A Bridge is a Lie: How Metaphor Does Science
by Jeffery Donaldson
In the following paper, author of Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution (2015), Jeffery Donaldson, explores how science engages in productive analogy, while at the same time denigrating the “metaphoric initiative.” What can an understanding of poetics teach about science?
MERE METAPHOR?
Nothing brings home the flight of time like finishing a book. You smash the bottle of champagne against your title and set the whole thing afloat, whereupon it drifts from harbour, captainless, over the horizon and out of sight. Not that you notice right away. You’re out looking for new crafts. When my book on metaphoric process—Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution—came out in 2015, I had no clear idea of what the next project would be. I had said my thing: so far from being a merely decorative or handy language tool for tough ideas and expressions, metaphor was fundamental, all determining … and absolutely everywhere. The “metaphoric initiative” is deeply embedded in material reality, in the mechanisms of relation that we accept as true in physics and chemistry, in evolution, in cognition and consciousness, in culture and literature. It is as profoundly consequential as it is hidden and misunderstood. Ask scientists about metaphor and they’ll give three cheers! Analogies are fine tools for describing tricky concepts. Thought pumps, as Daniel Dennett says. They’ll offer examples: the universe is a “block” of time; time is a frozen river; an atom is a solar system, and so on. But metaphors are seductive as well, they’ll warn, and deceptively relative. Use them carefully, keep them at arm’s length, and don’t mistake them for fact or truth. Ask anyone on the street. In fact, ask a literary critic, a religious person, a philosopher, a linguist, they will tell you the same thing. Often enough producing the old spoon—“Metaphor is a comparison that doesn’t use like or as!”—they will talk about metaphors, likenesses that they like or don’t like. They don’t talk about metaphoric thinking or the puzzles of relation itself. They tend not to consider that the logic they use to draw their conclusions and their means of thinking already evince a relational mechanism whose reach—literature shows us—is elusive and infinite. Science skips this step in exploring its own habits. Not that there aren’t good reasons to handle metaphor with care. See the end of this essay. But good reasons do not proceed by mischaracterizing the subject.
I’m enjoying an excellent study on the evolution of human mind and consciousness by David Lewis-Williams, called The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art.A fine study of pre-historic cave drawings and the sociological roots of image-making habits, Lewis-Williams’ book is a fairly typical example of the tacit metaphor prejudice you find these days in various disciplines. He considers, for instance, the “swiss-army knife” metaphor of mind, but is careful to introduce a decisive caveat: “It is important to remember that all these understandings are no more than metaphor: they have no foundation in physical existence.” The hierarchy implied in his “no more than” blossoms subsequently into full flower: “we may feel that we are indeed explaining the phenomenon of mind. But we are not. We are merely playing with words.” Such formulas remain invisibly a sign of the times.
Suspicions toward “mere” metaphor in the sciences might align with an apperception of the power it can wield when it gains traction in the general culture. Lewis-Williams talks about the ubiquitous presence, for instance, of the “mind is a computer” metaphor, which on the one hand influences what software and “wetware” engineers try to do with computer technology, but also drives subtle attitudes towards our identities as such. Daniel Dennett holds tenaciously, often for good reason, to his idea that our brains are complex machines. Richard Dawkins’ theory of the “selfish” gene is a further example of how metaphors become dominant concepts, the ground and means of current debates and their complicated outcomes.1 Pointing out to them that they are arguing over myths and metaphors is met with familiar indifference, a dull stare, a swatting at flies. They know what you’re talking about and what you have to say isn’t relevant. What they’re getting at, they retort, is truth. There is a conspicuous double-think in science’s application of metaphor that reminds me of Richard Wilbur’s fine adage (in a poem entitled “Epistemology”): “We milk the cow of the world, and as we do / We whisper in her ear, ‘You are not true.’”
Writing Missing Link turned my obsession with metaphoric process into a conscious despair at science’s and religion’s, and even literary criticism’s, patronizing mishandling of metaphor. While my focus is on this particular zeitgeist in the sciences, I might take a moment to observe its spread in my own discipline of literary criticism, for indeed, even in literature departments myth and metaphor can get short shrift. They can disguise, we say nowadays, ideological dispositions and thereby sweeten the pill that poisons your thinking. Your job as a creative critic is to find out where those seductions are hiding and purge the corrupted work of its too viral contaminants. Well-intended as the effort is, it can sometimes look like mere content spotting. Social concern criticisms in the humanities share an attitude with the ascendant modes in science. They both point to a certain real thing that grounds their theories. Science points to data and observed objects, litcrit to social and cultural history. Science says there is fact and truth in the world; story and metaphor are fine, but don’t get carried away. Litcrit says there is the urgent reality of social concern: myth and metaphor must, and in any case always do, serve these. The assumptions that these disciplines make as to their proper materials are necessary, they would say, and necessary because they are productive. Science offers us a world of working toasters and litcrit a world of social justice (in the criticism at least, not the literature, which must alas be saved from itself by those who know better).
FACTS & FICTIONS
Impatient of how we neglect properties of truth in fictive worlds, I took an interest in the work of the Heterodox Academy. Here were some folks who were interested in different points of view and provided a language with which a reader might resist the compulsory imperatives of our critical mood. Who could be opposed to heterodox approaches to the truth? You could have knocked me over with a feather last year when a colleague in my department expressed scepticism at heterodox ideas. I guess the thinking is that if you look at things from all sides you are insufficiently committed to real social change. The Heterodoxers are self-declared moderates who want to hear positions from all sides, love to be corrected, open their hearts to being wrong. All good practice, to be sure. Even here, though, I found the axioms of science at work. The only way to fund and nourish the heterodox spirit, they argue, is with “evidence-based fact” and “reasoned argument.” There was that binary again, the one that positions a certain understanding of reality as the correct one. The truth was out there, and a mind disciplined in heterodox thinking, with fact and evidence, would get nearer the mark. To me they are still missing a further underlying intuition (or fact if you like), that “fact,” “evidence” and “reasoned argument” are themselves implicated in metaphoric relations. I thought I might try out a paper along these lines at their annual conference in Denver this past summer; it would align ideas of metaphoric thinking with the heterodox idea of alternative thinking.
So what about metaphoric thinking? In Missing Link, I took up the familiar idea that there are two kinds, or degrees, of metaphoric identification. I’m not referring here to the distinction between simile and metaphor, where the former softens the “error” of metaphors by saying that one thing is only like another, the latter going full monty on the transgressive potential of saying that one thing simply is another. No, I mean something nearer to Philip Wheelwright’s distinction between epiphor and diaphor. His work in books like The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism and Metaphor and Reality goes to the mood and effect of the metaphoric moment and the consequences of its audacity. We all recognize those times when we struggle to describe something—like time itself, for instance—and must have recourse to an analogy, something that the elusive idea is like. We find it: time is like a road that runs in two directions. Excellent, now we understand time a little better. We draw the vague idea towards the familiar one and our consciousness is expanded. But now consider a different metaphoric moment. “Daylight lies on the bed like a fresh shirt.” This is Walter Benjamin at his finest. In this instance there is no prior state in which something is not understood. We know what daylight is and we know what a fresh shirt is. But then along comes the troublemaker poet. He says, these two things are actually involved in one another. Your sense of how things are is now questionable. What must the world be like for this new thing to be valid or interesting and not simply nonsense to ignore? Your mind goes with the beguiling chance. The “break and make” moment, as I call it—out with the old way, in with the new!—expands your consciousness. You do more thinking. You chase after the “opening away” of new possibilities.
In Missing Link, I call these two kinds of metaphor “assimilative” and “inventive.” When we say that “time is like a road,” we assimilate the vaguer idea to the more certain one. When we say that “Daylight lies on the bed like a fresh shirt,” we destabilize knowledge (as we like to say). We oblige the reader, if she wants to “go with” the suggestive implication, to reinvent her sense of the world. The assimilative metaphor is essentially conservative: the known now includes an unknown and is thereby expanded and consolidated. The inventive metaphor, on the other hand, is transgressive. It obliges the reader to question the coherence of the prior understanding. It isn’t a bad idea to have both conservative and transgressive ways of thinking, and metaphor assures us of both.
So far, I've been talking about things like “understanding” and “what the world is like.” We can expand our language here to see how science, religion, and literature are implicated. We could take a phrase like “what the world is like” and think in terms of cosmology, that is, ideas of total order, the world as it really is, and so on. We can take terms like “understanding” to refer to the kinds of patterns or models or unities by which we gather and organize and make sense of experience. We say that the pattern or unity or model holds together. It does so because all of its elements are in agreement with one another, relate in a way that we say works. How do we get time to fit our understanding of the world? Ah, it’s like a road. How do we get the idea that “daylight lies on the bed like a fresh shirt” to fit what we say the world is like? How interesting, let me try to figure that out. In both cases we work with a kind of heuristic axiom that truth is what “makes sense” and “holds together.”
How things hold together is fundamentally a metaphoric problem. We have to take a moment to understand how. The mathematician Max Black did excellent work when he tried to explain, in mathematical terms, what really happens in a metaphoric event. Every item of knowledge, every meaningful word, every datum of experience possesses what he called its own “system of associated commonplaces.” By this he meant the ready associations that are available when you invoke a thing: what you know about it, in effect. You have, for example, all the things that come to mind in relation to the word “love”: for instance, that it can give joy and pain, that it is beautiful, that it can die with neglect. Definitions are obviously included, but associated commonplaces are broader than that. In fact, the number of love-associations are apparently endless. On the other side of the metaphor you have the things you think of when you think of a “rose,” that it is beautiful and thorny, that if you don't water it, it will die, that it needs proper soil and good weather, that it is fragile, and so on. Good! We say we understand these things. Then the poet, in this case Robert Burns, comes along and says “My love is like a red red rose.” We permit Burns the impertinence (this is Ricoeur’s term) of saying so because we “see” that some of the associated commonplaces of both love and rose are themselves relatable. Love can hurt; roses are thorny. Love can die; roses are fragile. The possibilities are multiple, yet circumscribed.
A logician might argue that Max Black has merely reduced the metaphor to a set of logical moves: “love hurts” equals “roses are thorny.” The authority of logic itself is still intact. The metaphor theorist, in reply, might accuse the logician of simply interposing a further set of metaphors. How is the pain of love like the thorniness of a rose? You have to find the associations of “emotional pain” and the associations of “thorns” and make connections between those parts, and then the parts of those parts, and the parts of those parts of those parts. Even the original ideas that we began with, love and rose, were only metaphorically associated with their own commonplaces. In the sciences we once said that objects are definite things, elementary and substantial, but then we learned that even the hardest things in the world are made of atoms in relation; then we discovered that atoms are electrons and protons in relation, which we found are further made of more elementary particles like muons and bosons, which are made of, well, what? strings vibrating in relation? We’re not sure yet. Another rabbit hole. All knowledge is relational knowledge. As you chase after the infinite regress of “reasons,” you never escape the cascade of relations themselves.
Knowledge itself then is a way of putting things together. Putting things together is a way of thinking metaphorically, which is to say, a way of finding the relations that enable things to be themselves. The more relations you can set up between parts of an argument or idea, the more the ensuing pattern becomes convincing. Your argument holds together. At any one particular instant in your thinking experience, your thoughts point in two directions at once: “upwards,” as it were, towards the overall context or unity or model you have in mind, and “downwards” towards all the little reasons and connections you might rattle off to explain what you mean by this or that in your overall picture. Relations form into unities and unities subsist on relations. Think of the chicken and the egg.
COHESION & CORRESPONDENCE
Let’s apply these intuitions to a scientific description. A theoretical physicist might come up with a model of the universe. She would take any new observed data from the objective world, which experiment provides, and assimilate those parts to the model she is developing. The model is true only when all the parts fit together and there is nothing that doesn’t fit. The model accounts for observations and appearances, but it never accounts for all of them, that is, for all of what we imagine to be out there. Thomas Kuhn writes in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “there are seldom many areas in which a scientific theory, particularly if it is cast in a predominantly mathematical form, can be directly compared with nature.”2 We can also see how the process of refining the model predetermines what is permitted to stand as evidence and fact within it. Kuhn argues that “until the adjustment is completed … the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.”3 In other words, “facts” are only considered as such within the context of a given model or way of looking at things. It does not become a fact until it fits. In short, whenever you claim that a fact is a fact, you are pre-invested in your model as the one and true model. Models are made into models by having facts connected within them. No models without facts, but no facts without models. The chicken-and-egg puzzle again. Truths come in degrees of convincingness, whereas final proofs for models and facts can only appear in the form of one hand washing the other.
It turns out that what you mean by truth is itself variable, such that your definition already provides the grounds to support itself. In truth, we trade in self-fulfilling axioms. We can add a modicum of clarity if we conceive of our models along two essential axes: “correspondence” and “coherence.” In the correspondence model, a proposition is true if it “corresponds” with something outside it. In the coherence model the proposition or model is true if it “holds together.” Think of a wheel that we say “spins true.” While I’ll be showing some love to the coherence model, I’ll nevertheless insist on a group hug. As it happens, these two ideas of truth form a dialectic where each is inescapably related to the other. Facts depend on models, models on facts. We are still fussing, scientists included, with the implications of this.
Kuhn’s book on revolutions in science, mentioned above, was itself a revolutionary work. He noticed an important detail about how scientific models evolve. Looking at changes in our theories over history, he saw that “normal science” was the work of assimilating new data to existing models. At the same time, he noticed that the criterium of truth was never any absolute knowledge of the relationship between the model and any reality outside it, but rather simply the extent to which the model itself held together. We say it is true because it works. The work of science expands the model, such that the expansion is itself the proof of its authority. Major changes in the model tend not to occur. They do so only when a new observed datum is discovered that does not fit with the existing unity. If you cannot get the datum to fit, you have two choices. You can tweak things to make it fit—using modelling stratagems known variously as “saving the appearances” and “saving the theory”—or you can treat the new datum as an “anomaly” (Kuhn’s term throughout the book) and go to work changing the model itself. And Presto! a revolution. We can relate the habits Kuhn describes here to our two kinds of metaphor. Normal science is like assimilative metaphor, a conservative initiative that consolidates and expands the model. Revolutions in science are like transgressive or interactive metaphors: they occur when the anomalous thing is so counter-intuitive that it eventually drives a reinvention of the model itself.
When it appeared in the 1962, Kuhn’s argument ruffled some feathers in the science community. His critics saw that he favoured a coherence model of truth over the correspondence model. What else do we have, asked Kuhn? We can only credit the “descriptive” value of a model when it coheres within itself. There is no “outside the model,” or as Derrida would say, “Il n’y a pas de hors text.” All a model can do is grow, not grow towards anything. Scientific process, he allowed, gives us an “increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature…. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.” We are accustomed to seeing science as “drawing constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal?.”4 This past summer, we've seen the process at work that Kuhn describes. Theoretical physicists are, as we speak, debating the meaning of new observations from the James Webb telescope. Observations of certain distant galaxies, so I gather, don't quite fit with the current modeling of the so-called “Big Bang” universe. Actually, physicists don’t even agree on whether the data represents a new anomaly (revolution!) or really does fit after all (save the appearances!). They are nonetheless in agreement that “more thinking” must be done to sort out these quirks in relation to the existing model.
A BRIDGE IS A LIE
What gets to be true and serious and “at the table” in this world relates to facts and verified theories. You can see how literature falls out of the question. The first thing a scientist—I’ll throw together a strawman here, just to make a point—wants to say about a poem or novel is that it is not a true theory about the world and does not use fact as a decisive criterium. It trades in fictions and says things that don’t need to correspond with the real world outside it. It makes stuff up, unlikely stuff, and this self-granted allowance disqualifies it—in the same way that it disqualifies religion and superstition—from the more serious conversations about what the real world is like. Most suffering and error, a Richard Dawkins argues, can be attributed to a failure to be reasonable, to distinguish what is true from what is false or fake. Religious or political zealots, extremists of all cloths, are trying to pull the wool over your eyes. They say stuff that ain’t so. And oh, by the way, so do poets! Thinkers like Dawkins get rather fuzzy when they try to parse the distinction between these two ways of going astray, that is, believing in God and writing poems about unicorns. Many poets and novelists (and their critics!) meet him halfway. They can feel awkward and even guilty about “deficits” in their own discipline. They’ll twist themselves into every awkward attitude trying to prove that their work has to do with more than imaginary things. My son found a science-fiction writer online who denigrates writers of fantasy. His books, at least, are about science and the real world!
In a first-year course at McMaster, I defend the authority of literature as imaginative fiction by pitching an analogy. I try it out on my students at the beginning of term. I say, “A bridge is a lie.” Then I wait. After a bit of head scratching, we get into it. We like to say, I explain, that poems are not about the real world in the way that science and technology are about the real world. But if we’re to say that, I propose, you also have to say that a bridge is a lie. Why? Because it does not follow the contours of the world, the terrain as we know it to be. Instead of going like this (I make a U-shaped curve down into an imaginary valley on the chalkboard…), it goes like this (… and draw an arcing road across the top). It's a boldfaced lie! Who would fall for it?! Look how it deviates from how the world really is. But keep watching! The person driving along the road does not screech to a halt at the foot of the bridge and complain that the bridge is just “making stuff up.” No, the driver is happy to “go with” the arc of the engineer’s narrative, the little story he tells of how the world might go, if only we went with its way of being. The unfolding arc of the bridge supersedes any sceptic’s observation of how the world really goes. And the arc is realized, in every actual and metaphoric sense, because we go with it! Think of a corollary: all those ancient, abandoned bridges and aqueducts that crop up in the middle of nowhere in Italy, no longer connected to anything. How many landfills overflow with computer monitors from the 1980’s? They are as outdated as myth, and we go with them no longer.
We could say the same of cell phones and office towers. What kind of true model of the world do they support? Totally made up, fictions every one of them! What is an iPhone but technology’s version of fantasy literature? Why do we go with such fake fictions, such whacky ideas of what the world is like? On the one hand, because they work! Because they hold together. And on the other, because they expand our reach. Our scope for action is enlarged, like a model of what things are like. We realize, and activate, some idea of our human potential. Bridges and iPhones and cars and fridges and dentist chairs all project (like bridges!) a cosmology of their own, a crazy world whose purpose and utility are realized when we go with them. They don’t build up a real world, they build up a made world, a human world.
A certain materialist might reject this dichotomy between real things and made things. Fiction is make-believe fantasy because it isn’t composed of matter, whereas a bridge is really real because you can touch it. The argument is shortsighted. First of all, the criterium of solid material hardly accounts for arts like sculpture, to mention an obvious case. But there is a further complication. Every fiction or work of art has a manifesting materiality, violins for music, bodies for dancing, books and paper for poems, even just a voice for speaking. The materials are organized in such a way that they evince an otherworldliness, an alternative way of inhabiting what you call the world. The same goes for the materials that materialists call real. You hold an iPhone in your hand, but nothing about the world it projects—a cyber world—is material that you can touch at that moment. Cyber reality is a real thing because so many of us live by it, and there seems to be nothing about its immateriality that gives us pause. Even a bridge, which you can crash into, is the material instantiation of a conceptualized plan that the world should really be, or go, in such and such a way. It is the alternative idea, and not its material embodiment, that we go with. Take the abandoned Italian aqueduct again. There is nothing about its materiality that compels us to go with it any longer. It is a “mere myth” now, no matter how much its brickwork still weighs. A further corollary begs me to point out that when some people don't like what a story projects, they burn the books, a tragicomic mistaking of where the genuine reality of the book’s made world lies.
Where am I going with all of this? I’m arguing for the real authority of the metaphoric imagination and all the ways it expresses itself. I’ll take a step back and start again. Clearly there is a lot of familiar stuff in the world, bodies made of flesh and blood, hard objects, real needs, urgent concerns. However hard it is to define the limits of that world, science does excellent work in approaching it as the appropriate world to focus on. W.H. Auden’s observation that many have lived without love but not one without water still makes its point, and it would be odd indeed if science threw all its resources behind finding an explanation for weird cosmic events in a Star Trek episode. We do appear, for the time being, to live in a certain kind of shared single world that (more or less) holds together and doesn’t go away. Poems and stories that create alternative worlds would be pointless if they did not include in their own materials the world of familiar experience in front of us.
But here’s my point. The fields of science and literature each include and license the authority of the other. In making many worlds, poetry uses, as its material-to-play-with, the world that science treats as solid and singular. In building up its single world, science uses fiction’s willingness to make up things that aren’t so, bridges and iPhones and coronary stents. Science plays in its single world and literature is very particular and exacting in its proliferation of many worlds. We’ll lay this perspective aside for a moment, develop some related ideas, and then come back to it for a grand finale.
MADE UP WORLDS
Perhaps now we have a leveler playing field, a conception of what the world is like that makes it less easy to subordinate the imaginative and fictional. We can put literature on the same footing with what scientists and literary critics say is the world that really matters. Time now to push a little further still. Like those that science creates, poems create whole worlds. They are models and universes that hold together. They hold together in the same way that bridges and iPhones hold together, by having all of their parts relate to one another in a way that works. Every verbal fiction is a heuristic: it is based on the self-granted assumption that it is an entire universe unto itself and has in it everything it needs to be whole. Ezra Pound offers an entire world that goes like this: “The apparition of these faces in a crowd, / Petals on a wet black bough.” Nothing more, nothing less. John Keats says “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.” Lo, it is so! And off the poem goes. The world it makes unfolds and expands from within. It expands even after Keats finishes writing it. Let a reader engage the smallest poem with imagination and curiosity and she will quickly discover that the world opened there is potentially infinite, that no constructed library, howsoever large could contain all that might be said and discovered among its relations. Part of what a poem foregrounds and emphasizes is the very condition of metaphoric relation that makes it what it is. In a poem, as in a scientific model, everything is relation, a whole that derives from the leaps of mind that pass between words, images, stanzas, sounds and rhymes, echoes of other words and other images and sounds. An entirety of relation. Like a bridge that goes this-a-way, the poem speaks into being what it says. Both poems and bridges are hypothetical and heuristic. They say, “let’s see where this goes.” Their authority lies in how they cohere, complete and whole unto themselves. The reader (and the driver) show how such alternative ways might be worth going with.5
This was the attitude I was trying to recommend to the folks at the Heterodox Academy. After I made my case, a scientist came up to talk and said that he really liked what I had to say about metaphor. It fit with a book he had read about the authority of metaphoric thinking before the Enlightenment, before, that is, we replaced its habits with rational and scientific thought. Still handy though! he wanted to throw me a bone. Ah well, Rome wasn't built in a day, I thought to myself. And neither is the world of heterodox cosmologies, its many poems, its many metaphors, its many ways.
In any case, thank God for science. It provides us with a world of wonders. We live by its recommendations, kinds of poems in their own right, speculations on how the world might be if it went like … iPhones and electric cars. Science may be vulnerable, however, when some of its advocates insist that its way of knowing is the real and only way. They keep wondering why everyone can't think the way they do. I should of course be speaking of scientism rather than scientists. The past century has showcased brilliant theoretical physicists who push at the limit, in every sense, of their discipline. A brief stare out my window has brought to mind Einstein of course, Alfred North Whitehead, David Bohm, Roger Penrose, and younger folk like Donald Hoffman and Julian Barbour. Such writers make generous allowances for all ways of knowing. They speak their own language without seeming to pat other languages on the head, telling them to go out and play. It is a sign of the power of a certain way of thinking—and of marketing that thinking—when its own habits of mind are thought of in popular culture and media as the only habits going, the true ones.
PLAYFUL COHERENCE
I come to the big hurdle again, that science is about real things and poetry about imaginary things. I’ve tried to indicate a few ways over it, but will stop here, take a few steps back and then try to clear it for good. We seem to live these days at a breaking point (haven’t we always?) of tensions between disagreeable factions of mind and idea. Everyone wants to be right. People want to live by their models and their ways of thinking. Everyone gets to point to their own facts—facts that really do fit their perspective—and accuse everyone else of failure. A chaos of relativisms! Reason cries out. Metaphor and fiction and imagination and wishful thinking, with their associated abracadabras, are only making things worse, trying to make things so, just by saying them. The only cure for radical relativism, they say, is good science, and fact, and objective truth. It isn’t hard to see why they feel so driven to pound on the table of facts; they see around them so much wishful thinking gone off the rails. But is playing the fact-and-evidence card getting them where they want to go? Are they convincing the people they want to convince? Taking science at its own word, fundamentalists can always find actual objective facts to suit them. You have your facts; I have mine. What gets to be fact remains in question. It is why, as Northrop Frye says, no one was ever convinced by an argument.
As Thomas Kuhn showed, the real proof of any model, either scientific or poetic, is not its connection with a merely relative idea of the facts, but its inclusivity and coherence. When we say that a model holds together, we are evaluating it in a “closed” context, as a model. No single model that is epistemologically open is also holding together at that instant. There would be loose ends. Trying to be open and closed at the same time leaves you staring at the paradox of all metaphoric thinking, where we accept out of hand (for the sake of argument, so to speak) that A is not-A. In any case, refusing this inference is exactly what allows us to do more science. Most normal science goes on, indeed is only possible, for the very reason that scientists guard the coherence and fixed nature of the single world they build up. Their job is to develop the potential of further relations within it. One wants to see, after all, just how far such a world can take us.
If normal science is the work of relating everything to everything else inside a model, we ought to have some such term as “normal creation” in the making of a poem. We watch over Emily Dickinson’s shoulder as she writes. Her poem grows and we think of her hard at work “saving the appearances,” that is, permitting nothing to be added that doesn’t fit the whole, while expanding that whole using everything that does fit. Like the concept of dehiscence in biology (the flower in relation to its seed), the poem opens toward the total form that its smallest parts already predict. There is, again, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in the made worlds of science and poetry.
But there is a difference between these two expressions—in science and poetry—of making things work. In science there is the commitment to a single model, what it would say was the true world. As new data arises needing to be assimilated to the model, scientists will use every trick in the book to preserve the model itself. Kuhn is spot-on in his description of these “saves,” calling them “numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications.” In short, they use metaphoric (which is to say relational) leaps. Northrop Frye talks about how the space between any two conflicting points can be “filled in” with further connections and leaps.6 The scientist sees a gap between two points and adds extra moves to make the gaps smaller between each one. You “explain” the gap, which is literally to say you spread it around. The poet would embrace the original gap as a gap. Scientists use their extra leaps in the service of preserving their model and so employ the gap-fillers accordingly. Poets, because they can make many worlds, can be more committed to the gap-moment itself and discovering what sort of new world it will, quite actually, predict.
Science devotes itself to a single world for intelligible reasons. It explores and expands upon what we call an objective physical world, a world that emerges out of consensus and represents that consensus. We don’t have to say that it is the true world, only that it is a negotiated and shared one (a metaphoric problem, no doubt, to begin with). Science helps to work out its contours and characteristics, dizzyingly complex in its unfoldings. There is a sense then in which we “go with” the single bridge (the only one, as it happens, that arches over the valley for the time being) because it is the bridge that others go with, and we only have so much money to spend on bridges. Social relations require efficiency, convenience, and a pooling of resources. The difficulty arises when one neglects the intuitions, for instance, of a John Keats, whose idea of “negative capability” celebrates that state of mind that can inhabit “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” We want to go with the bridge in the spirit of consensus while not taking the bridge literally. We confidently put our foot on the accelerator and drive out onto clouds.
And so each discipline disappears into the other. In its effort to preserve the logic that its system requires, science chases quantum mechanics and string theory to their limits and ends up creating, in its one model, theories of a multi-verse (at least according to some thinkers). Out of the one, many. Literature, conversely, in letting multiverses expand exponentially on library shelves, leaves each individual fiction free to enjoy all the rights and privileges of a single universe, the very “truth” that science itself longs for. Out of the many, one.
Each system includes, then, as its enabling mechanism, features that we associate with the other system. In its idea of one real world, science tells real fibs about how the world actually goes. It makes things up, then like a poem, invites us hypothetically to “see where this takes us.” The converse applies for fiction, which, in its hypothetical pitch to “see where this goes,” keeps turning back to our familiar consensus world for material already actualized and prepped for playful handling. Poetry is free to treat metaphoric gaps as free-radicals (if I may misuse that word), because it can permit worlds themselves to multiply. Science will use tricky leaps too—gaps to close gaps—but it must do so to preserve its single model. And notice that when it does come upon anomalies that it can no longer finesse, it will favour some new theory (which may already have been around for some time) that allows interpretation to go off in an alternative direction in just the way that poems do.
And so, up and over the hurdle: we actually live inside made-up worlds, imagined and theoretical worlds. In turn, our novels and stories are populated with actual things—trees and street cars—to play with. A poem is a universe! A universe is a poem! With both poems and universes, we live as though they had everything inside them, not because we can prove them true, compare them to, or make them absolutely fit with, anything beyond, but because they work, and because they exclude nothing. To imagine that they exclude “outside” things is simply to point to another world, like the one a reader could say she lives in, or the one a sky-watcher might imagine is beyond the cosmic microwave background. It would not be the one that the poem or the universe holds before you, with all its own infinities opening up inside.
Metaphoric thinking favours both/and ways of being. We take it on good faith—the great heuristic assumption—that however little we may understand poems and universes, we may treat them as true so long as everything fits and remains in play. Like a fantastic hypothesis—opening and opening into what it already says—poems and universes invite us to see how everything is related to everything else, which is the very instantiation of potential as such. They point in the direction of more.
Let’s leave things there for now. Once again, my aim was not to show that there are deficits or shortcomings in the vastly intricate and brilliant models of science. But there is no Kool-Aid one needs to drink to push at the limits of what science shows us. Scientists do it themselves all the time. Normal and revolutionary science will continue, to our hopeful advantage. Poems that are both finished and infinite will go on doing their thing. My aim was to introduce questioning complications into the attitude of some science advocates towards what it means for their work to be true and for literature's work, in turn and by definition, not to be true. Science is about reason; art is about feelings. Reason is calming and stable, and therefore can be trusted and followed; make-believe is risky and unpredictable, so must be constrained. That the implied hierarchy is simply assumed in our age ought not to obscure a fundamental reality that both science and art share. The human mind has a relational architecture that must, and always will, manifest in two directions—towards the seen and the unseen. In order to be what it is, science must evince the very habits of mind it pretends to disavow, hurling iPhones in every fantastical direction. Conversely, poems will always be imaginary gardens with real toads in them, as Marianne Moore says. How we parse the different products of their work, where getting out of bed in the morning to find reasons for living is concerned, is partly a matter of personal choice, not of a hierarchy that favours one way of thinking over another. I might only add that metaphoric thinking, which lies at the heart of both practices, is the force that unites them and points them in expanding directions.
It seems to me now that the best test of a poem, or a model, or a universe is not whether it is true in the way that popular science often means, but how playful it is in relation to its own coherence, its ways of relating that lead to more thinking, not some idea of righteous thinking. Scientists sometimes brag that they are very good, possibly the best, at being open to new truths and new ways. That may be. I would only want to add that poetry as well, in its infinite metaphoric potential, has been revealing the same way all along.
Jeffery Donaldson continues to daydream, in front of students at McMaster University, about metaphor theory, fictive worlds, poetry, and poetics. His seventh volume of poems, Granted: Poems of Metaphor, is appearing in December 2022 with Porcupine's Quill.
If we must talk about a kind of metaphor-illiteracy among the New Atheists, we must also allow that the illiteracy is highly literate. The arguments advanced in defence of science’s truths are as profound as any imaginative thinker could wish. But Richard Dawkins provides ample evidence in his angry book The God Delusion, for instance, of what evolutionary science can and cannot explain when it ignores the intuitions of its own procedures. When Dawkins writes that “Creationists adore ‘gaps’ in the fossil record, just as they adore gaps generally” (GD 127), we’re happy to dance along: “Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God. The reasoning that underlies intelligent design theory is lazy and defeatist—classic ‘God of the gaps’ reasoning.” Dawkins is quite correct: evolutionary science is a process of filling in gaps in the fossil record. Only an impatient thinker would conclude that when gaps remain in the record the whole system falters, proving apparently that God exists. You find a chink in the fossil record and rush to fill it with God. God becomes the explanation of the gap. Dawkins might accuse the apologist of attempting a bait-and-switch, that is, looking for a space where there appears to be no material fill, accusing him of lacking what he needs (enough material fill), and then filling it with immaterial fill. After all, who wouldn’t be able to say that the gap isn’t a gap after all because it is filled with invisible things? And yet are not scientists doing the same thing? The fossil record is filled with things that we cannot see, at least not yet, but they are there. Both appear to say, “Trust that inside the gap is something that for the present time is invisible.” Both are gap-handlers, with conflicting ideas of what gets to stand as fill.
From my perspective, gaps are metaphoric oxygen, the space of hypothetical potential, the mystery of relation itself that resides in all betweenwheres. Later we will see how scientists too use “unseen” things to fill in and fill out gaps in a model or argument where parts don’t fit together. They chase after (very imaginative) speculations on how the parts might go together after all. They tinker with the math to create possible powers, agents of connection, proffered logic. But then they turn around and—God of the gaps!—make fun of anyone who does the same thing in their field. That isn’t so much illiterate as monoliterate.
I think Daniel Dennett does a better job exploring his own literacy in his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. We might expect a book with such a title to be more skeptical about its own thoughtful assumptions, and Dennett is. The whole of his argument—use thought pumps to move your thinking forward—supports Paul Ricoeur’s idea that metaphoric thinking is “thinking more.” In Dennett’s case, one might say: Ok, that works, now just let the other shoe fall. But he doesn’t. There is still a certain rhetoric that favours binary conceptions of truth: “The level of mutual understanding achieved by this international system is invaluable, but there is a price to be paid: some of the thinking that has to be done apparently requires informal metaphor-mongering and imagination-tweaking, assaulting the barricades of closed minds with every trick in the book....” (11). I like the idea of opening closed minds through metaphor, but purveyors of this approach are nonetheless charged with hawking (false) goods and playing tricks. Dennett comes nearer to pushing his own envelope in this formula: “This vision of things, while it provides a satisfying answer to the question of whence came our own intentionality, does seem to leave us with an embarrassment, for it derives our own intentionality from entities—genes—whose intentionality is a paradigm case of mere as if intentionality. How could the literal depend on the metaphorical?” (171). Precisely, it simply does.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Fourth Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 26.
Ibid, p. 53.
Ibid, pp. 170-1.
We might want to note here that drivers and readers are perfectly free to use their respective made worlds in other ways that suit them. A bungee jumper might see in the bridge a perfect launch pad for his jump, and seeing it thus, go with that idea. There is nothing in the structure of the bridge that prevents this. Nor would we want there to be. Like a poem, a bridge is not an imperative instruction, but an invitation to engage with a possible way of being. Nonetheless there are people who want to approach the invitation as an imperative, insofar as a consensus has formed around it, even brought it into being. A bridge is not for jumping! The reader of any form of writing (fiction or non-fiction) can always extract (like our bungee jumper) features they would like to use in their own made world. Take Hitler’s use of Nietzsche, for instance. We want to cry foul and argue that the heuristic invitation was not an invitation for that. An appeal would be made to the larger context (or unity) of Nietzsche’s argument. The bungee jumper, at least, in his “deviant” engagement with the bridge, was only putting his own life at risk.
Northrop Frye, Notebooks on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, Collected Works Vol. 13, edited by Robert Denham, University of Toronto Press, 2003, p. 291. “If you just write enough sentences you can ‘reconcile’ anything with anything else.”