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philosophy -> RE: Metaphors (7/16/2009 12:15:03 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Kalista07
Anyway, as i'm typing this i asked Him for an example of something recently that we watched that most everyone else would have gotten that was a metaphor for something else that i wouldn't have gotten..He informed me: True Blood= human and vampire interaction was apparently metaphoric interaction for racism and homosexuality....WTF??!! i really don't know how a person's mind can make those kind of corelations...
....first off, a metaphor is not the thing itself. However it is a tool used to illuminate something else.
True Blood is a good example. One could write about racism and homophobia in LA. It's been done before. In fact it's probably been done too many times, because each iteration adds to a generalised collective understanding. Eventually, a blunt forthright telling of a story encounters so much resistence from that collective understanding that nothing new can be said. This is where metaphor comes in. We take the shape of the story, and retell it in another context. Now it's not the LGBT community looking for equal rights, but vampires. Now, if we'd left it as an LGBT story, all that would happen is that those who already know what side of the divide they fall on take nothing from the story. By recasting the story we've allowed people to examine the issues and partially bypassed pre-existing biases.
Metaphor is a highly useful tool. However, i bet you do get them...you just don't realise it. For instance if you have a tatto, what was it like getting it done? If your answer wasn't, 'it was like getting a tattoo' then you used a metaphor.
What does love feel like? The instant your answer refers to something that isn't love, then you're moving into metaphor territory.
A metaphor is a map, not the territory itself. However maps can tell us things about the territory that walking on it doesn't give us.
Oh, and to clear up the birds and the bees thing. Basically, in a tight laced repressed society one can't talk openly about sex and reproduction. However, we can look out the window and see things reproduce that don't have obvious willys or ladies front bottoms :) So we don't say sex, we point at how birds give rise to other birds. How bees give rise to other bees. It's not accurate, but at least we're talking real reproduction and not pointing at babies delivered by Stork airways.
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