Katherine Mosca
04 October 2001
Summary #1
In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson give the following definition: “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (5). An obvious focal point of Metaphors We Live By, and the idea this essay will attempt to further explicate, is the notion that the title implies: we live by certain dominant metaphors.
Some of the most universal concepts in our species, culture, and language are not only talked about, but also thought about, in metaphorical terms.
The concept love, for example, is structured mostly in metaphorical terms: love is a journey, love is a patient, love is a physical force, love is madness, love is war, etc. The concept of love has a core that is minimally structured by the subcategorization love is an emotion and by links to other emotions, e.g., liking. This is typical of emotional concepts, which are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor. (85)
This passage describes the concept of love and the metaphors by which people generally understand, think about, and act in love. Additionally, the authors suggest that love is thought about almost entirely metaphorically because it is an emotional concept.
We are concerned primarily with how people understand their experiences. We view languages as providing data that can lead to general principles of understanding. The general principles involve whole systems of concepts rather than individual words or individual concepts. We have found that such principles are often metaphoric in nature and involve understanding one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience. (116)
This takes note of an interesting chain process in how people understand their experiences. First, experiences themselves are ways of understanding complex emotions, controversies, and other innate human feelings. In an attempt to understand these experiences, we employ language. But then, the chain repeats as we search for ways of understanding our language. The metaphor, frequently used to render language more accessible, in fact, loops us back to the beginning of the chain: we again use experience as a means of understanding. Essentially, this complex process of understanding our most basic human feelings is circular—with metaphor providing the crucial link that closes the circle.
Because these metaphors are central to the ways we understand our lives, the book gets its title.
Expressions like wasting time, attacking positions, going our separate ways, etc., are reflections of systematic metaphorical concepts that structure our actions and thoughts. They are “alive” in the most fundamental sense: they are metaphors we live by. The fact that they are conventionally fixed within the lexicon of English makes them no less alive. (55)
As an integral part of our everyday language, used even when we do not even realize we are using them, these metaphors structure our common, daily thought, speech, and action, further reinforcing the idea that they create a circular process of understanding experience. The metaphors shape the way we experience something, but the experience itself must, at some level, influence the metaphor we use to comprehend it.
Along with their participation in this circular construct of experience, metaphors also feed off of themselves. For instance, the book articulates and explains the metaphors love is war and argument is war. But how do we understand the experience of war? It is certainly a more concrete experience than love, and it is slightly more tangible than argument, but can we really, fully understand the deafening horror and power of something so evil, yet as universal as love, without the help of metaphor? After all, as we have discussed in class, war is hate, war is money, war is power, war is terrorism, war is theatre, etc. Even though we use war to understand other experiences, we still need other experiences to understand war.
The following excerpt makes this food chain of metaphor preying upon metaphor easier to understand:
The reason we have focused so much on metaphor is that it unites reason and imagination. Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of is many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing—what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inference, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature. Given our understanding of poetic metaphor in terms of metaphorical entailments and inferences, we can see that the products of the poetic imagination are, for the same reason, partially rational in nature (193).
Using metaphor to explain something we could not otherwise explain makes sense in light of these relationships between imagination and rationality. For instance, war is not something that most people, especially in younger generations, have experienced; they cannot even imagine what war means or what war is. However, even those men and women who have experienced war are often unable to express what war means or what war is. These are inexpressible, unanswerable questions regardless of one’s proximity to war. So, metaphor combines what one can logically deduce an experience to be and what one can more intuitively envision an experience to be.
“love is not a concept that has a clearly delineated structure; whatever structure it has it gets only via metaphors” (110). Ultimately, I find that this is the real essence of the authors’ point. Mostly for those concepts that are hardest to define and understand—those emotional or abstract—but also for almost all universal ideas and experiences, we allow metaphor (the combination of our rational and imaginative thought about something) to direct our understanding. Without metaphor, these experiences become not meaningless, but structure-less and therefore incomprehensible.