Metaphor, Language and Struggling to Consciousness

Metaphor..is the very constitutive ground of language....This is indeed the nub (knob), heart, pith, kernel, core, marrow, etc. of my argument, which itself is a metaphor and ‘seen’ only with the mind’s ‘eye’. (OCBBM, Ch 2)

The relationship of how language and consciousness are related is a contentious subject. Is language necessary for consciousness? Did the evolution of language skills cause consciousness to emerge? Or vice versa? In chapter two of OCBBM, Julian Jaynes gives us particularly insightful and lucid answers to at least some of the most perplexing issues regarding the relationship of language and consciousnesses. In chapter two, Jaynes addresses what he believes consciousness actually is, and he begins by asserting language and metaphor are the basis of introspective consciousness.  Jaynes argues that, as we have new experiences, our faculties for language allow us to understand more and more complex and abstract ideas; and therefore, language is not just a way of communicating, but is an "organ of perception". 

This is based on his insights regarding how metaphor functions to expand language and human understanding. That is, whenever we encounter something new, we make sense of it through the use of metaphor to familiarize ourselves with the object of our attention. This causes us to stretch our language until we can arrive at a more or less satisfactory understanding of what the entity we are perceiving is or what a particular state of affairs means to us.

Say for example, you are traveling in Africa and suddenly you come across this animal:

In trying to understand what you are seeing, you might say to yourself something like, "It's part reptile, part armadillo and part anteater." That is, the first thing you do when attempting to understand something new is draw from what you already know and make associations to what the new object of your attention is like. (In fact, the author of the bog I copied this picture from compared this creature to a dragon, a dinosaur and a Pokemon!) In other words, what we do is use the known as the metaphor that makes the unknown intelligible to us. This is true whether we are trying to understand something that actually exists in physical space, like the animal pictured above (which is called a 'pangolin'), or if we are trying to understand an abstract concept, like love, by comparing it to, for example, the sweetness of candy and the warmth of a blanket.

This process of metaphorical comparison driving our ability to better understand our experience underlies how we generate new concepts through the expansion of language. The first time I got a sense of what this really means was as a youth in my school library when I happened to come across the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED). I was amazed to see the many volumes stretching down the book shelf, and wondered how this could be, given I had a dictionary of my own that fit nicely into a small back pack with the rest of my books. I reached for a random volume and opened it up, and I saw that the reason it was so huge was that each word not only had a definition, but also contained a history of where the word came from including all the various meanings the word had in the past. I did some further research and discovered scholars began working on the OED in 1878 and did not get the 15, 490 page first edition completed until 1928! I remember when I read the etymologies of some of the words in the volume I was holding how I felt like I was getting a direct look at how consciousness was changing and growing, as I went from a particular word's form and meaning in one era to its new form and meaning in the next.

A good example of how metaphorical comparison expands language can be seen in the way the word 'line' evolved. About 800 years ago, 'line' meant rope or cord and is still used that way at times in the present. However, as history moved forward we developed the need to quickly and easily access in our awareness an abstract representation of the shortest distance between two points. A line in the sense of a rope became a metaphor, and voilà, the meaning of the word line expanded to aid our consciousness into becoming comfortable with a geometry concept.

Jaynes succinctly makes the point stating, "The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex....language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors...." Jaynes gives us a poignant example of this process in action when he discusses the evolution of the verb 'to be':

"It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, 'to grow, or make grow,' while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmiy 'to breathe.' It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it 'breathes.'"

Creating a more complex and abstract language has allowed our cognition to expand and develop this new mind-space (metaphorically speaking) we call consciousness in which we effortlessly manipulate and maneuver the objects of our attention both forward and backward in time. The previous example suggests to us how, as our ability to introspect grew, we went from only being able to understand our place in reality through concrete analogies with physical functions like 'grow" and "breathe', to being able to stand back and use this new mind-space of consciousness to, for the first time, be able to conceptualize abstractly something like the whole of our 'existence'. And all this is made possible by the capacity we have evolved for complex language.

In my experience, all the above thoughts on how language and consciousness are related have very important implications in our day to day lives. In this modern complex world we are living in, where the pace of change is lightning fast as compared to the experience of our ancestors, strong language skills are essential for being able to interpret and keep up with the various demands the social environment continuously puts on our powers of cognition. This is even more true in regard to the interior life each one of us grapples with.

As a therapist, I have spent endless hours with people who repeatedly struggle to name there own experience. On the flip side, it has been very gratifying and inspiring to have witnessed the journey of clients and students who become proficient at articulating their thoughts and feelings. As I have watched this happen in others (and myself), I can see their consciousness expanding as evidenced by the fact that they are less often reflexively parroting what they hear from others, jumping to conclusions based on emotional reactivity and using trite phrases as a substitute for thoughtful dialogue.

Essentially, what I mean when I say "I can see their consciousness expanding" is that, to use Jaynes' terms, it is evident that they are developing an analog 'I' that operates in a clearly intentional manner when considering the objects they are dealing with inside the mind-space of consciousness. We often hear what I am talking about referred to in 21st century language as 'mindfulness'. When a person's modus operandi consists largely of reflex responses and reactions as I mentioned in the last paragraph, what is happening is they have not developed a distinct internal observer, i.e. an analog 'I', that can thoughtfully consider their own emotional and cognitive content at any given moment.

The ability to do this is predicated on having a rich and flexible vocabulary. Or to put it another way, putting in the effort to develop the habit of slowing down and struggling to say what you mean in as nuanced and clear a fashion as possible is the process that creates a distinct analog 'I'. And often times the struggle I am referring to here is, even if it not consciously always experienced this way, the struggle to find appropriate metaphors that are rich enough to encompass and clearly define what it is one is trying to understand; whether that is one's own feelings, a new concept, the meaning of an event, etc.

And this process does not just allow people to become clearer about the feelings and perceptions they already have. Developing a greater and greater array of vocabulary and syntax expands and deepens the variety of emotional and cognitive experience they are capable of. Indeed, Jaynes discusses in the afterword he wrote to the second edition of OCBBM how, as people became literate and introspective consciousness emerged, humans became capable of moving from simple primitive affective responses to the environment, like fear and desire, to a world of what we in the modern era call emotions, like anxiety and hope.

I mentioned above how I have seen people grow in there ability to express themselves, and this implies a conclusion that I do not believe is overstating the point: We are all not equally conscious--especially if what we mean by being conscious is having a rich and reflective awareness of self and the world. I have experienced clients, students and other individuals in my life whose range of verbal responses they have ready access to in large part boils down to canned phrases like "Oh my God, that's so awesome", "Damn, that sucks", "She's killin' it", "That's sick, man", "lol", etc. It is clear to me these people are not going to be able to respond, when receiving the news that a dear friend from their past died yesterday, with, "If only I could cure evils by lamentation and raise the dead with tears! For I can sense a storming torrent rising up inside my breast, and it will surely have its way with me."

Jaynes teaches us the power that metaphor and language has had in building human consciousness. Really understanding what he is saying about this subject also helps us realize we are making a mistake when our culture glorifies the hackneyed use of language under the sexier titles of urban slang, Ebonics, folk linguistics, etc.