The Significance of Metaphor.

What Lakoff, Johnson, and McCloud wrote seemed to agree conceptually, even if they discussed two very different metaphorical approaches at communication. McCloud's comic pointed to the fact that people perceive themselves and every extension of themselves metaphorically because we have little to no sensory information being streamed to us about ourselves. When you look at someone else, all of their sensory information is being offered to you in an infinite stream (you can smell them, you can hear them, you can see their body move, all at the same time) but you aren't looking at a mirror so you can only have a vague understanding of what you probably look like.

To McCloud, that's why comics are a universally adored medium for communication; we can relate to the characters because they are simplified to the point of resembling the metaphorical image we have of ourselves. I think this fits perfectly with Lakoff and Johnson's idea that metaphorical expressions in language shape how we culturally perceive things. The language we share with our society represents the kind of culturally accepted opinions we hold.


If we think symbolically (if we behold ourselves metaphorically as McCloud would say), and we employ a language that is based off of symbols which are arbitrarily assigned their meanings (as Locke would say), then it follows that our metaphorical language has practical weight in our society. Our metaphors, which are based off the understanding of symbols as vehicles of meaning or we would otherwise not be able to equate time with money at all without being utterly confused, employ secondary language to flesh out culturally unique, conceptual connections. Those same connections, those same outlines, are in an abstract way a replication of the process we undergo when we try to connect our "metaphorical" vision of ourselves to our actual embodiment and everyone else's actual embodiment. What that culture values as "true" will be made clear through their choice of metaphorical associations and what that culture is willing to accept as true must, in part, be integrated into their abstract and highly symbolic vision of themselves. Money is inherently valuable + nonrenewable resources cost more money + time is nonrenewable and thus valuable = time is money. Some cultures don't define value by the cost of an object, and some cultures are much more relaxed about how they use their time.

That metaphor would therefore be totally inadequate in those other cultures but here it is such a commonly understood phenomenon (i.e. we all generally agree that money is valuable and time can be quantified) that we understand the statement to be true to the extent of incorporating it in our language and allowing it to restructure our ways of thinking inside ourselves. This falls directly into the territory of New Critics who believed that literary or artistic language (metaphorical, secondary, connotative, etc.) convey certain kinds of truth that empirical, scientific, denotative language could not possibly convey. I do think though that it should almost be impossible to write off metaphorical language as impractical anymore (as Enlightenment philosophers, Locke, and Plato would all probably say). The fact that so many theories have come out about literary vs. scientific language (or the fact that so many Western philosophers spent their time on it) implies that whether you're rejecting it or not, it is still a very real thing that has serious prevalence in our societies. And a lot of those philosophers, in the end, defaulted to literary examples and metaphors in their discourses to help further establish their ideas about why the same such literary language should be avoided.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I totally agree.


Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Excerpts from Metaphors We Live By (1980). The Literary Link. Janice E. Patten. 2010. San Jose State University. Web. http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html.

McCloud, Scott. “The Vocabulary of Comics.” In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. 24-45.