I first read parts of this book nearly 20 years ago. I meant to get my hands on the whole thing back then too and read it from cover to cover, but for one reason or another I never seemed to get around to it. This is a pity, as it is the sort of book I really ought to have read in full back then and perhaps again a couple of times since. This really is an interesting book.The main idea is that rather than metaphors being curious literary devices, that they in fact are central to how we understand the world. Many of the conclusions proposed in this book are fairly standard theory now. V.S. Ramachandran makes it clear that metaphors play a central role in our understanding how the brain works, although he goes somewhat further than Lakoff and Johnson in putting a lot of the reason why we use them in the first place down to synaesthesia. Lakoff and Johnson are concerned to stress that we would not be able to understand the world at all without our ability to create, understand and deploy metaphors.Metaphor is distinguished from metonymy (where the part takes the place of the whole – as in, he’s in dance or the ham sandwich on two also wants a coke). They make the interesting point that when we say things like ‘we need some new faces around here’ this is partly because faces are the most important distinguishing feature people have and that, foe instance, handing someone a photo of your son which shows all of his body from the neck down is really not showing someone a photo of your son. The key idea is that metaphors structure how we think about the world. The best examples of this are those around love and arguments. In our culture we talk about arguing as if it was about war. We dig in to our positions, we take sides, we prepare for someone’s onslaught, we shoot down their arguments, we make tactical retreats and we defend our ground. In particularly acrimonious arguments we may even hurt the feelings of some of those around us and (in these days of military euphemism) we may refer to these people as collateral-damage. As the authors say, just what would it mean if we changed our metaphors about arguments? What if arguments were no longer wars, but rather dances? Dances where someone leads and the other follows, where arguments have a certain pace and rhythm, where both parties are concerned with maintaining the flow of the argument and do what they can to help the other carry the tune and stay in time. Whatever ‘argument as war’ means it could not be further from what ‘argument as dance’ means. This is such a fundamental shift in paradigm, as Kuhn would say, that really there is virtually no common ground between the two kinds of ‘arguments’.The only time this book comes close to being a self-help book – which, I have to admit, the title almost does sound like – is when they discuss changing metaphors to change the nature of love. They make the very interesting point that virtually all (that might actually be all, by the way) of the metaphors we use are used to help us understand something abstract (like love) in terms that have a concrete awareness for us, (like war – love is a battlefield, or a journey – the course of true love never ran smooth or a container – my heart is bursting open with love for you). They talk of how we might trasform our notions of love by discussing love in terms of a jointly constructed and collaborative work of art. Imagine how such as notion moves our understanding of love from something that either is or isn’t, from something that happens to us beyond our control – towards love being something that needs to be worked on and created and composed and jointly constructed. Love then becomes something that is never actually completed, but rather is always a work in progress. I really like this idea. And notice, beyond the idea itself, that what is really happening here is that in changing the structure of the metaphor we get a series of consistent baby metaphors that each say something different and interesting about the nature of love. A metaphor family on a consistent theme.And that is, in part, the point of this book. The person who introduced me to this book was a teacher. She said that once she had read this book she couldn’t help thinking about metaphors and what they said, how they were like a window into the souls of what people actually believed. In Orwell’s Politics and the English Language he says that if people use mixed metaphors it shows they aren’t paying attention to what they are saying. And if they aren’t paying attention to what they are saying, that probably means what they are saying contains some kind of barbarism their ‘blind words’ (blind to the images their words create) display. The authors here point out that this works in reverse too. It is not so much that we choose our metaphors, it is rather that our metaphors choose us and tell us important things about what we think. Our metaphors cohere. They cluster together in like groups and in ways that Kuhn, referred to, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with the metaphor ‘to accrete’ - like barnacles on the bottom of a boat, if I remember rightly.The teacher who introduced this book to me spoke of how once people in her profession had been referred to as teachers. There were problems with this name, of course. It implies a master/servant relationship between teacher and learner that anyone who has spent any time at all being one or the other would know is hardly accurate. Then they were called facilitators – which has nice implications (a bit like the word ‘catalyst’ in chemistry, something that must be present for the reaction to take place, but isn’t actually involved in the reaction itself in any way) – but perhaps this goes too far the other way, in that if teacher is too bold a term, facilitator is simply too humble. But at the time she was working in TAFE and this was a time when accountants had only just taken over – philistines with eyes directed towards the bottom line and with a tape measure always in one hand to ensure everything is appropriately calibrated. It was then that she stopped being a teacher and facilitator only to became a package delivery officer. Notice the metaphor here is virtually indistinguishable from a postal worker. Notice too that education is literally about the transfer of ‘knowledge’ (I guess that is what fills the packages) from one head (full to overflowing with the stuff) to the other head (empty and ready for the receiving). This is the perfect example of what Freire called the ‘banking model’ of education, in yet another beautifully turned metaphor. They make the interesting point that many of our metaphors are ontological – in that they are born from our lived experience. So, the reason why so many positive emotions are spatial where good = up, is because we experience standing tall and upright as being positive and healthy. Therefore we rise to the challenge, reach for the sky, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps or jump in the air when we are happy, but are brought down low, feel crushed under a terrible burden, shrink into the ground and so on when bad things happen. The consistency of metaphors really is interesting.I’ve gone on for too long – but want to end with something quite different. This really is a book overflowing with interesting ideas, but one that I particularly liked was their saying that not only is it impossible to truly paraphrase any sentence in English, but they even explain why. If I say Jack killed Tom – that is as strong a way as I can say that idea. Any other permutation of how to say it will only make it a weaker statement. Watch – ‘It is clear that Tom had been made a victim of Jack for one final time. These two sentences say almost the same thing – but all of the words between the subject of the sentence, the verb and the object make us wonder about the causal relationship between Jack and Tom dying. Even the sentence ‘Jack definitely killed Tom’ is weaker than ‘Jack killed Tom’. We think adverbs will ‘add to the verb’, but what they actually do is almost invariably take away from a naked verb’s power. The rule they suggest, is that the further away in words you make the cause from the effect, the weaker appears the causal relationship between the two. There is a long discussion in this book regarding Objectivism and Subjectivism and how they see the need for what they call an experientialist reconciliation between these two extreme positions (not unlike Kant’s reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism). This isn’t nearly as interesting as the first 24 chapters had been– nonetheless, the last five or so chapters didn’t take away from the power of the ideas contained here. A wonderful book I highly recommend.
The basic idea argued by Lakoff and Johnson (L&J) in Metaphors We Live By is that most, if not all, of our reasoning about abstract concepts is done through metaphors. These metaphors conceptually link the domain of abstract concepts to the domain of concepts that are closer to our everyday bodily experiences. This link allows us to determine the logical entailments in the more abstract domain by comparison to the cause and effect relationships in the concrete domain of how we physically interact with the world.In the language used by L&J metaphors map entailments from the source domain into the target domain while preserving the structure of entailment. For those of you who happen to be mathematically inclined, you might have thought to yourself that a mapping that preserves structure is called a morphism. Or at least that's what I thought the moment L&J's thesis became solidified in my own head. After that thought, I couldn't help but to continue reasoning about their thesis in that way, and when I realized what I was doing, it became clear to me L&J are definitely on to something good. By understanding their argument in comparison to something I already understood--the concept of a morphism--I was actually using the very type of metaphorical reasoning L&J wrote about in Metaphors We Live By. L&J would naturally take this a step further and say that I must have already understood the concept of morphisms in terms of something more basic. At some point our most basic understanding, our foundation, comes from our physical interaction with the world.I found my own reflections on this more convincing than the examples of common metaphors given by L&J. As a whole L&J's examples initially seemed strained and unconvincing.By showing how reason--embodied human reason--ultimately depends on a foundation of understanding our world through our senses and movements, L&J eliminate the division between body and mind, originating with Cartesian dualism, which has existed in Western philosophy. The best parts of Metaphors We Live By are the last several chapters where L&J explain and critique several aspects of Western philosophy in light of their analysis. It is best to read, or re-read, these chapters after convincing yourself of L&J's central thesis. Philosophy in the Flesh, L&J's other major work, takes the ideas of these last couple of chapters and extends them to a more detailed analysis. I found that book much richer in ideas, but this is balanced by that tome's length.
Do You like book Metaphors We Live By (2003)?
This book is apparently important in the history of linguistics. Although it is about 30 years old, it provides important insights into the ways human thought and understanding are structured. Much of our thinking is metaphorical, and modern neuroscience appears to be bearing this out.Its major philosophical weakness is its assumption that truth is in the human realm. It posits that the problems objectivism and subjectivism have connecting meaning, understanding, and truth are solved in experientialism. I believe much of what it says about experientialism is consistent with what humans perceive; like Camus, I believe perhaps we know something about what is out there, but that our knowledge of The Truth is quite limited and will never be unifiable because of its (read our) limitations.Nonetheless, the chapter on truth is quite important. Overall, the beginning is easy to read and then it becomes thicker. It is quite synthetic, and the analysis of the linguistic structures themselves are quite crisp. No wonder it's had such far-reaching influence.
—Leslie
This book is one of the pillars of the field of study now called 'embodied cognition'. The principle idea of this field is that the brain is tuned for action, not thinking per se. Many writers in this tradition combine expertise in biology or neuroscience with a background in phenomenology stemming from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Lakoff's work here on metaphors shows how pervasive rudimentary, everyday experiences are for talking about intangibles. Metaphors are more than rhetorical flourishes that make writing and speaking interesting, they frame the categories with which we think. They are also, in a manner of speaking, hidden from our view, mostly because we are only looking for literary metaphors. In some ways, this is more of a reference book full of examples, but it is precisely those repeated examples that start to make you more aware of the metaphorical nature of communication. Metaphors in turn guide our actions. An early example from the book shows that describing argumentation as either a "conflict" or a "journey" would make a big difference for the cultural practice of point and counterpoint discussions. Some other examples: "time as a valuable or limited commodity", "communication as conduit", "happy is up and sad is down", "the mind as a brittle object or a machine", "ideas are food", "love is magic". Lakoff goes on to discuss metonymy and personification in the context of metaphors as well. "She's a pretty face" (part for whole) or "Inflation is our biggest enemy right now". For Lakoff, we do not just have perceptual experiences, but our experiences are shaped by our cultural presuppositions, values, and attitudes. The book goes on to discuss theories of how human conceptual systems are grounded, structured, related to each other, and defined, before tackling the concept of "truth" in relation to the metaphorical nature of language. Lakoff locates the proper view between objectivism and subjectivism, calling metaphor "imaginative rationality".
—Mark Wendland
This amazing book will have you questioning everything that comes out of your mouth. A simple statement like, "My friend is "in" the race or "in" love will have a completely different meaning. In so far as the human mind can not understand things like events or emotions in concrete terms. It has a difficult time understanding abstract concepts. So in order to make sense of a friend that is "in" love or "in" a race we turn the event or the emotion into a contain with boundaries. We see love as a container that someone can get into. We see an event that actually has no sides or walls, and turn it into a container that our friend can be "inside" of. We experience the world in terms of our physical selves. We are a being that is contained inside a body. We have an inside and an outside. We have directions in relation to ourselves. We have an up and a down. Down is always what our feet are on. Even if we are upside down with our feet on the ceiling, our feet are "on" the ceiling. The ceiling is "down" below us.We turn things like time, a very abstract topic, and define it with metaphors such as "time is money" so we can understand it. We can "spend" time and money. We can "save" time and money. We can "waste" time and money, etc.This is by far one of the most "eye opening" books (notice the metaphor: eye opening to help us understand that the ability to "see" is a metaphor for understanding) that I have ever read.This book took me a while to get through and it was worth it. I am going to reread it again in a few months.If you want to raise our consciousness a few points and "wake up" a little more, read this book. It will definitely change you.Nick Arkesteyn
—Nick Arkesteyn
