Oh my god
"Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds."
- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
I'm still enjoying this book - I'm a little over halfway through - but this line in particular just jumped out at me. The idea that language evolves as a series of metaphors, always increasing in complexity, by which new things are understood in terms of old things, is one that I find very appealing - especially in contrast to some kind of universality, in which language is understood as accessing structures in the brain that were somehow already there instinctually. (I've got Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By on deck, by the way). Here Jaynes proposes the idea that language and metaphor were intimately involved not only in the creation of understanding, but in the creation of the underlying structures and mentality on which our understanding is built. At some fundamental level, it is the poetic - the metaphorical, rather than the literal; the subjective diachronic narrative rather than the objective syncronic instance - that allowed, and continues to allow, humans to expand our minds. At the outer limits of our comprehension there will always be poetry.
- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
I'm still enjoying this book - I'm a little over halfway through - but this line in particular just jumped out at me. The idea that language evolves as a series of metaphors, always increasing in complexity, by which new things are understood in terms of old things, is one that I find very appealing - especially in contrast to some kind of universality, in which language is understood as accessing structures in the brain that were somehow already there instinctually. (I've got Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By on deck, by the way). Here Jaynes proposes the idea that language and metaphor were intimately involved not only in the creation of understanding, but in the creation of the underlying structures and mentality on which our understanding is built. At some fundamental level, it is the poetic - the metaphorical, rather than the literal; the subjective diachronic narrative rather than the objective syncronic instance - that allowed, and continues to allow, humans to expand our minds. At the outer limits of our comprehension there will always be poetry.