360. The World Of Metaphor

The world of experience is the world of metaphor. Limited always to our perceptions of the world, we never make contact with the thing-in-itself, which would provide our understanding with a more solid foundation. We are instead forced to relate perceptions to other perceptions, and we do this through metaphor.

We use basic metaphors like induction and causality to formulate more complex metaphors that we call rules of logic. These metaphors furnish us with the general structure of language, which we then use to construct our entire system of knowledge. But at no time do we ever achieve a direct linkage with bare reality or escape from metaphor, which means all of our understanding of the world depends on it. Furthermore, because we can only understand ourselves through experience, the self is also metaphorical, insofar as it is a substantive entity at all.

A poem is a way of using metaphor to express something. And because our understanding of both the world and the self rests on metaphor, poems go directly to the heart of our experience. By communicating in the most direct way possible for a human being, poems are capable of revealing truths we would not otherwise be able to reach. They do this by leveraging the metaphors we use most — those of ordinary language — to reveal facets of experience that have previously gone unnoticed.

Poems show us something about the kind of beings we are and the possibilities available to us. By revealing something about the self, they also reveal something about the world — the world that could not exist other than as a continuous extension of that self. Poetry then, in addition to being a mechanism for creating delight, also reveals the nature of our reality, and our experience of this revelation is what we call a poem’s beauty and truth.