The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

Good metaphors are like good jokes: they rely on making unusual connexions. As Zwicky says, ‘Surprise is common to good metaphors and good jokes … Seeing [a weak metaphor] requires no leap of imagination.’207 A metaphor fails if it is too familiar. Its energy dissipates immediately and it dies. We no longer see the gap that is overcome. The two parties are either so remote that no ‘electrical connexion’ can take place, or so close that none is required: in either case, no leap of imagination takes place. Mythos, relying on implicitness, can be responsive and responsible: inextricably bound up with its reception in the mind of the one who hears or sees, it is itself changed by that reception. Relying on explicitness, logos is unidirectional: it drives a line of argument, it declares ‘how things are’, and by so doing aims to fix them. Each has its uses. But note that in metaphor nothing can remain unchanged by the interaction, which is bi-directional, reverberative. When we call a man a wolf, we don’t just make the man more wolf-like, but the wolf more human.