Metaphors and the History of Philosophy

Overcoming Our Childhood: Metaphors 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 metaphor. 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 perception 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.

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