Problem This Solves
We assume language evolved primarily for communication and that metaphor is merely decorative. This obscures language's deep connection to manipulation and control, its origins in music and the body, and the indispensable role metaphor plays in keeping language tethered to lived experience.
Key Principle
Language did not originate primarily as a means of communication but as "a means of manipulating the world." It is intimately connected with grasping, tool use, and the left hemisphere's drive for control. Music -- a right-hemisphere capacity -- is language's precursor, and metaphor -- also right-hemisphere-dependent -- is the bridge that reconnects language to the lived world it abstracts from. "Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself."
Good Examples
- Language as manipulation: The proximity of Broca's area (speech production) to areas controlling grasping movements is not accidental. "We talk about 'grasping' what someone is saying" -- the metaphor reveals the deep kinship between language and manual manipulation.
- The language-origins spectrum: From music/musilanguage (right hemisphere, empathic, embodied, communal) through gesture of dance (social, holistic) to gesture of grasp (individualistic, purposive) to referential language (left hemisphere, denotative, abstracted from body) -- with metaphor as the bridge back.
- Living metaphor vs. dead metaphor: A symbol like the rose, with its endless network of connotations (right hemisphere), versus the red traffic light with its 1:1 mapping (left hemisphere). Cliched metaphors, having lost their living quality, are processed by the left hemisphere; fresh metaphors require the right.
- Music as right-hemisphere expression: Music "consists entirely of relations, 'betweenness'" and exemplifies the right hemisphere's world: holistic, implicit, embodied, emotional, relational, never static. Composers with left-hemisphere strokes continued composing excellent music despite severe aphasia.
Bad Examples
- Language severed from metaphor: Purely literal, denotative language severs itself from lived experience. "Language has done its best to obscure its parentage." The flight from embodiment in modern linguistic theory (Saussure, Chomsky) reflects the left hemisphere's drive to deny its origins.
- The arbitrary sign doctrine: The kiki/bouba effect disproves the purely arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign -- people with no knowledge of a language can correctly guess which word goes with which shaped object.
- Reducing music to parts: The left hemisphere's attempt to quantify time into measurable units creates "a Frankenstein's monster of body parts that never truly lives." Music's meaning is not additive but relational.
- Mistaking linguistic mastery for understanding: Language brings "precision and fixity," essential for manipulation, but loses "the picture as a whole." Do not confuse the ability to articulate something with genuine comprehension.
Key Quotes
"Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience -- and it does so via metaphor."
"Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life."
"Eliminating metaphor would eliminate philosophy. Without a very large range of conceptual metaphors, philosophy could not get off the ground." (Lakoff)
"Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common." (Nietzsche)
"The thoughts that are expressed to me by music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite." (Mendelssohn)
Rules of Thumb
- Understand any particular use of language by locating it on the spectrum from pure denotation (left hemisphere) to metaphorical, connotative, prosodic richness (right hemisphere). The more language moves toward pure abstraction, the more it loses contact with reality.
- Value non-verbal communication: "A touch by the shoulder, a handshake or a look tell more than can be expressed in a long monologue. Not because our speech is not accurate enough. Just the contrary. It is precisely its accuracy and definiteness that make speech unsuited for expressing what is too complex, changeful and ambiguous."
- Only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor. Metaphor is "language's cure for the ills entailed on us by language."
- Music's meaning is more specific than language can capture, not less. The right hemisphere deals in a precision beyond words.
- Recognise language's strengths (precision, planning, reference to what is absent) and its limitations (inability to capture implicit, contextual, embodied meaning).
- When trying to solve a problem, relaxation and broadening of attention may be more effective than effortful concentration, because it engages the right hemisphere's wider associative network.
Related References
- [[core-framework]] -- The overarching thesis and the right-left-right cycle that language participates in
- [[two-hemispheres]] -- How the hemispheres differ in their relationship to language and meaning
- [[attention-and-reality]] -- How attention and metaphor shape what reality discloses