[MD] Metaphor (or All This is Just an Analogy)

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Ian]
One reason I latched onto the Johnson quote you 
brought up (or was it Arlo) is because Lakoff & 
Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By" and "Fire, Women 
and Dangerous Things" made a big impression on me.

[Arlo]
Just adding the following to support our position.

Mark Johnson, in his introduction to his edited 
volume "Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor", 
describes something I think should resonate 
(perhaps uncoincidentally) strongly with those 
familiar with Pirsig's expostion on the sophists.

"Early on, metaphor flourished in myth and 
poetry. It was natural for the pre-Socratic 
philosophers to feel at home with the mythic 
modes of their predecessors and to utilize 
figurative language to express their insights. 
Indeed, their philosophic fragments constitute 
one vast network of interrelated metaphors - and 
to make sense of their thought is, above all, to unpack these metaphors.

It is one of the ironies of history that Plato 
(428/27-348/47 B.C.), the master of metaphor, 
having left no explicit treatment of his primary 
art, should have been taken as providing that 
basis for the traditional suspicion of metaphor. 
That alleged bias is his discussion of the "old 
quarrel between philosophy and poetry" (Republic, 
X, 607b). Plato defends the banishment of 
philosophically uneducated imitive poets on two 
grounds: (1) These poets have no genuine 
knowledge of that which they imitate - they 
produce imitations of imitations of the real and 
are thus "three removes from the king and the 
truth as are all other imitators" (Republic, X, 
597e). (2) Poetry "feeds and waters the passions, 
instead of drying them up; she let's them rule 
instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, 
with a view to the happiness and virtue of mankind" (Republic, X, 606d).

Plato's expulsion of the imitative poets must 
not, of course, be read as a condemnation of 
figurative language per se. But it does show his 
awareness of the power of metaphor and myth to 
influence conviction, and it reveals his fear of 
their potential for misuse. This vulnerability to 
abuse seems to be the reason for his claim that 
the poet, "knowing nothing but how to imitate, 
lays on with words and phrases the colors of the 
several arts in such fashion that other equally 
ignorant men, who see things only through words, 
will deem his words most excellent..." (Republic, 
X, 601a). It is on similar grounds that he 
criticizes sophists who care nothing for the 
truth and who "make trifles seem important and 
important points trifles by the force of their language" (Phaedrus, 267a-b).

Plato's attack is directed against the poet of 
sophist whose misuse of language leads others 
away from truth. The irony here, to repeat, is 
that his criticique of imitative poetry has often 
been read as applying to metaphor generally, 
despite his supreme use of metaphor to convey his 
most important philosophical convictions." (Johnson, 1981).

This mirrors the discussion held in ZMM. 
Importantly, I would draw your attention to this 
passage. "Phædrus reads further and further into 
pre-Socratic Greek thought to find out, and 
eventually comes to the view that Plato's hatred 
of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger 
struggle in which the reality of the Good, 
represented by the Sophists, and the reality of 
the True, represented by the dialecticians, were 
engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of 
man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why 
today we have so little difficulty accepting the 
reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting 
the reality of Quality, even though there is no 
more agreement in one area than in the other."

Jumping ahead slightly, Pirsig writes, "They were 
teachers, but what they sought to teach was not 
principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was 
not any single absolute truth, but the 
improvement of men. All principles, all truths, 
are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of 
all things." These were the famous teachers of 
"wisdom," the Sophists of ancient Greece."

How does this insight, advancing the 
"metaphoricity" of all things, relate to Quality? 
"And yet, Phædrus understands, what he is saying 
about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It 
seems to agree much more closely with the 
Sophists. "Man is the measure of all things." 
Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality. Man 
is not the source of all things, as the 
subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the 
passive observer of all things, as the objective 
idealists and materialists would say. The Quality 
which creates the world emerges as a relationship 
between man and his experience. He is a 
participant in the creation of all things. The 
measure of all things...it fits."

Pirsig has two passages that relate to the 
fallout from this shift from "metaphoricity" to 
"Absolute Truth". The first comes shortly after 
Phaedrus realizes the "encapsulation" of the 
sophists "metaphoricity" into a system of 
"Absolute". Pirsig writes, "And the bones of the 
Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they 
said turned to dust with them and the dust was 
buried under the rubble of declining Athens 
through its fall and Macedonia through its 
decline and fall. Through the decline and death 
of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman 
Empire and the modern states...buried so deep and 
with such ceremoniousness and such unction and 
such evil that only a madman centuries later 
could discover the clues needed to uncover them, 
and see with horror what had been done...."

The modern fallout of this, Pirsig describes as 
such. "And now he began to see for the first time 
the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he 
gained power to understand and rule the world in 
terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built 
empires of scientific capability to manipulate 
the phenomena of nature into enormous 
manifestations of his own dreams of power and 
wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire 
of understanding of equal magnitude: an 
understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it."

"Metaphoricity" and an understanding that 
"relative" does NOT imply subjectivity nor 
objectivity but an active, participatory role in the emergence of Quality.

Mark Johnson, also in his introduction mentioned 
above, describes a similar stance taken by 
adherents of metaphor. "In general, 
[irreducibility theorists]  must hold that we 
encounter our world, not passively, but by means 
of projective acts influenced by our interests, 
purposes, values, beliefs, and language. Because 
our world is an imaginative, value-laden 
construction, metaphors that alter our conceptual 
structure (themselves carried by older metaphors) 
will also alter the way we experience things."

In this last Johnson post, I think one can 
clearly overlay Pirsig's description of the 
mythos and, even more directly, the "figure sorting sand" passage.

This "active, participatory role" of wo/man in 
the creation of meaning (and its subsequent 
adherence to metaphoricity) is also addressed by 
David Granger in his book on Pirsig and Dewey.

"In light of the above, we will henceforth adhere 
to Dewey's regular practice of speaking of 
knowledge in terms of "knowledge relations" or 
the process of "coming-to-know." This will remind 
us that knowledge, for Dewey and Pirsig, exists 
neither in a static state nor as an 
individualistic possession of some sort. For the 
Cartesian thinker, to the contrary, the move to 
such an active, situation-based conception of 
knowledge flies in the face of the quest for 
certainty: It deprives us of the so-called 
Archimedean point, the absolute perspective from 
which to behold the world and its contents.

All the same, this quest holds no place on 
Dewey's and Pirsig's philosophical agendas. As 
they see it, uncertainty must be accepted at the 
end of the day as an indelible part of the human 
condition in a world such as ours. "Absolute 
certainty in knowledge of things and absolute 
security in the ordering of life" are to them no 
more than chimeras, and, to the extent that their 
pursuit pulls us away from the dynamic everyday 
world of people and things, potentially 
destructive (LW 1: 373; see also ZMM264). If 
Experience and Nature left us with any doubt as 
to Dewey's position here, a succeeding volume, 
his now-classic The Quest for Certainty (1929), 
made it emphatically clear. Aided by the work of 
twentieth-century physicist Warner Heisenberg, 
whose ground-breaking research had appeared only 
two years earlier, Dewey tried once and for all 
to close the book on spectator theories of knowledge." (Granger, pp. 60-61)

"Or as Heisenberg puts it, "what we observe is 
not nature in itself but nature exposed to our 
questioning."19 This means that there is no way 
for an inquirer to remain a detached spectator. 
The knower is continuuous with what is finally 
known, an active participant in the ongoing drama 
of an unfinished world (LW 4: 163)." (Granger, p.62)

Granger as well refers to this passage from 
Pirsig, quoted below from LILA, which I'll end with.

"Unlike subject-object metaphysics the 
Metaphysics of Quality does not insist on a 
single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects 
are held to be the ultimate reality then we're 
permitted only one construction of things - that 
which corresponds to the "objective" world-and 
all other constructions are unreal. But if 
Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate 
reality then it becomes possible for more than 
one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn't seek 
the absolute "Truth." One seeks instead 
the  highest quality intellectual explanation of 
things with the knowledge that if the past is any 
guide to the future this explanation must be 
taken provisionally; as useful until something 
better comes along. One can then examine 
intellectual realities the same way he examines 
paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort 
to find out which one is the "real" painting, but 
simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. 
There are many sets of intellectual reality in 
existence and we can perceive some to have more 
quality than others, but that we do so is, in 
part, the result of our history and current patterns of values."