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We look for missing links in the sciences and humanities, but the essential missing link – metaphor – is always in front of us. In Missing Link, Jeffery Donaldson unites literary criticism and evolutionary and cognitive science to show how metaphor has been with us since the beginning of time as a seed in the nature of things.
With examples from centuries of poets, critics, philosophers, and scientists, this book details how metaphor is a chemistry, an exchange of energies forming and dissolving, and an openness in the spaces between things.
Jeffery Donaldson is professor of English at McMaster University and the author of five volumes of poetry, including Palilalia and Waterglass (both of which are included in our Poetry Month Sale this month).
MQUP Editor Mark Abley recently spoke with the author about the philosophical questions explored in his latest work.
Mark Abley: Missing Link is an ambitious work in which you make countless bold and striking connections between literary criticism and evolutionary science, two realms of thought that rarely speak to each other. Do you have an ideal audience for this book? Who are you hoping to reach?
Jeffery Donaldson: The short answer is scientists who are interested in humanities and humanists who are interested in science. I hope that readers from either discipline will find useful material here to help them progress with whatever work they happen to be engaged in. At the same time I don’t think it would be controversial to say that in literature studies we are better accustomed to thinking of metaphor and metaphoric behaviours as an inherent rather than an additional complicating factor in human thought.
With some important exceptions celebrated in the book, scientists tend naturally to think of language as primarily descriptive, leaving metaphor on the margins as a useful but potentially obfuscating tool. They bring it in at the end to help communicate subtle points. I try to show how metaphoric behaviours are active and inherent in the materials themselves that they study, and then again in their modellings of those materials. Metaphor is the missing link in every sense. I didn’t want to preach to the humanist choir, so instead kept in mind those scientists who are interested in adding to their own toolbox a nimbleness of mind that is imaginative at heart.
MA: In a footnote you cite Alex Rosenberg, who wrote The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, as saying things like “Stories are fun, but they’re no substitute for knowledge.” Indeed he goes so far as to state, “The humanities are nothing we need to take seriously, except as symptoms.” How do you, writing not as a scientist but as a poet and a teacher of literature, rebut such comments?
JD: I came to Rosenberg’s book fairly late in my writing and I have to admit that it got under my craw. If I had to characterize those antagonists who represent a blight on interdisciplinary thought, it would be those practitioners on both sides of the humanities/science divide who pretend to understand what is wrong and pointless about the area of study that happens not to be their own. You see it on both sides. And of course from my perspective it represents a betrayal of imaginative thought, a lack of willingness to enter into the gaps of relation and to find something different about oneself there.
Rosenberg appears to have no idea what kind of genuine knowledge is aligned with the paradoxes of metaphoric thinking. Would he say for instance that hypothesis in the sciences is “no substitute for knowledge”? Of course not. He’s a smart man. He simply isn’t thinking about how the roots of hypothetical thinking find nourishment in fictive soils. In the end he betrays what is most worthy about his own discipline, for scientists understand better than anyone that no sooner do you say some material has no purpose than someone comes along and shows you what that purpose is.
MA: Without metaphor, would language exist? Indeed, would we exist?
JD: You’ve cut to the heart of the chase. What we call metaphor is the evolved expression of relational energies that can be traced back to our earliest models of origin in both the sciences and religion. Metaphor as we see it now is a bit like the Cosmic Microwave Background for astrophysicists. The Cosmic Microwave Background is the “writing on the wall” (a rather interesting metaphor, now that I think of it!), and so is metaphor. It is the evidence here and now visible to us of behaviours that are quite possibly original. We can look into that writing on the wall to discover secrets about how we got here and who we are.
The book as a whole is founded on an important distinction between metaphor as a troping device in language and what I call the metaphoric initiative manifest in all things. We see all around us evolved species that have little use for language broadly speaking and certainly therefore little use for metaphor. But if we think of metaphor as the evolved expression of relational energies in matter itself, and therefore a means of our access to them, we can say that metaphor expresses something that is essential in evolution. Part of me feels that, given the nature of those relational energies, there is something about metaphor proper that was inevitable.
MA: In the Introduction, you say: “We can understand spirituality in secular terms without disqualifying in the eyes of ‘believers’ … the reality of what they feel.” How in the world is that possible?
JD: An excellent question. I feel like I need a team of lawyers at my elbow on this one, with stacks of evidence on the precise meanings of words. I try to be careful throughout the book to steer clear of the question, a misleading one for both theists and atheists, of whether the word “God” points to something that actually exists. The battles on YouTube are very entertaining, but their debate is stuck hopelessly in the descriptive uses of language and goes wrong from the start in that fact alone. At the same time, I know that as soon as you start to tweak the terms of reference and say things like “God is metaphoric at heart” scientists and believers lose interest and start to fidget like a child in church. It doesn’t speak to what they want to know, or prove.
But ah (one of my lawyers has just whispered in my ear), you’ll notice that I said “the reality of what they feel” and not “the existence of God.” I argue that, given the reality of the metaphoric initiative, there is something about human consciousness and its inclination towards “spiritual sense” that was inevitable. Our belief in, or our preoccupation with, the gaps in our understanding is an actualizing phenomenon. What it actualizes is the reality of the unseen, the play of energies in the interstices between things, between ourselves and things, between ourselves and each other.
What any person comes to believe is entirely personal, but the experience of being spiritual in this sense is very real and very tangible. Once a more nimble metaphoric imagination sees beyond the merely descriptive properties of language, the question takes on a new meaning of whether the word “God” points to something that actually exists. I would say finally that it does point to something that actually exists, because it embodies it. You’ll have no trouble guessing what that something is.
MA: So have we arrived by unorthodox means at what Dante called “the love that moves the sun and other stars?”
JD: I would love to think so. I argue towards the end of the book that the almost impossible command to love what is different has been written into the heart of matter since the Big Bang. In the material world we say that things are defined in relation; in love, we say both “I am you” and “I am not you.” The material world comes of the ensuing tensions, just as society comes of the tensions of difference and identity at the heart of love.
Dante of course is our great example of the long upward journey. He started with a hell (with its slaves of an absolute determinism) and strove towards a heaven, where one enters into the promise of “all things are possible.” Our long journey from primordial soil to makers of love poems describes a similar arc.
MA: I’ve always liked and puzzled over a quote from the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane. He once wrote, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Does Missing Link help explain what Haldane meant? Or does the book, insofar as it celebrates imagination, work to disprove his remark?
JD: What an interesting issue. Can I say both? Haldane is spot on, I think. A lover of metaphor might only want to add that queerness, as Haldane thinks of it, is written into the supposing. On the one hand, yes, the reality we perceive is an expression of mental habits that filter what we can discover. We think metaphorically, that is to say, queerly. No surprise that everything around us looks metaphorical. That seems to lock us into a form of idealism, where what we see is only an extension of ourselves.
But if those habits of mind are rooted in corresponding behaviours that derive from the very matter we observe … well, that’s a potential game changer. The queerness that we see with becomes a revelation of how matter itself goes about being what it is. In the end, if the universe is itself “imaginative” in its own becoming, we “discover” something about it in being who we are. And we in turn are then able to reveal something about what the universe itself can become in being part of what it expresses. As I say at one point in the book, we follow to see where we will lead.
In McMaster University’s Faculty Spotlight, Jeffery Donaldson discusses his research and new book, Missing Link. Watch the video here.
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