Book Review
Reality . . . What a Concept!
Metaphors We Live By
by George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2003
(256 pages; $14.00, paperback)
reviewed by Peter J. Leithart
For many moderns, metaphor is an ornament to “truth” that can easily be dispensed with. George Lakoff, a linguist from Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, beg to differ.
In Metaphors We Live By, an update of their 1980 volume of the same name, they argue that metaphors are not only fundamental to language but fundamental to thinking and acting. For instance, the metaphor “time is money” finds expression in our usage in all sorts of ways (“how do you spend your time?”; “don’t waste my time”; “he must learn to budget his time”) and shapes the way we think about, experience, and “invest” our time.
Another key example is “argument is war,” a base metaphor that is evident in much of our talk about arguments: “Phillip Johnson launched a counter-attack on the Darwinian establishment” and “Richard Dawkins responded by defending his position.” Believing that “argument is war” helps us perceive when we have moved from conversation to argument. This metaphor is not merely a fancy way of talking about argument, but actually defines what we mean by “argument” and what we experience in an argument.
Many metaphors are rooted in physical experience: “Up” usually connotes “more,” and more is usually good (but not always: no one wants to be “fed up”). This metaphorical correlation of “up” with “better” expresses physical experience; we actually do sink toward the ground when we’re “low in spirits” and stand up when our “spirits rise.”
Basic Metaphor
The authors’ key claim is that metaphor is not only basic to language, but basic to all conceiving and thinking. Metaphor is a “conceptual” category, and does not merely describe a literary device. We come to understand abstract ideas by forming metaphorical connections with physical and cultural realities, because we are not detached spirits but embodied minds in relationship with other embodied minds with whom we are engaged in various cultural practices.
The implications of this work are particularly evident in epistemology, the branch of philosophy devoted to the study of knowledge, asking how we can know what we know. Lakoff and Johnson point out that philosophers of knowledge tend in one of two directions: They are either objectivists or subjectivists.
Objectivists believe that things are true regardless of whether we believe that they are true, and they also believe that we can know and state what is true in a direct fashion. Subjectivists believe we never have direct access to the world because we are always looking at it through a set of assumptions, which are like a set of colored glasses glued to our faces. If my glasses are blue, the world looks blue to me; if yours are green, the world looks green to you. There is no way to tell what the world actually is like because we cannot take off the glasses.
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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