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  • Metaphor and Metaphilosophy: Philosophy as Combat, Play, and Aesthetic Experience by Sarah A. Mattice
  • Ann A. Pang-White (bio)
Metaphor and Metaphilosophy: Philosophy as Combat, Play, and Aesthetic Experience. By Sarah A. Mattice. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Pp. xiv + 152. Hardcover, isbn 978-0-7391-9220-7.

What is philosophy? What is metaphor? Could thinking (i.e., thinking philosophy and, for that matter, thinking about thinking, a.k.a. metaphilosophy) take place metaphorically? If one follows the mainstream Western definition of philosophy (namely that philosophy is strictly an enterprise of analytical reasoning by means of rigid arguments and logic), the answer to the latter question would certainly be negative. Metaphors are perceived as primitive, pre-analytical, and imprecise—thus pre-philosophical! Drawing on multiple cross-cultural resources, Metaphor and Metaphilosophy: Philosophy as Combat, Play, and Aesthetic Experience by Sarah A. Mattice insightfully challenges this widespread assumption in the current culture of philosophy.

Agreeing with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that “The limits of my language means the limits of my world” (p. ix), Mattice convincingly argues that we are in a unique position to expand our philosophical world through attention to one important aspect of our language: metaphor (more specifically, “metaphors for philosophical activity”). Our use of language reflects not only how we do philosophy but also what we think philosophy is. Chapter 1 presents three arguments for the importance of metaphor in both philosophy and metaphilosophy. First, building on the perspective of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and contemporary cognitive linguistics, Mattice argues that metaphors are not “improper naming” (contrary to Aristotle); rather, they are sets of “conceptual mappings,” “a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system” (p. 3). Conceptual metaphors are “thoughts” and they are necessary tools in our reasoning and understanding of abstract concepts. Imagine, for example, “love is journey.” Without using the conceptual metaphor “journey,” our understanding of love would be left with a “mere literal skeleton” without richness and complexity (p. 4). Second, in addition to the argument from contemporary cognitive linguistics, chapter 1 also covers a discussion of Gadamer’s hermeneutics (the metaphoricity of language as one locus of our prejudices) and the prevalence of correlative thinking in early Chinese philosophy (e.g., in the Yijing 易經) as two additional arguments that further exhibit the centrality of metaphorical thought in thinking about philosophical activity.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 contain treatments of three essential metaphors for philosophy: combat, play, and aesthetic experience. In the combat metaphor, philosophers are conceived as combatants; philosophical activity as strategic maneuvering of attack, defense, and counterattack; and the purpose of the dialogue as victory. Chapter [End Page 1374] 2 traces the combat metaphor, dominant in Western philosophy, back to the city-state polis of ancient Greek culture, where compulsory military service for all male citizens and “math envy,” the desire to possess absolute certainty of truth as seen in mathematics, are two of the historical reasons for the prevalence of the combat metaphor for philosophy in ancient Greece (pp. 23–25). Juxtaposing the historical setting of ancient Greece with the Chinese Warring States period, it is interesting to note that even though war was a constant in their vocabulary, few classical Chinese philosophers chose to use combat metaphors to illustrate thinking, virtue, or honor. Radically diverging from their Western counterpart, the Art of War (Sunzi 孫子) and other works consider war to be a last resort. Warfare is often described as a failure to use civic, diplomatic, or other alternative means to resolve conflict. This cross-cultural example demonstrates that the combat metaphor is neither a universal nor a necessary linguistic or conceptual tool to conceive philosophical activity. The combat metaphor is also plagued by several serious problems, including: the internalization of violence; the narrowing of possibilities (closing the dialogue prematurely so that a victor may emerge); the domination of others in power relations; the privileging of combative individuals; difficulty in self-reflective meta-critique (when one is so engrossed in a battle so as to view only winning as the outcome); and the demise of civic discourse (when the only goal is to win and to break the enemy’s will).

Chapter 3 comprises an examination of the...

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