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Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution
We look for missing links in the sciences and humanities, but the essential missing link - metaphor - is always in front of us. In Missing Link, Jeffery Donaldson unites literary criticism and evolutionary and cognitive science to show how metaphor has been with us since the beginning of time as a seed in the nature of things. With examples from centuries of poets, critics, philosophers, and scientists, he details how metaphor is a chemistry, an exchange of energies forming and dissolving, and an openness in the spaces between things. He considers the ways in which DNA learns how to liken things that have been, how mutation makes errors and then tries them on, and how evolution is hypothesis - nature's way of "thinking more." The mind is a matrix of neural synapses cascade into ever-changing pathways and patterns. Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is the unbroken thread between matter and spirit. Whether offering analysis of a turn of phrase or chemical reaction, Missing Link presents a vision of literature that is also a vision of the cosmos, and vice versa. It enters the debate between evolution and religion, and challenges scientists, literary theorists, and religious advocates to rethink the relations between their disciplines.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2015
13 people want to read
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July 6, 2017
Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of transformation. For centuries, metaphor has been a verbal embellishment, a vivid way of saying things. At times, metaphor was given the credit for helping us better describe and understand what is unknown or incomprehensible. Now, large and growing scientific evidence puts metaphor at the core of human cognition — metaphor is no longer a decoration of language, it’s a cornerstone of human thought and knowledge. Being a source of our understanding, imagination and reasoning, metaphor is central to all thinking in any field of human endeavor, from art and religion to philosophy and science to business and politics.
More radically still, some thinkers, including famous scientist Gregory Bateson, give metaphor not only epistemological, but also ontological status, viewing it as a feature of both human mind and nature itself. The most recent and quite remarkable example of such approach to metaphor is an ambitious and thought-provoking book “Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution” by Canadian poet and critic Jeffery Donaldson.
Bateson said that metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive. For Donaldson, it seems, metaphor is at the bottom of pretty much everything. The Big Bang, fundamental elements of the universe, chemistry, DNA, mutation, evolution, cognition, ourselves, consciousness, culture, spirit are all expressions of continued metaphorical unfolding, metaphor is “the inner particulate and the allowing condition of everything that has come to express it.” Kenneth Burke once said, “A person has the right to worship God according to his or her own metaphor.” Donaldson’s metaphor came to be metaphor itself, “the creative power that issues from whatever we imagine the original fabric of creation to be.”
“Missing Link” is one of the most comprehensive, profound and far-reaching treatises on metaphor. Furthermore, it is a fascinating book, combining the breadth of topics with the depth of insights, yet written in a beautiful poetic manner. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in subjects of God, reality, evolution, and mind.
However, there are a few premises in the book I’d like to challenge. If I got everything right, they may hide an even greater potential of metaphor from readers and probably even from the author himself.
First, Donaldson claims that “space is the radical environment of metaphor, its allowing condition.” Space is at the roots of our experience, so we are reaching the limits of the thinkable here, but let’s ask ourselves: is there no metaphor without space? Applying this question to the “real” world would be challenging and frivolous at the same time, so let’s rather consider examples of human imagination. Since Donaldson views metaphor as a source of both real and imaginary worlds, what’s true in one should also be true in another. So, can, for example, Abbott’s King of Pointland in principle use metaphor? What about non-spatial creatures in Stapledon’s Star Maker, who “appeared to one another as complex patterns and rhythms of tonal characters?” Do they have metaphors and if yes — what could they be? Perhaps, by space the author doesn’t necessarily mean physical space, but rather the space of variants. In that case, not space, but variation, the very possibility of change and difference is a prerequisite for metaphor.
Second, Donaldson’s view of metaphor, however comprehensive, is restrictively linear. Evolution is the central concept of the book: the universe and everything it contains — from Big Bang, through origins of matter, life, mind, and culture, to what the author calls spirit — is a result of continuous metaphorical process of development and sophistication. Linear time then, along with space, is another allowing condition of the metaphorical unfolding.
Moreover, according to Donaldson, metaphor “may be traced back to a time before the advent of mind.” This implies existence of the objective world, before and independent of our observation, which, according to quantum theory, is untenable. “The universe does not exist out there, independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening,” as the legendary physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it. Regarding the linearity of time, he said elsewhere: “The universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole. Its history is not a history as we usually conceive history. It is not one thing happening after another after another. It is a totality in which what happens ‘now’ gives reality to what happens ‘then,’ perhaps even determines what happened then.”
What if premises of linear time and objective world turn out to be wrong, or at least incomplete? What if humankind is not a point on the ray that started with the Big Bang and goes on infinitely (or will end in the Big Crunch)? What if we and the world rather form a circular reference, forever shaping one another like two hands in the famous Escher drawing — “we form what forms us.” Will it undermine the importance of metaphor? I think not.
Considering himself a “hopeful materialist,” the author wanted to “conceive a vision […] on which both materialists and spiritualists would be willing to sign their names.” Traditionally, both groups are used to see and look for a single reality or truth, be it “The Law of God” or “a law of nature.” The scientific quest for the final theory is going on; the universe was a machine yesterday, it’s the Big Bang expansion today, it may be a hologram or information tomorrow. But whatever it is, we should remember that, as Norman O. Brown said, “all that is, is metaphor.” In this sense, if the theory of everything is attainable in principle, Donaldson suggests probably the best candidate for it.
However, by ontologizing metaphor we probably make the same mistake as when we ontologize everything else. And this gets me to my main question. Despite all the beauty and omnitude of “Missing Link,” Donaldson’s view of metaphor seemed to me, “to invoke an important oxymoron,” too literal.
Donaldson uses different definitions of metaphor: substitution, interaction, A=B, identity and difference, “is and is not.” But as we know from Lakoff and Johnson, “even the theories of metaphor themselves must be analyzed. The theory of conceptual metaphor, for example, employs metaphors of ‘mapping’ and ‘projection’ to conceptualize the nature of metaphor itself. Such a conception could never be absolute […] and so we must always be self-reflectively aware of our own metaphorical assumptions and their limitations.” Particularly when metaphor is ontologized.
The author warns that “the risk of seeming to speak of fixed absolutes and concrete realities, and implying that metaphor […] has been here from the beginning, is greater than any advantage the term may have.” Notwithstanding this important reservation, the book gives an impression that it describes the way things really and ultimately are, as if the final theory has been finally found.
There can be no theory of everything. No final destination from where we can say: “This is how the world really is.” The quest for the final theory is misguided; moreover, it’s against the very spirit of metaphor, which by its nature is transgressive. It seems like this quest will never be over.
Nothing should be taken as a literal truth, and taking metaphor literally would be, by definition, a mistake. “Missing Link” lacks metametaphor, reflection on itself. To illustrate my point I will cite two sources that strongly influenced my view of metaphor.
The first is Madhyamaka Buddhist school of philosophy with its central concept of śūnyata (emptiness, groundlessness). According to Madhyamaka, all phenomena are empty of nature, a substance or essence, which gives them independent existence, because they are dependently co-arisen. There is no fixed way in which things exist, no way things truly are, in and of themselves. Emptiness means interdependence or relationality: things don’t exist inherently or objectively, instead, they exist by depending on other things, including our means of interacting with them. To be empty is to be dependently originated or, to use Thich Nhat Hahn’s term, to interbe. To be metaphorical, in a sense.
However, the most crucial point of Madhyamaka — and this is the reason of disagreement with some other Buddhist schools of thought — is that emptiness itself is also empty. “It does not have an existence on its own, nor does it refer to a transcendental reality beyond or above phenomenal reality.” “Emptiness is not an essence. It is not a substratum or background condition. […] Emptiness is not a quality that things have, which makes them empty. Rather, to be a thing in the first place, is to be empty.”
The victorious ones say that emptiness
Undermines all dogmatic views,
Those who take a dogmatic view of emptiness
Are said to be incurable.
(Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way)
Another source comes from the philosopher Cathy J. Wheeler. In her article “The Magic of Metaphor: A Perspective on Reality Construction,” she challenges single reality thesis and its “values of unity, generality, and integration,” “strive for simplification and elimination” and “concern with absolutes and ultimates.” Wheeler suggests that “reality is multiple and that metaphor plays an essential role in creating it.”
Donaldson asks if metaphors are made or discovered. The question itself is the consequence of the subject-object split, which Wheeler wants to relativize, taking it as metaphor and blurring the line between ontology and epistemology. “Consciousness neither precedes nor follows reality, they are one and the same,” as Roger S. Jones put it in his book Physics as Metaphor.
In another, a later article “A Question With No Answer, Or: Reality as Literalism and as Metaphor,” Wheeler lays the same emphasis on metaphor as Donaldson does in “Missing Link.” “Metaphor is not a product of human mind, but act of the universe [Wheeler uses the term ‘universe’ in the philosophical, rather than the physical sense], bringing together things that have never mingled before, resulting in certain reality.” However, there are at least two significant aspects, which differ Wheeler’s and Donaldson’s approaches to metaphor.
First, reality-making needs sensitivities. “Sensitivities are vessels in which the universe’s reality comes to formulation: The thoughts, experiences, and images that take shape within them are reality itself. […] Sensitivities are the universe’s means of having reality, its way of coming into focus as being some way in particular.”
Thus, according to Wheeler, reality itself, being a circular relationship between the universe and its sensitivities, is metaphor. Metaphor is neither how we view the pre-existing universe, nor how the universe is inherently is. Rather, metaphor is how the universe is through us. It is everything or nothing (depending on your metaphysical preferences), being something. “Reality-making is a continuous and ubiquitous undertaking,” “a dynamic generation of perspectives recursively linked to perceivers.” We don’t just live inside the metaphor, we are its co-creators and its limit.
It goes well together with the intuitions of quantum physics: “the observer, the observed and the act of observation are inseparably united,” “it makes no sense […] to talk about an objective universe as if it exists separate from our observation of it.”
The second and, in my view, the most important point comes at the end of Wheeler’s second article. It says that all reality is metaphorical — the universe takes form “as if” certain things:
1. do not “really” exist
2. are appearances of other things
3. are simply how things are
Whether implied by Wheeler or not, the following inferences may be drawn from her article:
1. Reality does not exist without sensitivities. Non-metaphorical reality does not exist.
2. Reality is what the universe appears to be through us.
3. All reality is metaphorical, it’s simply how things are.
Having correlated these two lists, we get into a strange loop of “as if” and come to the key conclusion: reality as metaphor is also a metaphor. Emptiness is empty.
This strange loop, this paradox, this tautology, beyond which we probably can’t proceed, is crucial if we want to keep our metaphors (and metametaphors) alive and prevent them from turning into ossified literalisms. All is mutable in reality as metaphor, and so is our understanding of metaphor itself. Everything, including ourselves and what we think about everything, is one great metaphor, the universe “realizing” itself — coming into existence as being some, but not the only way — through us. Metaphor is not the supreme principle, owing to which everything exists, rather to exist in the first place is to be a metaphor. To be is to be as, “isness is asness is metaphoricity.” Realization of this raises metaphor to the power of itself, leading us to an infinite mirror hall of how things are or can be, to what some of us might call God.
Coming back to my comments on the book, I realize that they may look like preaching to the choir, just in different language. My arguments don’t contradict with what Donaldson says and are not about proving him wrong or Wheeler right. It can’t be proven because there is nothing to prove. To prove something is to pretend that there is one true way things are. Their visions are neither true nor false, rather they are different metaphors.
“The world is everything that is the case,” Wittgenstein said. The case, however, is not “engraved on a tablet of stone for all eternity.” “The universe keeps coming together in different configurations, each one producing a sense of reality ‘as if’ this is how the world is.” Having read “Missing Link,” so convincing, so poetic and inspiring, full of startling ideas, I was left awaiting the author telling me that last, but all-important thing about the book itself — “As if…”
More radically still, some thinkers, including famous scientist Gregory Bateson, give metaphor not only epistemological, but also ontological status, viewing it as a feature of both human mind and nature itself. The most recent and quite remarkable example of such approach to metaphor is an ambitious and thought-provoking book “Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution” by Canadian poet and critic Jeffery Donaldson.
Bateson said that metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive. For Donaldson, it seems, metaphor is at the bottom of pretty much everything. The Big Bang, fundamental elements of the universe, chemistry, DNA, mutation, evolution, cognition, ourselves, consciousness, culture, spirit are all expressions of continued metaphorical unfolding, metaphor is “the inner particulate and the allowing condition of everything that has come to express it.” Kenneth Burke once said, “A person has the right to worship God according to his or her own metaphor.” Donaldson’s metaphor came to be metaphor itself, “the creative power that issues from whatever we imagine the original fabric of creation to be.”
“Missing Link” is one of the most comprehensive, profound and far-reaching treatises on metaphor. Furthermore, it is a fascinating book, combining the breadth of topics with the depth of insights, yet written in a beautiful poetic manner. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in subjects of God, reality, evolution, and mind.
However, there are a few premises in the book I’d like to challenge. If I got everything right, they may hide an even greater potential of metaphor from readers and probably even from the author himself.
First, Donaldson claims that “space is the radical environment of metaphor, its allowing condition.” Space is at the roots of our experience, so we are reaching the limits of the thinkable here, but let’s ask ourselves: is there no metaphor without space? Applying this question to the “real” world would be challenging and frivolous at the same time, so let’s rather consider examples of human imagination. Since Donaldson views metaphor as a source of both real and imaginary worlds, what’s true in one should also be true in another. So, can, for example, Abbott’s King of Pointland in principle use metaphor? What about non-spatial creatures in Stapledon’s Star Maker, who “appeared to one another as complex patterns and rhythms of tonal characters?” Do they have metaphors and if yes — what could they be? Perhaps, by space the author doesn’t necessarily mean physical space, but rather the space of variants. In that case, not space, but variation, the very possibility of change and difference is a prerequisite for metaphor.
Second, Donaldson’s view of metaphor, however comprehensive, is restrictively linear. Evolution is the central concept of the book: the universe and everything it contains — from Big Bang, through origins of matter, life, mind, and culture, to what the author calls spirit — is a result of continuous metaphorical process of development and sophistication. Linear time then, along with space, is another allowing condition of the metaphorical unfolding.
Moreover, according to Donaldson, metaphor “may be traced back to a time before the advent of mind.” This implies existence of the objective world, before and independent of our observation, which, according to quantum theory, is untenable. “The universe does not exist out there, independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening,” as the legendary physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it. Regarding the linearity of time, he said elsewhere: “The universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole. Its history is not a history as we usually conceive history. It is not one thing happening after another after another. It is a totality in which what happens ‘now’ gives reality to what happens ‘then,’ perhaps even determines what happened then.”
What if premises of linear time and objective world turn out to be wrong, or at least incomplete? What if humankind is not a point on the ray that started with the Big Bang and goes on infinitely (or will end in the Big Crunch)? What if we and the world rather form a circular reference, forever shaping one another like two hands in the famous Escher drawing — “we form what forms us.” Will it undermine the importance of metaphor? I think not.
Considering himself a “hopeful materialist,” the author wanted to “conceive a vision […] on which both materialists and spiritualists would be willing to sign their names.” Traditionally, both groups are used to see and look for a single reality or truth, be it “The Law of God” or “a law of nature.” The scientific quest for the final theory is going on; the universe was a machine yesterday, it’s the Big Bang expansion today, it may be a hologram or information tomorrow. But whatever it is, we should remember that, as Norman O. Brown said, “all that is, is metaphor.” In this sense, if the theory of everything is attainable in principle, Donaldson suggests probably the best candidate for it.
However, by ontologizing metaphor we probably make the same mistake as when we ontologize everything else. And this gets me to my main question. Despite all the beauty and omnitude of “Missing Link,” Donaldson’s view of metaphor seemed to me, “to invoke an important oxymoron,” too literal.
Donaldson uses different definitions of metaphor: substitution, interaction, A=B, identity and difference, “is and is not.” But as we know from Lakoff and Johnson, “even the theories of metaphor themselves must be analyzed. The theory of conceptual metaphor, for example, employs metaphors of ‘mapping’ and ‘projection’ to conceptualize the nature of metaphor itself. Such a conception could never be absolute […] and so we must always be self-reflectively aware of our own metaphorical assumptions and their limitations.” Particularly when metaphor is ontologized.
The author warns that “the risk of seeming to speak of fixed absolutes and concrete realities, and implying that metaphor […] has been here from the beginning, is greater than any advantage the term may have.” Notwithstanding this important reservation, the book gives an impression that it describes the way things really and ultimately are, as if the final theory has been finally found.
There can be no theory of everything. No final destination from where we can say: “This is how the world really is.” The quest for the final theory is misguided; moreover, it’s against the very spirit of metaphor, which by its nature is transgressive. It seems like this quest will never be over.
Nothing should be taken as a literal truth, and taking metaphor literally would be, by definition, a mistake. “Missing Link” lacks metametaphor, reflection on itself. To illustrate my point I will cite two sources that strongly influenced my view of metaphor.
The first is Madhyamaka Buddhist school of philosophy with its central concept of śūnyata (emptiness, groundlessness). According to Madhyamaka, all phenomena are empty of nature, a substance or essence, which gives them independent existence, because they are dependently co-arisen. There is no fixed way in which things exist, no way things truly are, in and of themselves. Emptiness means interdependence or relationality: things don’t exist inherently or objectively, instead, they exist by depending on other things, including our means of interacting with them. To be empty is to be dependently originated or, to use Thich Nhat Hahn’s term, to interbe. To be metaphorical, in a sense.
However, the most crucial point of Madhyamaka — and this is the reason of disagreement with some other Buddhist schools of thought — is that emptiness itself is also empty. “It does not have an existence on its own, nor does it refer to a transcendental reality beyond or above phenomenal reality.” “Emptiness is not an essence. It is not a substratum or background condition. […] Emptiness is not a quality that things have, which makes them empty. Rather, to be a thing in the first place, is to be empty.”
The victorious ones say that emptiness
Undermines all dogmatic views,
Those who take a dogmatic view of emptiness
Are said to be incurable.
(Nāgārjuna, Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way)
Another source comes from the philosopher Cathy J. Wheeler. In her article “The Magic of Metaphor: A Perspective on Reality Construction,” she challenges single reality thesis and its “values of unity, generality, and integration,” “strive for simplification and elimination” and “concern with absolutes and ultimates.” Wheeler suggests that “reality is multiple and that metaphor plays an essential role in creating it.”
Donaldson asks if metaphors are made or discovered. The question itself is the consequence of the subject-object split, which Wheeler wants to relativize, taking it as metaphor and blurring the line between ontology and epistemology. “Consciousness neither precedes nor follows reality, they are one and the same,” as Roger S. Jones put it in his book Physics as Metaphor.
In another, a later article “A Question With No Answer, Or: Reality as Literalism and as Metaphor,” Wheeler lays the same emphasis on metaphor as Donaldson does in “Missing Link.” “Metaphor is not a product of human mind, but act of the universe [Wheeler uses the term ‘universe’ in the philosophical, rather than the physical sense], bringing together things that have never mingled before, resulting in certain reality.” However, there are at least two significant aspects, which differ Wheeler’s and Donaldson’s approaches to metaphor.
First, reality-making needs sensitivities. “Sensitivities are vessels in which the universe’s reality comes to formulation: The thoughts, experiences, and images that take shape within them are reality itself. […] Sensitivities are the universe’s means of having reality, its way of coming into focus as being some way in particular.”
Thus, according to Wheeler, reality itself, being a circular relationship between the universe and its sensitivities, is metaphor. Metaphor is neither how we view the pre-existing universe, nor how the universe is inherently is. Rather, metaphor is how the universe is through us. It is everything or nothing (depending on your metaphysical preferences), being something. “Reality-making is a continuous and ubiquitous undertaking,” “a dynamic generation of perspectives recursively linked to perceivers.” We don’t just live inside the metaphor, we are its co-creators and its limit.
It goes well together with the intuitions of quantum physics: “the observer, the observed and the act of observation are inseparably united,” “it makes no sense […] to talk about an objective universe as if it exists separate from our observation of it.”
The second and, in my view, the most important point comes at the end of Wheeler’s second article. It says that all reality is metaphorical — the universe takes form “as if” certain things:
1. do not “really” exist
2. are appearances of other things
3. are simply how things are
Whether implied by Wheeler or not, the following inferences may be drawn from her article:
1. Reality does not exist without sensitivities. Non-metaphorical reality does not exist.
2. Reality is what the universe appears to be through us.
3. All reality is metaphorical, it’s simply how things are.
Having correlated these two lists, we get into a strange loop of “as if” and come to the key conclusion: reality as metaphor is also a metaphor. Emptiness is empty.
This strange loop, this paradox, this tautology, beyond which we probably can’t proceed, is crucial if we want to keep our metaphors (and metametaphors) alive and prevent them from turning into ossified literalisms. All is mutable in reality as metaphor, and so is our understanding of metaphor itself. Everything, including ourselves and what we think about everything, is one great metaphor, the universe “realizing” itself — coming into existence as being some, but not the only way — through us. Metaphor is not the supreme principle, owing to which everything exists, rather to exist in the first place is to be a metaphor. To be is to be as, “isness is asness is metaphoricity.” Realization of this raises metaphor to the power of itself, leading us to an infinite mirror hall of how things are or can be, to what some of us might call God.
Coming back to my comments on the book, I realize that they may look like preaching to the choir, just in different language. My arguments don’t contradict with what Donaldson says and are not about proving him wrong or Wheeler right. It can’t be proven because there is nothing to prove. To prove something is to pretend that there is one true way things are. Their visions are neither true nor false, rather they are different metaphors.
“The world is everything that is the case,” Wittgenstein said. The case, however, is not “engraved on a tablet of stone for all eternity.” “The universe keeps coming together in different configurations, each one producing a sense of reality ‘as if’ this is how the world is.” Having read “Missing Link,” so convincing, so poetic and inspiring, full of startling ideas, I was left awaiting the author telling me that last, but all-important thing about the book itself — “As if…”
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