To not know is an experience that feels like an impenetrable wall of silence. We rebel against it and invent tools, such as metaphors, to penetrate that silence. But, as useful as metaphors are, they are limiting. For one, they create boundaries where no such boundaries exist. Lakoff and Johnson, in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By argued that the metaphors we use for a thing dramatically constrain our freedom to think about it. If we touch the elephant’s snout, in the story about the blind men and the elephant, and think it is a snake, that concept will forever affect how we relate to it. Or to put it more scientifically, analogical thinking constrains hypothesis-making. Hence, the mind-metaphor of a container means we will tend to think of things either inside or outside the container mind. But that is an artificial distinction.
A more interesting relationship between mind and metaphor is the idea that mind, specifically thinking, or the intellect, or conceptualization, is the process of attempting to capture and understand the unknown. Metaphors are the essence of how we think and is so pervasive we aren’t really aware of doing it. As some psychologists have argued, “Figurative speech reflects how we actually experience much of our lives.” Mind is the meaning-making or metaphor-making process we engage in.
But even more interesting in the relationship between mind and metaphors is the question about the necessity for metaphorical thought. Is there a different way of understanding an ineffable experience or an unobservable condition than by comparing it to something known? Does a metaphor truly increase our understanding or is it simply a way to increase our sociality, the ability to communicate with others?
My experience suggests that its more the latter than the former. Mind, on its own, is quite capable of experiencing the silence of the world, of not knowing, of actually knowing the unknowable, its beauty and terrifying aspects without language and intellectualization. But because we are social beings, we need to express these experiences in a transmittable and understandable way. Metaphors are necessary tools not for living but for sociality.