the motivations for metaphorical communication. By specifically focusing on the purpose conceptual metaphors serve in today’s society, one will also gain an understanding of how the mind and body, the physical and mental essences, work together to shape the way humans think and act. By the end of this second part one should have a full understanding of why communication could not stop at the basic level and the role metaphor plays in our human existence.
Metaphor and the Synchronization of Mind and Body
I think it helps to begin discussion with an explanation of what goes on inside each individual’s brain that allows for one to conceptualize in such an abstract manner. To understand what is going on it helps to look at a study done by the German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. In 1929, Köhler demonstrated that the human brain is able to extract abstract properties from shapes and sounds.[1] When he showed islanders two shapes, one round and amoeboid and the other sharp and spiky, and then asked them to associate the words “takete” and “baluba” with the shapes, he discovered the majority of participants associated “takete” with the sharp, spiky shape and “baluba” with the round, amoeboid shape (Geary, 80). It is the instinctive ability to make associations like this that helps explain why metaphors typically “take the commonly shared world of physical sensation as their source and the private, abstract world of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and emotions as their target” (Geary, 82). For a further example, think about the words “light” and “dark” and how they affect one’s opinion when associated with someone’s personality: a sunny person is typically characterized as someone who is happy and cheerful. In contrast, someone who is gloomy is characterized as being sad and depressed. These types of metaphors begin to create consistent patterns. The words we use for everyday experiences, physical things, and sensations become used to describe abstract thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ideas (Geary, 78-79).
Conceptual Metaphor
There is such a close-knit relationship between human cognition and metaphor because mind and body are not separate metaphysical entities. For this reason, everything appears to come down to human reason and the duality between mind and body. Physical experience and perception are both basic and shared between humans and human mental states are less readily communicable than physical ones (Sweetser, 719). To better understand the synchronization of mind and body, it helps to unravel what conceptual metaphors are. Conceptual metaphors allow us to “conceptualize one domain of experience in terms of another” (Flesh, 91). Because of their literal, basic level- entailments, conceptual metaphors allow us to conceptualize and comprehend our experiences, and then communicate them.
Time
Take for example the abstract concept of time. Time is not a concept that can be conceptualized on its own terms; it must be conceptualized metaphorically. Think about how humans orient themselves in space and time. “The most basic metaphor for time has an observer at the present who is facing toward the future, with the past behind the observer” (Flesh, 140). From this conceptualization, humans can talk and reason about the here and now because the observer’s physical location serves as a reference point for the words preceding and following (Flesh, 143).
Argument is War
One commonly used conceptual metaphor is argument is war. “Words are weapons in this verbal combat: sharp-tongued people make cutting remarks, for example, and sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me seems to be a formulaic attempt to assert the metaphorical rather than literal status of such weapons.”[2]
Humans perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors. Continuing with the theme of argument is war, one can see the parallel made between combat and conversation; “one may verbally and psychologically, without physical intervention, push someone into something, drag someone unwillingly into a situation, pull someone out of trouble, give someone a (verbal) nudge (= a reminder) slap someone’s wrist (= reprove someone mildly), and so forth” (Sweetser, 718). Humans plan and use strategies in order to try and win verbal arguments. It is hard to imagine a culture where the metaphorical concept argument is war is not used to structure what humans do and how humans understand what they are doing when they argue; try and imagine a culture where no one ever wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending. These people would view arguing differently, if they even had a perception of argumentation at all. American culture has a form of discourse structured in terms of battle, and this discourse demonstrates how metaphors allow for the perception of one thing in terms of another. These conceptual arguments serve the purpose of shaping understanding; the construction of these arguments shows the connections between things that are and things that are not obvious by putting ideas together.
Summary
These various defining concepts (e.g. journeys, war, health, etc) emerge from the interactions between human beings, and the concept they metaphorically define (e.g. love) is understood in terms of interactional properties.[3] This identifies how metaphors are grounded in human interactions with the physical and cultural environment. Reason and concepts therefore are not transcendent – not utterly independent of the body (Flesh, 128). The traditional theory of metaphor, which has persisted for twenty-five hundred years in the philosophical and literary tradition, treats metaphor as irrelevant to fundamental questions about the nature of the world and knowledge of it, but these traditional views must be challenged.[4] Metaphors are imaginative and creative, but the irony is that they are necessary for the conceptualization of the real (Flesh, 14). Truth is always relative to a conceptual system that is defined by the metaphor (Lakoff, 3). Therefore, since the primary role of language is to express and communicate basic truths about the world, these metaphors are proven to be necessary.
[1] I Is An Other (Geary, 81)
[2] Sweetser, Eve E. “English Metaphors for Language: Motivations, Conventions, and Creativity.” Poetics Today 13.4 (1992): 705-24. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773295>. Further reference to this source in parentheses (Sweetser, p.#).
[3] Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980. Print. Further reference to this source in parentheses (Lakoff, p.#).
[4] Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic, 1999. Print. Further reference to this source in parentheses (Flesh, p.#).
Metaphor: Making the Abstract Concrete and Visual 