Metaphors We Live By (Mountain Photography) · Thursday January 11, 2007
“The human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined”
Metaphors We Live By Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 6
Like it or not, predictably or not, photography is constantly implicated in a constant discourse about appearance and reality. It’s been going on for decades, the philosophy even longer, giving it an admittedly tired first impression. ‘Been there, done that, this is 2007 and we have better things to think about’. I don’t entirely agree. I think the debate has become more sophisticated, and requires more encompassing and sophisticated ideas. Additionally, some forms of photography – mountain photography in particular – may embody some of this discourse in certain interesting ways.
Citing Plato’s Cave has no great impact, other than to give the debate an historic context; even citing Roland Barthes has no great impact, when thousands of students do it every year: yes, we know he mused painfully on the simultaneous presence and absence of his deceased mother, that his cherished photographs hurt him as much as they consoled.
There are however, stones waiting to be lifted and avenues waiting to be walked. There’s more to say. And photography, as a working aesthetic and implicit thinking process, has an interesting potential for playing a part where for example: “metonymy functions actively in our culture. The tradition of portraits, in both painting and photography, is based on it (Lakoff 1980: 37).
Lakoff and Johnson’s book is an interesting specialist study in the primacy and importance of metaphor in thinking and cultural life. They say:
Each culture must provide a more or less successful way of dealing with its environment, both adapting to it and changing it. Moreover, each culture must define a social reality within which people have roles that make sense to them and in terms of which they can function socially. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality. What is real for one individual as a member of a culture Is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the world. Since much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us (146)
Metaphor and metaphoric conceptions of “reality” underpin much of our cultural and thinking life; it’s a cognitive strategy facilitating an apparent meaning, where lack of meaning makes life worthless and unbearable. Psychologist Victor Frankl discovered the men and women who survived the concentration camps were those, like him, who benefited from a love, a hope, the possibility of a future project, that allowed them to transcend their conditions and project into a conceivably better future. Without that, prisoners literally gave up on life and died. If they had no wife, child or hope for a child, symphony to play or, in Frankl’s case, psychology books to write, the brutality and degradation of the conditions overpowered them. In that respect, it doesn’t really matter if playing in a symphony is a metaphor for accomplishment, self-esteem and aesthetic musical mastery, possibly even love; what matters is that a person endows it with value which makes their life worth living. It could be a symphony, or something else; anything.
However, it gets tricky when we start to consider deeper philosophical questions. Lakoff says: “cultural and religious symbolism are special cases of metonymy. Within Christianity, for example, there is the metonymy dove for holy spirit” (40).
The nature of metaphor, portrait, relationship to metaphysics (philosophy) and how it all gets mixed up with a confused differentiation about metaphor and reality became a violent, murderous campaign in 2006 with the Danish cartoons. I was appalled. The philosophical and cultural achievements of past centuries was violently opposed with an insistence on a selfish and narcissistic ignorance. Free speech, in which I include the independent thinking demonstrated in my own writing, was demonised and made violently answerable to what is, by contrast, one of the most regressive forces on the planet. Primitive emotion and blind “belief” was challenged, in the form of supposed no-go satire, and like a Freudian neurotic reaction the “believers” could not tolerate that possibility. It’s still not resolved; there was a rumbling from the media and from intellectuals railing against the totalitarian insistence that the religion should not be criticised or satirised like any other. I rumbled myself, and will do so again when the subject arises as it inevitably will: the violence intimidated people into non-publication, but their values remain the same and rightly so. Free speech lies at the very heart of Western cultural and intellectual advance. After the previous oppressions of Christianity, Fascism, and Stalinism – all of them with a structural similarity – it is perhaps the most precious principle we have. The ’I’ word is currently fighting against this, which is a structural dynamic unacceptable in the modern world.
Religious metaphor is so primal and powerful for large numbers of people, they will kill for it. And yet at the heart of every single religion is a metaphysical promise which, if it were true, would be untroubled and untouched by scepticism from other people. A belief is not a fact but people behave as if it is a fact, and when it’s questioned they react furiously, betraying the fact of their dependence on it’s illusory contingency. It’s just grandiose hope, and they won’t admit it. That in itself is fair enough – live and let live – except where you find traits unacceptable to modern political and humanitarian values, worthy of the same kind of criticism you find in any sphere of life. Thus, criticise and satirise the existence of photography as much as you like: I don’t care, because it’s a fact that cameras exist, capable of visual reproduction. I might even feel sympathy for you, because you are ignorant and don’t know how to benefit from photography. Even more than sympathy, I would probably feel compassion. I wouldn’t seek to silence or kill you because your disagreement would be flawed, not the practice of my art. This shows the structure of what happens with religion, which is predicated on belief, which is not knowledge.
These issues about metaphor, metaphysics and meaning are integral and central to current worldwide sensibilities. They should not be confined to stereotypical forms of discourse, and certainly not blocked and censored by people incapable of, or unwilling to allow, their philosophical scrutiny.
Lakoff again:
Most of our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured; that is, most concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts. This raises an important question about the grounding of our conceptual system. Are there any concepts at all that are understood directly, without metaphor? If not, how can we understand anything at all? (56)
It’s a good point, although I disagree with the premise implied here regarding direct and indirect understanding, as if they are qualitatively different. I don’t think they are, in the sense that in both cases it concerns the same ‘substance’, i.e. the nature and function of thought. A thought about a sandwich you have not eaten is essentially no different from a thought about that yummy snack you had for lunch. Whether you enjoyed the yummy snack or not is not the point; the point is that in both cases, thinking about it is not eating it. They are two different things. I think Lakoff is trying to make this distinction, but fails. However, he proposes that the stereotyped polarity between objective and subjective, rationality and irrationality is erroneously formed and there is in fact a third possibility. This is a topical subject recently debated in national newspapers, prompted by conflicts surrounding Islam. I agree with Lakoff, although not necessarily with all of his ideas, that:
We have argued that truth is always relative to a conceptual system, that any human conceptual system is mostly metaphorical in nature, and that, therefore, there is no fully objective, unconditional, or absolute truth. To many people raised in the culture of science or in other subcultures where absolute truth is taken for granted, this will be seen as a surrender to subjectivity and arbitrariness…For the same reason, those who identify with the Romantic tradition may see any victory over objectivism as a triumph of imagination over science…either of these views would be a misunderstanding based on the mistaken cultural assumption that the only alternative to objectivism is radical subjectivity – that is, either you believe in absolute truth or you can make the world in your own image. If you’re not being objective, you’re being subjective, and there is no third choice. We see ourselves as offering a third choice to the myths of objectivism and subjectivism (185)
There is a third possiblility. Rationality and subjectivism both fail where they are predicated on an assumption of possible cognition, while failing to recognise that cognition of a yummy snack is not eating it. There are spheres of life where this error is consistently made. It annoys me slightly when people stereotype my mountain photography in terms of “Romanticism”. Doing so locates it in a category over which they then have a strategic intellectual advantage, but where actually they don’t understand the subject very well. Chances are, I’m more conversant with the subtleties and intricacies of metaphor and understanding than they are, and while I acknowledge the tradition and implications of Romanticism, I conduct my photography in a different and dual manner. First, I realise and agree that Romantic notions about the ‘Spiritual’, epitomised by Ansel Adams and American Transcendentalism, and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, are indeed naïve and fanciful. Even a little unbalanced, in the case of the poets. However, that doesn’t mean a Third Possibility doesn’t exist, which is neither subjective nor objective but rests, rather, on a fundamental premise of phenomenology elegantly summarised by Lakoff:
Truth is relative to understanding, which means that there is no absolute standpoint from which to obtain absolute objective truths about the world. This does not mean that there are no truths; it means only that the truth is relative to our conceptual system, which is grounded in, and constantly tested by, our experiences and those of other members of our culture in our daily interactions with other people and with our physical and cultural environments (193).
This is a perceptive and necessary distinction between the ‘truth’ that exists, and our understanding of it. They are two different things, routinely conflated and confused. Kant addressed this point with considerable acuity in his Critique Of Human Reason. Thomas Kuhn addressed it in the domain of science with his groundbreaking work The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. And Lao Tsu said it concisely and poetically in his words The Tao that can be told is not the real Tao.
That’s the spirit in which I go romping on the hills with my camera. It’s a beautiful aesthetic playground where, like the Zen practice of ‘just sitting’ or just staring at a wall, my thoughts have no effect on the environment and are thus revealed to me with a similar dynamic to meditation. Displaced from my normal environment and my complex engagement with it, my thoughts ramble around habitually until, gently, they begin to slow down and resonate with the mountainous silence. This is not ‘Romanticism’, it’s phenomenology: by which I mean the lived experience of doing something, and the implications it has. I negotiate the hills with map, compass, and careful planning of survival snacks, while the hills are impervious to my delight, inert with regard to my intrusion, and my worries about job, money, whatever, fade into irrelevance. The ostensible lack of power within mountains is paradoxically refreshing and therapeutic. My habitual thinking is temporarily useless, so I can let go of it. I am free from the confines of the city and its predatory, competitive, materialistic and uncaring operations, the idiocy of politicians and general News At Ten bullshit. As Thoreau put it:
I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilisation: the minister and the school committee, and every one of you will take care of that (Walking, The Nature Company, 1993: 11).
It’s certainly true that Thoreau was Romantic, one of the American Transcendentalists, but that in itself doesn’t mean his comment has no universal value. We are conditioned by society, in different ways according to the culture we inhabit. There is no reason to accept that identity as paramount; not in the sense of cultural relativism whereby other cultures have equal value (which is not always true), but in the sense that ‘nature’, as he refers to it here, may have metaphoric value. Cultural identity is not absolute or unquestionable, and may not be intelligent. Intelligence itself has no form and, maybe, it’s something we can realise whereby the metaphor indicates a real possibility.
