Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (18 page)

Seldom if ever reflecting on the literal meaning of what we are saying, we casually speak of such things as:

and of course we could go on forever. The halo of a word gradually moves outwards or, rather, the blurry boundaries of the concept named by a word gradually engulf what were once metaphorical swamps and forests and turn them into apartment buildings, parks, and shopping malls.

Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have shown that there are certain systematic tendencies that guide the construction of a number of metaphors in everyday language. Their studies, along with related studies by other researchers, have helped to demonstrate that metaphors, far from being just an elegant rhetorical flourish exploited solely by poets and orators, are the coin of the realm in much of ordinary discourse. For example, time is often characterized linguistically in terms of physical space (
in
three weeks;
at
four o’clock; a
distant
era; the
near
future;
from
now on; a tradition that
goes back
to the seventeenth century), and conversely, space is often represented in terms of time (the first street
after
the traffic light; the road changes name
when
it crosses the river; a star twelve
light-years
distant). Likewise, life is often spoken of in terms of motion or a trip (the
path
of her success; a
sinuous
career; the
dead end
in which they’re trapped), with everyday events as places one passes through (I’m
going
to see them tomorrow; I’ll
come back
to that point), and happiness and unhappiness are often represented by the concepts of high and low (
raising
someone’s morale; to be in
seventh heaven
; to
plunge
into despair; to be very
down
). Abstract notions are often conveyed through comparisons to familiar human activities (her experiment
gave birth
to a new theory; the facts
speak for themselves
; fate
played dirty tricks
on me; life was
cruel
to her; a religion
dictates
certain behaviors; his fatigue
caught up
with him). Complex situations are often cast in terms of a metaphorical fight with a metaphorical adversary (the recession is our
enemy
; our economy has been
weakened
by inflation; corruption must be
fought
; outsourcing
kills
growth; we are
victims
of the stock-market crash; we have
declared war
on the economic crisis; we have
won a battle
against unemployment, etc.). Systematic families of metaphors such as these abound in human languages and they explain, at least in part, the great richness inherent in even our most casual and informal speech.

On the other hand, thousands of words are used metaphorically without belonging to any systematic family of metaphors. Here is a small set of examples:

and on and on.

Calling someone “butterfingers”, for instance, does not belong to any large, overarching system of metaphors, but the image is very easy to relate to, since butter is slick and slippery, and thus, one imagines, a person whose fingers were covered with butter (or even were
made
of butter) would be completely unable to catch a ball or hold
onto anything at all. Therefore, someone who often drops balls that are thrown to them can be easily found in the (metaphorical) halo of the concept of
buttery fingers.
In summary, we often come up with a label for a complex situation by finding a more familiar concrete situation to which it is analogically linked, and then borrowing the standard name of the concrete situation. Such a strategy allows us to create a useful verbal label for a new category of situations.

The act of “metaphorization”, whether it is broad and systematic, like the set of metaphors portraying life as a voyage, or narrow and one-of-a-kind, like “butterfingers” and the other phrases cited in the display above, is a crucial aspect of the way in which we naturally extend our categories. The human mind is forever seeking novelty, and it would never be satisfied with a limited and fixed set of metaphors. One might say that human nature is characterized by a constant, intense drive to go beyond all conventional metaphors, which are often labeled “dead metaphors”, since when a metaphor is used enough, one no longer hears the original imagery behind it and it loses all its sparkle. Categories are extended successively via metaphors that at first are used over and over again in a vivid, evocative fashion, but then, like dough that first needs to settle before rising, they gradually congeal and become inert, and this very fact sparks a quest for a new extension. Each time a metaphor loses its punch, we push the boundaries further out with new metaphors, always with the goal of understanding more directly and intensely what surrounds us, of adjusting to change, and of adding piquancy and novelty to the way we see familiar things.

It might seem tempting to establish precise boundaries for each category, just as we do for cities, and to declare that anything that is found outside of those boundaries is not a member, end of story. In order to retain some flexibility, however, one could grant the title of “honorary member” to certain non-members, as long as they were found within a certain distance of the category’s
official
boundaries; in such specially sanctioned cases, one would put the category’s name in quotes to indicate that this would be an
official
metaphorical usage. In such a world, then, if someone said, “Ella has a large circle of friends”, it could mean only one thing — namely, that Ella’s friends were neatly arranged in a big closed curve having a fixed radius; to indicate otherwise, one would have to say, “Ella has a large ‘circle’ of friends”, and in order that one’s listeners would realize that the term was not being used literally, one would have to wag one’s fingers in a quote-marky fashion or else say, “so to speak” or “quote unquote” or “metaphorically speaking” or something of the sort.

In a world where this linguistic convention held sway, Galileo would not have seen the moons of Jupiter but the “Moons”, quote unquote, of Jupiter. And no one would ever come home to the cocoon of their family (since the expression would make no sense, unless the family had acquired one prized cocoon, but even then it would be far too small for a human to fit into) but
so to speak
to the cocoon of their family, or to the
metaphorical
cocoon of their family. One would no longer
give
kisses, but one could
metaphorically
give a kiss to someone or
so to speak
give a kiss to someone. One would never be
under pressure
, but quote-unquote under pressure, and as for the so-called pressure, it too would have to be in quotes, unless one were a diver thirty meters below the surface of the sea. And so on and so forth, without end.

Unfortunately, such a solution would give rise to more problems than it would solve. Firstly, those “precise boundaries of categories” — even of the most common categories — are nonexistent, as we’ve shown. And secondly, even were we to imagine that categories could be precisely defined, the problem of identifying their so-called “honorary members” would not be solved. Earlier we suggested that some entity located outside the border of a concept would be granted this title provided it were “sufficiently near” the boundary line — but what is the nature of this conceptual distance that would allow us to measure proximity precisely? What kind of yardstick would we use to measure distances? And would there be precise outer limits for the use of quote marks, beyond which even “quote unquote” would not apply? And would all of this be taught to children in courses on categorization and quotation-mark usage?

We could of course imagine introducing second-order quotation marks, which would be used to name entities found in a ring yet further out from the concept’s core than the first-order quote-mark ring. One’s fingers would soon become indispensable aids to one’s mouth in communicating these subtle distinctions. Among the most frequent words and phrases would be “so-called”, “in quotes”, “so to speak”, “metaphorically”, and others. In addition, there would be a whole system for expressing the number of quotation marks needed — second-order, third-order, and so on — in other words, oral or manual “roadsigns” telling the distance to the center of the “city”. It’s “pretty” clear that this “ ‘straitjacket’ ” would soon “give” “ ‘ “royal” ’ ” “ ‘headaches’ ” to anyone who “wore” it, metaphorically “speaking”.

The idea of courses to teach people how to categorize and how to use quotation marks to indicate metaphorical uses of terms seems ridiculous, and for good reason. It’s like imagining that in elementary school we should teach children how to walk, eat, and breathe. The reason we don’t do that is that our bodies were fashioned by evolution to do such things, and it makes no sense to teach a body what it was designed by nature to do. The same can be said about our brains, which evolved as powerful machines for categorization as well as for quotation-mark deployment. But there is no sharp boundary between pure categorization and quotation-mark deployment, for all the reasons just given. A category has an ancient core, some commercial zones, some residential zones, an outer ring, and then suburbs that slowly and imperceptibly shade off into countryside. It’s tempting to say that perceiving something as a member of the “old town” or “downtown” is an act of “pure” categorization, while seeing something as belonging to the outer ring or the suburbs involves a certain amount of quotation-mark deployment — but a bit of thought shows that one passes smoothly and continuously from a concept’s core to its fringes, and there are no clean and clear
demarcation lines anywhere. All these concentric layers making up a category in its full glory are the result of a spectrum of analogies of different types, collectively made by millions of people over a period ranging from dozens to thousands of years. These analogies form a seamless continuum; they range from the simplest and easiest to make, giving rise to the concept’s core (so simple and natural that they are not even seen as analogies by an untrained observer), to more interesting and lively ones, giving rise to the suburbs, and finishing up with extremely far-fetched and unconvincing analogies, giving rise to the remote countryside (that is, objects or situations that hardly anyone would consider as belonging to the category in any sense).