Overcoming Our Childhood: and the History of Philosophy

question of whether the Astral body was composed only of legs, since they are the PRELUDE essential feature of dancing, or whether there was a complete body including internal organs Plato’s dialogue, the Critias, has an which performed the thinking. An even more elaborate description of the country of Atlantis, impassioned debate was whether there was an a country that perished nine thousand years Astral floor to which the dancing feet were before Socrates, who heard about it from his attracted by Astral gravity, or whether the grandfather. The dialogue has seldom been body, being Astral, was suspended in space – read, probably because we have had only small Astral space, of course. fragments of it, none of which contains any philosophy. Very recently however, in the In the Critias, Plato (or is that Socrates?) Journal of Undiscovered Manuscripts (2001), refuses to support any of the sides in this we have a new report of the full dialogue debate in Atlantis. Instead, he questions which turns out to be primarily about the very whether the assimilation of thinking to dancing early Atlantis philosopher Otalp. was useful in the first place. He proposes instead to try a quite different . But Otalp, perhaps because dance was a before we examine the metaphor Plato himself highly appreciated art form in Atlantis, proposes, we need to look at the nature of compared thinking to dancing. In one of his metaphor in general. dialogues called the Odeaph (it now appears Plato borrowed the dialogue form from Atlantis), he claims:

There are two classes of dance: the physical and the Astral. The physical is performed by the body, while the Astral is performed by the Astral body. Just as the physical dance exists only when and while the dancer is dancing, so what is thought exists only when there is thinking. Just as no one can dance my dance for me, my Astral dance can be performed only by my Astral body. (79a)

This comparison raised so many questions that Otalp’s approach determined the history of philosophy in Atlantis for thousands of years. Among the many disputes was the David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 2

PART I: METAPHORICAL use a system of implications ... as a means for THINKING selecting, emphasizing, and organizing relations in a different field.” (Black 79) We The O.E.D. defines a metaphor as a can think of it as a screen or filter. “We can figure of speech: say that the principal subject is seen through the metaphorical expression – or, if we prefer, Metaphor: the figure of speech in which that the principal subject is ‘projected upon’ the in a name or descriptive phrase is field of the subsidiary subject.” (Black 75) transferred to some object different from, but analogous to, that to which it Suppose I am set the task of describing is properly applicable. (OED) a battle in words drawn as largely as possible from the vocabulary of chess. If I say, “Mary Walsh is a star,” I am These latter terms determine a system using the word star metaphorically. The phrase of implications which will proceed to is convenient shorthand for something I could control my description of the battle. say literally, at some length. I mean that Mary The enforced choice of the chess Walsh stands out from a large number of other vocabulary will lead some aspects of actors as someone who catches our attention, the battle to be emphasized, others to be just like literal stars stand out in the night sky. neglected, and all to be organized in a Max Black might call it a “substitution way that would cause much more strain metaphor” in the sense that I could easily in other modes of description. The substitute a literal phrase with the same chess vocabulary filters and transforms: meaning (Black 71). Metaphors such as these, it not only selects, it brings forward which are the kind the O.E.D. is defining, are aspects of the battle that might not be of a purely verbal and superficial nature; they seen at all through another medium. have little effect on our thinking. (Black 75.)

Mac Cormac, on the other hand, claims While the metaphorical concepts are there are three levels of metaphor: surface organized into a new framework, and their language, semantics and syntax, and cognition. criteria of relevance may be very different from The star example counts as a surface language the case of the principal subject, the framework metaphor. Cognitive metaphors influence not and criteria will only occasionally be explicit. just how we speak but how we think. It is Usually, and for the most part, they will be left exclusively the cognitive level of metaphor that implicit in the kind of meaning structure that I will be discussing in this paper and in Husserl refers to as a “horizon.” Indeed, we particular those cognitive metaphors which may not even notice that we are using a Mac Cormac labels “basic metaphors” – the metaphor at all. The new framework will raise metaphors which determined the fundamental novel questions, indeed an indefinitely large basis of our thought. number of novel questions, some of which may suggest fruitful lines of inquiry, while others A cognitive metaphor places a word or may lead us into blind alleys. concept in a new context or frame of interpretation. As Black puts it, the “mode of operation [of metaphors] requires the reader to David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 3

Let us look at a couple of other literally, Socrates distinguishes between examples. If I say that students are sentenced to four years in a University, I call up an these concrete objects [e.g., horses] you authoritarian frame of reference – that of a can touch and see and perceive by your prison – in which students are told what to do other senses, [and] those constant by professors. If on the other hand I speak of entities [e.g., equality] you cannot the University offering a menu of courses, I possibly apprehend except by thinking; invoke the restaurant frame of reference. they are invisible to our sight. ... we Without explicitly saying so, I place the student should assume two classes of things, in the role of consumer with the power to make one visible and the other invisible. (79a) choices and the professor in a serving role as waiter or cook. Among the fruitful questions it He slips quickly, however, from the might raise is whether the professor, like a literal sense of seeing to a metaphorical one: gourmet cook, is skilled at delivering tasty courses. One could also inquire what the menu Observation by means of the eye and would be like if it were translated into Tibetan, ears and all the other senses is entirely but while this remains a valid possibility, it deceptive ... because such objects are would usually be highly irrelevant. One might sensible and visible but what the soul also be led to ask whether, at the end of a itself sees is intelligible and invisible. course, a student should give the professor a (83ab) tip. That’s surely an example of a blind alley. There are a number of interrelated A metaphor, then, should not be metaphors at work here. Plato assimilates understood as a kind of discovery that one abstract qualities such as equality to our thing is like another. As Davidson puts it, everyday notion of “thing,” for instance, but “Everything is like everything, and in endless let us leave that metaphor aside for a moment. ways.” (Davidson 254) A metaphor is a I want to focus first on his use of sight as a creative inspiration to our thought, an metaphor for thinking. invitation to ask new questions, a proposal for new kinds of investigation, a task we lay out Visual brings with it a frame before ourselves. Like any project it can lead with certain elements: There is the object seen, us far astray if we don’t pay attention to what the eye which sees, and the perceiving we’re doing, especially if we don’t realize that relationship between them – seeing: we’re using a metaphor in the first place. • The seen object is experienced as PART II: PHILOSOPHICAL separate from and independent of METAPHORS the seeing; as the Latin etymology – ob-jectum – Western philosophy is the development suggests, the object is out in front of a cluster of interrelated metaphors. (That, of of me, at a distance, present course, is a metaphor, so this is a project I’m before me. It also has a temporal proposing.) The most central of these is the independence from me in that it optical metaphor which is developed by was there before I looked at it, Socrates in the Phaedo. First, speaking and will continue to be there David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 4

when I look away. It escapes my personal possession in that it is Immediate “seeing,” not merely equally perceivable by others. sensuous, experiential seeing, but • The eye which does the seeing is seeing in the universal sense as an independent of any particular originally presentive consciousness of seen object and remains the same any kind whatever, is the ultimate whatever object it perceives. legitimizing source of all rational • The seeing relationship between assertions. ... If we see an object with them is a passive one in that the full clarity ... if we then see (this being eye does not create the object but a new mode of “seeing”) how the object subordinates itself to the object in is, the faithful expressive statement has, a receptive manner. as a consequence, its legitimacy. Not to assign any value to “I see it” as an Each of these elements gives rise to a answer to the question, “Why?” would series of subordinate metaphors, as I will be a counter-sense, as, yet again, we explain below. see. (Ideas I, Para 19, Kersten trans. 36-37 – all Husserl’s own italicizing The use of sight as a metaphor for and quotation marks.) thinking, once created and established by Plato, becomes the dominant metaphor of Western The metaphorical use of seeing, then, is philosophy and reverberates throughout our central to Western philosophy over the course history to such a point that its status as a of most of its history. But the metaphorical use metaphor becomes invisible. of any term, as I have explained, drags in with it a frame of interpretation involving other, Watch how easy it is, for instance, for interrelated concepts and questions. I would Descartes to follow the same well-worn path as like first to look at the metaphorical use of he examines the perception of a piece of wax “object seen.” Later I will look at the notion of (in the Meditations). First he states that he the eye. judges, rather than sees, the nature of the wax to be extension. But only a few sentences later, In ordinary, everyday seeing, we look at he claims it “is perceived by the mind alone. ... objects or things – I use the terms the perception I have of it is a case not of interchangeably. Note for contrast that this is vision or touch or imagination ... but of purely not, in general, true of smell. It is possible that mental scrutiny [inspectio in Latin].” Soon he some other animals have the experience of is questioning all visible objects: “what was it simply smelling objects, but humans tend to about them that I perceived clearly? Just that experience a smell and ask ourselves about the the ideas, or thoughts, of such things appeared cause of it. In vision, however, we seldom before my mind.” (Second Meditation, 85, 87) experience a sensation of light and ask ourselves what the cause was. We simply Three centuries later, Husserl, too, in experience seen objects directly. Thus, when discussing “the right of autonomous reason ... we approach thinking with the metaphor of to judge rationally or scientifically about seeing, the new frame of interpretation things” slips within one page into interpreting naturally inclines us to expect something such judgment as a kind of vision: analogous to the seen object. Socrates refers to David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 5 what we think of as “constant entities ... difficulties with Astral gravity, the philosophers invisible to sight,” such as equality. The of Atlantis never have to deal with the metaphor implies that these abstract entities convolutions of theories of representation. have by default many of the properties of seen objects: separation from me, independence of One of the offshoots of me, existence before and after my thinking of representationalism is a dualistic approach to it, availability to others, etc. the . To say that a word has a meaning, in this approach, is to How exactly such properties can be made hypothesize behind the word a second mental to work in the metaphorical world has intrigued object, the idea, representation, or mental state philosophers since Plato. (though which the word expresses. This obsession with maybe not Plato himself) accepts that such the concept “object,” or “thing,” follows abstract objects have the properties of naturally from the optical metaphor in a way independence, existence and availability while that it would not follow if our basic metaphor stripping them of spatial properties, of change were based on smelling or dancing. “If my in time and of (literal) visibility – eternal only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a Platonic Eide. This gives rise to new nail.” (The thesis that the Western obsession questions. How do the abstract objects relate with interpreting all phenomena as things or to the concrete objects of visual perception? substances is based on the optical metaphor is The relations of “participation” and “imitation” defended in my earlier Colloquium paper in are invented to answer this question. Whatever 1995, “Individuality: , Horizon and other problems Otalp encountered with his Language,” which can be found on my metaphor of the dance, at least he didn’t have website.) to deal with these questions. Apart from the need for an object seen, Cartesians, in contrast to Plato, strip off the optical metaphor requires that there be an the property of independence and place the eye doing the seeing. Since the object of thought-of object, the “idea,” within the mind thought is invisible, and the seeing is itself, as part of mental substance. But now we metaphorical, the optical frame of have to ask how these objects within the mind interpretation raises the question whether there relate to the physical objects of vision. The is some invisible eye of thought. Plato, in the answer to this question is no longer quotations above, proposes that there is an eye “participation” but “representation,” although of the mind, the soul. Which features of the this concept is no less problematic. Exactly eye does the I have? Clearly it doesn’t need to how representations succeed in representing have legs (after all it’s not a dancer), nor any has given rise to an industry which has other spatial properties. But it is still separate employed philosophers for three centuries. from the objects thought, is independent of One thing has become clear: “Representation” them, and receptive of them. Even in the cannot be taken literally, either in its political Cartesian version, where the objects thought sense of delegation, or in its artistic sense as an are within the mind, there is some distinction image which duplicates an original. between the ego cogitans and the ideas. Later, Representationalism is a subsidiary metaphor Husserl distinguishes the empirical ego from generated by the questions raised by the the spontaneously self-constituting original, optical metaphor. For all their transcendental ego. David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 6

that the optical metaphor had a monopoly on Before the arrival of the optical Western philosophy – indeed there were other metaphor there were of course thinkers such as metaphors at play (consider act and agency) – Thales and Pythagoras. Both these were but rather that we should view the history of human beings, visible to others. What the philosophy as largely the working out of more metaphor introduces is a soul or Subject over and more intricate questions proposed by basic and beyond the human person with whom we metaphors. “As the twig is bent, so grows the interact in an everyday manner. The Subject is tree.” If Plato had chosen to discuss thinking the pure power of “seeing” and makes sense by means of the metaphor of smelling, of only within the frame of reference of the dancing, or of speaking (as Rorty does), rather metaphor. Once the metaphor is challenged, than of seeing, our history would have been the subject no longer has a leg to stand on. very different indeed.

The metaphorical scheme can be PART III: PROBLEM: pursued indefinitely. Since we cannot see in MYTH AND the dark, is there some kind of invisible light to allow the invisible I to see the invisible But would it have been more valid? object? Ah! Maybe the form of the Good is like the sun. And since the sun makes the It is tempting to say, as Mac Cormac plants it shines on grow, as well as making does, that, when philosophical reflection fails them visible, what does the invisible sun do to to recognize a metaphor as metaphorical, a the invisible objects of thought? Ah! “Their myth is created. Platonism, i.e., the claim that very existence and essence is derived to them abstractions are objects, would then be a myth from it.” At which point in the discussion even because the optical object metaphor on which Plato feels required to comment: “And it is based goes unrecognized. But, Mac Glaucon very ludicrously said, Heaven save Cormac claims, if we are not to declare all us, hyperbole can no further go.” (Republic, philosophy and indeed all thought to be VI 509c ) If Glaucon has been around two mythological, this position assumes that below thousand years later to hear Descartes identify metaphors there is a literal layer, and it is here the Natural Light with God, I expect he would that real truth is to be found. Further, if we have split his sides with laughter. view the history of philosophy as the elaboration of metaphors, must we not then Despite Glaucon’s laughter ringing say that earlier, less metaphorical positions, down the ages, it is not until well into the 20th- are closer to the truth? But is this plausible? century that philosophers, working from a Could we do an ontological deconstruction number of different traditions, such as Derrida which could lead us back down through the (continental), Sellars and Rorty (analytic) and cave of layered metaphors to that primordial Dennett (naturalism), have made explicit the moment when the black cow steps out from metaphor behind the notion that thinking the forest of the night into the clearing where should be conceived of as the presence of an the sunlight reveals its bovine truth for the first inner or abstract object to a viewing subject. time? If we cannot point to something literal, The enchantment has been broken and we are does the notion of metaphorical not vanish due now free to consider other ways to discuss the to vacuous contrast? If there is no literal truth, nature of thinking. My point is not primarily are we not left with metaphors all the way down? David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 7

we can assume then that when it first evolved, PART IV: SOLUTION: perhaps a hundred thousand years ago, it too EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH was cobbled together from vocal, aural, and mental functions which originally played other I suggest we can overcome this dilemma roles. And, of more relevance to our current by avoiding black and white thinking and project, when, within language, a new instead adopting a gradualist, evolutionary linguistic need or opportunity arose, language approach. would evolve by taking advantage of whatever capacities it had already developed. Thus, Let’s look at how evolution unfolds. If metaphor should not be seen as an Mother Nature were a master designer who extraordinary, unique, or novel departure but thought through her plans from scratch, then as the continuation of an approach endemic to when a new niche appears a species adapted to nature. A limb, a tool, a technique, or form of the niche would be engineered rationally from expression, originally adapted to one purpose, the ground up. For example, if a niche gets pressed into service opportunistically to appears for a flying creature, then Mother fulfill a new one. Nature would wait millions of years until some random genetic mutation grew wings on This way of looking at metaphor allows the back of, say, a horse. The result would be us to interpret in an interesting way the Pegasus, a four-footed horse with wings. But relationship between an old structure and a Mother Nature is not a human engineer with a new structure. It would make little sense to master design. She is more like a tinker who think of wings as a metaphorical way of cobbles together some minor innovation from dealing with the world, whereas the dinosaur’s whatever materials are hanging around. This forelimbs were the literal way. Grasping the is the process that Dennett refers to with the history of evolution enables us to understand French term “Bicolage” (225). When the why a bird has no front claws, but we don’t opportunity appeared, perhaps 60 million have to assume that the earlier structure was years ago, the forelimbs of some dinosaurs superior to the later, nor vice versa. There is changed gradually into wings. So nowadays no privilege to anteriority nor to posteriority. what we actually have are birds. I’m sure We need to investigate each feature many a reflective bird-philosopher has cursed independently with respect to its own niche to Mother Nature for the absence of arms, which discover how successfully it relates to the would have been so useful for dealing with the world. world. Surely any rational designer with a good master plan would have seen how useful Language, and the development of basic it would be to have wings as well as forelimbs. metaphors, are ways that we deal with the The ubiquitous feature of biological evolution, world, so any sharp distinction between the as Dennett points out, is the principle that literal and the metaphorical can be obliterated. “local rules generate global order.” (223, As we climb back down the beanstalk of borrowing from Kauffman.) Nature produces metaphors, we do not eventually stand safely birds not Pegasus’. on the solid ground of literality. Rather, we burrow down into the prelinguistic dirt of If we think of language as itself an biological adaptations. (If ontogenesis evolutionary tool for dealing with the world, recapitulates phylogenesis, then we should not David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 8 be surprised that Freud and Lacan propose that start again from scratch, yet they are among babies develop words as substitutes for the the philosophers who most obviously are presence or absence of their mothers. Words trapped into working out the implications of are metaphorical substitutes for desire.) If we the optical metaphor they inherited from their go back in the history of metaphors, in the ancestors. When once, in the childhood of history of language, we come not to some philosophy, a metaphor is adopted, it gets ultimate, prelinguistic presence of being, but taken for granted, becomes commonplace, and to a biological organism dealing with the lays out a series of ever more intricate world. Merleau-Ponty claims that the origin investigative questions which appear to be of words is to be found in bodily gesture. We reasonable only because we are prisoners of a could try to say, rather clumsily, that all certain picture. For those not ensnared in the language is a metaphor based on our literal metaphor, or for those who have different interaction with the environment, but this metaphorical agendas, these questions may would be as unsatisfactory as describing a end up appearing, as Glaucon put it, ludicrous. bird’s wing as a metaphor for a dinosaur’s It would be nice to believe, with St. Paul, that forelimb. Metaphorical language and literal “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I language are not fundamentally different: they understood as a child, I thought as a child: but are both evolutionary adaptations which allow when I became a man, I put away childish us to deal with our environment. things.” Unfortunately, the pursuit of metaphor in philosophy can lead us to become even more childish in our old age. CONCLUSION The danger is not metaphor itself; it is The way to individual freedom and unrecognized metaphor. Metaphors have the enlightenment passes through the analysis of potential to be inspiring, to raise new our own childhood. Those who do not study questions and suggest new lines of their childhood have little hope of investigation. We can no more escape understanding their adult character. But this is metaphors than we can escape language. It is not to glorify childhood. Only a crazed when, with hubris, we think of our metaphor romantic would search for the answers to adult as the one and only, absolute way that we get questions in the babbling of children. We led astray. Our best hope is to reflect upon our analyze our childhood in order to escape from ancestors’ metaphors and consider whether it. Yet total freedom from our childhood is they are appropriate to our own situation. If just as crazy and romantic a notion. The we don’t reflect upon and understand the desire to escape, like the power to analyze, is historical origin of our inherited metaphors we itself a product of that same childhood. The remain trapped in the childhood of philosophy. most we can hope for is a spiral of dialectical As Rorty, who insists so strongly on the study bootstrapping. of the history of philosophy, puts it: “Just as the [psychiatric] patient needs to relate to his As philosophy matures from its infancy, past to answer his questions, so philosophy it is frequently tempted to forget its childhood needs to relate to its past in order to answer its and begin afresh. Descartes and Husserl make questions.” (PMN 33) much of their new beginnings in philosophy, of the idea that we can discard our history and David L. Thompson Overcoming Our Childhood 9

“No doubt metaphors are dangerous – Descartes, Rene, Meditations on First and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a Philosophy, in Selected Philosophical Writing, prohibition against their use would be a willful trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and harmful restriction upon our powers of and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University inquiry.” (Black 79.) Press, 1988.

Mac Cormac, Earl R. A Cognitive Theory of BIBLIOGRAPHY Metaphor, MIT Press, 1985

Black, Max, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Rorty, Richard, “Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Aristotelian Society, N.S. 55 (1954-55): 273- Davidson on metaphor,” in Rorty, Richard, 294. Reprinted in Johnson, M (ed.), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge Philosophical Papers on Metaphor, Minnesota UP, 1991. 162-172. University Press, 1981. Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Davidson, Donald, “What Metaphors Mean,” Nature, Princeton University Press, 1979. in Davidson, Donald, Inquiries into Truth and (Referred to as PMN.) See especially Ch. 1 on Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. the optical metaphor. 245-264. David L. Thompson Dennett, Daniel, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Memorial University of Newfoundland Simon & Schuster, 1995. January 2002