“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
— George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
Metaphor is the foundation of language. We understand the world through metaphor. We build our perception of the world from the ground up. It begins with how we experience our environment as babies. Cold is bad. Warm is good. We build these concepts into more abstract concepts. We feel that someone is cold when they neglect us. We feel warm when someone smiles at us.
Hunger is bad. Satiation is good. We hunger for love. We hunger for power. We hunger for status. We must fill the pits in our stomachs. If we only attain that love, power, or status, we will be satiated. We will feel full.
Just as all matter is constructed of atoms, all thoughts and feelings are constructed gradually from these base experiences. Everything that we think and feel are the complex interactions and combinations of these base experiences—we put them into containers called words.
But we all have different base experiences. Warm means something very different to someone who lost their father to a forest fire compared to someone who had their first kiss next to a fireplace. And so the word “warm” can mean something very different for one person compared to another.
Most of the miscommunication in the world occurs because we assume that others interpret words the same way we do. But how could they? Without having gone through the set of experiences of our life, how could someone extract the same meaning out of the words we use? They can’t.
So words are proxies for meaning. They are not meaning itself. Just as we should not confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself, we should not confuse words for their underlying meaning. Words are simply tools for us to communicate our inner sensations. Words are crude tools, but they’re amongst the best tools we’ve discovered so far.
The next time we get into an argument with someone, let us look past the words. Let us explore what the person means. It’s estimated that over 65% of human communication is nonverbal. Let us pay attention to the person’s body language, facial expression, and tone. Let us pay attention to what they value and need from us. Let us collect more information. Let us add context to the words.
Let us extend our metaphors. Let us extend our language.
“Language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.”
— Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
