Metaphors and Realities

ABSTRACT

The notion that metaphorical statements are strictly false suggests that all statements, even those that seemed ‘literal’, are false, as none can ‘literally’ reflect reality. Statements about what we perceive or could perceive rely on evoking sensory images of such ‘visibles’, even though we have no direct access to what others, may perceive. In addition to what is visible, we must also deal with ‘invisibilia’ (both the fantasms that respectable moderns now reject and the realities that lie beyond or before all sentient experience). Talking about such distant or long-ago realities must always be ‘metaphorical’, as they cannot have any of the merely ‘subjective’ properties of experience, nor do they explain those latter properties. Is there some way of confirming the brute conviction that there is a ‘real and intelligible world’, and that we can find it out or describe it ‘literally’? May ‘Reason’ be a route to understanding? But this too is an illusion: we seem never in practice to escape contradictions and had perhaps better turn again to consider the worlds of experience to which we are confined. What we experience is conditioned by our imagination: whether that metaphorical imagination points beyond experience remains uncertain.

KEYWORDS:

• Metaphor
• imagination
• subjectivity
• reason

Speaking Metaphorically

By Aristotle’s misleadingly straightforward account, ‘metaphor consists in carrying over the name of something else’.¹ The simplest theory of metaphor is the Aristotelian: we use metaphors purely ornamentally to say things that should better be said in more appropriate ways. Strictly, all metaphorical claims are false, and consequently of no real interest. It is false, for example, both that any man is an island, and that any man is ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main’,² and false that a revolution is a dinner party (or a dinner party a revolution).³ In my earlier essay ‘The Possible Truth of Metaphor’,⁴ I argued that an immediate consequence of this naïve judgement must be that even the most careful and supposedly literal claims were false, since their truth must rest on their reflecting reality – and it is obviously false that any statements (or propositions, considered as whatever meaning is shared by cognate statements in different contexts or different languages) are mirrors. The claim that grass is green would be true only if that claim reflected or matched or somehow represented the grass’s greenness: since this is ‘literally’ false, the claim itself must be false – or rather it must have no real relation to reality at all.

Instead of ‘reflecting’ reality, I further proposed, all statements rather ‘evoked’ an image which could then – sometimes – be taken to be ‘realistic’. ‘A sentence uttered makes a world appear where all things happen as it says they do.’⁵ Sometimes that image may be so like our current perceptual experience (which is itself structured and controlled by other sentences taken as true guides) as to create no further problems. Sometimes, on the other hand, we are trying to speak about things wholly invisible: we populate ‘the dark side of the world’, the part we do not see, with visions of how things might look to us if we were only there to see them.⁶ We can overlook some problems: my images of the Australian Outback (which I have never seen with my waking eyes) are created in me by literal pictures as well as by verbal descriptions, and they may not be so far distant from what I might see if I were there, or what another traveller sees already. But there is an issue here already: neither my eyesight, nor my attention, nor my background information are likely to be as reliable as an informed observer’s. What I would see, or notice, is almost certainly very much thinner and less detailed even than an averagely experienced human observer – and altogether less than (for example) a dog’s world, informed by scent and sound as well as sight. It was this that Uexkuell was speaking about when he suggested that ‘biological theory seeks to draw to the attention of the naive person the fact that he sees much too little, and that the real world is much richer than he supposes because there is spread out around every living thing its own world of appearance, which is like his world in its basic traits [perhaps] but which nonetheless manifests so many variations that he could devote his whole life to the study of these worlds without there ever being an end in sight.’⁷ So also Blake:

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,

Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?⁸

So whatever I see or sense or imagine is far less (or at least far different) than whatever is phenomenally present to others, of my own species or another. My own reports, if they are taken to aim at what is either ‘really there’ or at least is perceptible to others, are all themselves metaphors. How then can I suppose that any verbal claims, whatever their power of evocation, are adequate to what potentially can be sensed? The best I can expect is that they won’t – I may hope – be too misleading: I will not often mistake a snake for a piece of string.

Sentences uttered may partly expand our visions of the world, in ways that may (or may not) be helpful: their ‘truth’ lies not in their reflecting all that really is in the region they seem to describe (all that is directly sensed by all the sentient observers there), but only in their continuity with usual phenomenal experience, and their sometime helpfulness. Even if we don’t share all our seemings, and cannot always even show another what seems immediately obvious to us,⁹ we can somehow maintain a conversation, even a cooperative plan of action.

But what of those ‘things invisible’? This might, to some, evoke an image of spectres, fairies, or demons – and it is not easy always to dismiss even such ‘imaginings’, as they populate the visions of people around the world. Maybe, as respectable modern writers usually suppose, such spectres are only ‘metaphors’ for familiar human desires and fears: ‘really’ and ‘realistically’ we should hope to uncover their chemical or neurological origins.

The poets of old to make all things look more venerable than they were devised a thousand false Chimaeras; on every Field, River, Grove and Cave they bestowed a Fantasm of their own making: With these they amazed the world. … And in the modern Ages these Fantastical Forms were reviv’d and possessed Christendom. … All which abuses if those acute Philosophers did not promote, yet they were never able to overcome; nay, not even so much as King Oberon and his invisible Army. But from the time in which the Real Philosophy has appear’d there is scarce any whisper remaining of such horrors. … The cours of things goes quietly along, in its own true channel of Natural Causes and Effects. For this we are beholden to Experiments; which though they have not yet completed the discovery of the true world, yet they have already vanquished those wild inhabitants of the false world, that us’d to astonish the minds of men.¹⁰

Even if there were none ‘out there’, there are still demons in the human heart, and all manner of other beasts there too, as Socrates remarked.¹¹ But there are other and more respected ‘invisibilia’, including those ‘natural causes and effects’ that Sprat preferred to invoke. ‘Behind’ and ‘before’ the phenomenal worlds we can immediately sense and imagine is a supposed reality far larger and stranger than any past ‘fantasms’. I can plausibly imagine the Australian Outback: that is, I can, with plentiful assistance, imagine something of what I – or even a better observer – might perceive if I or they were present there. Can I similarly, without self-deception, imagine what would have been perceived sixty-six million years ago by whatever sentient observers were present when the Chicxulub meteor crashed? We can draw pictures of that event. We can even, by our modern marvels, create computer-enhanced images of that time. But would the sentient observers present there have experienced ‘the same’ phenomena? We cannot easily even imagine what our own domestic dogs and cats perceive: what would Tyrannosaurs, or Pterosaurs, or even the early mammals? We ‘believe’ – or lazily imagine – that the distinctions we now draw, between individual organisms, kinds, stuffs, colours, temperatures and textures, elemental powers, were always ‘really true’, even if nobody then noticed things that way. But at almost the same time, we are ready to acknowledge, or even to assert, that the ‘world as we see it’ is constructed for us by our ‘brains’, in the grip of evolutionary imperatives to survive and reproduce. How ‘we’ perceive things is not necessarily less biologically determined than the way that sheep or sheep-ticks perceive.¹²

We may spread our imaginings even further, back before there were – we suppose – any sentient observers at all, or any we can usefully imagine. Once again, we may be deceived by enhanced photographs of how distant stars and galaxies look to us here-now, and forget that they didn’t ‘look like that’ before us, or from every spatio-temporal location.

It can do no harm to recall occasionally that the prehistoric evolution of the earth, as it is described for example in the early chapters of H.G.Wells’s Outline of History, was not merely never seen. It never occurred. Something no doubt occurred, and what is really being propounded by such popular writers, and, so far as I am aware, by the textbooks on which they rely, is this. That at that time the unrepresented was behaving in such a way that, if human beings with the collective representations characteristic of the last few centuries of western civilization had been there, the things described would also have been there.¹³

But there could not then have been the human perceptions we now have, neither those qualities dubbed ‘secondary’ (colours, smells, tastes, and more or less musical sounds) nor the identities and taxonomies that we now invent to order the buzzing confusion. There could be no answer to the question, for example, how long did such and such a prehistorical, pre-sensible, event take, nor yet how far one thing was from another? There was no-one then (we can presume) to feel the passage of time, whether fast or slow.¹⁴ There was no point of view incorporating memory or anticipation, nor even any clear sense of any single distinct identity. Things happened (so we suppose), but what they appeared as, to creatures of vastly different sensory apparatus and feeling, we do not know. Those days still earlier, before there were any sentient beings at all (or none of any kind we now acknowledge), could hardly even be described as having any temporal order or connection. Subjective time and location only began when there were perceiving, and remembering, creatures. Nothing then was either far away or near. ‘Before soul it was a dead body, earth and water, or rather the darkness of matter and non-existence, and “what the gods hate”, as a poet says.’¹⁵

Whether there was anything ‘objective’ even corresponding to our sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’, any more than to our sense of ‘long’ and ‘short’, ‘near’ or ‘far’, ‘boring’ or ‘exciting’, is, at the very least, moot. Time, as we experience it now, is strictly an illusion, and all our descriptions of those long-ago days and far-away places are firmly metaphorical.

This is not – so far – to deny the possibility that there was then (and still is now in places far away from sentience) a strictly material world laid out in accordance with universal laws: that is, in ways that can be compendiously described without recourse to a possibly infinite account of every singular entity’s behaviour (whatever counts as singular). This is indeed the standard ‘materialistic’ notion that now seems obvious, to us: the real world is one of merely material entities, characterized only by such properties as can exist unperceived. In reality, so Democritus declared, there are only atoms and the void: ‘all else is by convention’.¹⁶ In the case of light, we now have the weird result that the light identified with electromagnetic radiation is supposed to be ‘real light’, though most of it is invisible, ‘dark light’. It would be more sensible to think that light as physicists intend the term is only metaphorically so-called, since most of us are (possibly) helped to see by some of it. The first senses of ‘sight’, and ‘light’, are the subjective, but we abandon those in seeking to describe invisibles.

We may still, somehow, imagine (or think we have imagined) such a mindless realm, but we cannot, even in principle, discover what it is like. As the Polish philosopher and science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) said (though still managing somehow to believe in the real existence of a material world that is not, and cannot be, experienced), ‘one can say that an ocean exists when there is no one there, but one cannot ask what it looks like then. If it looks a certain way, it means that there is someone [or something] looking at it’.¹⁷ It remains a brute hypothesis, achieved by leaving out of account all features of our own experience that seem, just now, to matter less. We don’t usually need to know the colour or taste of a missile, any more than its national origin or nickname, to guess where it will fall! This very hypothesis of a ‘merely material cosmos’ creates the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’: if there were ‘then’ or ‘there’ no subjective properties, nor any logical or mathematical connection between whatever ‘objective’ properties there were and any ‘subjective’ phenomena, how does the hypothesis explain our present, obvious, experience? And if we can neither directly observe the supposed pre-sentient reality nor offer it as an explanation of our current real experience, why should we posit it at all?

Reason and Reality

We neither directly perceive the ‘real world’, nor have we any clear idea how the hypothesised, and metaphorically described, reality ‘explains’ experience. The worlds in which we variously live are essentially ‘subjective’, but we nonetheless still dream that there is ‘real world’ to which we might, through intellectual and ‘scientific’ enquiry, find our way, imagining it, through metaphors drawn from our own experience but immediately ‘denatured’. As George Berkeley wryly remarked: ‘the Wall is not white, the Fire is not hot etc – we Irishmen cannot attain to these truths’.¹⁸

We have only the languages we learn from that experience with which to delineate what cannot be consistently described and must therefore live with irreducible ‘metaphors’. It is therefore as true for modern, respectable materialists as it was for Plotinus, that we can only gesture towards the indescribable ideal, whether we are thinking of the ‘real world’ or of the state of our own minds in recognizing it.

The philosophers, assuming that [an unhindered] state of intellect is most pleasing and acceptable, say that it is mixed with pleasure because they cannot find an appropriate way of speaking about it [aporiai oikeias prosegorias]; this is what the other words which we are fond of do metaphorically [when we carry them over, metapherontes], like ‘drunk with the nectar’ and ‘to feast and entertainment’, and what the poets say, ‘the father smiled’, and thousands and thousands of others.¹⁹

We have no exactly appropriate words even for our own epistemic condition, let alone for ‘the way things are’. And yet we still believe in a ‘really real world’ that transcends our fluctuating, perverse and inconsistent state: a ‘really real world’ that does not depend for its existence on our experience of it, but that can – somehow – still be available to us. Lovejoy (1873–1962) spoke of ‘the inexpugnable faith of humankind’: that there really is a truth which is not dependent on our wishes or our reasonings, and that this truth is nonetheless attainable – in part – by those who follow the right way.²⁰

That right way, so Plotinus intimated with a cloud of metaphors, begins quite simply:

Let us fly to our dear country [the real world, that is, from which we come, and on which we depend]. What then is our way of escape, and how are we to find it? We shall put out to sea, as Odysseus did, from the witch Circe or Calypso – as the poet says (I think with a hidden meaning) – and was not content to stay though he had delights of the eyes and lived among much beauty of sense. Our country from which we came is There, our Father is There. How shall we travel to it, where is our way of escape? We cannot get there on foot; for our feet only carry us everywhere in this world, from one country to another. You must not get ready a carriage, either, or a boat. Let all these things go, and do not look. Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.²¹

Shut our eyes and wake ‘another way of seeing’. So perhaps we may ‘catch a glimpse’, intellectually but not dispassionately, of intelligible reality – what Plato called ‘the Forms’ – and at last the pure and formless origin of everything, ‘the First’, where all words fail. Plotinus did not suppose that even those who perhaps attained that insight could retain more than a partial memory. Most of us, even if the vision were granted to us, would be like ‘people who slept through their life [and] thought the things in their dreams were reliable and obvious, but, if someone woke them up, disbelieved in what they saw with their eyes open and went to sleep again’.²² Like Markandeya in the Hindu story, we may fall out of the sleeping Vishnu’s mouth into ‘the immense silence of the night of Brahma’ to discover truth²³! And then retreat again. How, after all, can we discover ‘the real world’ without immediately feeling a difference, even a gap, between the reality and our perception of it?

On this account, perhaps, all we can hope to do is ‘wait quietly till it appears, preparing oneself to contemplate it, as the eye awaits the rising of the sun’.²⁴

But from where will he of whom the sun is an image rise? What is the horizon which he will mount above when he appears?²⁵

In the likely absence of sufficient patience, on our part, to await the revelation, we may prefer to rely on what we can bear of ‘Reason’. If we must pare away all merely ‘subjective’ properties from our vision of the way things are, may we still rely on the bare arithmetical description? Even if all our ordinary perceptions have been sculpted by evolutionary needs, perhaps our arithmetical intuitions can reveal at least the ‘skeleton’ of reality?

We may, if we like, by our reasonings, unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulating strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish or crab!²⁶

But rather than believe in such a ‘black and jointless continuity of space’ as our beginnings, may we not rather suppose that there are eternal laws, discernible by noting what is in common through all observable worlds? Laws, or Forms of Being, form an interconnected whole, very much as Plotinus himself proposed as the content of the ideal Intellect. Scientists nowadays are not simply recording what phenomenally occurs, but rather seeking to establish an intelligible model of what ideally occurs. The physical world we imagine (behind the flux of disparate phenomena) is not simply a guddle of distinct material objects: it is to be understood as the manifestation of an underlying mathematical order, which is also almost apparent in phenomena.²⁷ If that order were merely our own abstract description of what (hypothetically) happens in the ‘real’, physical world, there seems no good reason to expect such descriptions to have more than local relevance, and therefore no good reason to suppose that we can expect any large-scale understanding of the universe. Indeed, the very idea that there is a ‘universe’, a single coherent set of all the truths or all the things there are, is likely to be a figment. Maybe we should be content with the practices that almost work here-now, and not expect ‘the same things’ to be happening, ‘in the same way’ in times and places immensely far away. Mere descriptions of what happens or seems to happen here are not themselves explanations. ‘At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena’²⁸ - but perhaps the laws are truly explanations because they do describe the underlying, causally active truth. Perhaps there is, as we hope, One World, even if it is manifested in multiple different ways. The ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’²⁹ (and of scientific enquiry generally) gives us hope that our predecessors were right to suppose that our thoughts, pace David Hume,³⁰ might indeed be considered a model for reality. In Benedict XVI’s words (2009): ‘the objective structure of the universe and the intellectual structure of the human being coincide; the subjective reason and the objectified reason in nature are identical. In the end it is “one” reason that links both and invites us to look to a unique creative Intelligence.’³¹

The Pope and others understandably appeal to the notion of a single source for all things. How else should we expect any congruence between parts of the observable cosmos so distant from each other that light itself (the electromagnetic radiance) has not had time to pass from one side to the other? How else should there be any ‘rational’ equation between quarks and quasars? But however powerful the ideal of Unity we find ourselves, in practice, relying on many different ways of dividing up experience, appealing to many different modes of experience and thought, just as if they were angels.

Physics, … geology, chemistry, zoology and even mathematics all start from an hypothesis; they are all based on an imaginative conception, and in this sense their votaries are poets, who see the unity of being throb in the particular fact.³²

Different scientists, or different thinkers more generally, will perceive the little gods of their own devotion in the confusion, even if they trust, in the end, that there is One Rule, One Ruler. But they may also remember Richard Feynman’s observation. First citing an unnamed poet as saying that ‘the whole universe is in a glass of wine,’ he said:

If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology and so forth—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, remembering ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it, and forget it all!³³

The unity of being, that is, may be more definitely experienced, precisely, in an untutored experience, rather than in an ideal revelation of what lies ‘beyond’.

Returning to Basics

So one critical response to this defence of ‘universal reason’, for the intellect as a model, a metaphor, for all the invisible world, is to acknowledge the force of the Earl of Rochester’s rebuke:

Our Sphere of action, is life’s happiness,

and he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass.³⁴

First, there are sufficient anomalies and contradictions even in our best efforts to comprehend the Way Things Are, and sufficient mishaps in our efforts to manipulate that Way, to throw doubt on the supposed ‘success of science’, or at least to think more carefully about what such ‘success’ amounts to.³⁵ Have we sufficient reason to insist that there is – somewhere – a single coherent Theory of Everything that will – someday – be accessible to us? Maybe we will always be faced by strictly incompatible notions, each useful in their own particular province, but never to be taken as universal truths. Maybe, in short, we shall always be dealing with ‘metaphors’, as strictly inconsistent with each other (if treated as ‘literal’ claims) as the ancient Egyptians’ various images of the vault of heaven.³⁶ Do we or should we really aim at ‘universal truth’?

In this respect physicists are like ordinary people. If they can’t resolve a contradiction, and the contradiction is not pressing, they just disregard it and give their attention to those aspects of the theory (or theories) that are pleasantly consistent.³⁷

Maybe our hopes for ‘Reason’ are simply an effect of our perennial human conceit.

Were I (who to my cost already am

One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)

A spirit free to choose, for my own share

What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,

I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,

Or anything but that vain animal,

Who is so proud of being rational.

The senses are too gross, and he’ll contrive

A sixth, to contradict the other five,

And before certain instinct, will prefer

Reason, which fifty times for one does err;

Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind,

Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,

Pathless and dangerous wand’ring ways it takes

Through error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes;

Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain

Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain.³⁸

We only find it natural or easy to believe that intellectual, scientific, enquiry has any chance to comprehend All Things because we find it natural and easy to believe that our ‘humanity’ is something special. But if we are doomed to speak in metaphors, drawn from our own experience of things, how should we sanely believe that any of those metaphors can reach beyond experience, or beyond their original setting? If we have abandoned any belief in ‘literal’ spectres as anything more than figments, should we not also abandon a ‘realistic’ belief in worlds too small, too large, too distant to comprehend? Why not turn round and reconsider the phenomenal worlds we live in, acknowledging that our pictures of the world that transcends, surpasses, encloses all of us, are just as much metaphorical imaginings as the stories our ancestors told, useful (perhaps) for different purposes? Sometimes useful, perhaps (and so are stories of spectres), but why consider them ‘true’?

It may be indeed that Wilmot and Sprat might have agreed in rejecting any transcendent ‘Reason’, urging us all instead to attend to simple observation and experiment, and abandon whimseys. But the danger for them both will be that they still suppose that everyone who trusts their senses will have experienced the same things. Maybe we are wrong to hope for a Universal Theory, and wrong to suppose that we could achieve it merely by ‘thinking things through’, or trying out hypotheses for as long as our patience lasts, perhaps in ‘controlled experiments’ that may serve as models, or metaphors, for what happens, perhaps, ‘by nature’. Maybe we are wrong to expect ever to discover ‘truth, without a flaw’.³⁹ It does not follow that we can all agree at least about phenomena: on the contrary, we are always disagreeing.

The phenomenal worlds of ‘ant or cuttlefish or crab’ are bound to be very different. So also the worlds even of domestic dogs, for whom both past events, present medical conditions, and even future intentions are immediately present through their scents. And so also the phenomenal worlds even of our own conspecifics, of different ages and times and cultures. Respectable people, here and now, may not see or hear fairies or spectres (or at least they will deny they do). If they seem to themselves to glimpse an image of some dead friend, they will reckon it a dream, a memory, a mistake. If they hear a constant hum or a hissing sound, they consider it ‘tinnitus’ or (perhaps) an effect of local electrical activity: they will not consider it ‘the music of the spheres’.⁴⁰ Respectable people, here and now, mostly have a very limited range of distinguishable hues to see, and hardly notice persistent scents or familiar sounds at all. Anyone afflicted with a more acute sensibility is likely to find normal urban life very painful – and will be considered ‘odd’ by her fellows. We may lazily suppose that our ancestors had much the same ‘experience’ as ourselves, and merely differed in having different ‘theories’ about their experience. But it just as likely that their experience was different, that they really did experience omens, spectres, sudden shifts of feeling. What we now reckon metaphors – the goddess Athena (for example) standing for a sudden ‘change of heart’, or for ‘common sense’, or for the civic spirit of Athens – were maybe simple reports:

If someone is able to turn around, either by himself or having the good luck to have his hair pulled by Athena herself, he will see God and himself and the all.⁴¹

Maybe there ‘really are’ demons ‘in the human heart’.⁴² And maybe Pheidippides did see Pan, on his run from Athens to Sparta and then back again, without our having the clear right to say it was an illusion brought on by undue exercise (or of course a simple lie).⁴³ Correspondingly, our own perceptions may be influenced by the images of distant stars or fossils or the trail of imagined particles across cloud chambers. Even if Frank Ramsey were – bizarrely – correct to suggest that astronomy ‘was only a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation’,⁴⁴ the stars we see are very different, as we see them, from those our ancestors acknowledged. The invisibles are imaginatively present for us as well as for our ancestors, even if we assign them different names and natures.

Attending to phenomena is a contemplative discipline at least as hard as attending to logical implication, or mathematical imagination: we don’t habitually notice even what is in front of us, and easily decide our eyes deceive us if we do. Learning to see things clearly, and see them whole, may – on the one hand – be what ‘reason’ and ‘philosophy’ demand: putting immediate impressions on one side, and looking always towards ‘the truth’. But it may – on the other hand – be a reminder that the phenomenal worlds are richer than we remember. Another sort of reason may suggest that we should rather put our ‘theories’ on hold and simply attend to what is directly present.⁴⁵ Suppose, for a moment, that the thoroughly sceptical thought is true: we are living in a dream world, devised for whatever purpose by powers exceeding our own. This need not be – it probably is not – a ‘computer simulation’ of the sort extrapolated from our current experience of ‘virtual reality’ adventures.⁴⁶ Obviously enough, once we have identified our current experience as a fraud, we cannot sensibly suppose that the ‘real world’ has to be anything like ours: all our favourite metaphors are likely to be part of the deceit. It does not follow that the argument is vain: whatever the ‘real world’ and its masters may be, we are embedded in a magic show, and must presume (for our health’s sake) that we should take the show ‘seriously’. We should not ignore what is on offer, nor trouble ourselves to find out – yet – what is hidden! Wouldn’t that be like sneaking a glimpse at the presents under the Christmas tree? Rochester was right.

Our Sphere of action, is life’s happiness,

and he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass.⁴⁷

Or perhaps he wasn’t: even within the phenomena there are reminders of enduring powers, and even occasional intimations of an exit from this world. The Invisibles are with us still. ‘Man [anthropos] is a shadow’s dream [skias onar]’, said Pindar [522–443 BC], ‘but when (a) god [theos] sheds a brightness then shining light is on earth, and life is as sweet as honey’.⁴⁸ Sometimes the world of our experience, as it were, ‘lights up’, and we hover on the verge of waking. ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face’.⁴⁹

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Aristotle, Poetics 1457b6f: metaphora estin onomatos allotriou epiphora.

2. John Donne ‘Devotions upon emergent occasions’ $17 (1624): Major Works, ed., John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.344.

3. Mao Tse-tung, cited by Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 77

4. ‘The Possible Truth of Metaphor’: International Philosophical Studies 2.1994, 19–30.

5. W. H. Auden, ‘Words’, in Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57 (London: Faber, 1966), p. 320.

6. For convenience I speak only of what is or is not seen: identical problems arise with the imagination of scents, sounds, and textures.

7. Jacob von Uexkuell, Theoretical Biology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1926), p.62.

8. William Blake, ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, plate 6 [1790–3]: Complete Works, ed., Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p.150; see Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (London: Bodley Head, 2022).

9. My younger daughter can identify particular sorts of bird or butterfly at a considerable distance, and cannot easily get me even to notice more than (at best) some small brown fluttering somewhat (or more often, nothing).

10. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (3rd ed.; New York: Elibron, 2005 [1722]), p.340. As I have pointed out in earlier works, Sprat was echoing, and appropriating, Athanasius’s remarks on the flight of demons at the coming of the Divine Word: Athanasius, On the Incarnation (London: Bles, 1944 [c.318 AD], ch.8, para.47.

11. Plato, Phaedrus 230a; see also Macarius, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, trans. A.J. Mason, 43.7 (London: SPCK, 1921): ‘The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there, and there likewise are poisonous creatures and all the treasures of wickedness; rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms. There also is God, there are the angels, there life and the Kingdom, there light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace: all things are there’ (cited by Kallistos Ware, ‘How Do We Enter the Heart’, in James S. Cutsinger, ed. Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East, pp.2–23 (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Inc, 2004), p.14).

12. See Jacob von Uexkuell ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men,’ in C.H.Schiller, ed. Instinctive Behaviour, pp.5–80 (New York: International University Press, 1957).

13. Owen Barfield Saving the Appearances: a study in idolatry (Faber: London 1957), p.37.

14. Chesterton cited H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) to show that whether something happened ‘slowly’ or ‘quickly’ was subjective: ‘in that sublime nightmare the hero saw trees shoot up like green rockets, and vegetation spread visibly like a green conflagration, or the sun shoot across the sky from east to west with the swiftness of a meteor’: G.K.Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Hodder & Stoughton: London 1925), p. 26.

15. Plotinus Ennead V.1 [10].2, 26–7: A.H.Armstrong, trans., Enneads (London. Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1966–88), vol.5, p.17 (quoting the Homeric description of Hades, ‘the Unseen’, in Iliad 20.65).

16. Democritus 68B9DK: Robin Waterfield, The First Philosophers: the pre-socratics and sophists (Oxford University Press: New York 2000), p.176

17. Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae, trans. Joanna Zylinska (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 [1964]), p.215

18. George Berkeley, Commentaries B392: Collected Works, ed., A.A.Luce & T.E.Jessop (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1948–57), Vol.1, p.47.

19. Ennead VI.7 [38].30,24ff: A.H.Armstrong, trans., Enneads (London. Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1966–88), vol.7, p.179; see also Ennead VI.5 [23].9, 19 on not taking descriptions ‘literally’ (oukh hos toi rhemati legetai).

20. See A.O.Lovejoy The Revolt against Dualism (La Salle, Illinois 1930), p.14. R.M. Rorty rejected both ideas as absurd, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell 1980), p.52n. How anyone could sanely believe him I still do not understand.

21. Ennead I.6 [1].8, 16–28: Armstrong tr., Enneads, vol.1, pp.257–9; see also Ennead V. 5 [32].7, 32–6: ‘so Intellect, veiling itself from other things and drawing itself inward, when it is not looking at anything will see a light’ (Armstrong, tr., Enneads, vol.5, p.179). Gregory of Nyssa used the same image, as it were in reverse: ‘“Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord” (Psalm 117:26). How does He come? He crosses over into human life, not by boat or by chariot, but through the incorruption of a Virgin’ [my italics]: Homily on the Nativity of Christ (Patrologia Græca, XLVI, 1128A-1149C). We have no need to go ourselves, since He (the Word of God) has come to us.

22. Ennead V.5 [32].11: A.H.Armstrong, trans., Enneads (London. Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1966–88)., vol.5, p.189.

23. Heinrich Zimmer Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed., Joseph Campbell (New York: Pantheon Books 1946), pp.38–9. See Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), for further discussion of the role of silence in classical thought and philosophy.

24. Ennead V.5 [32].8: A.H.Armstrong, trans., Enneads (London. Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1966–88)., vol.5, p.179.

25. Ennead V.5.[32].8, 7–10

26. William James The Principles of Psychology (Macmillan: New York 1890), vol.1, pp.288f:

27. See Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 2014) pp.257–74.

28. Ludwig von Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr.C.K.Ogden (New York: Dover 1999 [1922]): p.104 [6.371]).

29. See Eugene Wigner ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’: Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 1960.13(1): 1–14: ‘It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.’ See also Robert C. Koons ‘Science and Theism: Concord not Conflict’: The Rationality of Theism, ed. Paul Copan and Paul Moser, pp.72–89 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003).

30. David Hume Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed., J.C.A.Gaskin (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008 [1777], p.50).

31. Benedict XVI to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, on the occasion of the international congress ‘From Galileo’s Telescope to Evolutionary Cosmology’ (30 November−2 December 2009), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/pont-messages/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091126_fisichella-telescopio_en.html (accessed 8th September 2023).

32. Henry Festing Jones, Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1891), p.40; see further my God’s World and the Great Awakening: Limits and Renewals, vol.3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp.84–5.

33. Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p.32 (chap. 3.7), cited in Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London: Routledge, 2011), p.64.

34. John Wilmot, Selected Poems, ed. Paul Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p.53

35. See my ‘Folly to the Greeks: Good Reasons to Give up Reason’: European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4.2012, pp.93–113.

36. See Henri Frankfort, John A.Wilson, & Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy; the intellectual adventure of ancient man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949 [1946]).

37. Shimon Malin Nature Loves to Hide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.90. See David Kaiser, ‘History: Shut up and calculate!’: Nature 505, pp.153–155 (2014), for a brief history of that injunction, intended to divert practical scientists from trying to imagine ‘the Truth’. For some scientists, it is enough that particular theorems ‘work’ in particular circumstances; it is probable that even they began their career in hopes of finding out why they worked.

38. John Wilmot, Selected Poems, Selected Poems, ed. Paul Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.52–53.

39. Boethius Consolation of Philosophy: Medieval Latin Lyrics, tr.Helen Waddell (Penguin: Harmondsworth 1952 [1929]), p.59

40. See Peter Kingsley Reality (Inverness, California: Golden Sufi Centre 2003), pp.515–7.

41. Ennead VI.5 [23].7, 10–12: Armstrong, op.cit., vol.6, p.341; see Homer Iliad I.197–200.

42. That is to say, the heart we feel inside us, the heart that can ache or break, not merely the physiologists’ organ metaphorically so called: see my Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2016), pp.21–2.

43. Herodotus Histories 6.105–6

44. F.P.Ramsey ‘Epilogue’[1925]: Philosophical Papers, ed. D.H.Mellor, pp.245–50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.249.

45. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, transl. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983 [1913]) for the related notion of the phenomenological epoche: too large a topic to address here-now.

46. Nick Bostrom, ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?’: Philosophical Quarterly 53.2003, pp.243–255. See also my own, ‘Waking-up: a neglected model for the After-life’: Inquiry 26.1983–4, pp.209–30

47. John Wilmot, op.cit., p.53.

48. Pindar, Pythian 8.95–7. The shadow in Pindar’s verse may be a spectre: it may be that he was hinting that we here-now are being dreamed by the dead:

49. Paul, I Corinthians 13.12