Chapter 1: Metaphor
Contents
I. Introduction: Metaphor as Prism
II. Metaphor in Myth and Religion
Metaphor is a slippery beast. Ignore it, and soon your notions of truth become muddled and contradictory. Esteem it too highly, and everything becomes relative and symbolic - there is no truth anymore, just convenient constructions. Metaphor can either clarify - and so convey - the truth, or it can obscure, and thereby confound.
Perhaps the best way to view metaphor is as a prism that diffracts the incoming light, separating it into its contituent parts. The light entering the prism is whole, indivisible. It is the unified Truth from which all other truths eminate. Passing through the prism, though, the light is broken down so that the viewer can see what informs it, inspect each part for its unique contribution to the whole. Likewise, a metaphor focuses and separates the single Truth of religion and science, allowing us to understand it more specifically, to explore its diversity without fragmenting its whole.
So, in the above image, metaphor is prism. Not literally, of course. Literally, a metaphor is a figure of speech, a term on a English quiz. Figuratively, or metaphorically, though, a metaphor is a prism, a tool for deeper understanding, a clear lens through which the incomprehensible becomes suddenly clear and discernable.
Metaphor is closely related to two other terms: simile and analogy. Some dictionaries simply conflate their definitions, using them as rough synonyms for each other. For literary or conversational purposes, this is fine. But for scholarly purposes, for the purpose of finding out the truth about the world, the distinctions are vital. Judged in terms of degree, you might say that simile is the weakest form of comparison, since it uses the qualifier words "like" and "as". Analogy lies in the middle, relating two distinct but easily related concepts: "Mitten is to hand as sock is to foot." That's a formal analogy. A more literary analogy might state, "The human heart resembles a mechanical pump." A heart and a pump are, of course, two very different things. But the relation is obvious - both are automatic, both produce energy through simple motion.
Metaphor is the most difficult method of comparison. Though it often relates two similar concepts, like analogy, it also may equate concepts that seem dissparate or even unrelated. For example: God is love, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the electron "cloud", string theory. God being love seems a reasonable equation; many people would say that their picture of God agrees with this assessment. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a little more confusing - we know that trees don't have "knowledge", much less of "good and evil". So why does the Bible endow a tree with this unlikely trait? And electrons and strings, being invisible, massless particles (or, in stings' case, quivering bands of energy), cannot possible be related to the clouds and strings we know in the "real" world.
Metaphor is used, then, when describing the unimaginable and the indescribable. Metaphor, like the aforementioned prism, breaks impossible concepts down into more possible conceptions. The danger lies in thinking the metaphor is the original concept - in assuming the prism makes the light.
It should not be contrued that there is no literal truth in such works as the Bible and Qu'ran. That is indeed not the case. But it must be remembered that these books, though holy and timeless in their spiritual teachings, were written at a point in history where certain modes of thought and speech were common and indeed required. Prophets like Moses, Jesus and Muhammad received divine teachings but had to wrap them in the idioms and phraseology of their historic moment. How else do we expect first or eighth century people to have related to them? While it is a mistake to define religious works as primarily historic documents, it is just as must an error to pull them completely out of context and imagine them to be aimed solely at our second-millennial sensibilities.
AliasEliot thought that metaphor was the best way to introduce you to a new worldview, because it is vital to know, in our complex and confusing world, what should be interpreted literally and what should not. Many of our most serious battles turn on this interpretive distinction. It is the cause of the Creationist versus Evolution debate, the argument over whether to veil Muslim women, what is meant by call to "jihad". It marks the philosophical divide between those who believe in reincarnation and those who believe in an afterlife; those who believe the faithful will rise bodily on the Day of Judgment, and those who cremate, thus destroying their earthly vessel; those who imagine "God the Father", and those who believe the true god to be essentially unknowable and beyond personality or name.
The words of holy books are often invoked as justification for all kinds of atrocities when they are taken out of context and culled of their symbolic meaning. To prevent such future blindness, it is necessary for each of us to think critically about the role of metaphor in our daily lives. How does it inform the way we, as individuals and collective members of society, view ourselves and others, our relationship with the Earth, our place in the cosmos?
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Interview: Metaphor and Transcendence
Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, as found at www.mythsdreamssymbols.com
Moyers: What is the metaphor?
Campbell: A metaphor is an image that suggests something else. For instance, if I say to a person, "You are a nut," I'm not suggesting that I think the person is literally a nut. "Nut" is a metaphor. The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.
For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy, Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility. But if you read "Jesus ascended to heaven" in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward – not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.
Moyers: Aren’t you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faith – that the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own?
Campbell: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.
Moyers: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.
Campbell: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought. The myth puts you there all the time, gives you a line to connect with that mystery which you are.
Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, "The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."
Moyers: In classic Christian doctrine the material world is to be despised, and life is to be redeemed in the hereafter, in heaven, where our rewards come. But you say that if you affirm that which you deplore, you are affirming the very world which is our eternity at the moment.
Campbell: Yes, that is what I’m saying, Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The problem with heaven is that you will be having such a good time there, you won’t even think of eternity. You’ll just have this unending delight in the beatific vision of God. But the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.
Campbell: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be, This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
Moyers: So the experience of God is beyond description, but we feel compelled to try to describe it?
Campbell: That’s right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.
Moyers: And yet we all have lived a life that had a purpose. Do you believe that?
Campbell: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it,’ My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam, And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.
Moyers: I like the idea that it is not the destination that counts, it’s the journey.
Campbell: Yes. As Karlfried Graf Durckheim says, "When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey."
The Navaho have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. Pollen is the life source, The pollen path is the path to the center. The Navaho say, "Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path,"
Moyers: Eden was not, Eden will be.
Campbell: Eden is. "The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it."
Moyers: Eden is – in this world of pain and suffering and death and violence?
Campbell: That is the way it feels, but this is it, this is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world, The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.
Moyers: Is reincarnation also metaphor?
Campbell: Certainly it is. When people ask, "Do you believe in reincarnation," I just have to say, "Reincarnation, like heaven, is a metaphor."
The metaphor in Christianity that corresponds to reincarnation is purgatory. If one dies with such a fixation on the things of this world that one's spirit is not ready to behold the beatific vision, then one has to undergo a purgation, one has to be purged clean of one's limitations. The limitations are what are called sins. Sin is ismply a limiting factor that limits your consciousness and fixes it in an inapproperiate condition.
In the Oriental metaphor, if you die in that condition, you come back again to have more experiences that will clarify, calrify, clarify, until you are released from these fixations. The reincarnating monad is the principle hero of Oriental myth. The monad puts on various personalities, life after life. Now the reincarnation idea is not that you and I as the personalities that we are will be reincarnated. The personality is what the monad throws off. Then the monad puts on another body, male or female, depending on what experiences are necessary for it to clear itself of this attachment to the field of time
Moyers: And what does the idea of reincarnation suggest?
Campbell: It suggests you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth. And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that all the religions are talking of that.
Moyers: Who speaks in metaphors today?
Campbell: All poets. Poetry is a metaphorical language.
Moyers: A metaphor suggests potential.
Campbell: Yes, but it also suugests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.
Moyers: You speak of poets and artists. What about the clergy?
Campbell: I think our clergy is really not doing its proper work. It does not speak about the connations of the metaphors but is stuck with the ethics of good and evil.
Moyers: So you think religion's great calling is the experience?
Campbell: One of the wonderful things in the Catholic ritual is going to communion. There you are taught that this is the body and blood of the Savior. And you take it to you, and you turn inward, and there Christ is working within you. This is a way of inspiring a meditation on experiencing the spirit in you. You see people coming back from communion, and they are inward-turned, they really are.
Excerpt: Making Truth - Metaphor in Science
Theodore L. Brown, as found at www.morphostasis.org.uk
It is interesting to read of the increasing interest that is being generated around metaphors in science. It is, of course, almost impossible to formulate any easy understanding of the natural world without resorting to metaphors in some way or another. Even complex mathematical descriptions can rely on a few core linguistic metaphors. In the biological world, metaphors have a further complication in that they frequently become teleologies as well. A teleology is an explanation that accords purpose to some attribute. So, the eye is designed to be some sort of video camera; the immune system is designed to defend the body against foreign organisms; hair is designed to insulate the body; feathers are designed to help a bird fly. Now, although all these attributes can be seen to be an extant advantage that has followed their chance evolution, there was no "purpose" in their emergence. Indeed, in many instances (eg, feathers) the origins of their chance evolution may have conferred an advantage of a quite different "purpose" but happened, fortuitously, to promote a new advantageous adaptation. Apparent "purpose" arises - as an emergent property - from the evolutionary survival of a minute fraction of multitudinous different mutational changes. Whenever we let ourselves get wafted away on a teleology, we must always remember to go back and weed it out once we can envisage the sequence of chance events that led up to that accumulation of changes that eventually appears to have conferred "purpose" on some evolvent attribute.
However, there has also been an intellectual snobbery that tends to "throw the baby out with the bath water". Emerging explanations (or metaphors) are the life blood of scientific revolution, even though consolidative science needs (eventually) to iron these out of existence. There has been a great trend to condemn metaphor and teleology, "out of hand", as unscientific; so much so in biomedicine that the literature generated in scientific journals has become increasingly sterile and unadventurous. Hypothesis and speculation have become increasingly regarded as heretical and corrupting.
But, look at any text book of immunology (for example) and you will find metaphor and teleology in copious profusion: surveillance, self/nonself discrimination, tolerance, repertoire, signal, proliferate, engulf, protect, digest, release, secrete, trigger, drain, encounter, organise, architecture, migrate, recognise, bind, dispose, generate, initiate, destroy, recruit, kill, activate, repair, trap and carry are just a few. Each of these is a word that has a "day to day" meaning but is now used, analogously, to enhance understanding of the workings of the immune system. Inevitably, these metaphors/teleologies are tailored to the reigning paradigm. In a paradigm shift much of this profuse metaphorical language will shift in emphasis or even change radically.
The religious fervour that scientists have for particular paradigms is largely entangled in these metaphorical analogies - and that is an anachronism. We must recognise that this dependence on metaphor is both a strength (helping us to understand - at a certain point in time) and a millstone (leaving us stranded up blind alleys and generating Bacon's idols).
We have to adapt our language (that has primarily evolved for social interaction and a description of our immediate world) to help us to understand a strange new "world". This is inescapable. So, we must simply remain aware of its limitations, its dangers and be prepared to recognise it wherever it is employed.
I think it is an interesting feature of metaphors in science that they will often appear stealthily then take on a life of their own; they sneak in without anyone complaining (perhaps even noticing). They may initially be used as a descriptive technique to bring common sense to bear on a discipline. This enables it to be described and understood in a relatively uncomplicated way. But once established such metaphors attract potent advocates and protectors. These people often adopt them, lock stock and barrel, as literal "truths" rather than useful analogies. Although their meanings have often shifted subtly, their authority become unchallengeable without first committing an act of heresy. Metaphors should always remain malleable and their validity should be frequently reviewed; and they must be acknowledged so that we can stay on our guard.
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