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Metaphor, Thought, Projection, and ArchetypeJohn Boe

To cite this Article: Boe, John , 'Metaphor, Thought, Projection, and Archetype',Psychological Perspectives, 48:1, 68 - 83To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/00332920591001591URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332920591001591

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Psychological Perspectives, 48:68–83, 2005Copyright c© C. G. Jung Institute of Los AngelesISSN: 0033-2925DOI: 10.1080/00332920591001591

Metaphor, Thought, Projection,and Archetype

John Boe

Metaphor and ThoughtClearly, thinking does not only mean thinking with words. One of thegreatest thinkers, Albert Einstein, wrote to Jacques Hadamard, “Thewords or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to playany role in my mechanism of thought” (Hadamard, p. 142). Similarly, inconversation with Max Wertheimer, Einstein said, “These thoughts didnot come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all.A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.” Andwhen Wertheimer told Einstein that “many report that their thinkingis always in words,” Einstein “only laughed” (Wertheimer, p. 228).

But I myself, no Einstein, am a verbal person. Although I knowwhat it means to think with images, with numbers and symbols, withmusic, and even with my body, I also know that much of the time (evenif the claim would make Einstein laugh) I do think in words. But justhow exactly does one go about “thinking in words”?

There is, perhaps surprisingly, some agreement on an answer tothis question: To think in words is to use metaphors. Many scholars,philosophers, and poets have articulated this idea—for example:

John Middleton Murray: “To attempt a fundamental exami-nation of metaphor would be nothing less than an investigation ofthe genesis of thought itself—a dangerous enterprise” (p. 28).

Robert Frost: “All thinking, except mathematical thinking, ismetaphorical” (p. 37).

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JOHN BOE � METAPHOR, THOUGHT, PROJECTION, AND ARCHETYPE 69

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70 PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES � VOLUME 48, ISSUE 1 / 2005

Nietzsche: “What therefore is truth? A mobile army of meta-phors, metonymies, anthropomorphism, in short, a sum of humanrelations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, trans-ferred, and adorned, and long after use seem solid, canonical, andbinding to a nation. Truths are illusions of which it has been for-gotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors without sensoryimpact, coins which have lost their image and now can be usedonly as metal, and no longer as coins” (p. 250).

Ernst Cassirer: “If metaphor, taken in this general sense, is notjust a certain development of speech, but must be regarded asone of its essential conditions—then any effort to understand itsfunction leads us back, once more, to the fundamental form ofverbal conceiving” (p. 95).

Walker Percy: “Metaphors are very strange because when youput two things together it’s a way of discovering meanings whichhaven’t been discovered before” (p. 138).

Writers on metaphor often cite as the locus classicus for this ideaAristotle’s assertion that “the greatest thing by far is to be a masterof metaphor.” These scholars often leave off Aristotle’s next sentence,though: “It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and itis also a sign of genius.” But as I. A. Richards pointed out (I think, forthe first time) in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Aristotle was wrong in thesecond part, for everyone uses metaphor, not only geniuses. Metaphoricthinking is verbal thinking. As Paul Ricoeur put it, “If metaphor is atalent, then it is a talent of thinking” (p. 80).

Metaphor and ProjectionSince verbal thinking involves the use of metaphor, to think about meta-phor with words we must, of course, use metaphor—as I. A. Richards didwhen he labeled the two parts of the metaphor the vehicle and the tenor:For example, in the metaphor “love is a rose,” the tenor (the purportor drift of meaning being developed by the metaphor) is love, and thevehicle (which carries us to a fuller understanding of the tenor) is therose. So if thinking with words means using metaphors, then to thinkin words about metaphors also requires using metaphors: to understandmetaphor requires seeing it as something else.

One interesting approach lies in a comparison of mathematics andlanguage, noticing, as Northrop Frye did at the end of The Anatomyof Criticism, “the curious similarity in form . . . between the units of

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literature and of mathematics, the metaphor and the equation” (p. 352).Along these same lines, the eminent mathematician Donald Knuth hassuggested that the secret of doing mathematics is a kind of thinking thatis similar to metaphorical thinking:

The whole secret of mathematics is that most theorems are of theform “Something if and only if something else”—which means thatif you have situation A, then you can translate it into situation B,which is the same thing but viewed in a different way. By lookingat it as A you may not see anything to do with it, but you changeit to B, which is the equivalent but in a disguise, and then youcan see how to make some progress. (Boe, p. 15)

Mathematical thinking, according to Knuth, is the inverse of meta-phorical thinking: In mathematical thinking, we take advantage of anapparent difference between two identical things, but in metaphoricalthinking, we take advantage of an apparent identity between two differ-ent things. In both modes of thought, however, there is nowhere to gounless there is something different between the elements on each side ofthe equation or identity. As Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus, “tosay of two things they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thingthat it is identical with itself is to say nothing” (p. 139). If we want tosay something, we must have difference.

In both mathematical and metaphorical thinking, we understanda more mysterious element by equating it with something we know alittle more about. Thus metaphors are frequently used to elucidate ab-stract concepts; I better understand what you think of love dependingon whether you say love is a flower or love is a toilet. In both caseswe learn about an elusive concept (love) by seeing it as something withwhich we have more concrete familiarity with (a flower, a toilet).

A well-known psychological term corresponds to the familiar de-scriptions of how metaphorical thinking works: projection. I. A. Richards,the most influential 20th-century writer on metaphor, first suggested(though briefly) this connection in his seminal work, The Philosophy ofRhetoric, although later thinkers have ignored his fruitful idea. “Thepsycho-analysts have shown us with their discussions of ‘transference’—another name for metaphor—how constantly modes of regarding, of lov-ing, of acting, that have developed with one set of things or people, areshifted to another” (p. 135). Transference is, of course, a Freudian term;more widely used today is Jung’s term, projection. In either case theprocess involves one thing being projected or transferred onto another(for example, my image of my father onto my analyst). But if metaphor

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is projection with words, and if metaphor is the same thing as thinkingwith words, wouldn’t it make sense to suggest that projection is anotherword for thought itself?

Projection and ThoughtIn an insufficiently appreciated essay, psychologist and mathematicianRobin Robertson shows that projection is an essential part of humancognition. In this essay, he explains the “active nature of the humanthought process,” concluding:

We want to reach out to the world, grasp it, interact with it. Theprocess of projection can thus be seen as one of the most elementalprocesses of the human brain, which makes use of any availablemedium for its operation. We approach anything new in life byprojecting the world that we already have inside us onto the worldoutside us. Initially we confuse actuality with the projection, butgradually we adapt and something new forms inside us that isbetter suited to reality. Projection is thus a miraculous processthat underlies all perception and all change. We should praiseprojection, not damn it. (p. 101)

This lucid explanation reveals how projection and metaphor are bothways of describing thought. We project the knowledge we have inside usonto the unfamiliar object or thing. We already know something aboutroses and about toilets, and so we project the rose or the toilet onto theidea of love—thus, perhaps, learning something new about love. Projec-tion is thought and metaphor is (verbal) projection; therefore metaphoris (verbal) thought.

As Robertson explains, “Every new relationship—whether with aperson, an object, or an idea—in some way involves projection” (p. 95).Projection is not only the process by which we enter into a relation-ship with a new person, it is also how through language we enter intoa new relationship with a new idea. In this instance philosophers andrhetoricians have often called projection by the name metaphor.

The roots of the two words are remarkably similar: projection =throwing, metaphor = carrying across. In both cases we are bringing theunknown idea to a known image, discovering the inner idea by throwingonto it or carrying to it something we already know. The psychologicalact of projection, like the rhetorical act of metaphor making, explains theprocess of creative thinking. As Robertson says, “We approach anythingnew in life by projecting the world that we already have inside us ontothe world outside us” (p. 101).

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Thus educators, whether they know it or not, teach by encouragingmetaphorical thinking, showing students how to notice metaphors, howto make metaphors, and how to distinguish good ones from bad ones.As Roger Sale points out, “Care in the use of metaphor is tantamountto careful writing; sloppiness in the use of metaphor is the same thing assloppy writing” (p. 160). As any educated metaphor maker learns, youcannot sloppily project just any idea onto any reality. Neither projectionnor metaphor is arbitrary or random. Certain objects seem to fit certainideas better than others: for most, a flower is a better image for lovethan is a flowerpot. We find it easy to project time onto a river or ontothe number line. When we perceive a correspondence, then our ideasseem to fit reality. As Marie-Louise von Franz points out, “Seldom, ifever, is nothing of what is projected present in the object. Jung speakstherefore of a ‘hook’ in the object on which one hangs a projection asone hangs a coat on a coat hook” (1980b, p. 3).

Whereas the old metaphors model familiar ways of thinking (fa-miliar hooks for our projections), new metaphors suggest new ideas (sur-prising hooks for our projections). Poets, especially, can find new andunexpected reality hooks for verbal projections or bring the old ones backto life, so that the reader can also hang his or her projections there, feelthe power of the metaphor, maybe even “see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour” (Blake, p. 484).

A metaphor maker can stretch too thin the connection betweenthe two poles of the metaphor (Richard’s tenor and vehicle), as someof the metaphysical poets did for Dr. Johnson, who found in Donne,Cleveland, and Cowley that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked byviolence together”; he was unable (as I am also unable) to easily projectonto the loving of two lovers the movement of a pair of compasses (asDonne does in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”). The metaphorseems forced, because circle-drawing compasses do not have enough of ahook to hold the idea of love—at least, for some of us.

If the hook is not good enough, we are not sufficiently drawn intothe projection, and we notice the metaphor as metaphor; the processthen seems mechanical, not natural. With intellectual work (includingthe work of art) we tend to be somewhat conscious of the projection,often seeing it as metaphor or symbol. Such relative detachment wouldbe opposed to religious ecstasy or romantic love, where most obviouslywe encounter the reality of the projection. I once heard the poet WilliamEverson (aka Brother Antoninus) say—and I believed him—that he lit-erally experienced the Host at the Communion as Christ, that therewas no “symbolism” involved. But for those on the outside of such a

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religious experience, we might prefer to say he successfully projectedChrist (as an inner reality within him) onto the Host; or we might saythat the Host seems to be a metaphor for Christ. It is only when doubtarises, when we have some detachment, when we are aware of two termsrather than experience the one thing, that we notice the projection. Asvon Franz says, “When X falls in love with Y, an onlooker might callthat projection. . . . But as long as there is no uneasiness, I have no rightto cut into that participation by calling it projection; that is a horriblepoisonous mistake people constantly make” (1980a, p. 19). If you arereally in love, you would be foolish and inhuman to talk about “project-ing the anima”; such talk of projection is relevant only when one beginsto have doubts, to (alas) fall out of love. If you are in the middle of theprojecting, there is no metaphoric pretense involved: A is B, the Host isChrist, she is my love.

If we are really hooked by our projection, then we do not noticethe metaphor. Even scientists can hook themselves, be so in love withtheir projections (and good and useful projections, they can be) that ittakes a poet to notice that they, too, work by metaphor. Here’s RobertFrost on contemporary physics:

Everything is an event now. Another metaphor. A thing, they say,is an event. Do you believe it? Not quite. I believe it is almost anevent. But I like the comparison of a thing with an event.

I notice another from the same quarter. “In the neighbor-hood of matter space is something like curved.” Isn’t that a goodone! It seems to me that is simply and utterly charming—to saythat space is something like curved in the neighborhood of matter.“Something like.” (p. 38)

And when we see a good metaphor, when the projection works for us(even if only temporarily), we should be conscious enough of the powerof the metaphor/projection to say, as Robert Frost does, “Isn’t that agood one!”

Metaphor and ArchetypeAfter I. A. Richards broached the idea that metaphor was the samething as transference (or projection), he elucidated the psychologicalsignificance of projection by using his structure for describing meta-phor (vehicle and tenor). Not having the benefit of Robinson’s insight,Richards wrongly called the person who projects “the victim” of pro-jection—for if everyone thinks via projection, then none should be calleda “victim”—but he brilliantly describes how such a “victim is unable to

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see the new person except in terms of the old passion and its accidents.He reads the situation only in terms of the figure, the archetypal image,the vehicle.” When Richards begins to discuss metaphor in a psycho-logical way, he uses Jung’s terminology (archetypal), suggesting that thevehicle for the projector is an archetypal image. When I see love as aflower, I am using (or perhaps being used by) an archetypal image.

Theorists of metaphor have long described a kind of metaphorthat corresponds to the archetype, what has been called the “root meta-phor” (by Stephen Pepper) or more recently (notably by Mark Turnerand George Lakoff) the “basic metaphor.” Mark Turner points out thatpeople around the world share many basic metaphors:

Some basic metaphors are so entrenched that they seem to becognitively indispensable and it is hard for us even to notice thatany metaphor is involved at all. For example, the basic metaphorDEATH IS DEPARTURE FROM HERE, as in “She’s gone” and“He passed away,” is so entrenched that it is difficult to noticeat first that the “departure” associated with death is a meta-phorical “departure,” and “from here” is a metaphorical “fromhere.” (p. 160)

This is a helpful perspective. The metaphor “death as a departure” isshared by many people around the world; it is, indeed, one of the “cogni-tively indispensable” metaphors. But we could also say that “death as adeparture” is an archetypal way of understanding death, for what Turnercalls a basic metaphor is much like what Jung calls an archetype. Theyseem to be different words for the same thing, or rather, the “basic meta-phor” is the archetype dressed in language. Thus there are metaphorsthat most humans share, such as life = journey, life = fire, time = river,girl = flower, death = departure. These metaphors arise spontaneouslyacross cultures either because of the common experience of being humanor because of common qualities of the human psyche (i.e., archetypalways of thinking).

Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1967 Norton Lecture on “Metaphor,”spent the bulk of his presentation detailing a few indispensable meta-phors: eyes/stars, flowers/women, life/dream, sleep/death, then finallysaid: “If I were a daring thinker . . . I could of course say only a dozenor so patterns exist and that all other metaphors are mere arbitrarygames” (p. 33). As one of the “obvious and major conclusions” to hislecture he offers that “though there are hundreds and indeed thousandsof metaphors to be found, they may all be traced back to a few sim-ple patterns” (p. 40). Borges’s archetypal patterns surely anticipateTurner’s and Lakoff’s “basic metaphors.” Borges’s second conclusion—

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“that there are metaphors . . . that may not be traced back to definitepatterns” (p. 41)—reaffirms the ongoing possibility of new creation, thepossibility for emergence of new archetypes.

Both metaphor and projection involve “basic patterns,” that is,archetypes (a term to which many writers on metaphor surprisinglyresort). Robin Robinson has even suggested: “If we recognize projectionas a basic process of nature, then we can begin to understand thatall perception begins with projection of archetypal contents onto thephysical world” (p. 95). And surely “all perception” includes perceptionthrough language; thinking with words involves projection of archetypalcontents onto the physical world (the use of basic metaphors).

If a metaphor is good enough, it comes to be shared by a lot ofpeople; it becomes a collective metaphor, an archetypal way of thinkingwith words. Thus the idea that life is a tree is such a basic metaphor,and one that also can be seen as an archetypal image. Jung, for example,brilliantly elucidates the tree of life metaphor as an archetype, especiallyanalyzing the alchemists’ use of this metaphor, in The PhilosophicalTree. Frost writes, “And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago,said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto agrowing thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at somepoint, but it has not failed everywhere. It is a very brilliant metaphor”(pp. 38–39).

When old collective metaphors break down, poets and scientistsand other creative individuals set about making new metaphors. Arche-typal images change over time, transform slowly through history, justas scientific models live and die. The Bohr atom was a very good meta-phor for a while, but it no longer holds. The metaphor of everythingas a plant has held for so long that it has become one of the enduringarchetypal ideas.

Metaphor and the Archetype of NumberIf we can see some metaphors, the basic metaphors, as archetypes, thenwe are led to a curious idea, for one of the primary archetypes Jungidentified is the number. (It has been suggested, not quite in jest, thatthe number 4 plays as important a part in Jung’s psychology as infantilesexuality does in Freud’s.) Marie-Louise von Franz has dealt at lengthwith this subject in her book Number and Time, amplifying the idea that“from a psychological point of view number is an archetypal content”(p. 38)—especially the numbers 1–10. If number is an archetype, thenperhaps number (at least as it is used in language) can also be conceivedas a special kind of basic metaphor.

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The idea that applying number to reality is a kind of metaphormaking has already been suggested by Robert Frost, who discusses themost powerful ancient Greek metaphors (e.g., that all is change, or thatall is air, earth, fire, and water): “But the best and most fruitful [meta-phor] was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number. Numberof what? Number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and wehad science and all that has followed in science. The metaphor has heldand held, breaking down only when it came to the spiritual and psycho-logical or out of the way places of the physical” (p. 37).

Nietzsche, too, in his famous essay dealing with metaphor (“OnTruth and Lying”), suggested that numbers were projections: “Numberis the very thing that is most astonishing about things. All the regularitywhich so impresses us about the course of the stars and in the chemicalprocess coincides fundamentally with the properties which we ourselvesproject into things, so that we impress ourself with it” (p. 253). We areimpressed to find number in reality, but indeed we are the ones whoproject the numbers onto reality in the first place.

Remember that metaphor requires two distinct elements, whatRichards called the tenor and the vehicle. Unfortunately there has beenno agreement on these terms; thus Turner talks about the mapping of a“source conceptual schema”—such as journey—onto a “target concep-tual schema”—such as life—and Max Black calls the metaphor’s twosubjects the “principal” and “subsidiary” one. Whatever the terms, theprocess is agreed upon: We understand life (the tenor, the target con-ceptual schema, the principal subject) via the projection onto it of thejourney (the vehicle, the source conceptual schema, the subsidiary sub-ject). According to Ricoeur, Pierre Fontanier was the first to point outthat metaphor “consists in presenting one idea under the sign of anotherthat is more striking or better known” (p. 57).

Number as used in everyday language works as metaphor works.I can choose to see the chairs in my living room as three chairs, thusprojecting the idea of three-ness (here the vehicle, the better understoodterm) onto the chairs in my room (the tenor or target, what I am tryingto get more information about). Indeed number creates the metaphorswe most consciously project, most consciously use; it is the one vehiclewe can project more or less indiscriminately. In keeping with Jung andvon Franz’s suggestions, the higher numbers are less archetypal (thus,in my terms, less metaphorical). I cannot see the books on my shelfas 235 books (though I may count them), but I can at a glance seethe books on my desk as three books. I understand something aboutmy books, though of course not everything, by projecting number uponthem. “These books are three” is then a statement analogous to “love

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is a rose” or “life is a journey.” Ted Cohen pointed out that “metaphorsare surprisingly like jokes. With a joke, too, there is first the realizationthat it is a joke and then the understanding—what’s called getting thejoke” (p. 8). Thus in some sense, there are no such things as failed jokesor failed metaphors; if you don’t get it, you won’t see it as a joke or ametaphor; it will be nonsense. “These books are three” works like a jokeor a metaphor; you immediately get it.

Thus numbers, or at least the lower numbers, are both archetypesand the most common of humankind’s basic metaphors; all people useat least the first several numbers, applying them to reality. This use ofnumber is a metaphorical use. All is number, said Pythagoras, and inmath and science we have played that metaphor for all it is worth; asAristotle first pointed out, the mathematician strips away everythingsensible and leaves number. To equate shapes of objects (real or imag-ined) with numbers is to use a very good—probably our best—metaphor.Measurement with numbers is more efficient than with physical equiva-lencies such as “els” (the length from hand to elbow), but the length ofsomething as given in numbers is a perception of reality “metaphored”by the application of number to it.

To use Richards’ terms, objects are the tenor and numbers the ve-hicle. I have two apples on the table (two being, in modern terminology,the set of all sets that can be put into a one-to-one correspondence withmy apples). Those two apples represent the idea of 2; they are membersof the set we abbreviate “2.” “Two are my apples.” This extremely pop-ular metaphor tells us something, but not everything, about my apples.

Applying numbers (projecting them) onto reality is the most used(basic) metaphor and therefore, to me, the best candidate to be calledan archetype of consciousness, a basic way humans understand reality.Number is the best metaphor because it is the idea we (collectively)understand most clearly. Love is a fuzzy concept (“Love is but a flower,”Shakespeare says), but numbers are clear. At a certain age almost anyhuman can learn to see two apples as representing 2. I can reach aconsensus with anyone as to the number of some small group of objects—“five are the flowers in my vase”—but it takes a poet to convince us, ifonly momentarily, that love is a flower.

We understand aspects of the concrete world by projecting the ab-stractions of number upon them. But in this regard number is differentfrom most metaphors. Most metaphors proceed from the concrete—whatwe know better—to the abstract—what we know less. Thus we under-stand love through the flower or life through the river or thought throughthe bird. But with number, the abstraction is what we know best, andwe understand the tenor of the concrete (something about its underlyingmeaning) through the vehicle of the number (an abstraction).

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The progress of human thought, as suggested by many etymologies,seems to have moved from the concrete to the abstract. That so manywords are hidden metaphors suggests that it is literally impossible tospeak without metaphor. As Roger Sale has shown, “The only sentenceswe can construct that are really without metaphors are those we con-struct just to prove we can do it” (p. 160). For example, in talking abouta “point of view,” we are, of course, understanding something about themental process by talking about it metaphorically as the physical actof seeing. And “understanding” itself suggests the idea of “supporting”an idea by being able to “stand under” its weight (weightier ideas beingharder to understand).

That numbers can be used as metaphors may be less than obvious,in part, because such usage is not like that of most metaphors, whichconvey the abstract via the vehicle of the concrete. But the projectioncan go in either direction, as became clear to me when I was in thepreliminary stages of writing this paper.

One familiar metaphor, maybe even a basic metaphor, is thatthoughts are birds; thus the familiar phrase, “A little bird told me.”We understand the mystery of thought by projecting the more familiarexperience of the bird upon it; yes, thoughts, like birds, arrive suddenly,of their own will, out of the air; that thoughts are like birds is a familiarcomparison.

While reading and thinking about thought one afternoon in mybackyard, I was roused from my intellectual reverie by the alighting of asmall flock of birds onto the orange tree directly in front of me. I was sud-denly seized with a realization: Birds are like thoughts! I understood themomentarily surprising and thus mysterious concrete (the birds) by com-paring them with the (at the time) more familiar abstract (thoughts).So, too, do we understand physical reality by projecting number uponit, using the abstraction of numbers (the abstraction we all use mosteasily) in a metaphorical way. These numbers we all project so easilyare basic metaphors, archetypes.

Metaphor, Archetype, and Platonic DriftJung, the foremost modern exponent of the idea of the archetype, washimself aware of the connection between the metaphor and the archetype,writing, for example:

An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in meta-phors. If such a content should speak of the sun and identify withit the lion, the king, the hoard of gold guarded by the dragon, or

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the power that makes for the life and health of man, it is neitherthe one thing nor the other, but the unknown third thing thatfinds more or less adequate expression in all these similes, yet—tothe perpetual vexation of the intellect—remains unknown and notto be fitted into a formula. (par. 267)

The problem is that metaphors can lead us to believe in the reality ofconcepts we do not fully understand, such as spirit and God. Nietzsche,worthily imitated by many others of the nay-saying disposition, empha-sized how the concept is just “the residue of a metaphor.” Thus PaulRicoeur writes of the dangers of the metaphor’s Platonic drift: “But pre-eminently among all others, the metaphor that displays the inanimateby means of the animate has this power of making relationships visi-ble. Following Heidegger and Derrida, one might be tempted to detecthere some shameful traces of Platonism. Does not the invisible appearto us through the visible in virtue of the supposed resemblance of one tothe other?” (p. 34). Ricoeur, true to his postmodernism predisposition,hilariously sees any hint of Platonism as “shameful,” and takes refugefrom this threat in the less poetical Aristotle. The shame, to be avoidedby all (French) rationalists, is to let the metaphor lead you up Plato’sladder. The danger with metaphor is that it can lead us to the poetic,to the archetypal, maybe even back to some version of Plato’s shamefulForms.

Metaphor leads to poetic, not merely philosophical, thinking, leadsus to see even the metaphoric nature of science, whose models can belikened to extended metaphors. Max Black offers the best discussionof the metaphorical nature of scientific models, offering, along the way,this wonderful aphoristic speculation: “Perhaps every science must startwith metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without the meta-phor there would never have been any algebra” (p. 242). But again,Robert Frost put it best, in his essay “Education by Poetry”: “We askboys in college to think . . . but we seldom tell them it is just puttingthis and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another.To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the topof which sticks through the sky” (p. 37). The world of the archetype(Frost’s “top of . . . the sky”) is reachable only by projection, by meta-phor. As von Franz concludes, “Thus, projection is an essential partof the process by which the archetype assumes a determinable shape”(1980b, p. 86).

Once the connections between thought, projection, metaphor, andarchetype are comprehended, it becomes possible to talk about the in-visible, what for some is nonsense and for others poetic wisdom. With

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metaphor we can talk about what cannot be talked about, what we donot yet understand. Yes, indeed, the vehicle of the metaphor can carryus into mystical realms, can lead us to use figures that Nietzsche wouldsay are lies, but which some of us can nonetheless feel as truths. Howelse can we talk about what cannot be talked about—about what Kantcalled “things in themselves”? How else are we to talk about the thingsmost worth talking about? As Gaon Saadia wrote in Kitab al-Almanatwa-al Itiquadat (The Book of Beliefs and Opinions), “Were we, in ourefforts to give an account of God, to make use only of expressions whichare literally true . . . there would be nothing left for us to affirm exceptthe fact of His existence” (Davis & Hersch, p. 117).

The archetypal, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, can never be directlyapprehended; we can see the archetypal image (the archetype visual-ized) or articulate the basic metaphor (the archetype verbalized), butwe cannot see or articulate the archetype itself. As Wittgenstein said atthe end of the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one mustbe silent” (p. 189). Or else, he might have added, if one does not wantto be silent, start using metaphors.

John Boe, Ph.D., is a lecturer in English at the University of California, Davis,where he edits the journal Writing on the Edge. He has written one book, LifeItself: Messiness Is Next to Goddessness and Other Essays, and co-writtenanother,Your Joke is in the Email: Cyberlaffs fromMousepotatoes. He has alsopublished many articles, essays, and reviews and is a professional storyteller.

FURTHER READING

Black, Max. (1962). Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philoso-phy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Blake, W. (1970). The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. D. V. Erdman(Ed.). Garden City, NJ: Doubleday.

Boe, J. (1997). “ ‘A Little Bit of Your Soul in It’: An Interview with DonaldKnuth.” Writing on the Edge, 9, 1.

Borges, J. L. (2000). The Craft of Verse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Cassirer, E. (1956). Language and Myth. London: Dover.

Cohen, T. (1979). “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy.” In S. Sacks(Ed.), On Metaphor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Davis, P. K., & Hersch, R. (1981). The Mathematical Experience. Boston, MA:Birkhauser.

Frost, R. (1966). “Education by Poetry.” In H. Cox & E. C. Lathem (Eds.),Selected Prose of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Frye, N. (1957). The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-sity Press.

Hadamard, J. (1973). The Mathematician’s Mind: The Psychology of Inventionin the Mathematical Field. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Indurkhya, B. (1994). “The Thesis That All Knowledge Is Metaphorical andMeanings of Metaphor.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 9 (1 ), 61–73.

Jung, C. G. (1969). “The Psychology of the Child Archetype.” The Archetypesof the Collective Unconscious. Vol. 9.1. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Murry, M. J. (1972). “Metaphor.” In W. Shibles (Ed.), Essays on Metaphor.Whitewater, WI: University of Wisconsin.

Nietzsche, F. (1997). “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.” InD. Gilman, C. Blair, & D. Parent (Eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoricand Language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Pepper, C. S. (1972). “The Root Metaphor Theory of Metaphysics.” In W. Shi-bles (Ed.), Essays on Metaphor. Whitewater, WI: University of Wisconsin.

Percy, W. (1985). Conversations with Walker Percy. L. A. Lawson & V. A.Kramer (Eds.). Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Ricoeur, P. (1981). The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of theCreation of Meaning in Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Richards, I. A. (1965). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Robertson, R. (1997). “The Mote in Your Eye: In Praise of Projection.” Psy-chological Perspectives, 36, pp. 92–102.

Sale, R. (1970). On Writing. New York: Random House.

Turner, M. (1993). Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of CognitiveScience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

von Franz, M. L. (1974). Number and Time: Reflections Leading Toward aUnification of Depth Psychology and Physics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-versity Press.

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von Franz, M. L. (1980). Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and thePsychology. Toronto: Inner City.

von Franz, M.-L. (1980). Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology:Reflections of the Soul. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

Wertheimer, M. (1982). Productive Thinking. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Wittgenstein, L. (1947). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul,Trench, Trubner.

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