It seems strange that we are able to experience
things through other things. Because then we're really not
experiencing thing A, we're just experiencing thing B and calling it
thing A. But then it's even more strange because our only conception
of thing A is thing B, so therefore thing A is thing B. It's
all we know of it, so we can't really claim that it's anything else,
unless we experience it through another channel. Then it's both
things.
Maybe I can bring the little I know
about Derrida into this discussion (container). He seems fitting to this
conversation. Feel free to criticize my understanding, but from what
I remember, Derrida claimed that it was pointless to try and center
something, to try and situate an idea around a fixed point because
that actually destabilized it, in the way that making it stable
removed it from being able to be unstable (or something). So, when we
try and define quality, we get wrapped all up in all these other
things because we are trying to center it. Now enter abstract ideas,
such as love, government, morality, etc. We sort of center these
ideas by creating stock metaphors for them, such as “ARGUMENT is
WAR,” because we have concrete and physical representations of war,
which we can understand argument through. Having a concept of
argument completely centered around War, we allow ourselves to only
think and work underneath that understanding, and perhaps get too
huffy when our boyfriends just want to have an in-depth conversation.
I like how Lakoff and Johnson stress
the importance of new metaphors because they allow us access to new
worlds. Same with Derrida – centering a subject closes off the rest
of the possibilities and opportunities that exist for that subject.
And it's all got to do with our ideologies, and back to Pirsig's idea
of “one” god, “one” church, “one” ideology. For most
abstract things, there is only really one metaphor that might seem to
fit for someone, and so that's their metaphor that they follow and
understand and take into the world and render it concrete. There is
so much power behind that – its almost like the idea that just by
thinking of something it will become real. Having the mindset that
everything will turn out okay in the end will usually cause you to
see the end as everything being okay.
So back to my last post, about the
problems within Western society... maybe that's the issue. We can
only think of something in terms of ONE metaphor, when in reality all
possibilities exist. Why is it so tempting to believe in only one
thing? Can't we handle the paradoxes and the contradictions? Our
brains just can't make sense of all possibilities being right, and if
we can handle that, there is always one option that is “more”
right than all the rest.
I guess to finish off this mind melting
section of the book, I'd like to point to the quote, “Such a view
of reality – so-called objective reality – leaves out human
aspects of reality, in particular the real perceptions,
conceptualizations, motivations, and actions that constitute most of
what we experience” (145). We can read it as thus: If we only
believe in ONE thing, even if it is an aspect of human reality, there
are still myriad possibilities of experience that we are missing out
on (which is why metaphor is so brilliant). I think for English
majors this is easy to accept and to understand, because we have been
so accustomed to empathizing with different people through
literature. But of course, that's just my own experience with the
text so far.
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