Re: Using METONYMS; was: O Duty (Was: "If")

I think that Geroge Lakoff would say it only ought to be a "surprise"
to followers of the cult of "objectivism" as he calls it. :)

I've read a bit of Owen Barfield lately, and I highly recommend him.
One of the things that he insists on is that it is only fairly
recently, in historical terms, that we even had to start calling it
"metaphor."  Before that it was just that concepts were deeper; they
had inner and outer meanings that were part and parcel of each other;
distinguishable only with some effort.  We still have words that have
some bits of this left in English, like "heart," but not many.

Barfield insists that many people find the personifications (Love,
Virtue, Peace, etc) of the middle ages and renaissance uninteresting
because we have thrown off a 'participatory' style of thinking, in
which abstractions were very real and living and interpenetrated with
everyday reality in ways that seemed as obvious to them as the
interpenetration of the theories of physics (electricity, and so on)
with reality seem to us.

He says that artificially stripping reality of its "participation" in
higher realms, the divine, the ideal, the mana-filled, has made
possible modern science and the major religions... but that it is
founded on a lie, because in fact the world we experience *is*
participatory -- but it participates not in a divinity that is beyond
it and wholly separate from us, but in our humanity (and perhaps also
in divinity communicated through humanity).

That the world around us is not merely 'objective' but crucially
arises from the interface between an inaccessible 'objective' reality
and our consciousness is *also* what George Lakoff was trying to prove
in _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_!

I doubt he's read Barfield, and I think the convergence of their
conclusions is really interesting.

Anyway, I think you'd find Barfield's work (if you haven't already
read it) very interesting; a lot of what you've said about
personifications resonates with what he's written (and I'm sure I
haven't adequately expressed it in this message).

I only know two of his books well enough to recommend them: _Saving
the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry_ and _Speaker's Meaning_.  The
latter is a bit more linguistically oriented and a lot shorter.

Ed Heil -------------------------------- edheil@postmark.net
             "QuchwIj Dayachqang'a' bang?"
        (KHOOCH-widge da-YATCH-kang-a BANG?)
       Klingon for "Want to stroke my forehead, babe?"
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