Wisdom & Metaphor

WISDOM & METAPHOR

]an Zwicky Wi

GASPEREAU PRESS

KENTVILLE, NOVA SCOTIA

MMIII

Metaphor is a part ofthe not-knowing aspect ofart, and yet I'm firmly convinced that it is the supreme way ofsearching for truth. How can this be? CHARLES SIMIC

FOREWORD ~Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, according to Shelley. Whether or not this is true, they are, according to this book, among its unacknowledged thinkers. This is because the shape of metaphorical thought is also the shape of wisdom: what a human mind must do in order to comprehend a metaphor is a version of what it must do in order to be wise. But of course we are not wise in a vacuum; we are wise about things, situations, people, the world. Thus, this book argues, those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world.

These views are, in a number of ways, an extension of those developed in an earlier book called Lyric Philosophy. While it is not necessary to read that book in order to understand this one, it may help readers to know that two key terms from that discussion put in cameo appearances here . Those terms are 'lyric' and 'domesticity'; and in each case the earlier work fore grounds an understanding that is to some degree unusual. In particular, my use of'lyric' quite deliberately sets aside surface historical associations with Romantic poetry in order to pursue what might be called its deep epistemological structure. The word has been used to characterize things as disparate as Vermeer's paintings and Schubert's use of diatonic tonality, and what is common to them all, I believe, is thought whose eras is coherence. Thus, the characteristic formal properties oflyric, I have suggested, are resonance and integrity; and, as a fundamentally integrative mode of thought, I have argued that it is, at root, a flight from the condition oflanguage.

My use of'domesticity', on the other hand, sets aside connotative associations with clean aprons and contentment to focus on the attempt to lead a life that is neither swept up in the objectif}ring project of tool-use (which includes the use oflanguage) nor in the impossible goal of sustained lyric comprehension. Domesticity, I have suggested, is not so much a static mid-point between these two contrary moments in human desire as it is an active acknowledgement that the tension between them cannot be resolved. It is an attempt to come home to ourselves in the presence of that tension. The shape of the text itself is a response partly to the demand that form follow sense and partly to the need to mediate between the lyric and the scholarly. The series of aphorisms that make up the left-hand text is organizationally dominant, and the entries in the parallel right-hand text are, for the most part, attempts to illustrate, extend, or comment on the left's claims and arguments. There are, however, important intra- as well as inter-textual resonances, and for that reason, the right-hand text can, to some extent, be approached as an aphoristic archipelago of its own. Together with the left-hand text, I hope it is able to suggest new readings of certain passages in Wittgenstein and Herakleitos. As a whole, I hope the book is able to defend the necessity of both love and wisdom to the continued life of philosophy. Williamstown, October 2000

I am interested in the phenomenon of'se~as' because it encapsulates the mystery of meaning. The moment of recognition happens as if by m agic; and yet, when we reflect on it, we see- its very name tells us this-that it is impossible without prior experience. What becomes puzzling then is the phenomenon of insight, the creation (apparently) of new meaning. Here, we forget that to recognize can mean to re-think, as in think through differently. It need not always signify mere repetition of a former cognition. We say in such cases not only that we recognize x (as Y), but that we realize xis Y. In fact, we almost never use the word 'recognize' -even in the most straightforward cases of identification or recall - unless there is some problem: we don't see her face clearly, or she has changed, or we met only briefly years ago . That is, 'recognition', even in apparently straightforward cases, involves re-organization of experience- an act of contextualization, a sensing of connexions between aspects of immediate experience and other experiences. Thus, the experiences of seeing how an assemblage of parts must go together, recognizing an old friend in an unfamiliar setting, and understanding a metaphor are species of the same phenomenon. They all involve insight, understood as re-cognition; a gestalt shift. And this is the original of meaning.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

564. Now when the aspect dawns, can I separate a visual experience from a tho ught-experience?- If you separate them the dawning of the aspect seems to vanish. 565. I think it could also be put this way: Astonishment is essential to a change of aspect. And astonishment is thinking.

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The experience of understanding something is always the experience of a gestalt- the dawning of an aspect that is simultaneously a perception or reperception of a whole. One way the facilitation of understanding may proceed, then, is by the judicious selection and arrangement of elements of that whole. Another is by the setting up of objects of comparison.

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Charles Simic My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc .... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear.... In its essence an interesting poem is an epistemological and metaphysical problem for the poet.

Ludwig Wittgenstein 12 7- The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.

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All genuine understanding is a form of seeing-as: it is fundamentally spatial in organization.

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Max Wertheimer

Thinking consists in envisaging, realizing structural features and structural requirements; proceeding in accordance with, and determined by, these requirements; thereby changing the situation in the direction of structural improvements, which involves: that gaps, tro uble-regions, disturbances, superficialities, etc., be viewed and dealt with structurally; that inner structural relations- fitting or not fitting- be sought among such disturbances and the given situation as a whole and among its various parts; that there be operations of structural grouping and segregation, of centering, etc.; that operations be viewed and treated in their structural place, role, dynamic meaning, including realization of the changes which this involves; realizing structural transposability, structural hierarchy, and separating structurally peripheral from fundamental features- a special case of grouping; looking for structural rather than piecemeal truth.

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Metaphor is a species of understanding, a form of seeing-as: it has, we might say, flex. We see, simultaneously, similarities and dissimilarities. In metaphor we experience a gestalt shift from one distinct intellectual and emotional complex to another "in an instant of time". A metaphor, then, is also a meta-image. It is multiply resonant.

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Charles Wright I never quite got it, what they meant, but now I do, Waking each morning at dawn, Or before, some shapeless, unfingerprintable dread On me like cold-crossed humidity, Extinction shouldering, like a season, in from my dreamscape. Without my glasses, the light around the window shade Throbs like an aura, so faint At first, then luminous with its broken promisesFeckless icon, dark reliquary. Mortality hunches, like fine furniture, crowding the room.

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By 'metaphor' I mean the linguistic expression of the results of focussed analogical thinking. The linguistic expression of focus sed analogical thinking need not issue in a 'strict' metaphor, an explicit claim that xis Y. For my purposes, "construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap" is as much a metaphorical claim as "my heart is a sad device". Strictly speaking, "xis y" is not a metaphorical claim unless "xis not y" is true. In the general case, an expression is not metaphorical unless it implies-or insinuates - a claim of the form "xis y" where "xis not y" is true. ("A construction crane is the sort of thing that can desire to take big leaps.") Similes and analogies, too, are metaphorical in the sense I am concerned with. The 'like' in such figures is merely a nod in the direction of the strict metaphor's implicit 'is not'. What is important for understanding the ontology of metaphor is not that the 'is not' be fully implicit, nor that it be strictly implied, but that it be there.

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Herakleitos They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself [literally, how being brought apart it is brought together with itself]: there is a back-stretched connexion, as in the bow and the lyre.

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Metaphor is one way of showing how patterns of meaning in the world intersect and echo one another. The ability to think analogically is a reflection of sensitivity to ontological form.

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Max Wertheimer The fundamental question can be very simply stated : Are the parts of a given whole determined by the inner structure of that whole, or are the events such that, as independent, piecemeal, fortuitous and blind, the total activity is a sum of the part-activities? Human beings can, of course, devise a kind of physics of their own - e.g. a sequence of machines - exemplifying the latter half of our question, but this does not signify that all natural phenomena are of this type. Here is a place where Gestalt theory is least easily understood and this because of the great number of prejudices about nature which have accumulated during the centuries. Nature is thought of as something essentially blind in its laws, where whatever takes place in the whole is purely a sum of individual occurrences. This view was the natural result of the struggle which physics has always had to purge itself of teleology.... . .. . For Hume and largely also for Kant the world is like a bundle of fragments, and the dogma of meaningless summations continues to play its part. As for logic , it supplies: concepts, which when rigorously viewed are but sums of properties; classes, which upon closer inspection prove to be mere catchalls; syllogisms, devised by arbitrarily lumping together any two propositions having the character that ... etc. When one considers what a concept is in living thought, what it really means to grasp a conclusion; when one considers what the crucial thing is about a mathematical proof and the concrete interrelationships it involves, one sees that the categories of traditional logic have accomplished nothing in this direction. It is our task to inquire whether a logic is poss ible which is not piecemeal. ... Pictorially: suppose the world were a vast plateau upon which were many musicians. I walk about listening and watching the players. First suppose that the world is a meaningless plurality. Everyone does as he will, each for himself. What happens together when I hear ten players might be the basis for my guessing as to what they all are doing, but this is merely a matter of chance and probability much as in the kinetics of gas molecules. -A second possibility would be that each time one musician played c, another played f so and so many seconds later. I work out a theory of blind couplings but the playing as a whole remains meaningless. This is what many people think physics does, but the real work of physics belies this.- The third possibility is, say, a Beethoven symphony where it would be possible for one to select one part of the whole and work from that towards an idea of the structural principle motivating and determining the whole. Here the fundamental laws are not those of fortuitous pieces, but concern the very character of the event.

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Although understanding is spatial in organization, it is not necessarily visual or tactile. All grasp of musical ideas, for example, involves perception of a gestalt. One might say: ontological understanding is rooted in the perception of patterned resonance in the world. Philosophy, practised as a setting of things side by side until the similarity dawns , is a form of ontological appreciation.

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G.E.Moore What Aesthetics tries to do, [Wittgenstein J said, is to give reasons, e.g. for having this word rather than that in a particular place in a poem, or for having this musical phrase rather than that in a particular place in a piece of music. Brahms' reason for rejecting Joachim's suggestion that his Fourth Symphony should be opened by two chords was not that that wouldn't produce the feeling he wanted to produce, but something more like "That isn't what I meant". Reasons, he said , in Aesthetics, are "of the nature of further descriptions": e.g. you can make a person see what Brahms was driving at by showing him lots of different pieces by Brahms, or by comparing him with a contemporary author; and all that Aesthetics does is "to draw your attention to a thing", to "place things side by side". He said that if, by giving "reasons" of this sort, you make another person "see what you see" but it still "doesn't appeal to him", that is "an end" of the discussion; and that what he, Wittgenstein, had "at the back of his mind " was "the idea that aesthetic discussions were like discussions in a court of law", where yo u try to "clear up the circumstances" of the action which is being tried , hoping that in the end what you say will "appeal to the judge". And he said that the same sort of "reasons" were given, not only in Ethics , but also in Philosophy.

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A metaphor sets one thing beside another and says, "See, they have the same form". Which is to say: they make the same gesture; they mean in the same way. Why, then, is metaphor, as a linguistic trope, dependent on an implicit ' not'?-Metaphor results from an over-riding of calcified gestures of thought by being.

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Louise Gliick Art is not a service. Or, rather, it does not reliably serve all people in a standardized way. Its service is to the spirit, from which it removes the misery of inertia. It does this by refocusing an existing image of the world ... -where the flat white of the page was, a field of energy emerges.

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A good metaphor is no m ore a clever artifact than is an intelligently musical use oflanguage. Both , in different ways, are attempts to tell the truth, to get at the shapes of what-is. A good metaphor is the expression of a homology, an isomorphism, between the way two things gesture.

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DavidAbram ... Levy-Bruhl used the word "participation" to characterize the animistic logic of indigenous, oral peoples- for whom ostensibly "inanimate" objects like stones or mountains are often thought to be alive, for whom certain names, spoken aloud, may be felt to influence at a distance the things or beings that they name, for whom particular plants, particular animals, particular places and persons and powers may all be felt to participate in one another's existence, influencing each other and being influenced in turn. For Levy-Bruhl participation was thus a perceived relation between diverse phenomena; Merleau-Ponty's work, however, suggests that participation is a defining attribute of perception itself. By asserting that perception, phenomenologically considered, is inherently participatory, we mean that perception always involves , at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives. Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists.

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The implied 'is not' in a metaphor points to a gap in language through which we glimpse the world. That which we glimpse is what the 'is' in a metaphor points to.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein 171. Experiencing an aspect expresses itself in this way: "Now it is ... " 172. What is the philosophical importance of this phenomenon? Is it really so much odder than everyday visual experiences? Does it cast an unexpected light on them?-In the description of it, (the) problems about the concept of seeing come to a head. 174. What is strange is really the surprise; the question "How is it

possible!" It might be expressed by: "The same-and yet not the sam e." 175. The paradox may manifest itself in laughter. But couldn't we also imagine someone who wouldn't laugh in this situation; to whom nothing seemed paradoxical.

And yet he too would experience the change of aspect. He would call the picture firs t one thing, then another: and that would be all. 176. And what is he doing? What he presents as an expression of

his experience would otherwise be a perceptual report. (The strong similarity with the experience of meaning.)

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The truth of the implicit 'is not': this suggests that the positive assertion in a metaphor is always an act of overcoming. -As though 'calcified' uses must in fact precede metaphorical gestures; as though it were characteristic oflanguage that it first conceal the world- be non-metaphorical - before the metaphor reveals it to us.

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Nelson Goodman

In metaphor, ... a term with an extension established by habit is applied elsewhere under the influence of that habit; there is both departure from and deference to precedent. ... An understanding of metaphor further requires the recognition

that a label functions not in isolation but as belonging to a family.... . . . . What occurs is a transfer of a schema, a migration of concepts, an alienation of categories. Indeed, a metaphor might be regarded as a calculated category-mistake-or rather as a happy and revitalizing, even if bigamous, second marriage.

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But doesn't non-metaphorical language tell the truth abo ut the world , too? Aren't eyes eyes and windows windows? -Yes, that's one way oflooking at it.

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I. A. Richards

.. . any part of a discourse, in the last resort, does what it does only because the other parts of the surrounding, uttered or unuttered, discourse and its conditions are what they are. "In the last resort" - the last resort here is mercifully a long way off and very deep down. Short of it we are aware of certain stabilities which hide from us this universal relativity or, better, interdependence of meanings. Some words and sentences still more, do seem to mean what they mean absolutely and unconditionally. This is because the conditions governing their meanings are so constant that we can disregard them. So the weight of a cubic centimeter of water seems a fixed and absolute thing because of the constancy of its governing conditions. In weighing out a pound of tea we can forget about the mass of the earth. And with words which have constant conditions the common sense view that they have fixed proper meanings, which should be learned and observed, is justified. But these words are fewer than we suppose. Most words, as they pass from context to context, change their meanings; and in many different ways. It is their duty and their service to us to do so .... [T]he Proper Meaning Superstition .... [is] the common belief ... that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered. This superstition is a recognition of a certain kind of stability in the meanings of certain words. It is only a superstition when it forgets (as it commonly does) that the stability of the meaning of a word comes from the constancy of the contexts that give it its meaning. Stability in a word's meaning is not something to be assumed, but always something to be explained . . . . what a word means is the missing parts of the contexts from which it draws its delegated efficacy.

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So, then: What do calcified linguistic gestures make possible?

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

What compels us so to form the concept of identity as to say, e.g., "If you really do the same thing both times, then the result must be the same too"? - What compels us to proceed according to a rule, to conceive something as a rule? What compels us to talk to ourselves in the forms of the languages we have learnt?

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