Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’)or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings.
So far as the law is concerned, metaphorical thought, which is ubiquitous, does not exist. But in reality, unconscious conceptual metaphors do exist, they are everywhere, and they have consequences. This disparity between the law and the human brain and mind is unframed—not part of most people’s everyday consciousness or discourse.
Tell no lies…. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.
--AmÃlcar Cabral
[I]t’s important to acknowledge that there’s no clear boundary between human beings and their surrounding natural world— that the natural world is intimately part of us. This means that the boundary of our identity— of our “we”— must expand to encompass nature too. “To regain our full humanity,” writes the systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “we have to regain our experience of connectedness with the entire web of life.”
In this book, I explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply the ingenuity required in the coming century. For example, many people believe that new communication technologies strengthen democracy and will make it easier to find solutions to our societies’ collective problems, but the story is less clear than it seems. The crush of information in our everyday lives is shortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on critical matters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial.
N.B. This book was published in 2020.
Think of the macrophage—and, for that matter, the entire diverse assembly of immune cells—as a pack of friendly wolves patrolling the area inside our skin, attacking the things that might hurt us. What happens when those wolves no longer have regular prey? They go stir-crazy. They get bored. And they might turn on themselves.
In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness. Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. The stage is common to all who are alive, but it seems different to each species, different also to each individual specimen. Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators. In other words, every appearing thing acquires, by virtue of its appearingness, a kind of disguise that may indeed—but does not have to—hide or disfigure it. Seeming corresponds to the fact that every appearance, its identity notwithstanding, is perceived by a plurality of spectators.
