Home            The Belief Machine        Syllabus        Links

 

CHAPTER TWO
THE METAPHORIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD

...we have come to think of our social and cultural world as a series of sign systems, comparable to languages.  What we live among and relate to are not physical objects and events; they are objects and events with meaning; not just complicated wooden constructions but chairs and tables; not just physical gestures but acts of courtesy or hostility.  If we are able to understand our social and cultural world we must think not of independent objects but of symbolic structures, systems of relations which by enabling objects and actions to have meaning, create a human universe (Culler 1977:100). 

THE NOTION OF METAPHOR

Many terms have been used to label the subsidiaries, the "known," that we bring to each new experience to give it  meaning: "schemata," "themata," "paradigm," "world vision," "world view," "model," "framework," and "theory" are just some of these labels.  But, in the most rudimentary sense, all these things--schemata, theories, world visions, and the rest--are metaphors; like metaphors, we transfer theories and schemata, world visions and world views, paradigms and themata to experiential phenomena as our way of understanding the phenomena.  When we say with the poets that "love is like a rose," the rose, as metaphor, is a concrete known through which we comprehend the notion of love.  The rose is a paradigm, a theory.  And in comparing love to a rose, not only does the abstract notion of love come into focus, but the rose itself becomes more clearly defined, in the same way that a theory changes each time it is applied to some new phenomenon (Black 1962). 

Every theory, world view or paradigm contains assumptions about the way things or events relate to each other, and each is used to interpret and give meaning to the new.  They all, in one way or another, encapsulate the subsidiaries we bring to bear on focal objects.  All these things are, like metaphor, a way of moving from the known to the unknown, 

...a way of cognition in which the identifying qualities of one thing are transferred in an instantaneous, almost unconscious flash of insight to some other thing that is, by remoteness or complexity, unknown to us (Nisbet 1969:4). 

Metaphors filter our experience.  Suppose, Max Black says,

I look at the night sky through a piece of heavily smoked glass on which certain lines have been left clear.  Then I shall see only the stars that can be made to lie on the lines previously prepared upon the screen, and the stars I see will be seen as organized by the screen's structure.  We can think of a metaphor as such a screen and the system of "associated commonplaces" of the focal world as the network of lines upon the screen.  We can say that the principal subject is "seen through" the metaphorical expression--or, if we prefer, that the principal subject is "projected upon" the field of the subsidiary object (Black 1962:41). 

Metaphors create meaning by embedding each experience into a system of relations that are like systems of relations we already know.  By comparing love to a rose, the system of relations into which we place a rose (flower, fragrance, color, beauty) is the system of relations through which we comprehend love;  or a system of relations through which we understand the movement of the planets, becomes the system of relations through which we understand the relationships of the parts of the atom to each other.  But why use the metaphor as the basic component of the belief machine?  Why not use another concept:  world view, theory, model, or even culture?  There are two reasons.  First, others have already equated such things as theories, models or schemata with the concept of metaphor (see Barnes 1974:49).  As early as 1940, Stephen Pepper was referring to "world hypothesis" as "root metaphors," and Mary Hesse (1963) has claimed that all theories are metaphors.   But more importantly, the idea of metaphor more clearly calls attention to the central feature of the belief machine.  Given that each experience we have must always be mediated by some previous experience, then it follows that there can never be a perfect fit between the new and the known.  Metaphors are always different from the objects, events, or people they are brought to bear on.  Love is not a rose.  A person is not a fox.  Time is not a river.  No theory, model or paradigm can be the phenomena it is designed to comprehend.  They can only be approximations of those phenomena.  That is why our reasoning minds are so unsatisfactory.  I choose the metaphor in part, then, because it better conveys this central feature of the belief machine. 

Metaphor, then, will be the basic component of the belief machine.  We will assume the metaphoric process is the central idea behind such notions as "theory," "schemata," "model," and "world view," and that it is the essential part of the process by which the belief machine converts experience to meaning.  We are asking the metaphor to carry a heavy load.  Generally metaphor is thought of mainly as verbal decoration, a vivid way of saying things.  In the belief machine, however, we are assuming metaphor to be the basic component for converting experience to meaning. 

 For the remainder of this chapter I want to illustrate the power and elegance of metaphor as the fundamental component of the belief machine.  I will first examine where our metaphors come from and the variety of things that can be used as a metaphor.  Second, I want to demonstrate that metaphors have the power to make highly abstract ideas, such as "love," "time" and "space," concrete and understandable.  Third, I want to show that metaphors are economical and efficient.  Only a few metaphors are necessary to comprehend an enormous range of phenomena.  Fourth, I will illustrate how metaphors guide our experience, and persuade us that the world is as the metaphor represents it.  Five, I will show how metaphor gives us a feeling of power and control, and, finally, I will illustrate how metaphor has the power to "carry us away," to evoke powerful emotions. 

The major point I want to make is that all of our thinking is metaphoric; I want to demonstrate that if we were to build a belief machine to convert experience into meaning, the machine could work on what we might call a metaphoric principle that holds that we need make no distinction between what is metaphoric and what is literal, and that, therefore, the machine can generate meaning without explicit reference to the structure of external reality.  If we are to hold that beliefs can be explained solely on the basis of social and cultural factors, then demonstrating how metaphors function as the prime converters of experience into meaning is crucial.

 THE AVAILABILITY OF METAPHORS

The things we use as metaphor are generally the things we know best.  The human body is a good example.  As a child matures, its body is the first thing it comes to know, and so it uses this known experience to comprehend each new experience.  The infant learns about its mouth, genitals, hands, eyes, and what they do.  The infant uses its instinctive grasping reflex to classify things into those that are graspable and those that are not.  The innate sucking motion of the mouth can be used to order the universe into things that are suckable and things that are not. The body and its actions become a template, a coding device, a model of reality.  Even as adults, of course, we speak of the "head" of state, the ruling "body," "hands" of justice, a "right-hand" man, or a "left-handed" compliment.  We speak of the "foot" of the mountain, or the "shoulder" of the road.  We can get something off our "chest," or get to the "heart" of things.  Someone can be a "finger" man, or have a "nose" for news.  The body, as a system of relations, is used as a device for assigning meaning to other things--people, actions or physical objects. 

Virtually anything is capable of being used as a metaphor; in other words, anything we know can help us understand something new.  Certain things, such as the automobile, the game of cricket, or the computer, are unique to certain cultures or times.   Other things, such as the body, are probably used in all societies. 

Some people claim that there are innate metaphors, forms for understanding we are born with.  The archetype of Carl Jung is one example of an innate metaphor.  The archetypes are contained in what Jung called the collective unconscious; all men are genetically programmed with certain basic experiences, and these are expressed in literature, art, and myth. 

Up-down, light-dark, blood, water and the wheel are archetypal metaphors, according to Phillip Wheelright (1962:110). Rodney Needham says "percussion," like the beating of drums, has intrinsic meaning, perhaps because of analogy with the beating of the heart (Needham 1967).  Robert Hertz (1960), in a classic essay, showed how common meanings attach to the left hand and the right hand in virtually all societies; the right hand tends to be associated with goodness, light, cleanliness and maleness, and the left with evil, darkness, dirt and femaleness.

Are certain things used as metaphor by all persons?  The body is, as we've seen, an almost universally used metaphor.  Stephen Pepper (1942:120) suggests that the body is the most appealing metaphor that has ever been suggested, and that to take the body, its shape, its actions, its expressions, and emotions is the most natural thing in the world.

The Dogon of the Sudan organize their entire village and buildings within as if they were human bodies.  The village, for example, is supposed to extend from north to south as if it were a man lying on his back.  The head of the village is the council house; to the east and west are houses for menstruating women that represent the hands of the village; the large family houses in the center represent the chest and belly of the village, while the communal alters at the south of the village represent its feet.  In the middle of the village are stones on which certain fruits are crushed; these stones represent the female sexual parts. 

Beside them should be set the foundation alter, which is its male sex organ; but out of respect for women this alter is erected outside the walls (Griaule 1965:96-97). 

The Dogon portray a granary as a woman lying on her back with her arms and legs raised to support the roof (the sky).  The two legs that are on the north side and the door to the granary, that is at the sixth step, represent the female sexual parts (Griaule 1965:39).

Many of our traditional structures are conceptualized as a human body.  The European Gothic cathedral was laid out in the shape of a human body, to represent Christ, with the nave as the body and the alter as the heart. 

Herbert Spencer's late nineteenth century description of society as a body is one of the more elaborate examples of the use of the human body as metaphor; like the body, society exhibits augmentation of mass; it grows.  Like the body, societies increase in structure as they increase in size.

 Further, in social organisms, as in individual organisms, differentiations cease only with that completion of the type which marks maturity and decay (Spencer 1961: 140).

Societies, like organisms, Spencer says, not only grow, divide and die, but, as with living things, exhibit a division of labor. 

As living organisms have different parts, so it is with the parts into which society divides.  A dominant class arising does not simply become like the rest, but assumes control over the rest; and when this class separates into the more and less dominant, these, again, begin to discharge distinct parts of the entire control (Spencer 1961:140).

And, as different parts of an organism relate to and depend on other parts, so it is in society;  if the lungs stop working, the heart stops.  If the stomach fails, the rest of the body will soon die. If the eyes fail, the organism will soon stop functioning. 

And when, in a society, we see the workers in iron stop if the miners do not supply materials; that makers of clothes cannot carry on their business in the absence of those who spin and weave textile fabrics; that the manufacturing community will cease to act unless food-producing and food distributing agencies are acting; that the controlling powers, governments, bureaux, judicial officers, police, must fail to keep order when the necessities of life are not supplied to them by the parts kept in order; we are obliged to say that this mutual dependence of parts is similarly rigorous (Spencer 1961:141). 

After the human body, the most common source of metaphor is the world of nature.  It is easy to transfer systems of relations we know to exist in the natural world to some other system of relations we seek to understand. 

Totemism, the identification of a social group with a plant, animal, or other feature of the natural world, is an almost universal use of metaphor.  A clan is said to be associated with "crows," or the "white cockatoo," "bears" or the "moon. " Totemic societies, those which name social groups after objects or beings in nature, are called by anthropologists segmentary societies.  Each group with a totemic designation is structurally identical; each performs the same activities, produces the same goods and food, and has similar norms.  Unlike societies where group differences are created by intrinsic features of the groups, such as castes, groups in segmentary societies have no intrinsic characteristic to differentiate it from other groups. 

Claude Levi-Strauss says that if groups in segmentary societies are to interact with each other they need to be able to think of themselves as distinct entities.  Since there is no structural feature to differentiate them, such as the objects they make, or activities they perform, they draw on nature, and transfer the differences they perceive in nature to differences they wish to create in society.  Naming one group "the bears" and another "the lynx," effects a metaphorical transfer, and the relationship between the groups is thought to be the same as exists between the species in nature; the bear clan is to the lynx clan, as the bear is to the lynx. 

But, according to Levi-Strauss, there is more.  The animals used to differentiate groups are not randomly chosen; rather, they are selected because certain traits or behaviors of the animal resemble certain features of the group or characterize relationships between certain groups.  When contact with Europeans resulted in individuals of mixed Ojibwa and European parentage, the Ojibwa grouped them into their own clan, the Pig clan, since the pig was an animal introduced by Europeans.  The natives of the Torres Straits believed there existed a psychological and physical affinity between men and their totems, and believed men have an obligation to pursue the appropriate behavior.  The Cassowary, Snake, Shark and Hammer-head shark clans were supposed to love fighting, while the Shovel-nosed Skate and Sucker-fish clans were peace loving.  Members of the Dog clan were unpredictable, since dogs were supposed to be unpredictable.  Members of the Cassowary clan were thought to have long legs and run fast, and members of the Crocodile clan were thought to be strong and ruthless (Levi-Strauss 1966:115-116). 

In our culture, as James Fernandez notes, we are surrounded by machines, yet still draw from nature for metaphors. As he puts it:

Since children in 20th-century urban America and Europe spend so much of their time identifying with machinery--themselves assuming the dynamics and making the power sounds as they push car and truck or plane around--it may be hard to convince a reader from such a culture of the importance of these animal metaphors and the primordial nature of the horse play.  Since we are surrounded not by animals but by machinery, we may have forgotten man's close relation for millennia to animals, with which he has identified and from which he has learned.  But the sense of this powerful source of identity and learning survives.  We have only to think of how we surround our infants with stuffed animals and tell them animal stories; how we give them animal nicknames (tiger, kitten, little bear); how in rough-and-tumble with young children we play at eating them up or carrying them piggyback.  The primordial metaphors are still there.  We are still in some part being taught by the animals through identification with them (Fernandez 1974:121-122).

Sports teams in America often use nature metaphors.  Football teams, like clans in segmentary societies, are structurally identical--they have the same number of players, require people to play similar roles, and have identical norms and goals.  And, like clans, they sometimes draw from the animal kingdom to identify themselves.  Consequently we have "tigers," "lions," "bears," "wolverines," "wildcats" and "mustangs. " There is an attempt to transfer, not only the name, but also certain characteristics of the species; tigers are fierce, bears strong, and so on.  We would be hard-pressed in America to find football teams with nicknames of "rabbits," "sheep," or "kittens."

As some societies have taken from the world of animals to organize experience, industrial societies take from the world of machines.  The clock was probably one of the first machines to be widely used as metaphor in the Western world.  The French philosopher Descartes, speculating about the relationship between God, man and the universe, suggested looking at the universe as a watch whose face was visible, but whose internal mechanisms were hidden.  The most we could then say about the mechanism would be conjectural, since the watch might be constructed a number of ways.  In this analogy, the scientist is like a skilled watchmaker who is given a watch, but cannot see its internal mechanism.  He knows the general principles that govern his subject, but he is uncertain about precisely how it works.  Consequently, we can "never get inside nature's clock to see if nature's mechanisms are what we think them to be" (Laudens 1966:77).

The clock was a wonderful spur to the imagination.  Through some literary inventiveness it even became a euphemism for sexual intercourse.  In Laurence Sterne's eighteenth century comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the narrator could identify the day he was conceived because his father, a man of "punctilious regularity," always wound the family clock on the same day of the month he

brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my Uncle Toby, to get them out of the way at the same time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month (Sterne 1967 [1759-67]:39).

Because of the popularity of the novel, "winding the clock" became, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a popular metaphor for sexual intercourse. 

The development of the steam engine provided a rich store of metaphors.  "Letting off steam," "safety valve," "working under pressure" are present-day survivals of the steam engine as a source of meaning.  Later, with the advent of electrical power, we became "charged up" at "electrifying" events.  Today with computers and the popularity of information theory it is common to use such terms as "input," "output" and "feedback."   So once we know one system of relations, whether it be the human body, the world of nature or the world of machines, we can use it as a tool to understand other systems of relations. 

It is evident that different cultures and epochs use the metaphors available to them; but are there a limited number of metaphors or types of metaphors that each culture has available to it?  Lucien Goldmann, for example,  says there are a limited number of "world visions," but we have not yet cataloged them (Goldmann 1964:20).  And Gerald Holton (1972:29) asserts that there are a limited number of what he calls themata, and that while the range of experience and theory have multiplied, the themata used to comprehend this experience--metaphors of constancy and change, materialism, and mechanism, for example--have changed very little.

Since Parmenides and Heraclitus, the members of the thematic dyad of constancy and change have vied for loyalty, and so have, ever since Pythagoras and Thales the efficacy of mathematics versus the efficacy of materialistic or mechanistic models. The (usually acknowledged) presuppositions pervading the work of scientists have long included also the thematic couples of experience and symbolic formalism, complexity and simplicity, reductionism and holism, discontinuity and the continuum, hierarchical structure and unity, the uses of mechanisms versus teleological or anthropomorphic modes of approach.  These, together with others....--a total of fewer than fifty couples or triads--seem historically to have sufficed for negotiating the great variety of discoveries.  Both nature and our pool of imaginative tools are characterized by a remarkable parsimony at the fundamental level, joined by fruitfulness and flexibility in actual practice.

According to Stephen Pepper, there have been in the history of ideas a limited number of what he calls "root metaphors" such as "mysticism," "animism," "formism," "mechanism," "contextualism" and "organicism."  Formism, for example, uses as its "primitive root metaphor" the work of the artisan or workman making different objects on the same plan, the shoemaker using the same pattern to make shoes, or the potter using the same form to make his pots.  Each thing that exists be it plant, tree, or person, develops according to some innate plan or form, and objects and events. In a world dominated by formism, objects and events are related to each other by their similarity to each other; all red things have some connection to each other, or all round things are somehow connected.  Animism uses the human body as its primitive root metaphor, and things relate to each other as parts of the body relate to each other.  Mechanism uses the machine as its basic metaphor, and things and events relate to each other as the parts of a machine relate to each other.  According to Pepper, each culture draws its distinctive style from the root metaphor or metaphors it uses. 

   METAPHORS AND THE TRANSITION FROM THE ABSTRACT TO THE CONCRETE

Metaphors are capable of giving meaning to highly abstract notions such as love, time and space.  Robert Solomon, in his book Love: Emotion, Myth and Metaphor, describes some of the metaphors we use to give meaning to the idea of "love."  There is the economic metaphor of love as fair exchange; love is an economic partnership in which each partner gives something in exchange for something; love is a tradeoff of interests and concerns, particularly approval:   "I make you feel good about yourself and in return you make me feel good about myself" (Solomon 1981:17). 

Or love can be something you "work at": 

Love, according to the work model, gets evaluated above all on its industriousness, its seriousness, its success in the face of the most difficult obstacles.  Devotees of the work model not infrequently choose the most inept or inappropriate partners, rather like buying a run-down-shack--for the challenge.  They will look with disdain at people who are merely happy together (something like buying a house from a tract builder).  They will look with admiration and awe at a couple who have survived a dozen years of fights and emotional disfigurements because "they made it work" (Solomon 1981:19).

Then there is the dramatic model where love is theatre and melodrama.  Or there is the communication metaphor where love is understood as "getting through to each other," or a matter of self-expression.  And we can use a medical model for love; a lack of love, as some psychologists contend, may cause sickness, or love itself, as some feminists argue, can be a pathological condition, or a "search for self-annihilation."  Not surprisingly, says Solomon, many of today's books on love are written by doctors and psychiatrists (Solomon 1981:25-26). 

Time is another highly abstract notion difficult to conceptualize.  Yet we can make it meaningful by associating it with a familiar area of experience.  For example, since we can look at love as an economic commodity, why not do the same with time?  Time is money; "You're wasting my time," "This gadget will save you hours," "I don't have the time to give you," "That flat tire cost me an hour," "You need to budget your time," "Is that worth your while?," "He's living on borrowed time;"

Time in our culture is a valuable commodity.  It is a limited resource we use to accomplish our goals.  Because of the way that the concept of work has developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year.  In our culture TIME IS MONEY in many ways: telephone message units, hourly wages, hotel room rates, yearly budgets, interests on loans, and paying your debt to society by "serving time. " These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures.  They have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic activities in a very profound way (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:8). 

Time can also be represented as straight line, or as a cyclical movement of heavenly bodies.  Edmund Leach maintains that some societies represent time as an oscillation between polar opposites such as night and day, winter and summer, drought and flood, life and death.  These metaphors of oscillation imply a third element, the thing that oscillates.  For example, in some societies time is represented by a soul which moves from one world to another and back again.  To the Greeks the soul was thought of as a material substance (much the same as we view a clock as a material representation of time), and time was represented as the oscillation of the soul between life and death.  Since the Greeks believed the soul was concentrated in the male semen, time was therefore associated with sexual intercourse:

[When] the Greeks conceived the oscillations of time by analogy with the oscillations of the soul, they were using a concrete metaphor.  Basically it is the metaphor of sexual coitus, of the ebb and flow of sexual essence between sky and earth (with the rain as semen), between this world and the underworld (with marrow-fat and vegetable seeds as semen), between man and woman.  In short, it is the sexual act itself which provides the primary image of time.  In the act of copulation the male imparts a bit of his life-giving soul to the female; in giving birth she yields it forth again.  Coitus is here seen as a kind of dying for the male; giving birth as a kind of dying for the female.  Odd though this symbolism may appear, it is entirely in accord with the findings of psychoanalysts who have approached the matter from quite a different point of view (Leach 1979:224).

Or, finally, take our conception of space.  Here we have another highly abstract notion which can only be comprehended by something other than itself.  In a wonderful book, Physics as Metaphor, Roger Jones examines the metaphors we use to understand such concepts as space.  We see it as a void to be filled by concrete objects; it is like an empty room where we put discrete but separate objects such as tables, chairs or pictures.  This is not, however, the only way to conceptualize space.  In the Aristotelian universe of medieval times, space was not an empty void; it was full of essence which connected all things to each other.

It is difficult for us to conceive of space as other than an empty void to which the laws of perspective can be applied, and this has led us to believe that there is something objective or absolute about our spatial notions.  But the preeminence of our own view is not so difficult to challenge if we look at the art forms, belief patterns, and languages of societies remote from ours in time, place or experience.  For example, to the mind of medieval people, space did not have the cold, empty, geometric character that it has for us.  We experience ourselves as an isolated, disconnected entity in a vast, empty void.  But medieval people felt more a part of their surrounding environment.  They felt a kind of extra-sensory, but conscious connection to the plants and animals around them, to the heavenly objects, to the very elements and minerals of the earth itself.  We tend to dismiss such experiences as primitive or misguided (Jones 1982:59).  

Yet we misinterpret the medieval experience.  A man born under Mercury who feels an affinity for the planet and the substance mercury on earth does not feel these things as forces acting at a distance.  They are part of him, and contained within him.  As Owen Barfield said, "the man of the Middle Ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo, than we are" (quoted from Jones 1982:60). 

Jones also asks the question of why we think of space as an empty void full of discrete, but isolated objects.  He suggests it a consequence of our social experience.  Our metaphor for space embodies our own experiences of separation, distinction, differentiation and identity.  Our social experience leads us to emphasize distance, because we cannot distinguish and identify things that overlap.  A fundamental physical law, for us, is that two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time.  This is the essence of our spatial metaphor.  But, says Jones, it is not "space" itself that suggests this idea; it is our social experience that gives meaning to this idea of space:

  The laws of perspective and of geometry for us are a codified summary of our normal experience of alienation, unique identity, and unrelatedness.  It has all been abstracted, externalized, and synthesized into the cold, empty void we call space.  But it is all our own doing and the result of idolizing our creation.  Yet we continue to believe that space is simply there independent of us, and so it always was and always will remain (Jones 1982:61).

  THE ECONOMY OF METAPHOR

Economy is a basic requirement of the central component of a belief machine.  Since each experience we have is unique, each metaphor must be capable of assimilating and organizing a vast number of experiences.  If we were not able to use one metaphor to understand others, we would need a unique vocabulary for every metaphor, and either a vast vocabulary of elementary terms, or an incredible elaboration of composite terms (Goodman 1976:80).  But the metaphor, as Nelson Goodman points out, is wonderfully economical. Since we are able to transfer metaphors from one domain to another--animals to groups, economic activities to emotions, biological activities to time-- we can cope with a limited vocabulary and a limited stock of metaphors.  It is theoretically possible that with deep knowledge of only one system of relations, one set of metaphors, we would be able to cope with an infinite range of experience.  Most of the Bible is probably comprehensible to a person whose sole store of metaphors is taken from herding sheep. 

Common things such as houses or shelters are capable of organizing all kinds of experience.  We think of houses as utilitarian objects, when, in fact, they are rich sources of meaning.  The houses of the Atoni of Indonesia are literally models of their cosmos.  The "right-side" and "left-side" of an Atoni house corresponds to a division of the world into male and female.  The door to the house is always oriented to the south, a direction the Atoni call ne'u (right); a porch-like section is attached to this side of the house and is associated with men.  It is here the men eat and receive visitors. 

The left side of the house is associated with women and women's activities.  The naming of houseparts, such as roof spars and houseposts, follow the same right-left division.  The left (women) is always subordinate to the right (men).  The roof is associated with the ancestors because of its height.  In sum, the Atoni house is a metaphorical encapsulation of the entire Atoni universe.  The house, is a kind of mechanical model of the cosmos as conceived by the Atoni.  Their notions of social and political order are encapsulated in their homes; the Atoni dwell in their cosmos.

However the references extend beyond the social order: space, time, man and animals, man and plants, man and the supernatural are conceived to be ordered by principles related to those expressed in the house (Cunningham 1972:134). 

Americans, like the Atoni, use living quarters as vehicles of understanding.  The house is a metaphor for the family.  We speak of creating a family as "making a home together"; a wife was a "homemaker" or "housewife," while the term "homewrecker" is used for a person who threatens the sanctity of the family. 

The classic "two-story" American house consisted of systems of relations used to give meaning to social relations in the family.  The "den"--an interesting animal metaphor--is associated with the male of the family, while the kitchen is female.  Consequently the relationship between husband and wife is like the relationship between the den and the kitchen.  Like the Atoni, Americans set aside a section of the house for entertaining, and in doing this conceptualize a division between relations within the family, and external relations. 

In cross-section, the classic American house--to the extent we can talk of a typical house-- seems a representation of the Christian cosmos.  The two main floors are divided into public and private functions, and devoted to the activities of everyday living--eating, sleeping, or socializing.  The basement, since it is "underground," "dark" and "crypt-like" is where we place the fires of the furnace, family bar and other recreational, items of pleasure and perhaps sin.  The attic, the summit of the house, is where we, like the like the Atoni, store old objects and family heirlooms--things of the ancestors. 

It may be argued, of course, that these patterns of use reflect utilitarian concerns; we store valuable objects in the attic because it is dry, and basements are convenient places to put furnaces because they need to be supplied with oil or coal.  Nevertheless, like the Atoni house, the American house is a source of order and pattern.  It is a source of metaphor, and, consequently, of meaning. 

The Dinka of the Sudan provide us with one of the best examples of how a single metaphorical domain can be used to encapsulate a vast range of experience.  The Dinka are cattle herders, and most of their lives center on their animals.  Every Dinka cow or bull is described by a composite name which indicates the color, sex, and stage of maturation of the animal, and these terms are used to describe all sorts of experience.  Lienhardt says the Dinka would be lost without cattle terms to describe all sorts of visual experience.  Their very perception of color, he says, is inextricably linked to their recognition of color-configurations in their cattle.  Without their cattle-color vocabulary, says Lienhardt, the Dinka would have no way of describing visual experience in terms of color, light and darkness (Leinhardt 1961:12-13).  The color white is taken from the term used to describe the white of cattle; a spotted pattern, such as of a leopard, is called after the spotted cow. 

The Dinka also use their cattle as a means of comprehending people. Boys take the color names of oxen when they reach manhood and are called by these ox-names by intimate friends and agemates.  It would be like us calling our friends by the colors of our favorite automobiles. 

A man's metaphorical ox-name in not expected to refer directly to anything in his personal appearance, though in some cases, especially in the ox-names given to Europeans, a distinctive feature of the appearance may be seized upon for inclusion in the total association of perceptions of the ox-name.  In songs the same man may be given several metaphorical ox-names, perhaps derived from oxen of colours and configurations which he has never owned. The object is praise to him.  A Dinka's self-esteem and standing in the community are intimately bound up with cattle in this way (Lienhardt 1961:16). 

Cattle are also used to comprehend the structure of Dinka society; the system of relations making up the body of the animal are used to give meaning to the relations among men:

 

 

Perhaps the clearest example of the way in which cattle represent not only human beings but human relationships may be seen in the division of the sacrificial meat when a beast is killed.  `The people are put together as a bull is put together' said a Dinka chief on one occasion.  It will be seen from the plan of the division [Figure 6] when it has been sacrificed, most of it is divided according to the division of groups within a kinship system, leaving some over for the community in general, distinguished according to sex and age (Lienhardt 1961:23).

Cattle are also used to express legal transactions between people, and as a standard of value. All important transactions and acquisitions are expressed in terms of cattle (Lienhardt 1961:24). 

We see, then, the economy of metaphor.  It takes knowledge of few systems of relations contained in a metaphor for the belief machine to be able to assign meaning to the infinite diversity of our experiences. 

   METAPHORS DIRECT MEANING IN CERTAIN DIRECTIONS

Metaphors also determine how we view phenomena; they define the context of our experience.  The use of one metaphor instead of another leads you to certain conclusions about an experience that another metaphor might not.   Compare the view of the world from the perspective of an animate universe with that of a mechanistic universe.  In medieval times the world was thought of differently; it was alive, it was not a machine.  Consequently the meaning assigned to objects was different.  Chemistry in the fourteenth century, for example, as Ludwik Fleck tells us, operated in a world very different from our mechanistic universe.  In the medieval world metals were thought of as suns and moons, kings and queens, red bridegrooms and lily brides.  Gold was the God Apollo, silver was Diana chasing Apollo through celestial groves.  Quicksilver was mercury, Iron the ruddy-eyed Mars.  Lead was Saturn, tin the Diabolus Metallorum (Fleck 1978 [1935]:125).  

Contrast these metaphors of metals with our mechanistic systems of relations.  Instead of the personalized things of the medieval world, metals are structures composed of tiny, inert molecules linked in characteristic ways to each other.  Contrast also the seventeenth century view of the human skeleton with a nineteenth century version (Figure 7).  The seventeenth century skeleton was alive, showing emotions of contemplation and grief.  The nineteenth century skeleton is a mechanical structure like the superstructure of a building or a machine.  Thus each age has its dominant metaphors to give a distinctive meaning to the universe it constructs.

 

 

Using Stephen Pepper's idea of root metaphor, compare a formistic universe with a mechanistic universe.  For example, the statement "smoking causes cancer" makes sense in a mechanistic universe where the body is treated like a machine, and a substance (e.g. tars and nicotine) can have a direct effect on the "parts" of the machine.  It makes little sense, however, in a formistic universe which seeks similarities among things that relate to each other, for what is the similarity between a cigarette and cancer?  In a formistic world an illness is more likely to be caused by something similar to the illness or the symptoms of the illness.  In a formistic universe coming into contact with something yellow might cause jaundice, and something red (or associated with red) might cause fever. 

The connections we create in a mechanistic universe can be highly complex and involved.  The association of smoking and cancer, for example, is a complicated example of co-occurrence involving a complex mechanistic scheme of cellular disruption and breakdown.  But relations of similarities can be equally involved. 

The Dinka organize themselves into clans, each of which is named after some plant or animal that is considered the clan divinity or guardian.  Members of one of these clans, the Pajieng, were referred to as "shit" because of an elaborate system of association by similarity.   The black cobra is one divinity of the Pajieng clan.   It is a deadly snake and the Dinka regard its bite as inevitably fatal.   Consequently, the Dinka associate the snake with night-witches who use blood and venom to kill their victims.   The black cobra is associated with witches also because as the snake sheds and leaves its skin only to appear again and claim new victims, the witch is thought also to be able to renew itself and return to cause further injury.  One of the signs of witchcraft is human excrement left at night in a homestead.  To excrete in a homestead is a singularly unpleasant act among the Dinka, and is thought to be the kind of thing that witches do.  Hence the association excrement=witches=black cobra, and the idea that excrement may be the divinity of a clan associated with the black cobra. 

The metaphors we use define the limits of the possible and the impossible.  Metaphors not only associate things in systems of relations, but they also define the nature of the association.  To say "smoking causes cancer" in a society dominated by formistic metaphors makes no sense, while the idea of eating a red berry to cure fever is equally nonsensical in a mechanistic world.  In each case the nature of the system of relations will not allow that type of connectedness. 

In America today, sports events are gigantic public spectacles and rituals; 100,000,000 people watch a Super Bowl or World Series.  And sports have contributed to the meaning we assign to experience by supplying a rich supply of metaphors.  And since these things are contests, our lives become contests.  American business has made football a private metaphorical preserve.  Businessman speak of "team effort," admire people who can "take the ball and run with it," and not "fumble" their opportunities.  Vince Lombardi, the famous American football coach and cult hero, made films for businessman drawing analogies between success in football and success in business sales and management.  One football fan referred to cancer as a "15 yard penalty," and a minister, giving the eulogy at the funeral of a famous baseball player, gave meaning to his death by saying "he was rounding third and coming home."

The important thing in all this is that the metaphor we select determines the way we think of things.  Take our idea of "argument" for example.  We use expressions such as "His point was right on target," "Your claims are indefensible," "He attacked my argument," "I had to defend my position," "He shot down my argument" or "I think I won the argument."  Argument, in effect, is seen as akin to war.  We don't simply talk about argument in terms of war, we actually win and lose arguments (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:4).  What would happen if, instead of metaphors of war, we used metaphors of dance to comprehend argument.  Instead of two protagonists in a win or lose situation, we have two partners trying to coordinate their movements to arrive at a mutual accommodation? 

Let's combine the world of sport with the medieval universe to illustrate further how metaphor guides our perception of things .  Take a baseball player and an astrologer.  Each has an encounter with a member of the opposite sex.  The shortstop might say; "I met a girl, I thought she'd play ball, and that I'd not only get to first base, but score; but I struck out."  The astrologer, on the other hand, describing the same event, would put it differently: "I met a girls, I thought we'd be Leo and Cancer, that we'd be in conjunction, and she would be the sun to my moon, but our stars were crossed."  The differences between the two descriptions of the same event involve more than a simple difference in language.  The use of different metaphors assigns a different meaning to the event.  The shortstop, using a metaphor common to American youth, sees the experience as an encounter, a contest to be won or lost, and a way of demonstrating proficiency.  The astrologer, on the other hand, sees the meeting as a fated, predetermined event; it does not involve winning or losing but rather the discovery of pre-existent compatibilities. 

The metaphor we use to assign meaning to experience highlights certain features of a phenomenon, and obscures or even ignores others.  This is what Spencer did when he used the living organism as a metaphor for society.  The use of the organistic metaphor focused attention on certain features of society: the interrelation of parts, the division of labor, the hierarchy of control, the phenomena of growth and decline.  However the use of the organistic metaphor suppressed other features of society: the positive function of conflict, or the advantages of institutional autonomy.  Instead of comparing society to a living organism, we could, as other sociologists have done,  compare society to theater, to a play in which people play "roles" and "present selves."  The dramaturgical metaphor shifts our attention from society as a whole to the individual "actors."  Or, like Rousseau, imagine the relations among people as "social contracts," as, perhaps, in a business organization, where the fixed and rigid relations among people implied by Spencer's metaphor are replaced by individually negotiated "pacts" and "agreements."  As you can see, there is a great difference assuming that each person is a cell in a living organism rather than of an actor or actress in a cosmic play. 

   METAPHORS HAVE THE POWER TO EVOKE STRONG FEELINGS 

Metaphors give a feeling of power and control.  If we have a thorough understanding of one system of relations--say baseball, business, or nature--we can use it to comprehend a system of relations we only begin to grasp, and, as a result, we get a feeling of security, well-being and power.  Simply by naming features of a new experience, we fix and control that experience.  In every instance of the use of known metaphor to interpret a new experience there is a transition from helplessness to power.  Where something was puzzling, it suddenly becomes clear (Schon 1963:60).

This flash of creative insight provided by metaphor is illustrated nicely by Friedrich August von Kekule's discovery of the chemical structure of benzene.  One afternoon in 1865, after puzzling over the nature of benzene, he fell asleep in front of his fire.  Soon, he said, 

the atoms were gamboling before my eyes.  This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background.  My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion.  But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.  As if by a flash of lightning I awoke....  (quoted in Koestler 1964:118).

This vision suggested to Kekule that the molecules of certain organic compounds were not open strings, but closed chains or rings--like a snake swallowing its tail. 

But the metaphor does even more than give us a sense of power; it can take us places we had no idea we were going.  When we create a metaphor, says Israel Scheffler, we often surprise ourselves at the meanings which emerge; the maker of the metaphor does not have the special key to its meaning or use.  Instead the use of metaphor is an invitation to find new meanings.  In using a metaphor, the scientist, such as von Kekule, forges relationships that may lead us to rethink old concepts in new ways; we begin to think of the mind as an electronic computer or black holes as vacuum cleaners.

 Whether the task is to incorporate the novel or reorganize the familiar, metaphor serves often as a probe for connections that may improve our understanding or spark theoretical advance (Scheffler 1979:129-130).

Transferring a system of relations from one domain to another gives us a sense of well-being in another way.  If something we know well is used to understand something we do not know well, the new phenomena will already have some of the familiarity of the known metaphor.  John Ziman speaks  of this in regard to the use of models in science.  When we take a model or metaphor from one domain, and apply it to another, it brings with it a certain pre-existing understanding.  The Rutherford-Bohr picture of the atom as a system of electrons orbiting a nucleolus owes its strength not only to classical physics, but also to our familiarity of such a system in astronomy.  Our metaphors contain a good deal of intuitive and experiential understanding. 

It would be difficult, even now, to give a precise logical definition of Darwin's model of interspecific competition as the motive force of organic evolution.  This model derived its explanatory power from the fact that its audience was familiar with industrial and social competition, of which many characteristic features could be grasped and compared with biological phenomena without formal demonstration or proof... (Ziman 1978:23-24).

The fact that our metaphors contain elements of personal experience explains why metaphors have, as Michael Polanyi says, "the capacity to carry us away."

Let me illustrate with an event which occurred in the Southern United States a couple of years ago.  The account is taken from the New York Times;

Years of racial animosity in the Florida panhandle city have erupted into violence in recent weeks on the issue of whether athletic teams at the local high school will be called `Rebels' or `Raiders'.  The controversy over the name, simmering for several years in and out of court, caused a riot as Escambia County High School February 5.  Subsequently, crosses were burned in the yards of school board members, a shot was fired through the window of a black member and the homes of a human relations board member and a state legislator were burned by arsonists....  Four students were hit by gunfire in the school riot, 26 others were injured and $5,000 damage was done to the school during four hours of fighting, rock throwing, and smashing windows, trophy cases, and other school property....  Some three-quarters of the schools 2,523 students were involved....  The school riot occurred as the result of a school election the day before on whether to change the nickname of the athletic teams from the Raiders back to their old name, the Rebels.  The nickname Rebels, chosen by the students when the school was built in 1958, and used thereafter, first became the focus of racial trouble in 1973 when black students, attending the school under a court ordered desegregation plan since 1969, protested that the name, along with the Confederate flag, flown at games and other school functions, was a direct insult to blacks. Several fights and protests resulted from the controversy, and on July 24, 1973, a United States District Court permanently enjoined the use of the name, the flag and related symbols on the grounds they were `racially irritating'.  Students subsequently chose the name Raiders as their nickname.  However the school board and a group of white students appealed the court order and on January 25, 1975, the United States Court of Appeals overturned the injunction and returned the matter to the school board to make its own decision in the matter. 

Of course there is more than a name involved in this dispute.  The metaphor `Rebel' contains all sorts of subsidiary meanings for both sides in the dispute.  To one group it carries the meanings "pride," "manhood," "honor," "whiteness." To others, however, the nickname fused notions of "oppression," "slavery," "white supremacy," and "shame. " The subsidiaries packed into the term include personal ones; each black in Escambia County High School could bring some personal experience to bear on the term, as each of us does when we draw from a familiar metaphor.  As a result, metaphor embodies us in itself, moves us deeply as we surrender ourselves to it.  Each metaphor we use carries a host of subsidiaries we bring to bear on an object of experience, and some of these subsidiaries are personal, and, as Michael Polanyi points out, unspecifiable. 

THE DEFECTS OF METAPHOR

There is, I think, a compelling case to be made that the metaphoric process is at the heart of the way we create meaning.  This does not mean that what we "see" is determined by metaphor, but that the meaning of what we see is determined by the system of relations in which we imbed what we see.  We may all see an apple fall off a tree (although this statement is already full of metaphoric assumptions), but the meaning we give to that experience is very different if, like the ancient Greeks, we see the apple as an animate object seeking it rightful place in the world, instead of seeing the apple as an inanimate object affected by an external force called gravity.

Nevertheless, while it may be compelling to see the metaphor as the major component of our belief machine, the metaphor is, in many ways, an unsatisfactory device to organize experience.  Like any classificatory process, the use of metaphor is selective, it loses information by channeling our understanding in some directions and away from others.  If John is a "wolf," he is not a "tiger" or "pussycat"; to the extent argument is war it is not a dance; and to the extent an encounter with the opposite sex is a game, it is not a seeking of compatibilities.  Our metaphors allow us to see some things, and leave us blind to others.  The "point of view" is an intrinsic part of every act of knowing. 

In addition, metaphors are absurd.  A man is not a fox, a family is not a house, a football is not a bomb, and the human brain is not a computer.  Meaning generated by the metaphor process is always imperfect.  Since the known is never the same as the new, since no metaphor, no system of relations,  can ever be exactly like the experience it seeks to understand, the meanings generated by the belief machine must always be potentially ambiguous, anomalous, or puzzling.  There must be always the potential for conflict and doubt. 

Nor is there any way of reducing the potential for ambiguity and anomaly in belief by checking a metaphor against reality, since, for a metaphoric view of belief, there can be no valid distinction between the metaphoric and the literal.  There is no way of getting outside a metaphorical representation of reality, so to speak, in order to see things "as they are."  In this sense a metaphor is not simply a tool to help us understand things, or a rhetorical device to enliven our language.  The metaphor is the very stuff from which meaning is created.  To the extent that our metaphors are ambiguous, vague or anomalous, so, too, are the meanings created by the metaphors.  The difference between the literal and the metaphorical, as Barry Barnes (1974:53-54) points out, is simply a matter of social convention, and of what is institutionalized and what is not.  This has an important implication for our idea of "truth," as Donald Schon realizes:

Contemporary philosophy would like to say that a statement is true if and only if it asserts what is the case.  But this assumes a univocal, literal relationship between the statement and some state of affairs; that is a single literal meaning theory for all statements as well as words.  But a metaphor cannot be "true" in this way.  All metaphors are in one sense false, in fact absurd....  In the sense in which we believe the statement is not absurd, it may be believable.  But in this sense it is also far from univocal.  Metaphors are subject, with equal appropriateness, to an indefinite number of interpretations....  In short, if there are no literal statements, there is no literal truth (Schon 1963:50).

From the perspective of a metaphorical view of knowledge, truth is not something objective and absolute.  Instead truth is a function of our conceptual system, of our point of view, and of the metaphors through which we construe experience.  In fact the idea  of absolute  truth in  a world  given meaning by metaphor is a dangerous one.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book, Metaphors We Live By, vividly describe the consequences of the idea that we can discover some absolute, objective truth:

We believe that the idea that there is an absolute objective truth not only mistaken but socially and politically dangerous.  ...truth is always relative to a conceptual system that is defined in large part by metaphor.  Most of our metaphors have evolved in our culture over a long period, but many are imposed upon us by people in power--political leaders, religious leaders, business leaders, advertisers, the media, etc.  In a culture where the myth of objectivism is very much alive and truth is always absolute truth, the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true--absolutely and objectively true (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:159-160). 

The idea that the major process through which we create meaning is inherently flawed raises the question of why is it that sometimes people are aware of these flaws and other times not.  How are the ambiguities inherent in any system of beliefs masked; how does the belief machine create certainty and alleviate doubt?

Put another way, while we might not accept all the meanings generated by the belief machine, we at least accept some.  But if the ones we accept are as potentially absurd as the ones we reject, how are we able to maintain them?  How is it that we come to accept one meaning as literal truth, and reject others as false and nonsensical?  And what happens when a meaning that we have accepted as truth suddenly is called into doubt?  How does the machine deal with that?

To sum up, at this point let us assume that our belief machine looks something like this:

 

 

Experience flows into the machine, is assigned a metaphor that creates meaning.  The meaning may be unquestioned (creating certainty), or it may be questioned (doubt), in which case it is fed back into the machine through a feedback device.  The goal of the machine is to produce certainty and alleviate doubt. 

If one accepts a metaphorical view of knowledge (and it is difficult to comprehend what another conception would be), then one must accept the fact that there are problems with a belief machine constructed of metaphors.  Yet a belief machine must convince its user that the meaning it generates is an accurate rendition of experience.  It must give reality the taken-for-grantedness quality that it must have. 

There are two questions, then, that will set the agenda for the next two chapters: first, if we assume that every meaning generated by the belief machine is, in essence, absurd, how can certainty be created?  Second, what happens when there is doubt, and why does it arise?

Go to Chapter Three