I believe that Lakoff and Johnson explains that these words, ideas, beliefs, and dogma, can be best understood by realizing that through metaphors they come to be articulated. Lakoff and Johnson present and describe the power and impact of Metaphors. To do so they need to dispel what they believe are the false understandings concerning the nature of a metaphor. ‘Metaphor is for most people a device of poetic imagination and rhetorical flourish – a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. ’ The common notion is that metaphor is a device used to illustrate a point. That metaphor is a artistic additive in our speech but not fundamental in our thinking and analysis. Being an artistic additive we could theoretically remove the use of metaphors from our analysis and more objectively present that analysis. By stating that metaphors are artistic additives we are stating that they are emotional tools rather than intellectual tools. But Lakoff and Johnson believe this conception of metaphors is invalid.
‘ …We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.’ Hence their books title: Metaphors we live by. Lakoff and Johnson are saying that metaphors come out of our process of articulating our understanding of reality. To use Pirsig’s terms we encounter Quality and out of this encounter comes two types of Metaphors – Romantic Quality/Metaphors and Classic Quality/Metaphors. Metaphors are the means to comprehending Quality.
I am not going to attempt to prove their assertion. They did that better than me in their book. If you want to be convinced go and read it. I will list some of their conclusions regarding the nature of metaphors and I will make use of their insights and outline their explanation of Objective and Subjective Truth.
Metaphors I have been using are:
· Ideas as tools
· Ideas as sunglasses
· Ideas as fashion
· Ideas as artisan which shapes the self and shapes a worldview
· Ideas as maps
· Ideas as continuum
· Ideas as patterns
· Maps and mapmaker
· Maps and territory
· Ideas as uncarved block
· Idea as physical object with inside, outside, stable form, dynamic changing parameters, spatial/temporal dimensions, spatial/temporal context
· Ideas as theories and arguments which are buildings
· Analysis as argument
· Argument as a building
· Argument as a container
· Argument as Journey
· Argument as war
· Body as a tool
· Words as physical object
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s offers a further list of metaphors about Ideas:
· Ideas as food
· Ideas as people
· Ideas as plants
· Ideas as products
· Ideas as commodities
· Ideas as resources
· Ideas as money
· Ideas as cutting instruments
· Ideas as light sources and a light medium
· Ideas as container
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate and prove that we can not think without using metaphors. Metaphors are the foundation of and the basis for thoughtful analysis of any kind. Any and all attempts to articulate an understanding of some thing must use metaphors. Strip out the metaphors in any and all attempts of analysis and you are left with incomprehensible and inarticulate gibberish. Without metaphors all we have are words without structure and hence words without meaning.
1. ‘In actuality we feel that no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis.’
2. ‘Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms of one or more spatialization metaphors.’
3. ‘Spatialization metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience: they are not randomly assigned. A metaphor can serve as a vehicle for understanding a concept only by virtue of its experiential basis.’
4. ‘There are many possible physical and social bases for metaphor. Coherence within the overall system seems to be a part of the reason why one is chosen and not another’
5. ‘In some cases spatialization is so essential a part of a concept that it is difficult for us to imagine any alternative metaphor that might structure the concept.’
6. ‘So-called purely intellectual concepts, e.g., the concepts in a scientific theory, are often-perhaps always-based on metaphors that have physical and/or cultural basis….The intuitive appeal of a scientific theory has to do with how well its metaphors fit one’s experience.’
7. ‘Our physical and cultural experience provides many possible bases for spatialization metaphors. Which ones are chosen, and which ones are major, may vary from culture to culture.’
8. ‘It is hard to distinguish the physical from the cultural basis of a metaphor, since the choice of one physical basis from among many possible ones has to do with cultural coherence.’
9. ‘The most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture.’
10. ‘In all aspects of life…we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, be means of metaphor.’
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson realize that our map of the world, or inherited sunglasses have as defining elements of that map/sunglasses the ideas of Objectivity and Subjectivity. These two ideas have been considered as A-logic oppositional pairs. Now, I offer the insight that if we treat these ideas using the tool of Null-A logic, then those two pairs of ideas become the abstract extremes on a continuum. Considering then in that context we would no longer be considering them as oppositional or exclusive dogmatically defining choices.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, not having the tools of Null-A logic built their own map using their model of Metaphors. Their map is what we will consider and explore now. They consider the oppositional pair of ‘Objectivity’ and ‘Subjectivity’, which in accordance with A-Logic is suppose to be the only two choices available. But we know that those oppositional pairs need to be considered as two ends of a continuum of choices. Hence there is a middle ground, a choice that unites and unifies Objective and Subjective considerations.
According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson cultures are built around a collection of metaphors that work together to explain that culture. This collection is called a myth. ‘Myths provide ways of comprehending experience: they give order to our lives.’ ‘All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor. And just as we often take the metaphors of our own culture as truths, so we often take the myths of our own culture as truths.’
Lakoff and Johnson believe that we in the Western World have two twin myths concerning how we classify reality. They are the myth of Objectivity and the myth of Subjectivity. This insight into our cultures twin myths is similar to Robert Pirsig’s insight from his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig uses the term Classical Quality and this would corresponds to the myth of Objectivity and Romantic Quality would corresponds to the myth of Subjectivity.
The components of the myth of Objectivity are the following:
1. ‘The world is made up of objects. They have properties independent of any people or other beings who experience them.’
2. ‘We get our knowledge of the world by experiencing the objects in it and getting to know what properties the objects have and how these objects are related to one another.’
3. ‘We understand the objects in our world in terms of categories and concepts.’
4. ‘There is objective reality, and we can say things that are objectively, absolutely, and unconditionally true and false about it.’ Paraphrasing Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis further: we humans can make mistakes. We can make mistakes of perception, mistakes in analysis, we can be swayed by emotions and personal and cultural biases and thus fail to perceive or understand reality in its absolute and unconditionally true nature. Only science, the ultimate methodology of rational thought can aid us to uncover the truth and falsity of reality.
5. ‘Words have fixed meanings.’
6. ‘People can be objective and can speak objectively…’
7. ‘Metaphor…can always be avoided in speaking objectively, and they should be avoided, since their meanings are not clear and precise and do not fit reality in any obvious way.’
8. ‘Only objective knowledge is really knowledge.’
9. ‘To be objective is to be rational; to be subjective is to be irrational and to give in to emotions.’
10. ‘Subjectivity can be dangerous…unfair…biased…self-indulgent, since it exaggerates the importance of the individual.’
The components of the myth of Subjectivity are the following:
1. ‘In most of our everyday practical activities we rely on our senses, and develop intuitions we can trust.’
2. ‘The most important things in our lives are our feelings, aesthetic sensibilities, moral practices, and spiritual awareness.’
3. ‘Art and poetry transcend rationality and objectivity…’
4. ‘The language of the imagination, especially metaphor, is necessary for expressing the unique and most personally significant aspects of our experience.’
5. ‘Objectivity can be dangerous…unfair…inhuman. There are no objective and rational means for getting at our feelings, our aesthetic sensibilities, etc. Science is of no use when it comes to the most important things in our lives.’
Contained in these two myths are truths. Both of these myth try to define the other term, both of these myths try to swallow whole the meaning of both terms. When the myth is explaining its own term the explanation is valid, when each of the myths are explaining and defining the other term that is when it becomes invalid.
In the list for the Myth of Objectivity item #4 confuses External Reality for Objective Realty. There does exist a world made up of objects that are external to our internal world of the mind. Both our external and internal world are made up of objects. We do understand those objects in terms of categories and concepts. These objects do have inherent properties. It is not accurate to say that these properties are independent. All of these properties are holons in an interdependent holarchy.
Words have meaning in the context of a language system and the meaning of a word is not necessarily static and fixed for all time.
We do rely on our senses and on intuition. Feelings, aesthetic sensibilities, moral values/beliefs, and spiritual awareness are extremely important. They help to make us human. Art and poetry do transcend rationality. The language of the imagination – symbols and metaphors, are necessary for expressing and understand our own experience of our internal--external world.
Metaphors are the means to expressing ideas. It is through our senses, our emotions and our capacity to reason that we can understand our internal—external world and the experience of living in that world.
The goal should not be ‘objectivity’. The goal should be to understand the world as unbiased as humanly possible.
If the only system of analysis we had was A-Logic then we would be trapped in this oppositional dilemma. But we have Null-A logic and we know that this opposition is the tool trap imposed by the tool of A-Logic.
Robert Pirsig saw the way out of this oppositional dilemma. Pirsig realized that Classical/Objectivity and Romantic/Subjectivity are subordinate to an overarching idea. An idea that is the origin and the defining element of both Objectivity and Subjectivity. Pirsig called that idea: Quality. Pirsig compared the term Quality to Lao Tzu’s term Tao.
‘And really, the Quality he was talking about wasn’t classic Quality or romantic Quality. It was beyond both of them. And by God, it wasn’t subjective or objective either, it was beyond both of those categories. Actually this whole dilemma of subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter, with relationship to Quality was unfair. …Quality is not objective, he said. It doesn’t reside in the material world. …Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn’t reside merely in the mind. …It is a third entity which is independent of the two.’
Pirsig’s Quality as presented by Phaedrus ‘provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunified. These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that Quality is the central term of all three, and that this Quality is not of many kinds, but of one kind only, then if follows that the three disunified areas have a basis for introconversion.’
In summation, we live in a world made up of things, which is everything that is not words, and a world made up of humanly created things known as words. I believe there is a physical aspect to Reality, it can be experienced through our senses. This type of knowledge obtained from the study of our senses, and our augmented senses using technology, is knowledge of the External aspect of Reality. In general the study of the External nature of Reality is called science and scientific knowledge. For External Reality the truth and wisdom is tested against sensory data, what is in agreement with that sensory data is acknowledged as true.
Now I believe that there is consensus within the scientific community concerning the physical aspect of reality because adhering to and built into all nonverbal things, all the myriad of things around us we classify as physical, including our own bodies, is a structure that results in this consensus. Those nonverbal things, those physical objects are consistently measurable because they have at their core a structure that gives rise to the range of interaction of one object with another. This structure is real and is the ultimate source of reality itself.
