4. Categories and Metaphors in Philosophy. The
close connection brought out above between a set of
categories for a world hypothesis and their generating
root metaphor raises the question as to how the meta-
phorical basis of a set of categories could ever come
to light. For the categories are inevitably conceived
by the indoctrinated exponents of the philosophy as
the actual structural framework of nature. The meta-
phor is amalgamated with what it is a metaphor of.
To a philosopher fully immersed in his system, other
interpretations of the world than his are treated simply
as errors or meaningless or, perhaps charitably, as
partial approximations to the truth. To become aware
of the metaphorical nature of one's philosophical in-
terpretations, there is need of a certain amount of
cognitive “distance” like the “aesthetic distance” re-
quired in the arts to appreciate the realism of a play
or a novel or a picture. Yet the distance must not be
so great as to convert the object into pure fantasy and
absurdity. In art one must recognize the conventions
which support and sustain the aesthetic realism. So in
philosophy one must recognize the categories that
maintain the truth or interpretive adequacy of the
world theory. The categories must be taken seriously
as constructive instruments serving, like glasses to
astigmatic eyes, to reveal reality truly or effectively
in ways we have not previously seen. Bacon completely
missed the significance of comprehensive philosophy
through his lack of recognition of this cognitive dis-
tance. He noticed correctly the metaphorical interpre-
tive action of the traditional philosophies, but failed
to appreciate the revelatory power of the great systems
and the fruitfulness of their metaphors.
At what point in the history of philosophy did an
appreciation of the metaphorical action of categories
emerge? The ground was laid by Kant when, in his
Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that the structures
of space, time, causality, etc. attributed to nature in
scientific cognition were provided by the mind and
should not be taken as the intrinsic structures of things-
in-themselves. He introduced a little “distance” be-
tween phenomena and the interpretive action of his
categories (and also space and time which he distin-
guished as a priori forms of intuition). But he regarded
his categories as a priori, and inescapable, and incor-
rigible in cognition. As C. I. Lewis later pointed out
in his Mind and the World Order (1929) there was more
than a paradox implicit in Kant's view. There was a
self-contradiction—that of being at the same time real
and not real operations among cosmic events. For how
could a thinker distinguish his interpretive categories
from the structure of nature itself unless he had at least
one other set of categories with divergent inter-
pretations with which to compare them. In short, the
categories must be regarded as corrigible. They must
be open to error and correction. They cannot be
posited as wholly a priori and inescapable in human
cognition. They must be allowed enough “distance”
between themselves and what they are interpreting to
permit of alternatives and judgments of their adequacy.
They must be treated in some degree as explanatory
hypotheses, or metaphors.
That Kant had some awareness of this dilemma is
obvious from his treatment of moral and aesthetic
experience as distinct from that of scientific experience.
In moral experience particularly he found he could
bypass the categorial restrictions of scientific cognition
and obtain some authoritative disclosures about the
non-perceptual world. He accepted in a questionable
way the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality for
the moral life and its justification. Here, in a way, were
the two sets of categories which revealed to him that
the deterministic scientific categories clearly could not
be attributed to such structural features of things-in-
themselves as God, freedom, and immortality.
It should be acknowledged that there were many
earlier premonitions of some sort of mental projections
upon external things. Descartes' mind-matter dualism
had already raised the issue, and Spinoza's theory of
“attributes,” Locke's stress on the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities (a distinction that can
be traced as far back as Democritus), and finally
Hume's analysis of impressions, causality, and habit,
and his reluctant admission that he just could not help
believing in an external world although he could not
understand how he could justify any belief in it.
Following Kant, Hegel's dialectic can be viewed as
a proliferation of Kantian categories ordered according
to their increasing degree of scope and adequacy till
they culminated in the total synthesis of the Absolute.
But still the categories were not entirely shaken loose
from the actual structure of things they categorized.
The dialectic was not only a history of increasingly
adequate cognition but also a history of a kind of
cosmic growth.
It was not till pragmatic or contextualistic modes
of thought began to be influential that enough “dis-
tance” was introduced between the instruments of
cognition and what they cognized for sets of categories
to be viewed as metaphors. It was the typical prag-
matic theory of concepts as instruments that made this
possible. The pragmatic analysis of categories by C. I.
Lewis has been mentioned. And Hans Vaihinger's
Philosophy of As If (Die Philosophie des Als-Ob, 1911)
may have helped too, though his doctrine of fictions
was cognitively ambiguous in leaving one in doubt as
to their cognitive function. If the “useful” concepts
are rendered too fictional, the sense of metaphor may
be almost totally lost. In order to maintain the meta-
phorical character of a set of guiding concepts, the
structure of the concepts must in some degree be
identified with what the concepts are applied to. A
committed contextualist may accordingly be as un-
aware of the metaphorical relations of the categorial
presuppositions of his own philosophical view as any
of the traditional philosophers of the earlier schools.
The service of contextualism in revealing the explana-
tory use of metaphor in philosophy is due solely to
its theory of the instrumental role of concepts in
knowledge. Emphasis on this role revealed just the
degree of cognitive “distance” that has to be recog-
nized before the metaphorical character of a set of
categories can be consciously realized.
Once this is realized, a set of categories acquires the
role of a useful hypothesis and a philosopher becomes
wary of regarding the categories as a priori or incor-
rigible features of the world or of the mind's way of
looking at the world. Yet one is aware that the cate-
gories direct one's view of the world and one can
become critical of the adequacy of the view, and can
deliberately seek out other sets of categories offering
other views. Then it is possible for one to see that these
views are functioning as cognitive metaphors. And if
one seeks out the core and origin of these world meta-
phors, he reaches what may be called their root meta-
phors.
