Command of life through metaphor
In the previous post, we said that imagination is trained by studying metaphor. What is metaphor, and how does it train the imagination?
You probably remember the high-school definition of metaphor: an extended simile. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Metaphor, taken in its widest application, refers to all connections of any kind, all links among objects or thoughts, no matter how close or distant they seem upon first consideration.
The study of metaphor, the domain of connections, is crucial in education, because most of our thinking works through comparison. And comparison depends on following the connections among thing while holding them side by side in the mind’s eye. The more we study metaphor, the more we trace the paths of the innumerable relations that among the innumerable items in existence, the better we get at connections, even among the most dissimilar things.
Since everything we think and everything we do depends on our grasp of the similarities and differences among things, the better we are at are seeing connections the more control we have of the whole world around us. This is possible because metaphor transcends all specialized jobs, all divisions of thought into specialized disciplines. Metaphor is at home in all walks of life.
Mathematical proportions are metaphors, as are equations, which are proportions reduced to the single relation of identity. Science too proceeds by metaphor, and all the greatest scientists are metaphor experts, sniffing out connections among the most diverse things and devising ways to show whether the connections they suspect truly exist. And, of course, metaphor is just as important in all the so-called humanistic disciplines, where we continually search for the connections that make sense in history, politics, philosophy, literature, and the fine arts.
The universality of metaphor makes liberal education liberating. It allows us to fly from idea to idea, from thing to thing, freely and without hindrance. With an imagination invigorated by this freedom, we can repeatedly leave the confines of our current lives. We are free to remake our lives using whatever connections we can find or forge in the world around us. As I. A. Richards once wrote, command of metaphor is command of life. (I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric [London: Oxford University Press, 1936], 95.)
An imagination well trained by the study of metaphor, with the ability to follow its inclinations wherever they lead, frees the mind and the heart to take command of life.That is what liberal education is all about.And this a freedom that transcends all the particular knowledges converted by all the different academic specialties—as important and as fascinating as they may be.
More on this in the next post.