Simple Minds, Part 3 - Primary Metaphor
In the last post we looked at how Audie simplifies the world for us through metaphor. How does this work? How do we come to see something abstract in terms of something concrete?
Humans are amazing learning organisms, and it turns out that metaphor is with us from our earliest days as toddlers, and maybe even before.
In 1980, when they published Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson had an intuitive sense that metaphor was tied to the body, but it wasn’t until 1997 that it became clear exactly how. That year Lakoff’s student Joe Grady completed his U.C. Berkeley dissertation, “Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes.”[1] In his thesis Grady explained how our bodily experiences as toddlers create the conceptual mappings between source and target domains.
Consider a simple and intuitive example: walking towards and arriving at a destination. Imagine a toddler toddling across the floor towards her dad. She’s wobbling here and there, probably unsure whether she’ll make it. She has to stay focused, constantly rebalancing herself to avoid falling. Finally, she makes it, joyously hugging daddy’s legs. Daddy and all spectators immediately shout praise, and the toddler smiles a big smile of accomplishment.
At that moment, Grady argues, a binding in the brain/body is established (or reinforced, since this scene and scenes like it are repeated hundreds or thousands of times throughout childhood). The binding is between the physical experience of arriving at a destination and the emotional sense of accomplishment. This binding is so strong that we begin to think about accomplishments generally in terms of arrivals: the subjective sense of accomplishment reminds us of that earliest type of accomplishment called “arriving.” The binding isn’t limited just to the moment of arrival. The entire journey can be thought of as a set of correlations — mappings — between physical experiences and our associated assessments of those experiences. Swift, unimpeded motion feels hopeful, exciting, easy. Halting, interrupted motion feels frustrating and discouraging. Physical obstacles in our path become metaphorical “obstacles” to the good feelings we are seeking in our purposeful motion. And so on.
This is reflected in our language and its staggering abundance of expressions that describe purposeful actions generally in terms of purposeful motion specifically. Just a few off the top of my head:
Pat’s new job has been smooth sailing so far. (Nothing interfering with swift forward motion = nothing interfering with goal-directed actions)
There’s no getting around it. You’ve got a lot of revising to do before the report is ready. (Obstacle = difficulty in accomplishing a goal)
Chris has been in a rut. (Lack of ability to change direction = lack of ability to change goals and/or actions)
Languages the world over have this metaphor, which Lakoff and Johnson dubbed Life Is a Journey. The specific linguistic expressions used in each language are unique, as are broader social meanings around purposeful action. But the fact that the metaphor is so common around the world — quite possibly a linguistic universal — shows how fundamental the body is to how people think and talk.
Grady called this kind of correlation between sensory experience and subjective assessment “primary metaphor.” His research showed definitively that we can’t understand the mind without understanding the body. Grady brought metaphor down out of the ether and into the world of the body, providing a rigorous account of how exactly the body constrains and influences human thought and language — including even that most special, “high,” uniquely human faculty: reason.
Another early experience children have is of accumulating quantities of stuff and things. Milk goes from the carton to the glass, and the level goes up. The more blocks there are, the higher the tower is. A robust correlation forms between quantity and verticality: the more stuff there is, the higher it goes.
This correlation is so strong that we easily forget that it is metaphorical. In the introductory metaphor course at U.C. Berkeley, the More Is Up metaphor is one of the first examples given. Invariably a skeptical student will say something like this: “C’mon, this is isn’t a metaphor. Look at the stock chart in the newspaper. The line goes up and down for higher and lower prices. That’s it.” When asked why the line does what it does, the student goes silent, and then they see: the line does what it does because of the More Is Up metaphor. The line is an instance of the metaphor par excellence.
Verticality is associated with much more than just greater quantities. A lot of “good” things about verticality contrast with a lot of “bad” things about non-verticality. When people are vertical, we are alive, awake and functional. When we are non-vertical, we might be dead, asleep, sick or injured. Across all sorts of life forms and inanimate objects, vertical means functional and non-vertical means non-functional: animals, trees, buildings, and on and on. This creates a metaphorical mapping between verticality and positivity generally. Feeling “up” means feeling good; feeling “low” or “down” means feeling bad. Being in “top” shape means being healthy. Moving “up” the “career ladder” means gaining influence and autonomy. And so on.
Consider now the meaning of the following sentence: “It’s all downhill from here.” What does it mean? It has two very different meanings. We could paraphrase the sentence in two ways:
Starting now, everything gets worse.
Starting now, everything gets easier.
This simple English expression, in its ambiguity, makes a crucial point about metaphor: how we reason about the world depends on which set of metaphorical mappings is active at any given moment. One set of mappings is active in #1; a separate, almost opposite set of mappings is active in #2.[2]
As usual Audie does all of this simplifying for us behind the scenes. We're completely unaware. Audie takes something abstract and more difficult to understand, and puts in simple, physical, sensory terms. It's handy. But we need to know it's another way Audie is constantly tricking us.
[1] Grady, Joseph. 1997. "Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes", UC Berkeley.
[2] #1, incidentally, goes with “over the hill,” while #2 goes with “over the hump.”