First, what counts as a metaphor in terms of our experience? Although all language may be in origin metaphorical, many of the metaphors are now dead: in other words, there is no felt gap between the use we make of each such word in daily life and the anchor in embodied reality from which it derives its meaning. Thus although it is, I hope, interesting to be aware that, for example, ‘immaterial’ is rooted in metaphor, we do not register the word any longer as metaphorical when using it. In calling something immaterial, I don’t think and feel – and I don’t suppose you do – that someone here’s motherless. The word has lost ‘depth’, become one-dimensional. Literal.
Literalism can be lethal! Use with caution!
On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
True in the sense of every criminal trial: it’s about whether the defendant can be proven guilty of having committed a crime, not the consequences of the crime as such; the deeds of the defendant, not the results.
Since imagination affects memory and perception, what distinguishes old taste connoisseurs from other seniors dependent on taste enhancers may be not the quantity of their taste buds but their still freshly budding imagining powers.
My own personal observation is that describing a sensation like taste is enhanced by taking a moment to verbalize (at least internally) the sensation and associations of a taste, starting at the ground level—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, and going from there.
In writers such as Graham Greene, for example, who presents himself as an honest, serious author, telling his readers what life is really like, without romance or illusion, Wilson detects an undercurrent of pessimism that distorts the facts in favor of Greene’s rather sour assessment of things. The “reality” a reader discovers in Greene’s books is one seen through a rather jaundiced lens, but unless she were aware of this, the reader would accept Greene’s vision of a rather grim and sordid world as objective, and would view Greene’s response—a highly sin-conscious Catholicism—as understandable, even acceptable.
Not an unfair assessment of Greene. I’ve read a great deal of Greene, and I’ve found it most engaging, but does have a strong, sour bias. There’s little comedy in Greene, little levity, little humor (but some), little gentleness toward his fellow, fallible humans. Not even in The Comedians!
Wilson, on the other hand, reject unrelenting pessimism, even in his own brand of “existentialism.”
Rebellion
Robert Kagan
It may have been true, as modern liberals have argued, borrowing from the very unliberal Hegel, that all human beings seek “recognition” of their dignity as humans. But although they seek recognition for themselves, their family, their tribe, their co-religionists, their compatriots, few ever acknowledge that others who are not like them—who are of different religions, tribes, and nations—also have an equal right to “recognition.”