Can We Have Thought without Metaphor?
"The profound implication of such an account is that we do not really have a choice regarding the formation of metaphor."
by Zhou BowenOur minds definitely know our bodies better than we do! Look at the way people drink. Instead of directing the bottle to the mouth, people turn their heads a bit to the left, and then drink from the bottle. You'll be amazed to see how cleverly our brains work in the execution of this simple drinking mechanism. Notice first that turning your head to accommodate the natural crook of your arm may expend less energy than moving your arm out of its natural resting position to accommodate the middle of your face. Secondly, notice that when you turn your head, the bottle won't block your front view. Try this yourself and see how automatic it is!
If you have read Andy Clark's "Where Brain, Body, and World Collide," you'll better appreciate the above example. But don't worry if you haven't, because Clark's main idea can be summarized as follows: the main job of the body's brain mechanism is to build an interactive and dynamic system between the body and the environment, and it does this by exploiting both the givens of the body and the givens of the environment so as to achieve maximum efficiency for a specific task.
This all sounds well and good for unconscious, automatic processes like drinking, but what if the brain is assigned a more complicated task such as understanding subjective concepts like importance, intimacy, help or time? According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, our brains make extensive use of primary metaphors to deal with such concepts--for example, when we reason that important is big (metaphor: "tomorrow is a big day") or time is motion (metaphor: "time flies"). So can we still see the kind of efficiency revealed in the drinking mechanism in our conceptual use of metaphor? The answer is yes. With Clark's brain model in mind, I will demonstrate the efficiency of using primary metaphor in conceptualizing subjective experiences, taking as my starting point some of Lakoff and Johnson's ideas.
Primary metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is a way to conceptualize, reason and visualize subjective experience with reference to other domains of experience, mostly sensorimotor domains of incoming sensory experiences and our own body movements. Lakoff and Johnson have provided a logical account for establishing this metaphoric system based on two integrated theories. The theory of conflation explains the rise of primary metaphor: "For young children, subjective experiences and judgments … and sensorimotor experiences … are so regularly conflated--undifferentiated in experience--that for a time children do not distinguish between the two when they occur together" (46). For example, the metaphor "affection is warmth" is formed between the "subjective judgment--affection, and sensorimotor domain--temperature, by the primary experience: feeling warm while being held affectionately" (50). Narayanan's theory is the neural version of this theory: "'associations' made during the period of conflation are realized neurally in simultaneous activations that result in permanent neural connections being made across the neural networks [of both the subjective and sensorimotor domains]" (46).One of the more intriguing aspects of Lakoff and Johnson's theories is its insistence on the inevitability of primary metaphor: "You inevitably acquire an enormous range of primary metaphors just by going about the world constantly moving and perceiving" (57). That is the equivalent of saying that the brain automatically and unconsciously associates subjective and sensorimotor domains during the childhood conflation period, which directly leads to the formation of metaphor. The profound implication of such an account is that we do not really have a choice regarding the formation of metaphor, for the brain is not even attempting to build the subjective domain "separately." I shall discuss what I believe may be the reason behind this shortly.
To do so, I will use Andy Clark's model to prove that metaphor is an extremely efficient solution offered by our bodily and environmentally situated brain to accomplish the task of building a subjective domain. Accordingly, I would like to simplify Clark's model into two rules so as to make my proof easier to understand. And for this proof, I too, will be speaking metaphorically, asking you to visualize that in the example below, "the Man" stands for the brain, "crossing the river" stands for accomplishing a task, and "the construction team" stands for body and environment:
- Facing a river, if a man had a choice as to whether to walk over a bridge, or first to build a bridge for walking over it, he would opt for the former.
(Rule of taking the existent path)- If a man had to build a bridge across the river, he would bring along a construction team to carry out the project.
(Rule of achieving efficiency by cooperation with body and environment)next:"I would now like to use two examples..."