Metaphors for the sensual; or, of Locke and keys.

Apologies in advance about the length of this post. John Locke apparently just makes me really really excited. That excitement lies principally in the fact that Locke just goes to town about metaphors here. I suppose as reasoning an admission is in order; put simply, in the zoology of everything there ever was, ever, metaphors and similes are kind of my absolute favorite animal of all time. 

(see what I did there)

The title of this post echoes one of my favorite phrases to pull out and mull over in idle moments—‘Words are metaphors for the sensual’. A wonderful professor of mine just threw it out over the crowd in a Film and Photography lecture my freshman year, and it still strikes me every time I think of it. I was struck by it again and again as I read Locke, as it seems he was quite struck with it, too. On page 817, section 4, he writes, “Now…sounds have no natural connection with our ideas, but have all their significance from the arbitrary imposition of men…” This itself was enough to make me dance a little on the inside. The thing is, rather than being as infatuated with the idea as I was, it seems the notion of the vague nature of language—or, rather, the fact metaphors by definition are descriptions of one thing able stand for another—really kind of peeved John Locke. 

Locke seems to say this ‘inability of language’ arises chiefly from the mere human incapacity to transmit the largely untransmittable combinations of sensory input we receive from the reality continually assailing our senses. Rather like attempting to paint a landscape with brushstrokes, or sculpt a body with clay, with words we can come close to mimicking the real, but it will never be a perfect representation. I thought this a Sophistic notion, and therefore a rather liberating one—if we can describe and ‘stand in’ our realities with things like words, we can create and try to control the very colors, in a way, of our own cartographies. But Locke isn’t so interested in this. He wants there to be a direct tunnel from one person’s brain to another, within which no static to garble the meaning of a person’s ideas is present.

Curiously, he seems to think in some cases this is actually possible with words, such as when the thoughts conveyed are very simple, or ‘uncombined’ ones. But in order to make the argument that any idea, no matter how simple, can be transferred, he has to make a claim I’m not eager to buy. He forwards the notion that we as a species somehow share our senses, that we absorb the world, if not in the exact same combinations, then in the exact same ways. Therefore, the idea of tree is in one person’s reality exactly as it is in another. A bold statement at best, and one the hugely diverse spectrum we make as a species would be reluctant to fold into agreement with. Locke states on pg 818 that all he writes about pertains only to those words that are “intelligible”, or, I might say ‘shared’. “Those which are not intelligible at all,” Locke writes, “Such as names standing for simple ideas which another has not faculties to attain; as the names of colors to a blind man, or sounds to a deaf man, need not here be mentioned.” (818) 

The problem is, in the instance Locke is referring to, they kind of do have to be mentioned, because ‘faculties’ don’t exist in black and white. Locke firmly stands with the idea that humankind, staggeringly varied as we are, contains senses as perfectly duplicated as if the things had been pressed in a mold. But when senses are tied to the mind, and the body, and the consciousness—how can such a consistency exist? When you take into account children versus adults, men versus women, or crippled versus the capable, just to scratch the very surface… Well, one is startled to think we can find any connections with each other at all. And Locke is right in that we do. But I think he’s wrong in that the aim is—or should be—through exactitude of transfer.

The notion of words themselves as a metaphor brings to light a curious problem for the direct transfer of even simple ideas. When someone hears or reads tree, they do not see or hear the realities that the speaker or writer has attached to tree. Instead, their own reality of the word rises to the surface. Therefore, metaphors, even at their most basic, do not try to force an exactitude upon a person. They instead present an idea or a series of ideas in combinations unique as skeleton keys with which all those around us can unlock the compartments of themselves to build a reality of their own. It is this immediacy and realism of  construction that makes metaphor—whether presented through words, art, music, science—so intoxicatingly beautiful. We with these tools are not transferring our own realities; such is an impossible task. We are instead bequeathing ancient keys with which others can unlock the doors in themselves to their own realities—realities they never knew existed, and realities which can (quite magically) echo with our own.