Faith & Reason, Part 3: The Nature of Metaphor

Note: I altered some of this entry after studying conceptual metaphor more this summer.

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In the hopes of locating a tension between faith and reason by means of armchair philosophy I first explored the subject of Belief. I found nothing to be of help – just the opposite. Now I turn to Metaphor.

Appreciation has been growing for the metaphorical-like way we grasp one knowledge domain in terms of another very disparate knowledge domain; a corollary to this is the growing appreciation for what we are more familiar with: linguistic metaphor, such as ‘Juliet is the Sun’ or the first time someone said ‘take a hike’.

See for example:

Gibbs, Raymond (2006), ‘Metaphor Interpretation as Embodied Simulation’, Mind & Language, 21:3, pp. 434-58. Sopory, Pradeep (2005), ‘Metaphor and Affect’, Poetics Today 26:3, pp. 433-58. Hogan, Patrick (2002), ‘A Minimal, Lexicalist/Constituent Transfer Account of Metaphor’, Style, 36:3, pp. 484-502. (2003a), The Mind and Its Stories. Cambridge University Press. (2003b), Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (Routledge). Johnson, Mark and George Lakoff (1999), Philosophy In The Flesh (Perseus Books Group). Ritchie, David (2003), ‘ARGUMENT IS WAR—Or is it a Game of Chess? Multiple Meanings in the Analysis of Implicit Metaphors’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18:2, pp. 125-46. (2004), ‘Common Ground in Metaphor Theory: Continuing the Conversation’, Metaphor and Symbol, 19:3, 233-44. Guttenplan, Samuel (2005), Objects of Metaphor (Oxford University Press).

Novel metaphor is ubiquitous in natural language, and in fact appears necessary for understanding objects of science and our own unconscious mind. This is in part because metaphor allows us to understand something ‘not seen’ according to a domain we have a good deal of experiential knowledge of. More generally, though, this just seems to be a basic way in which our mind ‘maps’ any new domain of experience onto existing domains of knowledge. To make a metaphor out of linguistic ‘metaphor’, we could say that at root we know the world and ourselves metaphorically.

Metaphor is the predominate language of religion – once thought a liability, this fact may now be considered a strength. Just as the non-Christian and Christian know that in the same way – a fact well conceded by Plantinga’s popular conceptual analysis – the non-Christian and Christian also know metaphorically in the same way. There is no distinction in cognitive understanding between grasping the sage’s claim that ‘God is a rock’ and the philosopher’s claim that the unconscious mind locates, tracks, and identifies objects.

Something further follows: Sage, philosopher, and scientist are all free to engage in a form of understanding that does not permit matter of fact yes or no answers. Metaphor is not the sort of thing that is precisely true or false, but rather more or less apt; it would make no sense to assume that there is a cut and dry answer to the question “Is it really true that Juliet is the Sun?”; but it would be relevant to ask how apt the metaphor was in conveying the reality or experience it meant to capture. ‘Reason’, it would seem, should be able to include this form of understanding; but if so, Reason requires precise statements of fact no more than faith does. There is nothing hocus pocus going on cognitively when a Christian grasps the language of religion as found in ancient poetic texts – whether Christianity is true or not. And if Christianity was true, it is this sort of cognitive grasping that we would assume to be the most natural and effective way to understand God and ourselves.

Making a different but relevant point, C.S. Lewis argues that a sort of ‘faith’ is necessary for the successful engagement with a poet’s metaphor. Poetic language can only be received if you

are ready to meet it half-way. It is no good holding a dialectical pistol to the poet’s head demanding how the deuce a river could have hair, or thought be green, or a woman a red rose. You may win, in the sense of putting him to a non-plus. But if he had anything to tell you, you will never get it by behaving in that way. You must begin by trusting him. Only by so doing will you find out whether he is trustworthy or not. Credo ut intelligam…is here the only attitude.

You must trust the poet, have faith in the aptness of a poet’s metaphor, if you wish to grasp at all what the poet is claiming the metaphor is apt to reveal. One must believe in order to understand what the metaphor has to offer. Skeptical, critical enquiry is methodologically contrary to this mode of understanding. The same point could be made about Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance, where one must in a sense give in and treat an unconscious system as an intentional agent in order to understand and predict the system’s ‘behavior’. (On my view, Dennett’s thesis collapses to a straightforward metaphorical account of knowing.)

There is then, a sort of perfectly rational ’seeing’ that phrases in the form of ‘A is B’ are able to produce that is distinct from statement of fact and may not be sufficiently translatable to statements of fact. Analytic philosophy’s past failure to admit this is a bit of a scandal it seems to me.

So I give up my armchair attempt at locating, philosophically, the tension between faith and reason with respect to Metaphor. But again, our concern about the tension about faith and reason is a very reasonable one, a very sound, practical concern resonating with the intuition of most over many centuries. So where do we turn to address this tension? I have already found Belief to give us nothing, and now Metaphor is a dead end. Before abandoning philosophy proper altogether, I will give two other important topics a try: Narrative and Knowledge.

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Posted by metzler on Saturday, May 9, 2009, at 4:49 pm.
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Faith & Reason, Part 3: The Nature of Metaphor

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