What is Metaphor Like?

The last chapter of Volume I is Intuition, Imagination and the Unveiling of the World, and it's pretty much a continuation of the previous one on the cultural demise of RH intuition, one I'm pretty sure I survived. 

People sometimes ask about my plans, but I've never had one, perhaps because the RH is in charge, or maybe my LH could use some assertiveness training. 

In a way, I'm not very practical, but then again, it turns out that the snap decisions of the RH are often superior to the careful analysis of the LH. It's not as if my spontaneous nonplans have turned out badly. To the contrary, everything has turned out fine, even though I would hesitate to recommend this approach to others. Unless, like me, they just can't help it anyway. 

There's a lot of research in the previous chapter about how intuitions "are more often valid than not," and how we are "much better than chance" at judging things like age, sexual orientation, and political affiliation. It seems that gaydar is real. I know my guydar is unfailingly accurate at detecting when some guy is pretending to be a woman, just as all my Jewish friends and relatives have a highly developed goydar.

By the way, "stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable findings in social psychology," and stereotypes "have all been repeatedly shown to be remarkably reliable." Therefore (and this is something Thomas Sowell often discusses), "prejudices are not necessarily wrong. What is wrong is to be biased in any individual case by your prejudice." This latter is not especially difficult, rather, our capacity for this kind of detachment is "remarkably good."

Of course, this is not to excuse those MAGA deplorables who are much more prone to bias and discrimination.

Wrong. "Scientists are no less prone to bias than anyone else," and some research confirms your common sense belief "that people with more education are more likely to cling to ideological beliefs in the teeth of evidence." 

No! I shan't believe it! That the tenured live in a toxic bubble of ideological conformity? Never!

Back to the present chapter, 

The product of intuition is insight. It has been defined as "any sudden comprehension, realization, or problem solution that involves a reorganization of the elements of a person's mental representation of a stimulus, situation, or event to yield a non-obvious or non-dominant interpretation."

This is a subject I've been interested in since grad school, and two names stick out in particular, W.R. Bion and Michael Polanyi, each of whom describes this sudden reorganization of psychic elements from different angles. The vocabulary is different but the mechanism -- the underlying reality -- is the same, and I discussed it in detail in my ponderously titled dissertation mentioned yesterday (and in the Book).

But I don't want to revisit what I wrote 20 or 35 years ago, correct though it may be. Let's keep this discussion rolling forward. McGilchrist says something on p. 758 that goes to the coonological principle that metaphor isn't just a side dish, but the main course: this is a metaphorical cosmos, with all this implies. 

No, McGilchrist doesn't put it that way, but I will. He writes that metaphor

is fundamental to how we understand the world. It is only by seeing something as in some sense and however dimly "like" something else that we build knowledge, and insight consists in perceiving likeness in dissimilar things.

Now, I first encountered the Extreme Version of this idea when reading Stanley Jaki's Means to Message -- back in 2002, it was. But as soon as I read it, it only confirmed in me something I already knew to be deeply true. 

You have only to begin by asking yourself: in what kind of cosmos is metaphor even possible, and then you suddenly realize how central it is to everything, beginning with language itself, or rather, logos. Everything is like something, which is the very space between intelligence and intelligibility.

A note to myself in the margin says "Reality is first and foremost something capable of carrying a message between subjects." Nor does it take much intuition to leap from this to the Trinity. I would now say Of course this is a metaphorical cosmos, and the first metaphor is the Son, even though there was never a time this metaphor didn't exist.

Just a hunch.