Analogy Magazine: How the Journey Began

by Asa Boxer

Oct 27, 2024

Analogy magazine is nearing two years of age, and I thought it time to revisit the start of this enterprise and see how the mission is going. The whole thing began with an explosive concept, a paradigm-breaking, consciousness-transforming idea that science is relational, that science relies on analogies to establish a framework of understanding. These scientific frameworks apply instrumentation to establish measures that are then said to be “facts”; and these facts are taken for discoveries when, in fact, they are inventions that emerge from analogies. These analogies arise from the relationships between the instrumentation and the phenomenon under observation. Understanding how metaphorical play is central to science turns the conventional view of science on its head. After all, according to the prevailing view, science is objective and the only real and true way to frame the world. It’s got nothing to do with poetry and storytelling. Well, analogy magazine has news for you. . .

None of this was my idea. Scientists and philosophers have been puzzling over this problem since at least the Alexandrian period (circa 300 BC to 650 CE), when a sixth century scholar named Simplicius recorded the notion of σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα, generally translated as “saving the appearances,” but which I suggest makes more sense as “accounting for the phenomena.” According to this principle, science was not occupied with establishing any truth or reality, but instead doing its best to develop predictive modelling. The humility involved had much to do with the shabby state of cosmology at that time. Once Newton (1642-1727) resolved the problem of planetary motion with ellipses, the mathematical analogy could be said to correlate to the phenomena so closely, that the scientific model and the reality seemed to be one and the same thing.

Since Newton (more or less), scientific institutions gradually discredited previous prophetic practices, which were relegated with the old ways: with superstitions, and magic. The Enlightenment ushered in the way of science, blazing with extraordinary feats of engineering, leading to greater comfort for more people at less cost. It is this form of progress that lends science its credibility. In other words, we tend to conflate engineering and science. As we make machines, so the universe is a machine. Who made the cosmic machine? A lot has changed since Newton, who would have answered, “Well, God, of course.” However you answer the question, the machine metaphor guides your thinking. What else do you have to work with? (The Electric Universe, perhaps?)

It didn’t take long before the West lost the cultural thread and turned to the worship of science, which soon referred to some of its practices as “pure.” Presently, the word, science, emanates the light of perfection, the light of Truth: science is the reality; science is the phenomena. Before we knew it, science had usurped the God image. And today, only stupid people ask questions because labs coats don’t lie. This way of viewing the world is a satire of the philosophical journey, and yet it is popularly accepted that science is Truth, plain and simple.

But back to our mutton. What sparked analogy magazine was an email conversation with Jeffery Donaldson which went on for some months through the later half of 2022. I had read his 2015 book, Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution (McGill Queens) some years back, and had been blown away, so I solicited an essay from him for The Secular Heretic (the predecessor of analogy). Especially captivating about Missing Link was Donaldson’s demonstration of how the universe itself seems caught up in analogical behaviour, from chemical bonding through DNA coding and on up through to language and writing.

Missing Link begged an important question: were Donaldson’s correlations discovered or imposed? Did he invent an elaborate metaphor, or were atoms and galaxies truly behaving metaphorically? You’ll have to read Missing Link because I don’t have the space here to explain. What I can tell you is that his book is at once a carefully researched and well-developed examination of the topic, but also reads like a thrillingly surprising science poem—not in style (which is far from poetic), but in how tight and inevitable the argument.

Consequently, one of its chief strengths is that it gets you wondering about the problems inherent to our argumentation surrounding any theory: the relations, correlations, substitutes, stand-ins, and workarounds. . . Meanwhile, once seen, one cannot ignore the notion that the universe is somehow fundamentally analogical, not just among conscious minds attempting to account for the phenomena, but at the heart of the phenomena themselves. The implications are metaphysical and exciting because of an inherent magnetic quality of analogy to join ideas together and make sense of the world.

Or is that not it at all? Is it, instead, simply that mind itself cannot grasp the world without correlations? We invent the world and “go with it,” as Donaldson put it in his essay, “A Bridge is a Lie: How Metaphor Does Science.”

To help get his ideas across, Donaldson briefly addressed the problematic paradigm laid out by the Heterodox Academy, which presents itself as open to new perspectives:

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.

What does that mean though? It feels nebulous, requires flesh. Donaldson takes a good stab at it in his essay, which I encourage readers to revisit. But it was also necessarily, and tantalisingly, incomplete. There was so much more to be explored, and so much groundwork to be laid before the “metaphoric relations” could be fully appreciated. The historical links to how we arrived at the absurd conclusion that science is the phenomena had to be unearthed. The monumental claims of science, especially of twentieth- and twenty-first-century science, had to be challenged and dismantled. The storytelling in which science engages had to be defrocked. The correlations between instrumentation and phenomena had to be examined. I had to start with explaining how fundamental storytelling is to igniting the philosophical spirit, and to the very origins of naturalism—the doctrine that all phenomena must be explained using mechanistic metaphors. I had to demonstrate how the machine metaphor was the key analogy of science, and how this necessarily limits its scope.

Since then, the journey has been ongoing. As Henri Bergson (1859-1941) pointed out, matter and consciousness are on a continuum; they are different in degree, but not in kind. The more mind there is in matter, the more organised it becomes. What we call an organism is anything we perceive to be organised and bounded. Upon inspection, where we draw these boundaries can be problematic, almost arbitrary; for who is to say where one ought to start and where stop? Each cell of our body is an organism. There are elements in each cell that are organisms. There are bacteria living among our cells. Each organ in our body is an organism. We are therefore compound organisms. But does it stop at our skin? Or is the family an organism? Isn’t an ecosystem a compound organism? The planet? The solar system? You get the picture.

The same way that mind and matter are on a continuum, so are poetics and science, where poetics represents the fullest presence of the inner world and science, the least. Thing is, we can never actually disentangle one from the other because of the analogical or metaphoric imperative, as Donaldson calls it. Science is lost without poetics. It becomes absorbed in its own conceits, and gets drunk on its metaphors, losing sight of the logical structures supporting its theories. Meanwhile, without science, poetry and storytelling lose internal cohesion (rational argument) and outer correspondence (or relevance). As poet, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) put it: “The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines.” In their purest forms, science and poetry both wind up delusional, and carried away by fantasy.

It all sounds so highfalutin: metaphysics, metaphoric imperative, consciousness, the inner world. But I’m hoping to address an urgent problem. There’s something very wrong with the socio-cultural world we’re living in. There’s a complete lack of spiritual fulfilment on offer in Western culture, except as a sort of sideshow. Even church and temple-goers are generally more interested in the social cohesion that religion has to offer than with the canonical texts or the central doctrines. Those who do take those elements seriously, too often take them literalistically—which misses the point of how these ideas are meant to awaken one to the inner world. Without that awakening, no self-development. . . no inner growth is possible.

Our culture is afflicted by a madness that emerges directly from its unexamined metaphysic. The prevailing doctrine that the universe is an accident, and life just a wondrous freak occurrence in a disinterested cosmos of disconnected phenomena is unsatisfying because it fails to account for the phenomena of human experience. When it attempts to do so these days, it is invariably through evolutionary psychology, which is as far from pure science as poetry and storytelling. It indulges post hoc fallacies to build conceits describing—but never accounting for—things like emotional reactions and moral sensibility. This Neo-Darwinism papers over the reality of the inner world with plausible—i.e. analogically sound enough—mechanisms. From a philosophical and writerly perspective, it’s like proposing the exercise of making all your stories boil down to adaptations to environmental pressure. Of course, we can tell stories given various parameters! (Read a book gaddammit.) The genre is called, “Fiction.”

So here we are at the crossroads where science meets poetics. It might be a tad troubling for science fanatics to draw the connection between these disciplines, but I see it as the only way out of the madness. And I believe that when we do ultimately throw off the yoke of doctrine—in principle (and not just with regard to religion or science or whathaveyou)—we will find ourselves renewed and once again entering a period of truly astounding, paradigm-busting inventions. When we train the imagination and equip ourselves to discover these inventions within ourselves, we will excel at a far more rapid pace than we are now because we will also be more in harmony with ourselves and with the world.

Analogy Magazine: How the Journey Began

by Asa Boxer

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