As the mythologist Joseph Campbell observed: “metaphors are lies that tell the truth.” That is to say, there is an interesting tension built up within a metaphor. On the one hand a particular metaphor can’t be true - Socrates isn’t really a “Pillar of strength” . . . not literally anyway. But somehow a likeness is conveyed, a similarity between dissimilars, and when we come across a really good metaphor, particularly a novel and inventive one, we can experience a feeling of liberation, that a truth beyond words has been captured.

Let us consider Shakespeare, a true master of metaphor, beside whom all tailors of tropes seem but second rate attendants. Think about his likening that “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,” or that “My age is a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.”

Time and again, the Bard brought together seemingly far fetched concepts – love and smoke, for instance – connecting them in ways that seems natural and intuitive. Providing, as it were, the shortest possible route by which his audience might themselves recognize a connection between seemingly disparate ideas.

Language compels us to think in terms of dichotomies – matter and spirit, body and soul, the eternal and the temporal. But the reality we aim to describe somehow manages to transcend these concepts. And it is metaphor that possesses the unique capacity to reveal hidden linkages between disparate ideas

Speculation among leading cognitive scientists suggest that sensory motor patterns – a motor routine originating in the sensory-motor cortex, say for grasping an object with our hand -- can activate, through neuronal projections, neurons in the pre-frontal cortex which deal with abstract concepts and reasoning. This can lead to the “mapping” of sensory and bodily experiences onto abstract ideas. The latest scientific research on the brain would seem to offer some credence for this view, as it suggests that some of our brain cells and nerve pathways actually “migrate” from the more central portions of the brain (usually concerned with the body) to the periphery of the pre-frontal cortex(concerned more with abstract concepts).

Current neuroscientific research has a great deal to say about concept formation and how language comes to “represent” – some would say “create” – reality. This research suggests that all of our conceptual thinking involves metaphors drawn from our bodily experience.

We grasp ideas, reach for conclusions, and try to get in touch with our feelings. Kant once said that “the hand was the visible expression of the mind,” and in a very real sense the structure of our minds – of our thought – is composed from metaphors derived from our sensory-bodily experience.

The physical basis underlying the construction of creative and novel metaphors may have profound implications for how we understand consciousness.

Wittgenstein thought that language was incapable of expressing metaphysical matters, of expressing the ineffable. The metaphysical “subject,” the “I” that lies at the heart of experience, is itself part of the ineffable, beyond any kind of adequate description according to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s theory of language and reality, after all, posits a sharp division between the living experience of a subject - an “I” – and the lifeless marks, scribbles, and symbols that constitute our written language.

There is a common thread running through Plato’s Republic, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and Valmiki’s Ramayana – the use of language to reach beyond the limits of language.

Perhaps this is characteristic of all great philosophy. The use of words to go beyond words, of course, is the essence of metaphor, just as metaphor is the sine qua non and lifeblood of poetry.

On the subject Aristotle observed:

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity between dissimilars.

To learn more please read "Socrates in Cyberspace."

http://www.amazon.com/Socrates-Cyberspace-Search-Soul-Century-ebook/dp/B007...

And visit: http://neuroscott.wix.com/socratesincyberspace