[FRIAM] metaphor

[Barry MacKichan]

Didn’t know. Google told me almost instantly. That is, if you had 
submitted this as a term paper, my plagiarism detector would be flashing 
red. So, sorry, I guess I cheated.

— Barry

On 22 Jan 2025, at 14:30, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> I am curious how many of you on the list know or could guess at the 
> author
> of the following quote:
>
> I am interested in your guesses;  if you know it for SURE, please hold 
> off
> guessing.
>
> *I would be willing to throw away everything else but that: enthusiasm
> tamed by metaphor. Let me rest the case there. Enthusiasm tamed to
> metaphor, tamed to that much of it. I do not think anybody ever knows 
> the
> discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet 
> handling
> of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry.*
>
> *Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, “grace” 
> metaphors,
> and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides 
> the
> one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People 
> say,
> “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, 
> being all of us
> too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in
> indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.*
>
> *I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making 
> metaphor
> the whole of thinking. I find someone now and then to agree with me 
> that
> all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all
> thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be 
> difficult
> for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough.*
>
> *Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other what the 
> All
> was—or was like unto. All was three elements, air, earth, and water 
> (we
> once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it is only one). All 
> was
> substance, said another. All was change, said a third. But best and 
> most
> fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number. 
> Number of
> what? number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and we had
> science and all that has followed in science. The metaphor has held 
> and
> held, breaking down only when it came to the spiritual and 
> psychological or
> the out of the way places of the physical.*
>
> *The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist, whose latest 
> word
> to the world has been that the more accurately you know where a thing 
> is,
> the less accurately you are able to state how fast it is moving. You 
> can
> see why that would be so, without going back to Zeno’s problem of 
> the
> arrow’s flight. In carrying numbers into the realm of space and at 
> the same
> time into the realm of time you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and 
> you
> are in trouble. They won’t mix. The two don’t go together.*
>
> *Let’s take two or three more of the metaphors now in use to live 
> by. I
> have just spoken of one of the new ones, a charming mixed metaphor 
> right in
> the realm of higher mathematics and higher physics: that the more
> accurately you state where a thing is, the less accurately you will be 
> able
> to tell how fast it is moving. And, of course, everything is moving.
> Everything is an event now. Another metaphor. A thing, they say, is 
> all
> event. Do you believe it is? Not quite. I believe it is almost all 
> event.
> But I like the comparison of a thing with an event.*
>
> *I notice another from the same quarter. “In the neighborhood of 
> matter
> space is something like curved.” Isn’t that a good one! It seems 
> to me that
> that is simply and utterly charming—to say that space is something 
> like
> curved in the neighborhood of matter. “Something like.”*
>
> *Another amusing one is from—what is the book?—I can’t say it 
> now; but here
> is the metaphor. Its aim is to restore you to your ideas of free will. 
> It
> wants to give you back your freedom of will. All right, here it is on 
> a
> platter. You know that you can’t tell by name what persons in a 
> certain
> class will be dead ten years after graduation, but you can tell 
> actuarially
> how many will be dead. Now, just so this scientist says of the 
> particles of
> matter flying at a screen, striking a screen; you can’t tell what
> individual particles will collide, but you can say in general that a
> certain number will strike in a given time. It shows, you see, that 
> the
> individual particle can come freely. I asked Bohr about that 
> particularly,
> and he said, “Yes , It is so. It can come when it wills and as it 
> wills;
> and the action of the individual particle is unpredictable. But it is 
> not
> so of the action of the mass. There you can predict.” He says, 
> “That gives
> the individual atom its freedom, but the mass its necessity.*
>
> *Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all 
> our
> thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into 
> the
> Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant 
> or of
> the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, 
> said
> that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a 
> growing
> thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point, 
> but
> it has not failed everywhere. It is a very brilliant metaphor, I
> acknowledge, though I myself get too tired of the kind of essay that 
> talks
> about the evolution of candy, we will say, or the evolution of
> elevators—the evolution of this, that, and the other. Everything is
> evolution. I emancipate myself by simply saying that I didn’t get up 
> the
> metaphor and so am not much interested in it.*
>
> *What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the 
> metaphor,
> unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, 
> you are
> not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: 
> you
> don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You 
> don’t know
> how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. 
> You
> are not safe with science; you are not safe in history. In history, 
> for
> instance—to show that [it] is the same in history as elsewhere—I 
> heard
> somebody say yesterday that Aeneas was to be likened unto (those 
> words,
> “likened unto”!) George Washington. He was that type of national 
> hero, the
> middle-class man, not thinking of being a hero at all, bent on 
> building the
> future, bent on his children, his descendents. A good metaphor, as far 
> as
> it goes, and you must know how far. And then he added that Odysseus 
> should
> be likened unto Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t think that is so good. 
> Someone
> visiting Gibbon at the point of death, said he was the same Gibbon as 
> of
> old, still at his parallels.*
>
> *Take the way we have been led into our present position morally, the 
> world
> over. It is by a sort of metaphorical gradient. There is a kind of
> thinking—to speak metaphorically—there is a kind of thinking you 
> might say
> was endemic in the brothel. It was always there. And every now and 
> then in
> some mysterious way it becomes epidemic in the world. And how does it 
> do
> so? By using all the good words that virtue has invented to maintain
> virtue. It uses honesty, first,—frankness, sincerity—those words; 
> picks
> them up, uses them. “In the name of honesty, let us see what we 
> are.” You
> know. And then it picks up the word joy. “Let us in the name of joy, 
> which
> is the enemy of our ancestors, the Puritans….Let us in the name of 
> joy,
> which is the enemy of the kill-joy Puritan…” You see. “Let 
> us,” and so on.
> And then, “In the name of health….” Health is another good word. 
> And that
> is the metaphor Freudianism trades on, mental health. And the first 
> thing
> we know, it has us all in up to the top knot. I suppose we may blame 
> the
> artists a good deal, because they are great people to spread by 
> metaphor.
> The stage too—the stage is always a good intermediary between the 
> two
> worlds, the under and the upper,—if I may say so without personal 
> prejudice
> to the stage.*
>
> *In all this I have only been saying that the devil can quote 
> Scripture,
> which simply means that the good words you have lying around the devil 
> can
> use for his purposes as well as anybody else. Never mind about my 
> morality.
> I am not here to urge anything. I don’t care whether the world is 
> good or
> bad—not on any particular day.*
>
> *Let me ask you to watch a metaphor breaking down here before you.*
>
> *Somebody said to me a little while ago, “It is easy enough for me 
> to think
> of the universe as a machine, as a mechanism.”*
>
> *I said, “You mean the universe is like a machine?”*
>
> *He said, “No. I think it is one . . . Well, it is like . . .”*
>
> *“I think you mean the universe is like a machine.”*
>
> *“All right. Let it go at that.”*
>
> *I asked him, “Did you ever see a machine without a pedal for the 
> foot, or
> a lever for the hand, or a button for the finger?”*
>
> *He said, “No—no.”*
>
> *I said, “All right. Is the universe like that?”*
>
> *And he said, “No. I mean it is like a machine, only . . .”*
>
> *“. . . it is different from a machine,” I said.*
>
> *He wanted to go just that far with that metaphor and no further. And 
> so do
> we all. All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. 
> It is
> touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long
> enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much 
> you can get
> out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. 
> It is
> as life itself.*
>
> *I have heard this ever since I can remember , and ever since I have
> taught: the teacher must teach the pupil to think. I saw a teacher 
> once
> going around in a great school and snapping pupils’ heads with thumb 
> and
> finger and saying, “Think.” That was when thinking was becoming 
> the
> fashion. The fashion hasn’t yet quite gone out.*
>
> *We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties, but we 
> seldom
> tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just putting 
> this
> and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another. To 
> tell
> them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of 
> which
> sticks through the sky.*
>
> *Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the
> philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in 
> terms
> of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that 
> ever
> failed. We stop just short there. But it is the height of poetry, the
> height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that 
> attempt to
> say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter. It is 
> wrong to
> anybody a materialist simply because he tries to say spirit in terms 
> of
> matter, as if that were a sin. Materialism is not the attempt to say 
> all in
> terms of matter. The only materialist—be he poet, teacher, 
> scientist,
> politician, or statesman—is the man who gets lost in his material 
> without a
> gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost 
> soul.*
>
> *We ask people to think, and we don’t show them what thinking is. 
> Somebody
> says we don’t need to show them how to think; bye and bye they will 
> think.
> We will give them the forms of sentences and, if they have any ideas, 
> then
> they will know how to write them. But that is preposterous. All there 
> is to
> writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.*
>
> *The first little metaphor….Take some of the trivial ones. I would 
> rather
> have trivial ones of my own to live by than the big ones of other 
> people.*
>
> *I remember a boy saying, “He is the kind of person that wounds with 
> his
> shield.” That may be a slender one, of course. It goes a good way in
> character description. It has poetic grace. “He is the kind that 
> wounds
> with his shield.”*
>
> *The shield reminds me—just to linger a minute—the shield reminds 
> me of the
> inverted shield spoken of in one of the books of the “Odyssey,” 
> the book
> that tells about the longest swim on record. I forget how long it
> lasted—several days, was it?—but at last as Odysseus came near the 
> coast of
> Phaneacia, he saw it on the horizon “like an inverted shield.”*
>
> *There is a better metaphor in the same book. In the end Odysseus 
> comes
> ashore and crawls up the beach to spend the night under a double olive
> tree, and it says, as in a lonely farmhouse where it is hard to get 
> fire—I
> am not quoting exactly—where it is hard to start the fire again if 
> it goes
> out, they cover the seeds of fire with ashes to preserve it for the 
> night,
> so Odysseus covered himself with the leaves around him and went to 
> sleep.
> There you have something that gives you character, something of 
> Odysseus
> himself. “Seeds of fire.” So Odysseus covered the seeds of fire in 
> himself.
> You get the greatness of his nature.*
>
> *But these are slighter metaphors than the ones we live by. They have 
> their
> charm, their passing charm. They are as it were the first steps toward 
> the
> great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.*
>
> *The metaphor whose manage we are best taught in poetry—that is all 
> there
> is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go but it is the 
> mind’s
> furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors 
> we
> have rolled up.*
>
> -- 
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthompson at clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson

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