Review of the Book “Metaphor We live By” written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Reviewed by

Imran Khan

Master of Philosophy in Linguistics

In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson points out that, metaphor functions as vehicle for understanding one thing in terms of another. The main argument that justifies the title “Metaphors We Live By” is that metaphor guides our everyday action and thought. In other words, the authors argue that human beings are metaphorical being and most of our thinking pattern involves metaphor.

The notion of Love is understood through the metaphors of journey, patient, physical force, war, etc. Abstract concepts such as life, love and time etc. are not clearly delineated in our experience that is why it is understood and acted in terms of metaphor.

The author takes up the question of how we understand our experience.

The author describes that there is an interesting chain process when we try to understand our experience. First, experiences are manifestation of complex emotions, controversies and feelings. But when we try to understand our experiences through language, it triggers the chain process. The metaphor facilitates us to access to language, and connects us back with the chain. The main point is that the nature of our understanding of experience and feeling is circular and metaphor actually provides the link that closes the circle. Metaphor is core of the methods we understand our lives, the title of the book justifies.

Concepts like wasting time, attacking positions, going our separate ways, etc., are generated by the system of metaphor that steer our thought and action but they  are conventionally placed  within the vocabulary of English as a poetic device.

 Metaphor is an integral part of our everyday language being unaware of it and it further supports the idea that the process of understanding our experience, thought, speech and action is circular. But interestingly the experience itself must, at some level, influence the metaphor we use to comprehend it. In the process of circular construct of experience metaphor gets strengthen. For instance, the book describes that the metaphors “love is war” and “argument is war”. But how do we understand the experience of war? It is obvious that the experience of war is more concrete than love, and it is more visible and clear than argument, but can we understand such a horrendous activity of war in terms of general love, excluding metaphor?. After all, as it is under discussion that war is hate, war is money, war is power, war is terrorism, war is theatre, etc. Even though we use war to understand other experiences, we still need other experiences to understand war.

The study of metaphor becomes important because it combines reason and imagination. Reason, deals with classification and drawing conclusions. Imagination, deals with knowing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inference, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature. Given our understanding of poetic metaphor in terms of metaphorical entailments and inferences, we can see that the products of the poetic imagination are, for the same reason, partially rational in nature.

The relationships between imagination and rationality explains that why we understand one thing in terms of other. For example, war is not something that everybody has experienced, but it can be imagined. However, if it is experienced it cannot be expressed as it is. There are some hard questions regardless the actual experience of war. So, metaphor unites what one can inferred logically of an experience to be and what one can more intuitively envision an experience to be.

Love is not a concept that has a clearly delineated structure; whatever structure it has it gets only via metaphors. Those ideas which are difficult to explain and understand i.e. emotional or abstract but also for almost all universal ideas and experiences, we allow metaphor (the combination of our rational and imaginative thought about something) to guide our understanding. Without metaphor, these experiences become not meaningless, but structure-less and therefore indecipherable.