I guess if there’s a purpose to my post and my line of inquiry here it’s that I want to understand the relationship between truth, metaphor and how we understand the two. Truth strikes me as something…profound. Something undeniable.
we can conjure up a principle, a law. Like the will to power or life’s a catwalk etc. as they stand they’re merely words. metaphors relating to some aspect of contemporary life. but it seems before we regard them as truth they must first be experienced and then they become the lens from which we perceive life (maybe truth is no more than belief…).
It’s interesting. An example. The mind works like a computer. If I wanted to understand the mind you could provide me with this metaphor and because I know computers I can then transfer this knowledge onto the mind. And I can then inquire into the mind with the knowledge I have of computers - ideas about hardware and software etc.
When we seek truth are we just seeking a metaphor in which we can understand our reality?
Truth is a connection to reality. Our perception of truth is only tied to a number of interrelated beliefs about reality. I say beliefs because the mind is never directly connected to reality, it only interacts through mediums of interpretation (namely sense perceptions). When I say cup, I have a certain sense as to what physical properties the word “cup” has, these are beliefs as I can never wholly know every property of a cup as it is in reality. This gets into a sort of nit-picky realm of philosophy, so I’m really curious to see what sort of replies this topic gets.
The act of interpretation is a curiousity. Is there a line as to how far we take our interpretations? Consider Star Wars or Lord of the Rings (I guess you could just say fantasy in general), these are interpretations of reality, but fantastic interpretations, can they or should they serve us as a medium for our reality? Should we even judge interpretations. I mean each interpretation seems dependent on each individual doing the interpreting, as such, dependent on our personal tastes and temperments. Of course there’ll be overlaps between two people, positions on which we agree on things, but for the most part there’ll be disagreements - differences.
Slight tangent. But regarding your conception of the cup. What defines the cup - what it is or what it isn’t?
It depends what we’re seeking truth about. If it’s the distance to the sun, or the time of high tide, no; there is a truth that is how-the-world-is.
Complex topics like knowledge, love, suffering and so on are, well, complex. To communicate our thoughts on them, we have to abstract and simplify, and that is where metaphor can be a powerful tool. The reason that, say, “will to power” rings true is that it maps to some salient features of how-the-world-is, and is an effective and productive metaphor to use.