“All language is metaphoric in nature.”
How does that sound to you? Abstract? Confusing? Maybe dangerous? Isn’t language something real?
Understanding language as rooted in metaphor has a long history. Ironically, that history can be seen in the statement itself. As Iain McGilchrist observes, “the word metaphor implies something that carries you across an implied gap (Greek meta- across, pherein carry).”1 Additionally, “language” comes from lingua, the Latin word for tongue. Here is McGilchrist’s explaination:
“All language is metaphoric in nature. All meaning eventually arises from personal experience in the body; and language — including, and especially clearly, philosophical and scientific language — metaphorises bodily experience, however abstract (literally ‘dragged away’) its discourse (literally ‘running to and fro’) may appear. It is metaphor alone (the word itself is a metaphor: it means one that ‘carries across’) that can carry us across the apparent gap between language and the real lived world. The meaning of language begins and ends in the body — where it ‘cashes out’ in experience.”2
Why does this matter? McGilchrist writes, “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 [ie language] to life itself. It is what links language to life.”3
If we want life, we need metaphor. It is not merely the caviar of poets; it’s the bread of life for all.
Which reminds me of another statement that is at once literal and metaphorical: “And the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). As Dorothy Lee put it, “[The flesh of Jesus] is the core Johannine symbol of salvation, in which the material realm becomes the bearer of divine reality.”4 In other words, in the Word become flesh, the Son carries across (metapherein) glory from heaven to earth. So, “In a real sense, the metaphor is the message.”5
Following McGilchrist, we might also say that, before words become flesh, they come from flesh. While “metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words,”6 metaphor is also a way of living before it is a way of thought. So, to use language rightly, we must attend to the body.
One practical way to re-engage the embodied nature of language is poetry. Like song lyrics, poetry is incomplete without embodied vocalization. On that note, and because the statement “all language is metaphoric” sounds abstract but is itself metaphorical, I tried to put it in poetic form.
Tongues carry across— All language is metaphor— Our hearts, mouth to mouth.
Quote from George MacDonald
“All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. The better, however, any such word is fitted for the needs of humanity, the sooner it loses its poetic aspect by commonness of use. It ceases to be heard as a symbol, and appears only as a sign. Thus thousands of words which were originally poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their vitality, and harden into mummies of prose. Not merely in literature does poetry come first, and prose afterwards, but poetry is the source of all the language that belongs to the inner world, whether it be of passion or of metaphysics, of psychology or of aspiration. No poetry comes by the elevation of prose; but the half of prose comes by the “massing into the common clay” of thousands of winged words, whence, like the lovely shells of bygone ages, one is occasionally disinterred by some lover of speech, and held up to the light to show the play of colour in its manifold laminations.
For the world is—allow us the homely figure—the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in nature. Or, to use another more philosophical, certainly not less poetic figure, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, and hence an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought.”7
Question
What role does metaphor play in your life? Or, since “there is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor’s almost imperceptible touch,”8 what is your awareness of metaphor in your everyday life? How do you engage the world through images, analogies, and poetic language? Who is your favorite user of metaphor?
The Master and His Emissary, 116,
The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 186.
The Master and His Emissary, 115.
Dorothy Lee, Flesh and Glory: Symbolism, Gender and Theology In The Gospel of John, 48.
Lee, Flesh and Glory, 17.
James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), 3.
George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts (Withorn Anodos Books, 2024), 7.
Geary, I Is an Other, 3.