What is a metaphor?

[phil]

What is a metaphor?

[JamesLawley]

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's innovative and mind-expanding book, Metaphors We Live By, says:


"The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another."

Metaphor captures the intangible, the relationships and patterns, and the essential nature of an experience. Lakoff and Johnson's definition allows for metaphors to be expressed nonverbally, by objects and as imaginative representations. Thus whatever a person says, sees, hears, feels, does or imagines has the potential to be an autogenic, self-generated metaphor.

Because a metaphor describes one experience in terms of another, it specifies and constrains ways of thinking and behaving -- which is why people so consistently do what they do.

SYMBOLS
A metaphor is an expression which is itself comprised of a number of interrelating components which we call symbols. For example, "I feel like my back is pinned against a wall" refers to three symbols (I, my back, a wall), with a fourth (whatever or whoever is doing the pinning) being implied.

ISOMORPHISM
Metaphors correspond isomorphically to the original experience they are describing: although the form of a metaphor is different to the original experience, it has a similar organisation. This means the attributes of its symbols, the relationships and the logic of the whole, match the organisation of what is being described. When people comprehend a metaphor, it is their intrinsic ability to recognise and utilise isomorphism that allows them to infer the organisation of the original experience from the metaphor. Isomorphism is, what Gregory Bateson calls, "the pattern which connects" two different kinds of things.

THE MAGIC OF METAPHOR
Having facilitated hundreds of people to explore their metaphors, we know that metaphor can heal, transform and enrich lives. Why is this? Why does metaphor's efficacy verge on magic? Why is metaphor such a universal tool for description, comprehension and explanation? How is it that metaphor produces such novel perspectives?

In Metaphor and Thought, Andrew Ortony points to three remarkable properties of metaphors: inexpressibility, vividness and compactness. Put simply, because metaphors embody that "something vague, unknown or hidden" (Jung), they give form to the inexpressible. Because they make use of everyday concrete things to illustrate intangible, complex and relational aspects of life, they are vivid and memorable. And because of isomorphism, only the essence of an experience needs to be captured; the rest can be reconstructed from inferential knowledge. In short, metaphors carry a great deal of information in a compact and memorable package.

There is a fourth vital property of metaphor and it is the one which most impacts people's lives. A metaphor describes one experience in terms of another, and in so doing it specifies and constrains ways of thinking about the original experience. This influences the meaning and importance of the experience, the way it fits with other experiences, and actions taken as a result. Lakoff and Johnson state:


"In all aspects of life … we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor."
Metaphors embody and define the intangible and abstract, but this process limits and constrains perceptions and actions to those which make sense within the logic of the metaphor. Metaphors are therefore both descriptive and prescriptive. They can be a self-imposed prison or a a pathway to creativity.

James Lawley