Notes from Evil Bender

I’m going to temporarily put aside the events-driven posts that generally show up here and post some thoughts on the nature of metaphor as it relates to our understanding of the world. As humans, we appear to be wired to see patterns in things. That’s why we see smiley faces :) as smiling faces, why we see Jesus in oil-spills and faces on Mars and the Moon. Our minds categorize, organize data, make comparisons and evaluate new information in light of old. This is a fantastic adaptive method, and has served us well.

But it is not foolproof.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

These are among the most recognized lines of Shakespeare, and justly so: MacBeth, having learned of the death of his wife, dispairs, and sees his life as meaningless. But it is worth noting that no one interprets the play itself so: MacBeth is many things, but if anything it signifies too much, not too little. Even a Deconstructionist critic would not argue that the play signifies nothing, but rather that its signification is open.

MacBeth’s words are, in a sense, ironic, for they stand in contrast to the endeavor of playwriting and production, which surely is meant to communicate with the audience, to signify. But if Shakespeare meant to signify, that does not necessarily imply that life signifies. Like the nihilists from The Big Lebowski, one can believe that life has no signification.

We’ll cut off your Johnson.

But we’re so good at expecting the world to signify that, like the nihilists, we might find a meaningless universe to be “unfair.” Alternatively, we might look for meaning in our lives–the vast majority of us do.

What we seek when we look for signification–in MacBeth’s words, in life, in the universe–is metaphor. Not directly, of course: we do not say “I need a metaphor with which to understand the world.” But it is the nature of our experience that we use metaphors this way, that we cannot help but understand the world through the lens of metaphor.

Note here that I do not mean that there is no objective reality or that all metaphors are equally valid in understanding our world. MacBeth’s metaphor resonates so strongly because it has explanatory power. Like a poor play, life can sometimes seem meaningless, disjointed, full of sound and fury.

Religion is likewise a metaphorical way of seeing the world. The story of the Garden of Eden is not fact, but it is an excellent metaphor for life: it does an impressive job of discussing knowledge, suffering, and the cost of free will. Read as a metaphor, it emerges clearly as a means of understanding human experience.

Science too uses metaphors, though differently. Science’s primary metaphor is one of order: scientists implicitly accepts the metaphor that the universe is ordered, consistent, predictable. We accept experiments as valid because we believe that the rules of physics will not arbitrarily change, and gravity will “stop working.” Those who study evolution speak of “design” without meaning God Stepped In, because design is a convenient way of putting a complexity–in this case, the adaptive mechanisms that an organism uses to survive–into words.

And, most significantly of all, words are metaphors. There is no one-to-one correlation between words and objects. Words are only arbitrary signifiers which can point us in helpful directions. Take for instance the word “dog,” compared with the french “chien,” which also signifies dog, though it is a masculine form, something english does not have. Worse, our word “bitch” which can signify female dog or be a pejorative, does not translate directly. French has “garce,” which is also a pejorative in a similar sense, but which certainly does not correlate to the word “bitch” when used to mean a female dog. (If those who read this blog and know French better than me would like to correct any of this/add to it, please do.)

Words don’t correlate one-to-one between languages, much less with life. Words are a way of understanding, categorizing, and communicating. They are metaphor.

Humans, in short, cannot escape metaphor as a means of understanding. Nor should we try: metaphor is terrifically useful to us, for it allows us to take that which we can understand and use it to draw conclusions about that which is unfamiliar.

But metaphor is not perfect. In particular, we can not assume that our metaphors are perfect. We must continually revise them to best approximate the real nature of things. We cannot assume that because something seems obvious to us, it must be so: like many Victorian scientists, who believed that White Aristocratic Men were more highly evolved than women and people of color, and who then found mountainous “evidence” that seemed to validate their bias, we must be on guard lest a metaphor become absolute truth for us.

In other words, we must guard against fundamentalism. One of the defining characteristics of fundamentalists is that they take their interpretation of a text as absolute, accessible truth. Thus tied to, say, a literal interpretation of Genesis, they cannot understand that their Holy Book is open to interpretation, that even if it signifies perfectly, they are imperfect people for whom absolute signification is impossible: they are interpreting word, which is an exact science. Taking a few things as axiomatic, we can build a logically consistent mathematics, but we are not so lucky in the murky matters of the meaning of human life, and once we start to forget that, we have mistaken metaphor for reality.

Like other methods of interrogating reality, metaphor can be a wonderful tool. But like any tool, it can be misused. As humans, we cannot escape trying to make meaning of our lives. Just as MacBeth structures a careful, meaningful metaphor for the apparent meaninglessness of life, we can craft metaphor to better understand the world in which we live. But MacBeth is merely a character, his words but a single interpretation. If we wish to use metaphor, we must also know when it is time to reject a metaphor when it does not apply to the reality which it mirrors.

If you’ve read through this, thank you, and I hope you’ve found my rambling to be at least interesting.