METAPHORS WE LIVE BY


We see a single human motivation behind the myths of both objectivism and subjectivism, namely, a concern for understanding. The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding- what the individual finds meaningful and what makes his life worth living. The experientialist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns. It offers a perspective from which both concerns can be met at once.
The old myths share a common perspective: man as separate from his environment. Within the myth of objectivism, the concern for truth grows out of a concern for successful functioning. Given a view of man as separate from his environment, successful functioning is conceived of as mastery over the environment. Hence, the objectivist metaphors KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and SCIENCE PROVIDES CONTROL OVER NATURE.
The principal theme of the myth of subjectivism is the attempt to overcome the alienation that results from viewing man as separate from his environment and from other men. This involves an embracing of the self- of individuality and reliance upon personal feelings, intuition, and values. The Romanticist version involves reveling in the senses and the feelings and attempting to gain union with nature through passive appreciation of it.
The experientialist myth takes the perspective of man as part of his environment, not as separate from it. It focuses on constant interaction with the physical environment and with other people. It views this interaction with the environment as involving mutual change. You cannot function within environment without changing it or being changed by it.
Within the experientialist myth, understanding emerges from interaction, from constant negotiation with the environment and other people. It emerges in the following way: the nature of our bodies and our physical and cultural envi9ronments imposes a structure on our experience, in terms of natural dimensions of the sort we have discussed. Recurrent experience leads to the formation of categories, which are experiential gestalts with those natural dimensions. Such gestalts define coherence in our experience. We understand our experience directly when we see it as being structured coherently in terms of gestalts that have emerged directly from interaction with and in our environment. We understand experience metaphorically when we use a gestalt from one domain of experience to structure experience in another domain.
From the experientialist perspective, truth depends on understanding, which emerges from functioning in the world. It is through such understanding that the experientialist alternative meets the objectivist’s need for an account of truth. It is through the coherent structuring of experience that the experientialist alternative satisfies the subjectivist’s need for personal meaning and significance.
But experientialism provides more than just a synthesis that meets the motivating concerns of objectivism and subjectivism. The experientialist account of understanding provides a richer perspective on some of the most important areas of experience in our everyday lives:

Interpersonal communication and mutual understanding
Self –understanding
Ritual
Aesthetic experience
Politics


We feel the objectivism and subjectivism both provide impoverished views of all of these areas because each misses the motivating concerns of the other. What they both miss in all of these areas is an interactionally based and creative understanding. Let us turn to an experientialist account of the nature of understanding in each of these areas.


Interpersonal Communication and Mutual Understanding

When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need patience, certain flexibility in world view, and in generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while deemphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experience. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and skill and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves-disembodies, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUIT metaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.

Self-understanding

The capacity for self-understanding presupposes the capacity for mutual understanding. Common sense tells us that it’s easier to understand ourselves than to understand other people. After all, we tend to think that we have direct access to out own feelings and ideas and not to anybody else’s. Self-understanding seems prior to mutual understanding, and in some ways it is. But any really deep understanding of why we do what we do, feel what we feel, change as we change, and even believe what we believe, takes us beyond ourselves. Understanding of ourselves is not unlike other forms of understanding-it comes out of our constant interactions with out physical, cultural, and out interpersonal environment. At a minimum, the skills required for mutual understanding are necessary even to approach self-understanding. Just as in mutual understanding we constantly search out commonalities of experience when we speak with other people, so in self-understanding we are always searching for what unifies our own diverse experiences in order to give coherence to our lives. Just as we seek out metaphors to highlight and make coherent what we have in common with someone else, so we seek out personal metaphors to highlight and make coherent our own pasts, out present activities, and our dreams, hopes, and goals as well. A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives. Self-understanding requires unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of your experiences to yourself. In therapy, for example, much of self-understanding involves consciously recognizing previously unconscious metaphors and how we live by them. It involves the constant construction of new coherences in your life, coherences that give new meaning to old experiences. The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself.
The experientialist approach to the process of self-understanding involves:

• Developing an awareness of the metaphors we live by and un awareness of where they enter into our everyday lives and where they do not
• Having experiences that can form the basis of alternative metaphors
• Developing an “experiential flexibility”
• Engaging in an unending process of viewing your life through new alternative metaphors


Ritual

We are constantly performing rituals, from casual rituals, like making the morning coffee by the same sequence of steps each day and watching the eleven o clock news straight to the end (after we’ve seen it already at six o clock); to going to the football games, Thanksgiving dinners, and university lectures by distinguished visitors; and so on to the most solemn prescribed religious practices. All are repeated structured practices, some consciously designed in detail, some more consciously performed than others, and some emerging spontaneously. Each ritual is a repeated, coherently structured, and unified aspect of our experience. In performing them, we give structure and significance to our activities, minimizing chaos and disparity in our actions. In our terms, a ritual is one kind of experiential gestalt. It is a coherent sequence of actions, structured in terms of the natural dimensions of our experience. Religious rituals are typically metaphorical kinds of activities, which usually involve metonymies—real-world objects standing for entities in the world as defined by the conceptual system of the religion. The coherent structure of the ritual is commonly taken as paralleling some aspect of reality as it is seen through the religion.
Everyday personal rituals are also experiential gestalts consisting of sequences of actions structured along the natural dimensions of experience—a part-whole structure, stages, causal relationships, and means of accomplishing goals. Personal rituals are thus natural kinds of activities for individuals or for members of a subculture. They may or may not be metaphorical kinds of activities. For example, it is common in Los Angeles to engage in the ritual activity of driving by the homes of Hollywood stars. This is a metaphorical kind of activity based on the metonymy THE HOME STANDS FOR THE PERSON and the metaphor PHYSICAL CLOSENESS IS PERSONAL CLOSENESS. Other everyday rituals, whether metaphorical or not, provide experiential gestalts that can be the basis of metaphors, e.g., “You don’t know what you’re opening the door to,” “Lets roll up our sleeves and get down to work,” etc.
We suggest that

• The metaphors we live by, whether cultural or personal, are partially preserved in ritual.
• Cultural metaphors, and the values entailed by them, are propagated by ritual.
• Ritual forms an indispensable part of the experiential basis for our cultural metaphorical systems. There can be no culture without ritual.


Similarly, there can be no coherent view of the self without personal ritual (typically of the casual and spontaneously emerging sort). Just as our personal metaphors are not random but form systems coherent with our personalities, so our personal rituals are not random but are coherent with our view of the world and ourselves and with our system of personal metaphors and metonymies. Our implicit and typically unconscious conceptions of ourselves and the values that we live by are perhaps most strongly reflected in the little things we do over and over, that is, in the causal rituals that have emerged spontaneously in our daily lives.

Aesthetic Experience

From the experientialist perspective, metaphor is a matter of imaginative rationality. It permits an understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another, creating coherences by virtue of imposing gestalts that are structured by natural dimensions of experience. New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.
But metaphor is not merely a matter of language. It is a matter of conceptual structure. And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect—it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: color, shape, texture, sound, etc. These dimensions structure not only mundane experience but aesthetic experience as well. Each art medium picks out certain dimensions of our experience and excludes others. Artworks provide new ways of structuring our experience in terms of these natural dimensions. Works of art provide new experiential gestalts and, therefore, new coherences. From the experientialist point of view, art is, in general, a matter of imaginative rationality and a means of creating new realities.
Aesthetic experience is thus not limited to the official art world. It can occur in any aspect of our everyday lives—whenever we take note of, or create for ourselves, new coherences that are not part of our conventionalized mode of perception or thought.


Politics

Political debate typically is concerned with issues of freedom and economics. But one can be both free and economically secure while leading a totally meaningless and empty existence. We see the metaphorical concepts of FREEDOM, EQUALITY, SAFETY, ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE, POWER, etc., as being different ways of getting indirectly at issues of meaning of existence. They are all necessary aspects of an adequate discussion of the issue, but, to our knowledge, no political ideology addresses the main issue head-on. In fact, many ideologies argue that matters of personal or cultural meaningfulness are secondary or to be addressed later. Any such ideology is dehumanizing.
Political and economic ideologies are framed in metaphorical terms. Like all other metaphors, political and economic metaphors can hide aspects of reality. But in the area of politics and economics, metaphors matter more, because they constrain our lives. A metaphor in a political or economic system, by virtue of what it hides, can lead to human degradation.
Consider just one example: LABOR IS A RESOURCE. Most contemporary economic theories, whether capitalist or specialist, treat labor as a natural resource or commodity, on a par with raw materials, and speak in the same terms of its cost and supply. What is hidden by the metaphor is the nature of the labor. No distinction is made between meaningful labor and dehumanizing labor. For all of the labor statistics, there is none on meaningful labor. When we accept the LABOR IS A RESOUCE metaphor and assume that the cost of resource defined in this way should be kept down, then cheap labor becomes a good thin, on a par with cheap oil. The exploitation of human beings through this metaphor is most obvious in countries that boast of “a virtually inexhaustible supply of cheap labor”—a neutral-sounding economic statement that hides the reality of human degradation. But virtually all major industrialized nations, whether capitalist or socialist, use the same metaphor in their economic theories and policies. The blind acceptance of the metaphor can hide degrading realities, whether meaningless blue-collar and white-collar industrial jobs in “advanced” societies or virtual slavery around the world.


GEORGE LAKOFF
MARK JOHNSON

The idea the metaphors can create realities goes against most traditional views of metaphor. The reasons is that metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a matter of mere language rather than primarily as a means of structuring our conceptual system and the kinds of everyday activities we perform.
It is reasonable enough to assume that words alone do not change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.
The idea that metaphor is just a matter of language and can at best only describe reality stems from the view that what is real is wholly external to, and independent of, how human beings conceptualize the world- as if the study of reality were just the study of physical world. Such a view of reality - so called objective reality- leaves out human aspects of reality , in particular the real perceptions, conceptualizations, motivations, and actionas that constitute most of what we experience. But the human aspect of reality are most of what matters to us, and those vary from culture to culture, since different cultures have different conceptual systems. Cultures also exist within physical environments, some of them radically different - jungles, deserts, islands etc. In each case there is a physical environment that we interact with, more or less succesfully. The conceptual system of various cultures partly depend on the physical environments they have developed in.
Each culture must provide a more or less succesful way of dealing with its environment, both adopting to it and changing it. Moreover, each culture must define a social reality within which people have roles that make sense to them and in terms of which they can function socially. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality.

What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, metaphor plays a very significant rolse in determining what is real for us.

A good thinker might teach one to be no more than what cultures, societies, religions, traditions and civilizations have always made one into, except they have only made one an automation.

What makes a thinker's task even harder is that he must say what he wants to the most by never saying it directly. It is a disability our use of language and the metaphorical-conceptual system acquired through its cultural implications given us. Every thinker -when not speaking in the strictest of scientific terms or introducing new and unfamiliar metaphors - must leave the original thought alone and touch only the ones standing next to it thus preserving its essence.

How "Thinking" progresses is by altering what was previously believed to be self evident, virtuous, the good, the truth. And any attempt to overthrow it, to even make the mildest suggestion against it gives the opportunity to wake up the "might is right " cow. It provides an opportunity to shake heads with the herd- to feel better by feeling belonged to something, anything.

There can not be one universal explanation or definition of the world around us. There can not be a morality universal to all. No set guidelines for how to behave. There is no starting point for thinking. No suggestions for what to read and in what order. No instructions on what to think and how to think it. Thought that is exactly how the world seems to work. A list of instructions for doing all of the above.
We are programmed to instinctively absorb information - or to go out seeking it - from our environment. Its mostly an automatic mechanism and usually that information is internalized for the purpose of utility that wither resembles most our individual natural instincts (virtues) or we've acquired them thought habit.

It does us benefit to keep in mind that our reasoning faculties are relatively new developments in our evolution. And perhaps the reasons they were allowed to evolve by the great evolutionary scheme was to serve the curiosity drive - substantiating our learning instinct for better genetic fitness- and even then on a very short leash. Our instinctual animal behavior is very efficient - millions of years of succesful breeding and the dominance of the planet has proved that so far- but our newly evolved conceptual system at many points seeks to experiment against the basic evolutionary guidelines but perhaps that is the requirement or rather the cost of consciousness.

While reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine today I found myself experimenting which led somewhere not very pleasant.
The experiment was to listen to different songs from different times in the past 7 years here and to see what memes they raise up. All was going well and playful until I played this song from back home, and all of a sudden the hell breaks loose.
It was a sadness that I have not felt in a very long time. Not even the restlessness of my dating experiences , of lonely days, of depression , of existential angst could match what I started feeling. I havent stopped smiling in the face of all kinds of trials and tribulations that life has thrown at me. Broken relationships, immigrations crap, tensions at work, I've been above them all , until now....
What...? Does Shoaib the great psychologist, the self proclaimed disisslussionist carrys unresolved feelings? Feelings so strong that he cant even smile? The door is shot to any happy thought as I take in the feeling. There probably wont be a later when I'll stand above this feeling and laugh.
There is a tempest in the tent. It must wait until I go back home.
It must be forgotten, burried, ignored.
The music must stop.