[The original version of this essay was published as Ways of Speaking and True Being. It was finished and uploaded on 2008/11/22.]
Wikipedia tells us that metaphor is:
is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: “The [first subject] is a [second subject].” More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second object in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first. This device is known for usage in literature, especially in poetry, where with few words, emotions and associations from one context are associated with objects and entities in a different context.
We should note that metaphor seems to operate at a phenomenological basis. We remain on a surface populated by thing-like being and relate one thing to another — to speak a little simplistically.
Wikipedia also tells us that analogy is:
is both the cognitive process of transferring information from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target), and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process. In a narrower sense, analogy is an inference or an argument from one particular to another particular, as opposed to deduction, induction, and abduction, where at least one of the premises or the conclusion is general. The word analogy can also refer to the relation between the source and the target themselves, which is often, though not necessarily, a similarity, as in the biological notion of analogy.
Analogy seems to hint a little more about penetrating to deeper layers of being. That is, it seems to allow us to think in terms of being which isn’t immutable, a rock is a rock is a rock, but rather shaped from a rawer or more abstract stuff that could be something other than a rock and becomes a rock only by a process of development.
Our literary ways of speaking don’t penetrate to that abstractness from which thing-like being is shaped in my way of updating Thomistic existentialism to account for modern empirical knowledge. They abstract by ways of generalizing across thing-like being, a good and necessary activity in the human struggle to understand our world and what may lay behind or under or over it but that is only a baby-step. I repeat: they don’t penetrate to more abstract levels of being. As I implied, some thinkers have managed to use analogy to penetrate to more abstract levels of being, that is, levels of being shared across thing-hood. St. Thomas Aquinas, a master of analogy, is a clear example but so is the novelist Hermann Melville. But they had limited tools and limited knowledge to tell them how to do this.
Are we now in a better situation? I think so. Modern physics and modern mathematics have begun to teach us how to generalize in such a way as to reach more deeply into being rather than just looking for patterns on the level of perceivable phenomena. A particularly clear example is the work of Einstein which — somewhat to his surprise — reached to a level of abstraction at which matter and energy are made of the same stuff, an abstract level that was shown quite sadly at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be reachable by concrete levels of technology. Still more suprisingly, general relativity reached an abstract level at which we can suddenly see that space and time are intertwined into one geometric structure. We still don’t know the ‘shape’ of that structure, it it’s ‘flat’ or ‘curved inward’ or ‘curved outward’. (I’ll not explain further here.) Quantum theory and particle physics have told us far more about matter and energy and fields, probably even space-time, melting into more abstract and strange forms of being under certain conditions, such as the high energy or, equivalently, the high density of the universe in the very early fractions of a second of its current expansionary phase. (I’ve written of this on this blog and in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand.)
In the more traditional ways of analyzing being, soul and body are side-by-side. In my view, it’s legitimate to speak of soul but as more abstract aspects of that living entity which is embodied in front of us. It’s not clear to me how to describe those abstract aspects in more accurate terms but I strongly suspect that we would do well to meditate upon the success of modern physicists in using very abstract mathematics to describe matter, energy, and even space-time. A while back, I spoke of this issue in a short and somewhat general blog entry: Abstract Mathematics and the Real Presence of Jesus Christ.
God is present in all levels and aspects of His Creation but the ‘unseen God’ can be more clearly unseen in the more abstract levels of that Creation. So to speak.
Another way to speak towards the greater possibilities I can vaguely see is to speak in terms of what I called the Primordial Universe, the manifestion of the truths God chose for Creation, the truths from which He shaped this world and will shape the world of the resurrected. I’ve spoken of the Primordial Universe as an absolutely infinite ocean, a seething ocean of seeming chaos, of randomness. Think of a random number as a fact. Think also of random events as facts.
Islands of organized being rise out of that seething ocean of pure created being, of manifested truths. Islands of things made of what we know as matter and moved about by energy. And then there are fields. So long as we move about only on the surfaces of those islands or view only the surface of that ocean, we remain in the realm of appearances. We don’t account for modern science and what it has discovered of what lies underneath thing-like being. And nearly all metaphors and analogies work in that realm of phenomena, relating island to another island, palm tree to brush, land to ocean. They work horizontally. That was appropriate when the stuff from which things are made was seen as permanent in its nature. Even Christians who believed in a Creation from nothing and an end-of-times still thought of the stuff of water and rocks existing in that stable form from beginning to end. Water and rocks were immutable substances and not the results of developmental processes. It took an act of God to bring the stuff of things into existence or to destroy them to nothingness and God, of course, created water and rocks directly.
But I see all created being as the results of Thomistic acts-of-being and thus the creation of the stuff of things and the collapse of that same stuff into nothingness is happening at each and every instant of time in all of Creation — or at least in phases of Creation where time as we know it exists. Things in this world, in this phase of God’s Creation, and the stuff of which those things are made do have their horizontal relationships, but there is a fundamental ‘vertical-ness’ which goes right back to the most ‘raw’ stuff of Creation — the manifestation of the truths which God chose for Creation. I call that manifestation the ‘Primordial Universe’.
Modern physics and mathematics force a movement of the sort I’m describing — towards abstraction. Neuroscience and other fields are experimenting with various ways of moving more deeply into being. In any case, my current interest is in that sort of a physics-like movement towards abstraction for the understanding of fundamental aspects of being which are of direct importance to the understanding in turn of human nature and especially of the human mind. For example, we need a better understanding of causation before we can understand moral freedom. What we don’t need is an abstraction from concrete being but rather an abstraction which explores certain aspects of concrete being, such as the soul-like and mind-like aspects of a human being. In other words, an understanding of the possibilities of moral freedom isn’t to be found in the phenomenological events that are the chemical events of our nervous systems. Those possibilities lie in the chain of relationships which tie the physical human being to the fundamental or abstract levels of created being. At the same time, we must realize we won’t be able to deal with those relationships or even realize what they are unless we have good understandings of those chemical events in the human nervous system.
We should bear in mind that these more abstract aspects of being and of human being, though inherent in some sense, do not reach any maturity by necessary events. They develop in an organic way just as our brains and skeletal muscles do, a way that might not start at all and — if started — can go awry in various ways. Yet, it’s remarkable that so many paths of development, such as that of St. Francis of Assisi or that of Albert Einstein, can result in a human being with mature ‘abstract’ aspects, soul-like or mind-like or whatever.