METAPHOR

While Whitehead rarely used the term metaphor, present-day cognitive scientists have determined that metaphor is not merely a literary device, but is a prerequisite of all thought.  Of course, metaphors can be inappropriate and even disastrous.  Flat-Earthers and Augustine’s perpetuation of menstruation as a symbol of carnality come to mind.  Yet metaphor cannot be avoided even in mathematics.  Understanding space, dimensions, distance and geometric forms depend on understanding the body as located – as a container with a back, a front, as the perceiver or extension, and so on.  The conception of four-dimensional happenings, groupings, sets and loci all depend on Whitehead’s requirements of the body-mind’s transposition of embodied experience into metaphors of thought.  Lakoff and Johnson tell us that conceptual metaphors ground abstract concepts through cross-domain mappings. 

Mapping the body as container with the concept of loci informs the teenagers coinage of the term “spaced-out.”  This is not a liability – a means of obscuring fact with peripheral externalities – as would have been held by classical rationalists, but a gift – a tool for understanding things in a way that is tied to embodied, lived experience.  “to be or not to be” is an expression of conceptual mapping.  Existence is mapped onto implicit categories of lived experience: time, destiny, possibly a morally-based life, death, and so on.  This mapping is not a slow, careful, conscious process, but happens on the scale of our observations, seemingly at once, via neural connections. 

Let us go back to Whitehead’s famous argument against the presupposition of simple location advocated by Descartes and Newton.  For Whitehead and modern physics, the physical things which we term “stars,” “rocks,” molecules” and “cities” are each to be thought of as changing situations within space-time.  There is a focal region that we describe as where the thing is.  Yet its influence can stream away to the various reaches of space-time.  Intergalactic cosmic rays interacting with human genes and the historical influence of the city of Rome are ready examples.  For physics, the thing, mutating gene or Rome, is what it does and what it does includes its stream of influence.  The focal region of the thing cannot be separated from its external stream.  Thus if we attempt to conceive a complete instance of the thing in question, we cannot confine ourselves to one part of space or one moment of time.  The physical thing has to be conceived as a coordination of spaces and times, and of conditions in those spaces at those times.  Thus with the denial of simple location we must admit that, within any region of space-time conceived as a thing such as a rock, an innumerable multitude of contingent things is, in a sense, superimposed. 

Here is a technical explanation that nourishes the deepest root of metaphor from which all other analysis must proceed.  Classical philosophy, without the ever-increasing evidence of modern neurobiology to show us how the body-mind actually works, held that objects had fixed properties and that metaphor was merely an unscientific verbal elaboration of language.  Whitehead goes on to say that the coordination’s of space-time described above illustrate a rule that lies open to mathematical interpretation.  Such an interpretation lies far beyond my imagination, but I can accept his statement that, for an object conceived as a region of space-time, the innumerable multitude of potential things within its purview can be sensed as superimposed.  When we come to prehensions of rocks, ducks and cabbages, and our processing their images into actual entities, the mental act of cognition requires the same conditions of expression: the potentiality to see these objects in terms of other objects.


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