From literal dreams to metaphorical dreaming: art, rhetoric, and self-creation

Abstract

The rhetorical shifts used to capture oneiric experiences can materialize into a real-life shift between the imaginative and the experiential. By taking a Rortyan approach to the conception of the unconscious, this essay seeks to examine the ways in which the metaphorical and linguistic attachments to dreaming can help guide one’s own self-representation – that is, dreams become vehicles of creation. After tracing the semantic development of dreams, the essay surveys how dream-inspired art can transmit to and through lived experiences, as seen in examples from history. Then, by advancing the pervasiveness of the metaphorical dream, namely through analyzing expressions like the ‘American Dream,’ the essay turns to demonstrate how these pervasive metaphors can materialize into shared experiences. Such experiences can transcend metaphorical boundaries by fostering a representation far beyond mere fantasy toward a calculated self-creation.

Keywords:

• metaphor
• rhetoric
• dream
• art
• pragmatism
• Richard Rorty

Notes on contributors

Aaron Martin has a PhD from and is a Senior Lecturer in the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He leads an interdisciplinary research program where he and his research collaborators – including this essay's co-authors, Gianna Eisele, Ian Hogg, Hannah Neal, and Amal Shukr – analyze timely problems by applying the pragmatic method to interpret the social and political world. He – with other Honors students – has published multiple articles in various interdisciplinary scholarly journals.

Gianna Eisele is a third-year Honors student majoring in Anthropology at Wayne State University.

Ian Hogg is a third-year Honors student majoring in Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.

Hannah Neal is a third-year Honors student and has been accepted into the Occupational Therapy Program at Wayne State University.

Amal Shukr is a recent graduate of Wayne State University and is currently a first-year law student at the Michigan State University College of Law.

Notes

1 By ‘pragmatically informed analysis,’ we mean our application of the pragmatic method (referred to as neopragmatism, as well, once pragmatism took a ‘linguistic turn’ from empiricistic, or experienced-based, space previously occupied in philosophical thought). Our approach relies on the version of pragmatism, the term we will use throughout the paper, as developed by influential American pragmatist Richard Rorty, which is ‘an attempt to break down the distinction between the intrinsic and the extrinsic features of things (Voparil and Bernstein 2010, 245). For Rorty and this essay’s authors, pragmatism seeks to swap out traditional philosophy’s use of capital letter abstractions (e.g., capital letter ‘T’ Truth, capital letter ‘K’ Knowledge). Moving away from this foundationalism, we favor an approach which examines a thoroughly ‘contingent’ orientation to the world.

We share in Rorty’s view (1989, 3–4) that progress – intellectual, moral, or otherwise – is not the result of getting closer to ‘the way the world [really] is’ but in ‘how to give a [better, this-worldly] sense to one’s own life or that of one’s community’. Such an assertion amounts to taking historically assumed questions away from, say, philosophy or religion and handing them over to the realms of ‘art or [even] politics.’ This is what we intend to develop our analysis. Our interest in the artistic interpretation of dreams relative to art is one of ‘ends rather than means’. That is, we see the interconnectivity between dreams and art not so much as a device for attempting to locate ultimate truth. Rather, we examine how the interconnectivity contributes to the process of self-creation, the possibility of which is limited only by the human imagination (Voparil and Bernstein 2010, 479).

For more on the pragmatic method and status of pragmatism, see ‘Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism’ (Rorty 1980). For a more specific look at Rorty’s integration of pragmatism and postmodernism, where notions like contingency are especially developed, see the Introduction in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).

2 This essay adopts the use of the term ‘unconscious’ because of its application in Freudian psychoanalysis. Rorty studies Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to bolster his argument of contingency. We choose to implement ‘unconscious’ to describe the non-conscious mind, as a way to maintain consistency with Rorty’s argument.

3 The term ‘dream’ was available in the sense that it had only logical, yet abstract, application in society; its original, literal definition was created to describe a scientific occurrence, which little was known about. Due to the subjective abstractness of the logical implementation of ‘dream,’ the term was able to be adapted to include a metaphorical definition.

4 O’Donnell (2018, 24) observes that ‘Rorty’s Pragmatism is Rorty’s effort to exorcize the fraught notion of experience from Pragmatist thinking and to replace it with a thorough-going linguistic approach to thought.’ This may be why Rorty emphasizes the use of linguistic tools to compare finding one’s self to making a new language.