Can We Have Thought without Metaphor?
"However, by resorting to metaphor, subjective concepts are tremendously simplified."
[page 3]In light of the second Rule of cooperation, metaphor reveals another essential significance. It represents a mechanism in which the brain exploits physical and environmental logic to press for greater efficiency. Bear in mind that the brain initially has two choices for handling subjective concepts: it can either assign that task to a specialized department, the subjective domain, or engage the relatively simpler physical or environmental domain to accomplish the mission "metaphorically." In order to illustrate the efficiency and simplicity of the second, collaborative approach, I shall start off by showing how complicated things may get if the brain were to attempt to understand subjective concepts within the subjective domain only.
Allow me to dwell on the primary metaphor "affection is warmth" offered by Lakoff and Johnson one more time. Instead of using a metaphor, if we apply purely subjective reasoning, affection may be described as fondness. But then what exactly is fondness? For fondness is nothing but another subjective concept. After some chucking and humming, the brain decides that fondness is to be depicted as liking, which is best represented by love, which in turn can be explained as adoration.… No matter how hard the the brain tries, it always comes up with yet another subjective concept to be addressed. Sadly, while the brain restlessly "kicks the ball" from one subjective concept to another, this exhausting process has not yielded any constructive results at all. Thus we come to the conclusion that it is indeed immensely difficult, if not impossible, to grasp subjective understanding within the subjective domain alone.
However, by resorting to metaphor, subjective concepts are tremendously simplified. In the actual workings of the brain, the concept "affection" automatically activates the sense of "warmth" in the sensorimotor domain, which is straightforwardly settled by physical logic (we all know what warmth feels like). In other words, the exhausting part, that involving logic, is disentangled and performed outside the subjective domain. Generally speaking, the premise of this simple and trouble-free solution is that the brain views itself, together with the body and the environment, as an interanimated unity, which is essentially what Rule 2 is all about.
Moreover, Rule 2 states that the brain achieves efficiency by exploiting the body and the environment. So there must be metaphors that engage environmental logic, which Lakoff and Johnson have not really mentioned, since most of their examples (such as "affection and warmth") are based on physical, and particularly biological, logic. Sure enough, we can indeed find metaphors that exploit the environment, like "he wants to network with you" or "he tries to upgrade his knowledge by taking night classes." "Network" and "upgrade" originally come from the language of computers, and are purely environmental. It is amazing that the brain is able to utilize these words, which are totally independent of us, to express subjective concepts like "communication" and "improvement" in such a precise and efficient way.
In conclusion, Clark's model of the brain has helped us gain an insight into metaphor, a brainchild that exhibits both the brain's favor for "incremental processes" (259) and its dynamic collaboration with body and environment, resulting in enormous efficiency. Taking this a step further, if we look carefully at the working mechanism of the brain, whether in simple tasks like drinking or in complicated ones like understanding subjective concepts, we may even want to investigate whether our entire biological system builds upon a natural tendency towards efficiency.1 Certainly, this tendency for efficiency appears to be present in almost every aspect of the body's daily life. But it is important to see that it is not just the brain, and not just the body, but the incredibly powerful brain-body-environment alliance, which has endowed us with this competence that helps ease our complex journey in an even more complex world.
Note
1 Thanks to the writing assistant from the USP Writing Centre who helped me clarify my conclusion.
Works Cited
Clark, Andy. "Where Brain, Body, and World Collide." Daedalus 127 (1998): 256-277.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.About the writer: Zhou Bowen is an Environmental Engineering major who joined the USP in 2004. This paper was written for Don Favareau's Multidisciplinary Perspectives on "Mind."
[Page 1, 2, 3]
Go to volume 4, 2005